Principles of Acceptance as Applied to the Voice

Imagine you’ve just been born and you don’t know how anything works or what anything means or is supposed to feel and sound like. You’re just experimenting with new toy (like a baby does with their voice!). Experiment with the sound as it sits in your body, the room, the feel of the vibrations, the breath, the air around you. This is like having a clean slate. Think of the traumas you’ve put your voice through. This will help you develop a sense of compassion. This must not to be confused with hypersensitivity, fear or over-analysis of your voice and what it does. This is a non-judgmental compassion. Listen out for the qualities you like in your voice – even if they are currently just faint flickers or seeds of voice qualities you like (depth, beauty, expression, character). Don’t listen to the parts you don’t like. Amplify the good Don’t be concerned with WRONG or RIGHT or how you’ve done things in the past (or how little practice you may’ve done). Just focus entirely on the task at hand – the solutions to problems and your enjoyment of the sound you make and the expression it provides. Don’t expect anything out of your voice or compare it to how it sounded before (yesterday, last year, when you were a teenager!). Don’t compare it to how other people sound unless you’ve got your ‘healthy comparisons’ hat on! Accept every single little crunch and crackle in your voice with good humour and a giggle. (Like a fart or a burp).There is no need for shame in self critique. Use a contrast of being super-critical of your voice for a few minutes. Listen to it’s faults and register how this self-judgement makes you feel (eg. tension, fear, constraint, rigidity). How does this effect your vocal performance? Do not strive for perfection – strive to have character and be yourself. Notice how your voice feels when you sing in the shower, or surrounded by heavy traffic, or when you’re doing the vacuuming. When we don’t listen to ourselves with a critical ear (or half an ear to how we sound rather than 100% meaning and expression) we are freer, more open and enjoy our voices more. Think about the ‘ego’ in its reaction to our ‘true self’ (or ‘intuitive self’) as similar to the ‘throat’s response to our use of the ‘head’ when we sing. Both ego and throat take on the role of ‘controller’. They like to believe themselves as the sole creator of sound or experience, when they are in fact ‘in the way’ of those things they wish to create Envisage your ‘well’ of emotional history and reference being seated in your tummy. When we sing, we must draw from this ‘well’ in order to colour the sound and give what we sing meaning. Try to remove at the blocks to the access of this ‘well’: tummy tension, chest tightness, stiff shoulders and unaligned neck, jaw tension, tongue tension, facial tension, throat tension or a furrowed brow. Use a relaxation exercise to pinpoint exactly where you hold unwanted tension in your body.