Train your voice, train your soul
Singing has transformed my life and the way I am in the world. I would go as far as to say it might even be better than therapy.
When I grew up I used to sing A LOT. However, I was laughed at and told that my voice was annoying.
In addition, I was traumatized by TV shows in which the contestants are ridiculed for showing up with an average voice.
Yes, I loved singing but I became terrified to be heard.
I’ve learned that if you’re not good at something you shouldn’t pursue it, I mean, what’s the point if you won’t make money of it?
Fast forward to today: Every Friday morning I take singing lessons. It started out with the intention to read poetry to a small audience. I thought that no one would want to train my voice to sing because there was no hope.
I suspect that this was a pretext from my soul to get me enrolled and start singing again.
My teacher Lily is amazingly intuitive and highly knowledgeable. She naturally has deep love and respect for the Voice which she talks about as if it was the most sacred thing in the world. My soul awakens in each session.
When I start singing, Lily knows exactly in what mood I am in, what my voice needs and sums up my whole inner life situation just by listening to my first tone.
Lily has taught me how to work WITH what’s here instead of AGAINST it.
She never tries to change my voice but see what’s possible at any given day, never asking too much and never too little. She accepts my moods and knows how to turn fatigue into growth of muscle.
She knows how to balance out my edges and I never leave a session the way I came without ever talking about my private life.
She does it all in a very practical way.
What you basically do is you train your muscles to carry your voice.
Training the whole vocal system to communicate and work in harmony again. I am always surprised how a simple twist in breath, posture, angle of my tongue etc. is bringing forth a whole new facet of my voice.
What I’m most fascinated by are the parallels to my inner journey which are undeniable. Here’s just one example of how my voice reflects my patterns:
I am at a stage of rapid growth at the moment. I am seeing parts of my personality in action that I didn’t even know existed, this is a great sign of expansion. But sometimes I catch a bit of my limited mind and I shrink back into familiar territory because I don’t identify these wonderful personality traits as me yet. Does this sound familiar?
And it’s the same with my voice. I sometime hit a note that I wasn’t able to catch before and I surprise myself so much that it’s causing me to tighten and shrink into the smaller voice I know. I am afraid of just letting go and trusting my newly trained muscles to carry my voice consistently. It’s basically a constant balance between training the muscles and then surrendering to them.
I am learning through singing that as I train my muscles – spiritually, mentally, emotionally, vocally- I will always discover new traits and new notes and to be able to use them on a consistent basis I simply have to identify them as me.
I guess this is a recommendation letter for you to take singing classes. When you train your voice, you train your soul.
Love,
Jen