Author: Sarah Whitten

As I squatted down to move laundry along this morning I started thinking about my career path and had a little chuckle as I pulled multiple pairs of yoga pants and yoga shirts out of the wash to hang on a line to dry rather than putting them in the dryer.

I was often told to dress for the job I want. Perhaps that’s why I owned so many yoga clothes before becoming a yoga teacher?!

In reality, I set out on my path of voice and movement not really knowing where I was going. I’ve always been that way. I have a gut instinct to do something. It just feels right, and I say yes and then on to the next step.

That’s how this started.

I said yes to a yoga class in 1999.

That lead to curiosity about how much better I sang in my lessons after being at a yoga class. Which meant I started going to several classes a week.

That lead to doing a 500 hour yoga teacher certification program. Which meant I did every project in the program on something that brought together the body and the voice.

That lead to knowing just what I needed to calm my performance nerves so I was present and powerful on stage.

That lead to bringing yoga into my voice studio at Harvard where I taught for 13 years.

That lead to giving workshops at State and Regional NATS gatherings, for schools and choirs, all focused on how the body and voice intersect and work together.

Then, six years ago, my body blew up when my entire back seized after giving birth to my second child and the nagging aches and pains I’d had all through my 20’s and early 30’s became full blown, angry, unhappy places in my body.

I started to question everything that I’d learned and done in my yoga study in the preceding decade. I felt broken. Unfixable and unsure that I wanted to do any of this anymore.

It took some soul searching, digging on the interwebs and the discovery of two new ways of movement that brought me back and brought me where I am.

I’ll share more about how I got from flat on my back 6 years ago to the work I do now of helping singers and voice teachers better live in their bodies and better see the bodies in their studios.

If you live with jaw tension and pain you are all too familiar with the ways it can impact your singing. You may have observed and experienced how tension in the jaw tends be seen in conjunction with tension in the tongue as well as the larynx and the rest of the neck. That tension can lend itself to struggling to produce the voice easily and sing notes in certain registers, to dealing with a jaw that locks open, clicks, pops, is in pain or is simply too tense to open easily.

Because the jaw is a portion of what determines the shape of our resonator tube and is so intricately linked with the tongue, hyoid bone and the larynx suspended below, jaw tension is not a problem you want to live with when you need your voice to function at its best.

The question we want to get at is this: is the jaw responding to the rest of the body or is it the source of the problem?

The quick fix paradox

We are trained as a culture to focus on the part of the body that is in pain and identify the fastest way to fix it. In this case, the quick fix is often popping a pain pill and/or a massage of the jaw area and maybe the neck and shoulders. Something like massage (or taking a pill) can bring you short-term relief, which is great if you are standing backstage about to go on. Sometimes a one-time fix takes care of the issue in a long term way. Very often though once the quick fix wears off you are back to square one of experiencing tension and/or pain. When that happens you can easily get caught in a cycle of pain/tension, treatment, pain/tension, treatment, with no long-term relief in sight. If you are returning to the quick fix repeatedly, it is time to expand beyond the local area and look for clues in the rest of body.

Long-term relief from jaw tension (or any other tension/pain based issue) begins with embracing the concept of the whole body being connected and developing an awareness of current patterns that exist across the body. Once awareness is raised we can move on to skill building – finding new ways of moving that improve functionality and suppleness in the body.

Before we continue with the physical elements, I want to address the mental/emotional side of tension and pain. There are always emotional/mental connections to the issues we experience in our bodies. Unexpressed emotion can get housed in the tissues of our being.  I often recommend to clients that they begin by becoming an observer in the week following our session. They are to notice under what circumstances their tension or pain increases. For many, simply making that connection is enough to create an a-ha moment, that rather than expressing their rage over great aunt Tillie asking when they are going to get a real job and stop doing this little singing thing, they clench their jaw.

For those who discover they have a long pattern of unexpressed anger or a sense of not being safe to express feelings or be heard in their life, and it manifests in their jaw, I always recommend they find a qualified mental health professional to engage with to resolve the emotional component of the root of their issue. Releasing the emotional component frees them up to being to implement skill building to re-pattern better function in the body.

