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Let’s take a look at what we know about the wiring of the brain (its neurologic pathways) and how it connects with the throat.

We can move the front and outside of the face, head and neck (and shoulders) at will. I can ask you to smile, to frown, to open your mouth, close your mouth and to purse your lips. I can ask you to wiggle your jaw side to side and draw it a little bit down and back. I can ask you to stick your tongue out, and if I give you a mirror, you can make it roll up towards your top teeth without too much effort. I can ask you to look up, to look down, and to pull your head out in front of your body. I can ask you to raise your shoulders, to draw them slightly forward and round them backwards in a curved shape. If I include the belly as being part of the system because of its influence over exhalation, then I can ask you to make your stomach contract in and out (although if you are very out of shape you might have trouble with that).

There are variations of these movements, but mostly, that’s about all we can deliberately do. We can raise the eyebrows and bring them down in a frown. Some people can wiggle their ears or the end of their noses (that is a hoot to watch), and some people can make a groove in the tongue or turn it over (but that is genetic).

So, if I ask you to do any of these things on purpose, or more than one of them, and keep doing it continuously, you may or may not be able to, depending on all sorts of things. If I ask you to sing while doing them, that could make it harder. Nevertheless, sooner or later, if you kept trying, somehow most of these things would begin to be deliberately do-able and sustainable, even while singing.

But, if I ask you to raise your soft palate on purpose, could you? Would you know if you had or had not? I can say that it’s my experience that inexperienced, non-trained singers cannot do this, or, if they can, by accident, they can’t feel it as a response. That’s normal. NORMAL, people. You can’t lift the back of your tongue, either, or make your soft palate into a dome. You can’t widen your pharynx (throat) or even know what “open” feels like. If your throat ever totally closes, you will either be dying in short order or you will already be dead! Open just feels like nothing special. Sorry.

And, if I ask you to drop the back of your tongue, close the vocal folds with more firmness, to move your false folds, to constrict your aryepiglottic sphincter, or make your larynx go up and/or down deliberately, you either have to deliberately squeeze something in your throat and hope that the squeeze does whatever it is I have asked you to do, or think of some other reaction that might cause your throat to respond (vomit? gag? cough?) Basically, there is NO way to do any of these things deliberately without something else happening that you should not be doing.

YET. There are a lot, I mean A LOT, of singing training methods that teach people to do all manner of things that are not directly possible. THINK ABOUT THAT. People are paying money to learn how to squeeze their throats on purpose. They are paying money to make sounds that resemble retching, being in pain, and swallowing a potato, not as a means to an end (which would be not great but perhaps at least remotely understandable) but as an end in themselves. The people who teach these things DO NOT UNDERSTAND the autonomous and semi-autonomous nervous systems and how they work. Some of them are, sadly, getting rich anyway.

Your body has one primary response. You cannot override it, you cannot get rid of it. Your brain’s central cortex is geared to get oxygen in and carbon dioxide out, through your vocal folds, period. It is not possible to commit suicide by holding your breath. And, if you get something in your throat, your body is going to do its very best to get it out by coughing it up, and you can’t make that reflex go away either.

Therefore, any successful training approach has to work IN CONJUNCTION WITH the responses of the central cortex if the throat is to remain maximally functional. BIG STATEMENT HERE, and I know that, but I can’t make the nerves in my body or anyone else’s body do other than what they do and neither can anyone else.

This instruction was given to me by Dr. Daniel R. Boone, great-grand nephew of the original Daniel Boone of our country’s history, and one of the founding fathers of Speech Language Pathology research in America. Dr. Boone generously taught two workshops with me in the 90s — “Voice, Lies and Videotape” and “Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Speaking or Singing But Were Afraid to Ask”. He generously said that I was the only singing teacher he ever understood. That was partly because I had him as a mentor and he was a master.

If you study singing (or professional level speech) long enough, it is my belief (and I can’t prove it) that you eventually do develop neural pathways that are not in “average” non-singing people and that you can indeed learn to feel and move the soft palate or other structures that are inside the back of the mouth. I think you can learn to perceive movements in the back of the tongue and deep within the throat as well. I also think that making any of these structures do something deliberately while singing is a mark of desperation to be used by professionals only because they are out of shape and can only sing in a certain kind of sound (temporarily) by giving the vocal production some “help”. A really well trained, in shape singer, DOES NOT MAKE THE THROAT DO ANYTHING SPECIAL. He or she controls THE SOUND, not the throat, no matter what style is being sung.

