Author: Sarah Whitten

Have you ever asked a singer to raise their sternum, or told them to stand tall? Perhaps you’ve had them place three fingers or placed three of your fingers on their sternum and asked them to lift into your fingers? Maybe you’ve even had them roll shoulders up, back and down as a way of elevating and opening the front of the chest.

If you have, I hate to break it to you, but you’re asking for the impossible. That open chest you want, with a ribcage that is buoyant and flexible…It ain’t happening at the behest of a few words or a shoulder roll or even a shove of the sternum.

What we know should be happening and what a singer’s body can actually do are often a few light years apart.

Because most of what we do in life has our arms out in front of us and our heads looking down, our shoulder blades tend to be protracted – that means they are pulled away from the spine. The impact of this is rounded shoulders, a dropped sternum and lack of mobility in the thoracic spine. When we tell a singer to stand up straight or to raise their sternum, they can’t really do it due to the hyperkyphosis (spine rounding) and resulting immobility of the thoracic spine (the part of the spine where the ribs attach).

As an aside, we ALL have that hyperkyphosis, most of us are just able to mask it still. But, when you see an older body that makes a C shape in their torso, that is unmasked hyperkyphosis.

Because we don’t have good mobility in each spinal joint in the thoracic spine, when we’re told to stand up straight, we move from where the thoracic and lumbar spine meet at the bottom of the ribcage and thrust the entire ribcage forward. It might look like the sternum is now elevated, but we’ve created a swayback position and closed off the lower part of the ribcage so it doesn’t move well when we breathe.

And no, the answer is not to tuck the pelvis and bend the knees to address the swayback.

The answer to being able to stand up straight without creating a cascading avalanche of compensations is to improve mobility and build strength in the parts that are tight and weak. Rhomboids are muscles that run between the shoulder blades and the spine. Strength in these muscles helps keep the shoulder blades happily positioned on the back AND they counter the hyperkyphosis that we all have in the thoracic spine. Their primary action is retraction of the shoulder blades – meaning these muscles pull the blades toward the spine.

It would be nice if we could just issue a phrase or move a body into the position we want it to be in and expect it to stay there, but that’s just not how it works. You can’t shove a body part where you want it to go and have that fix years of patterning.

Let’s start being realistic in the physical requests we make of singer’s bodies. Change will happen much faster and actually be sustainable.

Want to get in on this goodness and discover ways of moving the body to make lasting, helpful changes that support the voice? Join me in the Singers’ Online Learning and Movement Library and get unlimited access to movement videos and workshops all geared toward the singer’s body.

I know, it seems strange that I, the movement teacher needs reminding that I like to move, but there it is.

If I back up to my pre-parenting days I was a always a mover and I liked pushing myself – I ran 10Ks, worked out at the gym, challenged myself at yoga, skied and skated in the winter, played tennis and canoed in the summer. I never did any of it with any concern that I would injure myself. I might get sore for a few days but then I’d be fine.

More than the movement itself, was HOW THE MOVEMENT MADE ME FEEL. When I moved I felt strong, confident, capable and happy. The endorphins of exercise are very real my friends. It was also a place where I connected with other people, running with friends, seeing my community at yoga class…exercise was a part of my social network.

A little over 6 years ago my youngest was born. I emerged from that pregnancy and birth with some pretty significant, birth-related injuries. I suffered in a high level of pain for about a year before I began to get my body back on track.

It all began when I was was out for a walk at about 5 months pregnant. I felt something in the front, left side of my pelvis change, not in a good way, and every step I took was painful. Whenever I brought any of it up to my midwives they shrugged it off to the general aches and pains of pregnancy. In my heart I knew it was more than that, but I wasn’t one to push back against an expert (OH HOW THAT HAS CHANGED!) so I just kept soldiering along.

By the final month of the pregnancy, that went 7 days past my due date, I was barely able to walk. I’d stand up and wait for the shooting pains to pass through my left pelvis and then stagger walk where I needed to go, gritting my teeth with every step.

My alignment for most of the pregnancy was a mess and it showed up when I finally went to give birth, the baby was facing the wrong way. He was sunny side up. Fearing back labor for me, the midwives positioned me on my left side in the hospital bed.

The labor was fast, with me arriving at the hospital around midnight and him born around 6am. I was so focused on the labor that I didn’t really think about the fact that they had me lie on my left side, where my hurt pelvis was, with nothing but a thin hospital pillow under my head.

I went through the entire, labor and delivery with my head improperly aligned to the rest of my spine and given my history of a waterskiing accident that did a ton of damage to the soft tissue of my upper body as well as my cervical spine, that was the equivalent of a train wreck for my neck and back.

In the car ride home from the hospital, my entire back seized up. I was in so much pain that I couldn’t be upright without a crushing headache.  Something I’d never experienced before and hope never to again. I then suffered in my own cave of misery for 2 full weeks, on my back for most of them, because being upright in the car was not an option so I could not get back to see the midwives and I had a new primary care physician closer, but I’d never seen her because I hadn’t needed to go and a new patient appointment availability in that office was months away.