Exploring the Whole Body Connection

While the whole body is our instrument, we still have long way to go before we better understand how all of our parts inter-relate. If you think of the body like a chain created by all the joints, tension and pain are most likely to occur at the weakest link in that chain. But, the way the other joint links are behaving while we are moving and not moving are also impacting that weak link.

The relationship between the jaw and the pelvis

The jaw and pelvis have a unique connection in the body. Located at opposite ends of the spine, they are bridged by all the tissues of the torso. We can discover several cross body connections between the jaw and pelvis. When there is tension in the jaw it is often mirrored in the pelvis – for example, tension in the left side of the jaw and tension in the left side of the pelvis. Along with that mirroring we can see an excessively tight pelvic floor. Another mirroring connection across the jaw-pelvis spectrum is tension at the base of the skull and a corresponding tension in the front of the lower belly. Bracing at one end or the other, or both, meaning you are holding a higher than normal level of tension as a way of providing stability, is not uncommon.

One quick way of understanding the connection between the pelvis and jaw is to sit comfortably and simply squeeze your anus. While you do that see what you notice in your jaw. Can you feel the muscles of your jaw engaging? Can you feel your breathing change? Now relax everything. Next, purse your lips really tensely. Can you feel a corresponding engagement in the anus? A change in the breath? It’s okay if you don’t. Sometimes connecting the body on a subtle level is tricky, especially if this is the first time you’ve tried.

Looking at how these two ends relate through alignment, breathing, and functionality of the core, all give us big clues as to how to work with the body to address jaw issues.

Alignment

The first place to can assess is your alignment, or how the body is stacked. When the head is not stacked well over the pelvis, meaning it is sitting in front of the shoulders, then we know there is a problematic relationship between the two ends. From the waist down we often discover many people ‘wear’ their pelvis in front of the body – meaning the mid-hip sits in front of the ankle because the pelvis is pressed forward. The pelvis can also be habitually tilted or tucked and not neutral.

Alignment is a wonderful assessment tool. However, it is one thing to look at a picture of a skeleton and understand the concept of alignment. It is quite another to translate alignment into your own body that is covered in clothing, adipose tissue and muscle. Enlist a friend or partner to take pictures of the body from the side to help you better understand how you hold your body. When we uncover problematic postural patterns we begin to understand how the ways we are (and aren’t) moving are impacting the whole body.  If you’d like to learn more about Alignment and how to use it in your studio, I have an entire workshop that teaches you how to use bony markers to align a body and ‘read’ the results. Click here to learn more.

Breathing

Breathing patterns are very telling of how well the body is functioning overall.

The breath provides us with a continuum that spans the distance between the jaw and pelvis. The more supple our body is between ribcage, belly and pelvic floor, the better our breathing patterns are.

Assessing the breath to determine your everyday breathing pattern, gain a better understanding of the quality of your inhale and exhale, and movement (or lack thereof) in the ribcage and belly can go a long way towards filling in the picture of what’s behind jaw tension.

Immobility and tension in the ribcage, observed while engaged in every day breathing and/or in singing are indicators that there is an issue in the torso that relates to the jaw. And yes, even singers can stand to improve their breathing patterns! When we lack fluidity and suppleness either caused or reinforced by poor breathing patterns, we will not align or move well.

Breath work is always a part of resolving issues with our body.

Getting to the Core of it

To resolve alignment issues we need to create circumstances through movement that invite change. We can’t just shove body parts into the location where we know they should be. First, they will quickly fall back out of that position. Second, we need to understand that they are in that position because it is the safest place for the body. Those tensions, no matter how problematic they are, are present to keep you from being further injured.

Insufficient function in the core is frequently the underlying factor contributing to jaw and pelvis tension, bracing and mirroring. The core, as I’m referring to it here, is the entire torso of the body, from where the neck attaches to the torso all the way down to the base of the pelvis and where the upper arm and leg bones meet the shoulder and pelvis respectively.

I’ve written before in Why Core Training Is Important for Singers about the importance of the deep layer of the functional reflexive core which includes the pelvic floor, transverse abdominus, psoai, multifidi, diaphragm, and muscles of the throat.