The last time I was examined with a fiberoptic scope, I was able to do all kinds of things in my throat by looking at the monitor. This was not news to me. Things do move. They do so because there is no constriction and because I can make all kinds of sounds on all kinds of pitches, not because I am moving my larynx or making my vocal folds do something on purpose.

The distinction here is CRUCIAL. C.R.U.C.I.A.L. People who teach you to put your larynx someplace or do something to your false folds are causing you problems, not helping you learn how to sing. People who teach you to make your gut like a stone wall or scream as if you were in pain are causing you problems, not helping you learn how to sing. People who tell you to send the sound into your masque, or your nasal passages, or your eyebrown or cheekbones or sing from your diaphragm ARE NOT HELPING YOU LEARN TO SING. They are causing you problems. Run away.

You cannot change the way your brain is wired. Work with it, not against it.

Performers have to be willing to criticized on a regular basis. We start being criticized as young students and it continues straight through until we retire or die.

The criticism comes not only from teachers but later from others if we go on to be in the profession. We get feedback from acting, language and repertoire coaches, from accompanists, conductors, from stage directors and maybe from our colleagues. We get it from the press, maybe also from our managers or agents and from our significant others. No matter how much you do not like being criticized, it never goes away. You can resist it but you cannot avoid it unless you stay in your living room.

It takes a special kind of person who has to develop a special kind of mindset to take in all the critical evaluation and make of it something positive. Of course, it depends as well on how the criticism is presented. It is a lot easier to deal with it if it is given in a fair and considerate way that is honest but kind. If the evaluation is just plain nasty and mean, it takes a lot more “inner strength” to see the value in it (if there is) and make it useful.

Everyone is criticized or evaluated, it’s true, but critical evaluation doesn’t necessarily come at average people in average jobs every single day, and hopefully doesn’t last year after year. And, if the person being criticized is lucky, what is being evaluated is the work being done, not necessarily the person who is doing the work. Personal criticism is much worse to face than criticism about the product itself, unless that product and the person creating the product are one and the same.

It’s hard to separate out who is the singer and what is being sung and that gets even worse if the person singing is doing a song of their own composition and also playing the accompaniment. It takes an extraordinary individual to be able to “step outside” their own experience and see it as if from “outside” in an objective way. The video camera has helped us all to do that in a better way, but not every artist records and watches their artistic endeavors to do self-analysis.

Being a vocal performer (or any kind of performing artist) is, by definition, a vulnerable thing. It takes real guts to stand up in front of an audience and depend on two tiny pieces of gristle, buried deep inside your throat, that you can’t feel and never see, and open your mouth in a song. It puts everything you have on the line, as you present something that you care deeply about and in which you have invested a lot of money, time and energy, and which you are hoping will be acceptable to others. If it is not, you can’t do much about it while you are still up there singing, so you can end up truly embarrassed. Of course, if you are successful, you can be thrilled, and, in some really rare cases, you can end up rich and famous.

AND, one of the worst things about being criticized is having to deal with the criticism that we aim at ourselves. Artists are notoriously hard on themselves. Some truly talented and well prepared people are so harsh on themselves and so unable to allow themselves to think they are acceptable, they never even attempt performing. I have had students who were genuinely talented and ready to take themselves out into the world as performers argue with me about how awful they were. Usually, those people don’t stay in the studio because if they can’t accept my opinion, why should I take their money?

Once in a while (and it is really rare), I run into someone who is the opposite, meaning the person thinks they are much better than they actually are. They stand up in front of others to sing (or perform in some other way) and are just terrible. Sometimes they know and don’t care. They just want to do it and do. Most of the time, though, they don’t know and if someone were to tell them, they don’t believe it. Lizzy Grant seems to be the “in the moment” example of someone who is making Lana Del Rey (her stage name) a success based entirely on how lousy she is. We live in an unbelievable country, folks!

I don’t know a single singer who really likes being criticized but most of them who are good are smart enough to know that the criticism is a necessary evil and that going on entirely without it would be a mistake. Allowing others to criticize you so you can improve automatically keeps you humble. It also allows you to change, to learn, to grow and to discover new things that are very exciting. It keeps you in touch with your humanity and with your art. In the end, it’s a pretty good trade off.

