My Yoga Story

I get asked periodically how I got into yoga and why I linked it to singing, so here's my story....

Singing always came easily to me, but what I know now is that performing did not.

In high school, I frequently had solo parts and leads in musicals and concerts. Along with all that singing (hello, I sang Cunegonde as a JUNIOR IN HIGH SCHOOL), came nerves. Mostly, I would snap at people (usually my mom, sorry mom!), not knowing that my fear was talking. Also, I was living with a heart condition, called supraventricular tachycardia (SVT), that caused my heart to race when under physical or emotional stress. The worst that could happen was fainting which I never did, but it was impossible to be connected to my breath while my heart was racing at over 200 beats a minute and all I wanted to do was sit down and put my head between my legs. I can recall being on stage many times while I had an SVT episode. It was never pleasant.

In college, I ended up majoring in English and didn't come back to pursue using my voice for my career until I was 28. I had a procedure done to eliminate the heart condition, but it didn't entirely work. It was better, but I could still have episodes when nervous (I took a beta blocker daily to manage it, but nerves trumped all).

Once I was in graduate school I had a mental game to play because I perceived that I wasn't as good as everyone else there because my undergraduate degree wasn't in music. That perception caused me to shy away from auditioning for solos in choir and going after the parts with the gusto that I saw in my friends.

One day in the fall of 2001 a friend invited me to go to yoga with her. Quite honestly I had no other plans that night so I went.

The physical practice was fun and challenging, but I wasn't so sure I bought the more subtle stuff the teacher talked about...really, I was balancing my brain by breathing through opposite sides of my nose (yes, I now fully believe that because I've experienced it!)??? Despite that something about the practice stuck with me and I stuck with yoga, going to the class every week.

There were several a-ha moments for me as my study progressed. The first came when I  needed to go to a voice lesson right after a yoga class. The memory of sitting on my couch feeling like I was a rubber band and wondering how on earth I could sing when I felt that way is still vivid in my mind. I went to that voice lesson and found that singing was easier than it had ever been. Was I a rubber band? No. Was my body relaxed in a way it had never been before? Yes.

For my final recital I used the meditation technique of visualization. Throughout school I'd avoided having solos in choir and other places because of my faulty mental perceptions, but also to avoid the stress of having my heart act up. That year I read a book on performance preparation and visualization was suggested as a way to calm nerves. So, I sat on my couch again, closed my eyes and visualized the recital...WHOA...the nerves that I would feel when I walked on stage were all there. I kept at it, making time every day for the two weeks prior to the performance to see myself going through the program flawlessly. Each time it got a little easier and I felt less nervous. When performance day came, I walked on stage, sang through the concert without a strange beat of my heart or a sense of terrifying nerves.

After I finished school, I repeated the heart procedure with success this time, but the mental elements of performance nerves were still there. However, I found that attending a yoga class during the day before a performance at night caused me to be more grounded, connected to my breath and frankly, fearless in my performing.

When I moved into teaching, I saw so many singers who struggled with balancing the demands of life and singing. Many of them were coping with vocal injuries. In an effort to help them I took additional classes in Voice Disorders and attended clinics when I could on how to teach injured voices. What I learned was that hyper-function was often an underlying cause of vocal injury and when there's tension in the voice, there's tension elsewhere in the body. Be honest, who among us couldn't stand to be a little more relaxed??

It was after 20 years of singing, 6 years of yoga study and 5 years of teaching voice that I decided to pursue yoga teacher training. I knew that I was not the only person who could derive benefit from these practices. Physical practice, breathing and meditation are holistic ways to manage nerves, balance stress and connect to your authentic voice so you sing from your heart.

Singing may come easily to you. Performing may not. Yoga can help you with that!

Your Voice as Emotional Expression Center

In his book The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals Charles Darwin's 4th chapter is called "Means of Expression in Animals".

Here's what he has to say in this chapter about singing... "whether we believe that the various qualities of the voice originated in speaking under the excitement of strong feelings, and that these qualities have subsequently been transferred to vocal music; or whether we believe, as I maintain, that the habit of uttering musical sounds was first developed, as a means of courtship, in the early progenitors of man, and thus became associated with the strongest emotions of which they were capable,-namely, ardent love, rivalry and triumph."(page 87)

Whether Darwin is right about this or not, the point he makes over and over in Chapter 4 is that the quality of sounds animals and humans produce are intrinsically linked to emotions. Pretty modern thinking for 1872, no? We now know through modern science that the voice is linked to the limbic system, a set of brain structures that governs emotion and long term memory among other things.

It isn't hard to understand - you can be in another room and if someone calls your name, you can tell from the tone of the voice whether they are happy, sad, angry or indifferent. When you are upset, you feel a lump in your throat. When you are excited your voice might take on a pitch that is slightly higher and a volume that is louder than your regular speaking voice. When our hearts are clear and our heads are quiet our voices ring true. We give voice to our truth by connecting emotionally to the core of a song. Our expressive ability is challenged when we've got emotions bound up in our memories and stored in our heart center.

