Listening To Desire & Listening To Your Voice

Do you ever feel like there’s a part of you wanting to unabashedly sing out but for one reason or another decide to hold back? A hidden or unmet desire that sits in close proximity like when children play hide and seek and then pick someplace easy to spot. Last week we sent you a survey to find out whether singing, or sounding, is something that you have been deeply and or secretly craving. So often it seems that people who don’t consider themselves “singers” or “good” singers feel they aren’t entitled to sing. And while it may not seem rational or logical or practical, the desire to sing remains.

You can witness the desire people have to sing just by observing how more and more instrumentalists have taken to releasing new music where they are singing. (One recent example is Jon Batiste’s latest record)

It’s pretty amazing that your voice, the thing causing you anxiety to sing in public or release your original music, is also the exact part of you that can heal those fears. It’s kind of perfectly poetic. Your throat cavity has so many ways it can open and stretch to reveal your voice without you having to push and squeeze to be heard. (This is part of why I jam out on teaching vocal technique). For example when you allow your face to soften and then widen into a smile as you open your mouth, your soft palate, the muscular part at the back of the roof of your mouth, is encouraged to rise up like a parachute (kind of like the image below). 

This creates more of a doming effect allowing your voice to resonate and become louder without pushing. Think of the architecture of a church or temple.

You are actually like a temple. Not in the religious sense (although I would argue that you are in the spiritual/energetic sense) but I am referring to the structure of your anatomy. From the top of your head to the roof of your mouth to your vocal folds to your diaphragm to your pelvis to the soles of your feet, you are filled with domes to absorb the shock of various surfaces (literally and metaphorically) that you walk upon and also support the sounds you choose to make. 

That is part of why you feel that call to sing! Your body is a temple despite what outside forces say or try to do to convince you otherwise. Your body, just like your voice, can be a place of rest, a place of sound, vibration, movement, micro movements, thoughts, emotions, insights, retreats and expansions, electrical impulses and more.

So if you haven’t already filled out the voice survey to tell us about your singing dreams, please do so here. In the coming months I will be launching a new online program for people of all levels looking to find more play and freedom with their voices. We would love to hear from you to know more of what you desire:).