We have had about five decades of good research on vocal production. Most of the early research was on classical singing. More recently there has been investigation of belting and belters. Not much else has been studied.

Think about that. No one has seriously studied successful professional singers. There is NO data on them that applies to any of them in a general manner.

Since I have been teaching for over 40 years, I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears the consistency within each style. Many of my jazz vocalists favor a certain kind of vocal production. No, they don’t copy others, but they do not generally sound like rock singers or Broadway belters.

On the other hand, the Broadway belters have a certain consistency, too. Men and women, kids and teens. A real “legit” sound is going away and a strong “mix belt” is right there along with the belters, but they don’t sound the same as the pop belters.

The pop belters make a different kind of sound, but are also consistent to their style, too. Mind you, the differences are not huge between some of the vocalists in one style and another, and some singers cross from style to style. Still there is a “certain something” that distinguishes each style.

I can’t think of a single other profession in which successful individuals have not been studied to find out about the parameters of the success. We have all kinds of statistics about swimmers, golfers, baseball players, and tennis stars. We know about politicians, chefs, lawyers and doctors. We can find data about housewives, factory workers, the elderly and kids of all ages. Where — WHERE–is the data about singers or singing?

We have information about vocal production but it is not aimed at the outside, just the inside. We know a bit about the vocal folds and the air flow parameters, but we do not know how people think when they sustain a high note. The books interviewing classical singers by Jerome Hines and others were interesting but certainly not “scientific”. Other books on individual singers may mention the singing in some specific way, but not in a way that objectively compares any data about singing to some other data.

We have sent scientists out to live with apes and elephants. We have sent them out to look into volcanoes and at the ocean floor. We have sent them to investigate the shopping habits of Walmart customers and the long term effects of sustained exercise or medication on various demographic populations. Indeed, we have studied all kinds of things animal, vegetable and mineral. I am waiting, as I said a few posts ago, for studies on singing — not on vocal production per se but on other parameters.

Remember, we teach people to sing in all kinds of ways. What we teach them is largely personal, subjective and often passed down from one person to another as folklore without any validation of any kind.

Isn’t it time that we go look at the people with thirty, forty, or even fifty years of successful professional singing in their lives and find out what that’s about?

If you study classical singing you will be taught to breathe (in any of dozens of ways), you will be taught to “vibrate something” in your head (take your pick — forehead, eyebrows, eye sockets, back of the nose, cheekbones, face bones, front teeth). You might be taught to “relax” (in some vague manner), you might be taught to “make the sound (fill in any of the following – float, spin, ring, buzz, point, focus, lift, open, widen, deepen, fill out, go forward, fly across the street, or just “project”). You might be taught to never move your larynx, your jaw, your face, your head or your ribs (everyone likes the upper body to be quiet. That’s the only thing that is agreed upon by everyone). You might be told to make your consonants “soft” or to clearly pronounce all consonants. You might be told to “sing on the breath” to “create a legato line” but not to be breathy or slur the pitches (good luck). You might be told to grip your belly muscles all the time, to use them only on high notes or loud notes or to leave them alone so they stay “relaxed”. You might be told to use your back muscles when you breathe (good luck again), or to feel like you are defecating while you sing loudly. You might be told that you should “act like you don’t have a (tongue, jaw, mouth, head)” or that you should never ever pay attention to what you feel or hear, lest it distract you. Of course, you should do this while noticing the vibration in your head, which you feel but do not notice. You might be taught to speak or sing from your diaphragm or your belly (which would be easy if the vocal folds were in either location). You might be taught that “you listen too much”, “you think too much”, or “you try too hard”.

You will be taught that the music has to be learned accurately. There will be a great deal of emphasis on the pitches and rhythms so that they are sung exactly as written (most of the time). You will be taught several foreign languages in various songs and hopefully will learn to speak them at least minimally, although if you never get there, probably no one will worry about it a whole lot. You will be taught about the great European classical composers of the last 400 years and you will learn to sight sing and train your ear. You might be taught to play piano a bit, and to take musical dictation. You will probably also be taught to evaluate music in terms of harmony and theory, at least enough to analyze a score.

You may be taught some kind of acting. What kind and how much is anyone’s guess. You might be taught “stage deportment” and I would not presume for a minute to say what that would be. You might be taught some kind of dance or movement, but you might not.