There are other lines of muscle connections that can impact jaw function. For example, in Tom Meyers’ Anatomy Trains he explores the connection between the deep front line: the muscles in the bottom of the feet, those in the inner line of the legs, the psoas, deep neck flexors, tongue and mouth.

Further up in the torso, the muscles surrounding the shoulder girdle are impactful to jaw function.

We also know there are broader connections of the shoulder area with the lower leg –  I’ve written before about the tensions mirrored in the two areas.  Additionally, tension in the shoulder girdle will both be present when the lower core doesn’t function well and the tension can keep the lower core from being able to work.  Even the way your leg bone is moving in the hip socket can have implications for jaw function.

All of this is to say, just looking at one area of the body in isolation just doesn’t give you a complete picture of what’s going on or how to work to improve function. Starting to get the bigger picture here?

All of this work comes together when you move slowly and really feel the body. That can be challenging when we are used to addressing individual parts and quick-fix solutions. When mobility is improved, strength and stability can replace tension and weakness, bringing about better alignment and breathing as well as alleviating tension and pain in the jaw.

Where do I go from here?

You may be able to immediately identify that you have issues in the areas of the body I mentioned above. When I work with clients I follow the paradigm of Awareness, Skill Building and Mastery, where we first get curious and honest about what’s really going on in the body. Then we move on to learning new ways of moving the body and get consistent about it. Mastery comes with time.

Because every body is unique, there is no one-size-fits all approach that will serve everyone well. If you would like someone who can assess your body and bring a better understanding of how parts of your body are moving, how they are moving relative to other parts and how some of them are not moving at all, please set up a free 30 minute consult time where we can talk more in depth about where you want to be with your body and voice.

Maybe, just maybe,

we don’t need to be told what to do with our voices

so much as we need permission to feel.

For me that sentence is loaded with so much goodness that can be explored, from emotional to physical, to developing the ability to feel the voice produced by our bodies and relying on it more than hearing when we perform.

First, the emotion side of feeling. As in, your feelings.

As artists it is imperative that we have access to the full spectrum of emotions and the ability to bring those emotions to our work so our audience connects and is moved.

But, what happens when you grow up in a culture and/or family that is anything but encouraging of having feelings? Well, we find ways to NOT feel. We eat, we watch tv, we engage in destructive behaviors, we avoid etc. You may have your own unique behavior of avoidance. Sometimes that avoidance happens on a subconscious level – you may not even connect that rather than feel your frustration you shove a handful of chocolate chips in your mouth (not that I’ve ever done that. Like, ever. Really.)

Feelings can be hard. It isn’t easy being human.

That avoidance though, doesn’t translate well on stage.

To illustrate I’ll tell you a story about me.

In between my first and second years of graduate school for vocal pedagogy, my father committed suicide. My reaction wasn’t just to his decision, which is a rug yanked out from underneath you moment, but also to the sum total of our relationship, which I would characterize as primarily difficult. He was a hard person to know because his depression kept him from being truly emotionally available and present both physically and emotionally.

The way my being dealt with that experience was to feel numb. It was a survival mechanism that allowed me to keep going and get through my second year of course work.

However, when it came time for the dress rehearsal before my final recital, I’d done all the work of learning the music, but one of my committee members offered feedback that I wasn’t really conveying emotion.

When I tried to access emotion in my lessons and coachings, no matter the timbre of the piece, all that came out was tears. I’d done such a good job at putting the grief I was experiencing away, that when I tried to access any emotion it was the only one that was available. Crying for an hour on stage wasn’t an option, so I went back to my largely expressionless singing.

When I listen back to the recording of that concert I can hear the ‘flatness’ in my voice. It took me time and space to be able to open the door on grief and allow it to begin to move through me so I could express emotion on stage. If I’m being honest, expressing emotion has never been a strong suit for me – I think I did it very well as a child, but that wasn’t always met with a positive response and I learned to tamp it down, as so many do. One of the great places of work for me as an adult has been a return to both allowing feelings and expressing them (hopefully more skillfully than I did as a child!).

No one, in that time or any other, ever really talked to me about the concept of embodiment when it came to singing. In the work I do now I work to find ways to encourage singers to feel emotion through the vehicles of the body and the voice and then communicate it. Sometimes the simplest of practices, like feeling the breath coming into your nose is a powerful place to start.