It took a solid 18 months of work on my part to rehab my body to the point where I didn’t end every day with an agonizing tension headache. I tried physical therapy, but they never seemed to look at the whole me, so I would leave those appointments feeling physically worse than when I went in. Chiropractic and massage each helped in the moment, but they couldn’t tell me what to do to hold onto the release they helped my body find. I tried a trainer at the gym, but she was young and ill-equipped to handle a body that was hurting, and I never returned after my first session because she seemed to ignore all I told her and I was in pain when I left.

It took me finally deciding I was going to take what I knew about the body and figure it out. I HUNTED online before I found Katy Bowman’s work and together with what I already knew, I put my  core back together, shrinking my 3 finger diastasis to under 1, built better balance in my pelvis and addressed the imbalances in my shoulder girdle. I built a small set of very limited, in my opinion, things that I could do that would not make me hurt. Walking, functional movement and some swimming.

That’s a very long story way of saying I gained function, but never strength like I had before, and the memories of that time linger. In the 4+  years since I’ve used the demands of two kids, a job, a house, a dog and a husband to ignore the fact that while I desperately missed moving, I was terrified to try anything for fear of hurting the way I hurt for so long.

It makes me tear up just to write that. Because that loss of movement has come with a loss of happiness, a loss of community, a loss of feeling strong and capable.

I’ve periodically tried moving how I used to. We’ve played tennis a few times, I’ve hopped on the elliptical, but it wasn’t until yesterday when I went XC-skiing with my husband that I realized I go into every single movement session harboring a major fear that I’m going to hurt myself. The impact of 6 years ago is still lingering in my brain.

I’ve kept movement minimal to keep me functional and not allowed myself to see how much fear was driving the bus.

I could feel my body yesterday out on the trails, but I’m not in pain today. My pelvis is fine, my upper body is fine. My muscles feel used and I’m sure I’ll be sore, but in a good way, not in a close your eyes in a dark room and pray for the day to end kind of way. I want to make a big giant note of all that and remember that I LIKE TO MOVE.

2019 is my year of Community. I’ve scheduled in times into my calendar to go to the gym this winter. I’m working on owning that I not only have the tools to help others, I have them to help myself too so it’s ok to try things out. I know there’s community waiting for me when I re-enter into the world of moving the way I love.

I will need reminding that when I move the ways that I love, I feel happy, strong, capable, confident. That I can move and not hurt. So hold me to it, ok?

I listened to Seth Godin say something this morning that stopped me dead in my tracks while I walked my dog.

In his book Tribes, he uses a fabulous analogy of a balloon factory, to talk about the institutions that we train and work under where the systems we have in place keep things humming along at status quo level. It’s safe in the balloon factory, it’s comfortable, and you learn how to do what you need to, to produce the product you want.

But, the problem with a balloon factory is there are these other things, sharp things, that are the enemy of the balloon. Things like pins, knives and, yes, Unicorns. If you work in the balloon factory you learn to fear those sharp objects.

If a Unicorn walks into a balloon factory, he suggests, it can send everyone into a panic. The disruption a Unicorn causes can make workers become protective of their work, fearful of the change it might cause and make people turn their backs.

As I listened, I realized I AM A UNICORN IN THE BALLOON FACTORY OF THE VOICE WORLD!

We are trained in school about the systems of the voice – respiration, registration and phonation. We read all the pedagogy books which teach us about the voice and how those systems work from the standpoint of ideals on a page.

I’m over here saying WAIT, what about skeletal, nervous and muscular systems of THE WHOLE BODY?  What about the fact that no one has a nervous system that developed perfectly, so we don’t actually function like a 2-D skeleton on a page? We have joints that are limited in range, muscles that are underused, imbalances and lack of function globally in the body. Those are the issues that impact the voice that NO amount of vocal technique can solve.

I’m disrupting the vocal balloon production line by suggesting that we can’t just say the pedagogical platitude the whole body is the instrument, we actually need to know what that means AND what that looks like in the body; our own and those of our students. We need to be the boss of our body so our careers are sustainable and productive.

I get it, Unicorns and their horns are terrifying if you need to make 30 beautiful balloons by the end of the year and have only 1 hour every week to work on them. Isn’t there enough work to do already? Everything you need to know you already learned from those 22 books you read on balloon production in graduate school, right?

The voice world, like so many other industries that rely heavily on the ‘this is how it’s done’ mentality, fears the Unicorns. But, we so desperately need Unicorns to help us grow and change and improve what we are doing and how we are doing it so we can do our jobs better than ever before.

Join me in popping those pedagogical voice balloons to find new ways of really understanding the body and voice and how they work together.

Here for you.

Your Vocal Unicorn,

Sarah

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?