What you almost certainly will not be taught is to ask yourself, “How would this person, if she were a live, breathing human being and not someone in an opera, sound if they were experiencing this situation?” You will not be asked to find a sound that is as close to that as possible, without sacrificing your own vocal production. You will not be taught how to bring together your vocal production, your emotional understanding of the communication of the song or aria and what it means to the character, and make them all become one. You might want to make that happen on your own, but you would have to have a strong desire and have a great deal of natural ability if you were to succeed.

How do I know this? Because I have been traveling all over the country (and the world) for the last 25 years doing master classes (both CCM and classical) and I RARELY find this at any level. Not undergrads, not grads, sometimes not even in young professionals (although by then, it frequently has finally arrived because if it had not, they would not be working).

Is it any wonder then that most average people do not like classical singing or music when they hear it? What is there to draw them in? Is it any surprise that those few artists who have somehow combined excellent vocal skills with a great instrument with deep emotional communication often end up with international careers?

What human beings respond to is emotion. Garcia said that in the early 1800s. Human beings are drawn in by powerful emotions in every circumstance. What we remember in life are the moments that are full of emotional power. Yes, intellectual stimulation is important and new ways to think are also fascinating, but not anywhere nearly as compelling as raw gut emotion.

If you want to succeed as a singer, no matter what you sing, find a way to get at your own emotional life and hook it to your best vocal expression. It always works.

Want to know what commodity is truly rare in singing these days? Emotion. Honest, simple, un-messed around with emotion.

What we get is most either faked or not there at all. Breathy insipid singing does not allow for genuine emotional expressiveness, but it is very popular now, thanks mostly to the popularity of Norah Jones. Screaming is also very popular, thanks to our pop rock divas. Screaming can be dynamic but it isn’t the only way to be emotional. In fact, it can get in the way of subtle emotions.

Have you ever paid attention to someone who is actually overcome with emotion? Have you heard what it does to the voice? Someone who is crying, or angry, or frightened has a certain quality of sound that is hard to imitate. Most music today is written by people who do not know much about singing or singers. They just write whatever they do and, if they make money, and many do, then they are validated for that.

The older composers knew how to make it easy for a singer to show emotion in a song and allow that to carry the song along in making it memorable. Now idiots like Simon Cowell, who wouldn’t know actual emotions in a song if they bit him on the leg, think that being emotional is somehow “not professional”. Hello? Just shows you that success and knowledge often do not have anything to do with each other.

You don’t have to literally cry when you are feeling sad in a sad song to convey that sadness. You don’t have to turn red with anger in an angry song either. You do have to allow the song to have an effect on you and some people don’t ever have that experience. The people who are highly reactive to music (who get emotional just listening to a piece of music or a song) don’t try to do that, it just happens. Sometimes the music can be powerful enough so as to be overwhelming.

If you are not one of those sensitive souls (and they are rather rare) it doesn’t mean that you don’t feel anything but it might mean that the depth of what you feel isn’t so strong as it is for those for whom music is a remarkably vivid personal experience.
If you sing and you are not physically strong, conditioned to stand up to this onslaught of energy, you can break down sobbing or begin to get so angry that you lose control of how your body is making sound. That doesn’t work. That’s the reason it’s necessary to have technique, so you can control the flow of feelings that runs across your body, and harness them to your sound in a positive way. Mostly, out there in the marketplace, there is no honest emotionality and so much deadness or hyperness, (as in screaming), there isn’t a lot of anything that really touches the audience.

Genuine emotion will also give you authentic communication with its own set of personal parameters regarding a song. No one will feel that song the same way you do. If you do not have that experience, you will be forced to intellectualize the song, deciding from a purely rational purpose what you want it to be about.

I remember a performance of “Tosca” at NY City Opera (may it rest in peace) in which the Tosca came out on stage yelling “Mario! Mario!” in a loud, shrill, hooty, wobbly screech. If I had been Mario, I would have run away – FAST! I had a similar experience at the Met once, watching Aida and Radames in the tomb where they would die, singing as if it was a discussion about what they had had for lunch. I doubt very seriously that dying people are that bland. Yes, it had to carry, but it would have if the sound had been infused with feeling. Somehow, my guess is that what these two characters were feeling, if they had been real live human beings, had never been discussed or approached by anyone…not the singers, the coaches, or the director.

You can still encounter emotion in a Broadway show because actors are encouraged to connect body, voice and emotion, but not as much as you might have heard before rock became such a big influence in theater. It varies, but sometimes you hear intensity and it’s up to you to figure out for yourself why that intensity is there. Sometimes loud is just loud for loud’s sake.