I’ll share another post about physical feelings like the what we often call the ‘stretch sensation’, but I’m curious to know, how do you address making space for emotions in your lessons so your singers can be embodied on stage?

We all know that right? Consistency is what will ultimately bring about change. Want to shift your voice? Your body? You have to put the time in.

But…there’s always a but, right?

What if being consistent is the thing that stops you in your tracks?

I’ll be the first to admit I usually start something great guns, but after a while I will peter out. When I began to investigate why that is I made a startling realization.

I’m someone who really needs external accountability to keep me on track. In my life that can look like paying for a gym membership, buying the right shoes for the movement I want to do, signing up for voice lessons. Hell, I rescued a dog so I would be forced to get out the door and move every morning because I knew if it were up to me I’d just stay where it’s warm and cozy.

Gretchen Rubin has done some really cool work in this area and come up with Four Tendencies – categories that most people fit into – Obliger, Rebel, Upholder and Questioner. You can take a quiz here to see which category you are.

I’m a classic obliger. If I tell someone I’ll do something for them, I do it. If I tell myself I’ll do something for me, it’s more than a little questionable as to whether I’ll follow through, unless I find a way to make myself accountable for it.

It is my understanding that there are an awful lot of obligers out there.

So, here’s my question….are you wanting to make a change to your body or voice, but simply making that commitment to yourself isn’t getting you where you want? If you need some external accountability, reach out and let’s talk. Maybe it’s a class. Maybe it’s a series of 1 on 1 sessions tailored to your needs. Maybe it’s a workshop.

But, rest assured, you don’t have to do it alone. I’m here to help keep you accountable!

What is going on in your lower leg is also happening in your neck and shoulders.

Are you working away at reducing tension in your neck and shoulders, but not seeing a difference? Or, are you calf stretching every day, wearing shoes with no heels, but STILL have tight calves? Perhaps it is time to look at the whole body and get a better understanding of how the tension at one end of the body impacts the other.

Here’s one reason why your lower leg is impacting your neck…

Shoes

Yes, even those cushy, comfy, ‘supportive’ shoes.

Why are they involved?
1. They have a heel which puts the ankle into constant plantarflexion (toes pointed).
2. Toe bed is elevated, keeping the toes slightly lifted off the ground
3. Stiff soles prevent all the small joints in the foot from moving well
4. Narrow toe box forces the toes together (bunions anyone?).

The degree to which 1-4 happen varies depending on the type of shoe, but it isn’t limited to high heels. It happens in those $150 running kicks you got from a shoes expert at your local running store.

Think about the shoes you wear most often…running shoes, dansko clogs, 2″ heels from DSW, etc.

When you are wearing stiff soles, heeled footwear with a narrow toe box you create adaptation in the joints of your feet and ankles. Adaptation isn’t a positive shift. It means less mobility.

Tension in the Calves

The connection between tension between the lower neck and the shoulder neck, continuing…muscles in the calf.

Not only are our feet impacted by shoes, but our calves are as well. Heels (of any kind, remember, not just high heels) create a shortening in the calf muscles.

Sitting also creates a shortening in the muscles.

We ALL have chronic shortening in the muscles of the lower leg.

This shortening impacts our gait (how we walk). For many of us, our short calves mean we have what is called a ‘negative stride length’, meaning the heel of the foot of the leg that stays behind when you step forward can’t stay on the ground long enough to allow you to push off posteriorly (using your glutes and hams). Instead, you are doing a process of falling forward and catching yourself when you walk.

Why a wave can help explain things

This picture shows a wave in the distance where the water is moving at the same (or close to it) speed. Then it shows waves at the shore that are breaking – the top is moving over the bottom as they crash forward.

The waves break at the shore because the lower part of the water is encountering the rising shore line which slows it down. That slow down creates a whip-like effect at the top of the wave propelling it forward until the top part of the wave falls forward and crashes into the shore.

Our bodies are like these waves. The tension, stickiness (highly technical term!) and lack of mobility in the joints of our feet and ankle make our lower body move more slowly as we walk. Our upper body should be propelled forward by that slow down BUT we know falling forward is a bad idea SO we create extra tension in the upper body to keep ourselves upright. You won’t be aware that you are doing this it is happening on a pretty subtle level.