For good and for bad, our voices are at the complete mercy of our emotions - and of our past via our long term memory.

In the summer between my first and second years of graduate school I lost my father to suicide. The level of grief was so overwhelming that it amounted to me feeling numb for most of the next year. I dutifully completed all the things I needed to, to finish my degree. I got by in classes where all I needed was my brain to function. My singing was another story. By the time May rolled around, my final recital, which was required to graduate, loomed. I knew I was going to stand on stage and sing right notes with no emotion. The emotions called for in the songs weren't accessible to me because when I tried to open to them all that came out was grief. The only emotion I had to offer was sadness and if I went there, all I would do was cry.

When I look back now I wish I had been brave enough to own my grief and just go to my voice lessons and cry. Every week for 9 months. What I know now, after more than a decade of time has passed since that event, and after many years of yoga study, is that our voices also have an incredibly powerful ability to help us heal. By staying with a difficult emotion and giving voice to it, we allow our psyche to release it, no longer giving it power over us. It wasn't until I traveled to Italy to sing for the summer after graduation where I reached the point that I could face my grief. And I cried. A lot. Sometimes in my voice lessons and sometimes on my own. Singing that summer as I processed those emotions, took on a new meaning for me. I finally owned my voice again.

Your voice might be bound up for different reasons - I meet so many people who love to sing but feel they shouldn't because some adult told them as a child that they couldn't sing in tune, or the quality of their voice wasn't nice. That moment of being told their voice was not good enough to be heard lodged inside them, taking up residence in their heart center. It leads to adults who hide in the back row of the choir, or those who feel guilty singing to their child. Their throat feels tight with muscle strain. Unless you are truly unable to distinguish between high and low pitches and speak in a monotone, you are not tone deaf. Your brain simply hasn't not developed the road map it needs to be able to tell your voice to sing specific pitches and you CAN learn that. If you got the message at some point that you can't match pitch, you also hold that emotional energy in your body and it hinders your brain's ability to do its work. When you do sing it helps if you are willing to sing out. I mean, sing LOUD. I always say to my singers, "if you're going to sing it wrong, sing it loud." I can work with wrong notes, I can't work in between the cracks. Beyond the bravery to sing out when you think others will cringe at what they hear, we need to release the energy you've stored up about how terrible you sound.

In our yoga practice of asana, pranayama and meditaiton, we bring attention to our heart center liberating it from the energy of past emotions. It is in doing this that the energy of the throat and the heart gain a fluid pathway on which to travel. Finding an expansive heart takes bravery.  It is hard to go to places of discomfort and knowingly acknowledge hurt and the person who incurred the hurt -whether that hurt is new or old. You probably will cry. That's okay!

Everyone deserves the chance to sing, as Darwin said "with the strongest emotions of which they [are] capable".  Yoga helps make this possible by combining a sense of community and trust with physical and emotional tools to work with the heart.

Yoga of My Own Voice

It has been a long, long time since I've taken a voice lesson. And even longer since I've performed on stage. Four years ago life called me in the direction of starting a family, moving to a new town and getting the Mindful Singer off the ground and that left no time or energy for my own singing. At first resentful of this loss, I eventually learned to embrace the impermanence of life and shifted my perspective to "it's just not my time right now". That softened the blow of not singing and helped me remember that when I was ready again it would be there for me.

The close of this summer has brought about a desire to sort out who I am as a musician in this iteration of my life; as a suburban dwelling parent of two small children with a busy life. It is driven in part by my meditation practice which has revealed the sensation of a block in my throat. The guided meditation that I've done in August is my fall back staple meditation where energy is brought from the crown of the head, down the spine and into the heart center. In the past I worked just fine with it, but this time when I reach the cervical spine area I can't sense anything. Nor can I move anything through it. All I sense is a big, black space that is impenetrable.

I am also someone who believes firmly that to teach you must also do, so just as I engage in my own yoga practice I want to return to my own singing practice to better myself as a teacher. So, I scheduled a voice lesson with my old teacher who was kind enough to let me return after a nearly 5 year absence.

When the dust settled on the scheduling I realized there's definite apprehension in me about singing again. Is my voice gone from years of pregnancy and nursing related reflux? Is the block entirely emotional and the result of pushing my voice aside to help others the last 4 years? Am I just going to open up to my voice and spend an hour crying in her studio?

Yoga tells me those are all options and the best I can do is be present to my emotions in the moment, breathe in and out and accept whatever is. So I'm going to try that. Rather than thinking I'm going to walk in, sing, choose rep. and be off and running on a concert plan, I've identified three things I'd like to get out of my hour lesson. I'd like to get an honest assessment of my voice, a short set of exercises that I can do on a somewhat regular basis to begin to rebuild and know when I'm going back for another lesson. I could do this on my own, but I know myself well enough to know that working with someone else is a powerful motivator and something I so desperately miss.

Send good thoughts Wednesday morning as I delve back into me and see what's going on vocally!