If you sing, ask yourself, if you were crying and singing at the same time, what would that be like? Your throat would close up, most likely, but even if it did not, could you sing in the same sound with the same kind of behavior in your throat and body while you were crying or would you have to stop crying in order to sing? Try to find a way to experience the emotion and the sound at the same time and a way to express them as partners that is full with feeling and free in production. It’s not all that easy to marry the two, but it is possible. The freer and stronger the vocal production the more it can stand up to vigorous emotional communication without issue.

You shouldn’t have to compromise between the two. Both are possible in equal measure as long as the body has been prepared in advance.

If you teach in a college, or even in a middle school or high school, sooner or later, you will be faced with having to compromise. If you teach in a private studio, this may be the case less often, but sometimes, even there, you may have to do something that isn’t what you would ideally like to do.

What is the way to compromise without feeling like you give away your integrity or do something you don’t feel OK about? Where do you go to find out the professional answer to this conundrum?

Beats me.

The professional singing teaching organizations do not address this very real issue. The topics presented at the national conferences or regional workshops never go near anything like this. Too bad.

Guess you will have to use me as a resource. I might be better than nothing at all.

My advice is:

Always put the long-term well being of the student first and tell the truth. Always do what is in the best interest of the student’s vocal health at the top of the list and let the artistic things be less important. Always EXPLAIN every aspect of whatever adjustments you must make to the student and give a rationale for accepting a situation that isn’t ideal along with a plan to address it later, if possible. Always tell the student why the compromise is necessary and what the solution is on a temporary basis. Then, do what has to be done.

Example: You have a student at a college who needs to do four songs for a jury at the end of the fall semester (which is short). The student has multiple issues caused by poor technique and is also dealing with outside issues that are impeding vocal progress. It could be that the student is on a work-study scholarship and has to put in a certain number of hours at a tiring job in addition to attending classes. She finds it hard to practice and is only able to make very small changes in her sound. You must be sure that she has the requisite four songs, in correct keys, perhaps also in foreign languages she does not speak or understand. She has to make the songs sound as good as possible, even though she does not yet have much ability to do them in a deliberate, well executed manner.

You have to give as much time as you can in each lesson to the development of the voice itself. You should choose the easiest songs you can find, with the minimum level of difficulty in terms of the musical structure, pitch range, lyrics, phrasing and dynamics. You should stay away from French and German unless the student has studied them and stick to Italian or Spanish because they are easier to pronounce. You should choose repertoire that does not expose the student’s weaknesses and make sure the student truly understands what the song is about and how to communicate that.

It’s better to allow breathiness than constriction. It’s better to allow for a freer sound than worry about any particular resonances. It’s better to go for a good tonal quality than to worry about the consonants. It’s better to have some energy in the sound but avoid excessive volume or extreme softness. It’s better to have the student stand up straight and tall than to worry about whether or not the breathing is “low enough”. It’s better to accept anything that gets the student to sing on pitch than not, no matter what that might be. It is better to have the student look relaxed and comfortable than to insist the student “breathe correctly”. It’s better to do two verses well than four verses badly.

Tell the student why you are allowing her to make adjustments for the sake of the jury performance but explain that the issues being “camouflaged” must be addressed as soon as the jury is over. Tell her why you are approaching things the way you are and make sure she understands why that is important.

If it is a professional singer and you are a private practice teacher, you may run into similar issues if the singer has a gig or a recording date coming up and there isn’t enough time to get all the various issues into ideal shape before the pending deadline. In this case, however, you have to be sure to let the artist have a say in what choice is made, especially if there is more than one way to adjust. The artist might decide it’s more important to get the lyrics across than to worry about the sound. She might decide that the breathing isn’t important but the pitch accuracy is.

After this is clarified, you should work with whatever exercises you know to get to the short term goal. You should also tell the vocalist what to do as soon as the jury or gig is over in order to get back to working on general technical and vocal improvement.

If you have a student (in a school situation) that is going to fall way below expected standards, be sure, for your own sake, that you communicate that to your department chair or principal as soon as possible. Alert him to the situation and explain that you are doing all that can be done to meet the school’s expectations or standards but that, for the sake of the student’s long term vocal health, you are having to compromise on X things. It might be risky, but not nearly as risky as pushing the student to go to someplace that is physically or vocally damaging, and not as risky as having the people in charge find out at the jury that you have not done a good job. By then it’s too late. If it is a pro, you must be sure the manager, agent or other parties know the deal, too, or you could end up risking your reputation.