Is this the only reason you have upper body and lower body tension? No, definitely not, but if you are working on it consistently and not seeing any changes, this is an important factor to investigate!

Ok, so sitting is a reality in our lives…can we make it work better for our body?

The most obvious solution is to sit as little as possible in your daily life – walk to do errands, walk your kids to school, take regular movement breaks at work.

But, when you have to sit, here are some things to explore:

Sit on the floor – there are a myriad of ways you can configure your body on the floor (I think I’ve sat in no fewer than 11 different positions as I’ve written blog posts this morning). The hardness of the ground lends itself well to making your body shift, which means lots of different joint configurations. It can take time to transition to floor sitting, so maybe start with only a few minutes on the floor a day and slowly add more so your body doesn’t hate you!

Sit on the floor when:

• watching tv
• talking on the phone
• eating dinner (indoor picnic anyone?)
• your kids are at the playground
• playing with your kids
• working
• waiting at a child’s sports event or in a waiting room

I’m sure you can think of other places you can get your behind out of a chair and onto the ground. Please share in the comments!

Sit better: when you have to sit on a chair or some other raised surface try these suggestions to get you out of a tucked pelvic position

• If the seat is bucketed (like in your car), fold a towel to fill in the bucket, bringing the seat level
• Sit forward in a chair so you can sit on your sitz bones
• Use something like sitonthewedge.com
• If your legs are long, sit forward and drop one knee toward the floor
• If your legs are short, put a block or a small step stool under them

You can view a video on how to sit better here.

Create an active standing workstation:

• You can turn a box upside down on a desk that brings your computer to the right height.
• Don’t just stand there! Put things at your feet – tennis balls to roll and step on, half foam roller for calf stretching, a cobblestone mat to step on (something like this one, or make your own in a boot tray filled with river rocks).
• Take breaks from standing and move.

Create a low workstation:

• Place your computer on a coffee table or other low desk
• Lie on your belly (create a small bolster with a hand towel that runs across the front of your pelvis to keep your low back from getting crunched – it’s all unhappy from all that sitting, remember?) to write.

There were some pretty sensational headlines a few years ago claiming ‘sitting is the new smoking‘. These articles talk about research that links sitting with an increased risk for cancer, heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

The solution, offered at that time, was to get a standing desk. Even better than that, get a treadmill desk. Just standing isn’t a whole lot different than just sitting.

So, what is the deal with sitting and standing?

It isn’t an issue that you sit or stand. The issue is HOW MUCH and HOW OFTEN you are sitting and standing. When we assume positions over and over again, as we do when we sit, our muscles adjust to being a particular length. That length will limit your joint’s range of motion. Those limits create small changes that show up as aches and pains. Those aches and pains lay the foundation of much bigger issues down the line – osteoarthritis, pelvic floor problems, foot neuropathy and on and on and on.

When we sit, there are pressures put on parts of the body (the pelvis in particular when sitting) that create unhappy circumstances of rolling back onto your sacrum (think about slumping into your super comfy couch, or sitting in the bucket seats in your car, or just being so super bored in your latest department meeting) – we aren’t building bone in the hip joint, we are causing changes in the tissues of our glutes (hello, wide, flat butts), creating pelvic floor problems, and without glute strength, we’re over recruiting our abdominals to stabilize the spine.

When we stand we aren’t really using the body, we’re just staying in a relatively fixed position – I well remember my parents starting up their school year of teaching and the pain they remarked on in their body in the first few weeks as they went back to standing for extended periods of the day. Treadmill desks probably deserve their own post. There are benefits that will come from using a treadmill desk, but the mechanics of walking on a treadmill aren’t optimal for the body, so if we are really looking to make a difference in the body, walking on a treadmill won’t do it.

The hard reality is we aren’t meant to be still anywhere near as much as we are in our modern lives. We are built to move. There is no right way to sit, or stand, but there are better ways to sit and stand. Way that have us sitting and standing in as many different configurations as we can.

I do recognize that sitting is a part of modern life so in my next post we’ll talk about how to make shifts in your sitting habits that will bring positive changes to your body.