It’s rare that you have everything in place just exactly as you would want it to be. There are always time constraints, performance demands and everything else in life that just shows up. Know that you can address these things and settle for something that is less than perfect while still being completely professional as a teacher. Your integrity depends mostly on telling the truth, doing the best you can with what you have to work with, and making sure your student knows what is going on.

In reading about “out of body” experiences, and I have read as much as I can on that topic, one thing that almost always shows up is that the person having this kind of experience sees him or herself “floating above their body”. They are watching their bodies while they are hovering above them.

Can we “leave” the body while it is still alive? What would that be about?

People who have been in accidents or have had other sudden trauma occur often report they are watching the entire experience as if in slow motion from the outside, as if the event were a movie. During this time, it is as if they are not “in their bodies”.

Now, either you believe this is possible or you don’t. If you don’t, and I don’t want to convince you as it really doesn’t matter, you can think of the entire episode as a dream. Most people seem to accept the idea that we dream. The reaction, whether it be literal and real or a dream, is frequently caused by a strong stimulus. It could be possible, in some kind of “altered” state, to be alive but not really connected to the body in the usual sense. It would be the opposite of what I wrote about a few posts ago — being “in touch” with the body and its sensations. It would be a state in which you are not in your body, you are in some way watching it from a distance. It is as if “you” are “out of your body”. (Don’t ask me to explain who is doing the watching, since someone obviously is).

As a performer, you do not want to be “out of your body” in any sense of the phrase. You do not want to watch yourself go through the motions of singing or hear yourself as if you were someone else. You do not want to feel removed from the experience as if you were floating above your body while it sings. You want to be fully present, awake and aware of your body and its responses to the music and the words.

And, if there are parts of your body that you cannot feel, or don’t much pay attention to, you would be benefitted by knowing that and changing it. If you can’t feel a part of your body, it will “die” in your consciousness and eventually it will be so far away from your own awareness as to be effectively not there.

You need to be in touch with and IN your body to sing. You need to experience being alive while you are singing, and you need to know when you are not present and why.

A lot to contemplate.

If you are not conversant with psychology you may not be conversant with some of the terms used in that profession.

“Secondary gain”, which has come up before on previous blogs, happens when someone seems to have the same negative things happen over and over again or just never stop. When someone is living with chronic conditions or situations that are not beneficial and those conditions could be changed but aren’t, it could suspected that there is a reason why. Something is a positive payoff to all the negativity. Example: You get sick a lot. When you are sick you get lots of attention, you don’t have to go to work, your family gives you special treatment and others are kinder to you than usual. If you find that you are getting sicker and sicker more and more often and that it is getting harder to stay well, it may be that you have a feeling that being sick isn’t so bad after all. That’s secondary gain. Until you know you have it and you acknowledge that to yourself, nothing happens. There are all kinds of possible ways that a chronic and apparently negative situation can have a hidden secondary gain.

I am not speaking here of a situation which is really outside personal control, such as being wrongfully in jail, or having a permanent injury that you got by accident and that will not ever heal, or being caught in a situation as a child or teenager that you cannot leave due to your age. I am speaking here of situations that adults find themselves in that they would like to change but somehow fail to do so.

For instance, if I am sick with a “diagnosed condition” and I allow that condition to become the dominant factor of my life, when other people who have the same condition do not routinely do that, there is a secondary gain that makes it worthwhile for me to stay sick and unable to function optimally. I have known people whose lives were always in great distress. One crisis ceases and another one quickly follows. There are always problems, troubles, issues, crises, and stress. Life is absolutely never quiet or calm or joyful or enriching. I have known others who go from illness to illness, (different ones) only getting better long enough to regroup before a new one comes along. (My mother was one of those people). Or people who go from job to job. Or relationship to relationship. The people who have lives like this never see the patterns and never imagine that they have anything at all to do with the patterns. It all seems to come from the outside. They are victims of their circumstances.

I have also known people who have had genuinely terrible things happen to them who just deal with whatever it is and go on. I have known people who have been injured in ways that could easily have stopped them in their tracks but fought hard to come back and succeeded, and these same people barely talked about what it took to do that. They do not feel victimized, they do not feel defeated, they do not feel “why me”? They understand that it’s always best to think, “Why not me?” and go forward.

My own husband had emergency open heart surgery four and a half years ago. From the moment he learned he was going to have his chest sawed open and receive a cow valve that would save his life, he was certain he would be fine and grateful that he was getting a second chance at life. He never had one second of feeling sorry for himself or sad at what happened. (I was a wreck, of course, but I dealt with it, too, as best I could, also grateful for his surgeon and his hospital care and for him and his attitude). Now, at 72, he is in great shape.

So few of us are taught to discipline our thinking. We do not understand how to take responsibility for what we tell ourselves in our own mental talk all day long. If you do not really, diligently, notice the chatter in your head, you are at its mercy. If you constantly think of all the things that could happen, that might happen, that have happened in the past that are bad, you will make yourself sick, just through that. If you do not “hear” your fear, or anger, or sadness, underneath that mental monologue, you will not understand why it is that the very things you are wanting to avoid will keep showing up in various forms.

In the Bible it says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh.” There is a similar passage in the Hindu scriptures using the word sound instead of word. Most Christians interpret this to mean that Jesus was the person who came to spread the Word of God. That’s not my take, however.

The “word” applies equally to all of us. The words we tell ourselves both out loud and in our heads literally create the life we live day by day. It’s like the Little Engine That Could……I THINK I can, I THINK I can. If you think you can’t, you can’t, even if you try. If you think you can, you might still fail, but you would be much more likely to go try again. Glass half full, not empty.

The people who argue with this are the ones who say, “That’s ridiculous. I can’t control everything. It has nothing to do with me or how I think or behave, except that I always have to deal with the X that comes at me.” Yep. If you are afraid of being poor and don’t want to be generous with money because you haven’t got it to share, you are creating poverty because by not giving you tell yourself, I’m broke. Self-replicating cycle. If you are afraid to commit to a relationship because it might be a mistake, or the wrong person, but you want to feel deeply connected to someone so you won’t be afraid to commit, you will continue to be with people who are also afraid that you are not the right person and are afraid, or you will create someone who is passionately committed to you, and that will scare you to death and you will drive the person away. The fear drives the whole pattern as long as you don’t call it by its right name.

So, be very careful with what you say and how you say it, both to yourself and to others. If you sing, your voice carries “extra power” in it, as it is supposed to be deeply connected to your emotions. That, coupled with a clear intention, has the same seed of power as the one that is mentioned in the Bible. In the beginning, there was what I said I would do. Who I said I was, who I say I am, what I say I will do, how I say I will do it. And how I will sing.

Tell the truth, to the best of your ability, and be scrupulous about how you form your phrases and choose your words in your head and out loud. Do not ignore the things you dare not utter, you desire never to speak, or things you wanted to say but never had the chance. Don’t forget to look at the things that were said to you that you did not acknowledge, the things you wish someone had said to you but you never heard, the things you long to say but are afraid to or have not had the opportunity to. All of this can contribute to negative programming and a consequent secondary gain. It also could contribute to vocal problems, speech issues, throat illnesses of various kinds, and a general inability to trust your own word in your life.

No, it isn’t always this way. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But it is more this way than most people realize. To “wake up” means that you understand that you are the driving force of your own life. The sooner you take that as a literal statement, the sooner you will move toward self-satisfaction and fulfillment. If you are a singer, be careful with what you sing, where you sing and how you sing. Be careful about who you sing with, and what they say. It matters.

The power to create is in each of us. Use it wisely.

What does it mean to be “in touch” with your body? If you are alive, aren’t you “in touch”? Does it mean that you can reach down and touch your hand to your knee? Why would anyone not be “in touch” with their own physical presence?

Being in touch, in the sense that I usually use those words, means being able to sense, with keen awareness, the body as a whole and also specific parts of the body as feeling and sensation. It means that you have some ability to put your concentration on that part of the body and hold it there, using your mind to quietly sense what is going on.

If you are not used to focusing your awareness on your body in this way, you might conclude that all you were doing is closing your eyes and getting a quiet, vague idea that you do, for instance, have a stomach in your middle torso. If you are practiced and willing, however, there is no limit to the kind of consciousness you can develop in such an exercise and no limit to what you will “get” as a response to “inner listening”.

The body is an amazing thing. It can feel deeply and powerfully any and all emotions. It can move in all kinds of ways from simple, everyday movements that we generally take for granted, to unusual movements that most people could never attempt. And, it is always moving, 24/7, because we breathe. The air moving in and out of our lungs 24/7 creates definite movements that are always changing. We mostly don’t notice them but they don’t ever completely cease until we die.

People who learn to cultivate a strong partnership with their bodies are unusual in our society. Mostly we are taught, either by word or example, to just ignore the body until it gets sick or can’t function, or to push its functions to the very back of our awareness. This works most of the time, but then the body fails us and we try to fix it. We are not guided to stay aware of what it feels during the day as we go through our activities while it functions normally, which is a shame. By the time something is wrong, it can be too late to do anything that is effective as healing.

Particularly in our American society, learning to pay attention to the body’s wisdom and honor it can be hard. Those who do manage, however, have something special and useful that many others lack. If you do not develop the capacity to “check in” with what the body is perceiving (and it does perceive whether or not you realize it), you can get lost. Sometimes people who have certain “conditions” or illnesses or people who have physical challenges develop sharper awareness about their bodies — what works for them and what does not. Ask someone with a food allergy how they are when they eat the wrong food and you will get a detailed answer.

Singers are known to have a much more heightened sense of the throat and the voice than average people do. There have been studies about that. I have seen in my experience that singers can be very sensitive to small changes in their voices that are important but nearly unnoticeable to others. It is my job to honor such information and help my singers reconcile what they know about their throats and their voices with what they perceive as being “wrong” and rebalance it. Someone who has been singing for 20 years certainly knows when her voice is “OK” and when it isn’t, even if there is nothing wrong with it biologically and that diagnosis has been confirmed by an MD.

Being in touch with your body is not just about being in “good shape” or being physical fit. Being in shape might be a way to notice what’s taking place in your physical self, but it can also be a way to “stay out of touch” with the body, depending on what your mental attitude towards being “in shape” is. If you push your body too hard because you have been taught to ignore pain and discomfort thinking it is somehow “better” to do that, and you can cause yourself a lot of trouble. If you have been encouraged to be the other way, however, thinking that every small little gurgle or blip is a cause for alarm and that you cannot eat regular food or drink regular water without being sick, that’s just as problematic. If you are taught to suppress unhappy experiences and emotions because you should always only “feel good” or because “no one should ever show their true feelings in public”, then you can learn, very well, to blot out both sensation and emotion, and this is downright dangerous to both your body and your mental health. Unfortunately, this is a situation that happens all the time.

Being in touch with your body allows you to realize that sensations and emotions flow through us all the time, sometimes strongly but sometimes just as slight waves of something that is hard to define in words. Allowing what is going on to just be there, with quiet attention and peaceful awareness, can be challenging, but it keeps us in the present moment, breathing, and knowing that life goes on around us even as we “go within”. If you have ever been asked, “How do you feel?” and your answer begins with the words, I think I feel……” I would say to you, “Do you mean, “I’m not sure what I feel? If so, please go deeper into your body until you can find out”. The body always knows. Try it sometime. You may surprise yourself.

Ever wonder what would be best for the profession of teaching singing and for professional or professional-level amateur singers?

I do all the time.

What would be best would be that we would all use the same terminology in the same way and that it would be based in function.

What would be best would be that we would all put the student’s needs above our own all the time.

What would be best would be that we would respect all styles of music on their own terms and teach them appropriately.

What would be best would be that everyone who teaches someone else to sing understood vocal function, vocal health and basic voice science.

What would be best would be that all teachers of singing could share their ideas about vocal success with their colleagues without rancor or suspicion.

What would be best would be for all of us to find a way to take those who do vocal or psychological harm out of the profession and prevent them from returning.

What would be best would be that all teachers would think of what is for the greatest good of all by being unselfish, generous, caring and open.

What would be best would be that all teachers would realize that many different approaches to teaching singing can work but that they must make functional sense. You cannot learn to sing by thinking about “the pink mist in the back of your throat” unless you are a very talented singer who would eventually learn on your own.

What would be best would be for us to study successful singers who have had long lasting careers and vocal health to learn from them about what they do.

What would be best would be that we train our singers with an eye to the marketplace to help them get work as singers.

What would be best would be for the younger teachers to have a mentor to guide them through the first five years of teaching.

Did I also say that I spend a lot of time in fantasyland?