IF YOU WANTED to join my vocal studio, I would ask you to take an introductory private lesson. In that first session you would learn that air wants you to thrive, that it does not discriminate between individuals, that it is not out of reach. As our first hour progressed I would focus on your body and its breath patterns. I would weave in some of my personal story while asking about yours.
“How do you describe your relationship to your voice?”
You answer and I listen. Empathy toddles between us.
“Sit beside me.” I indicate a cushion on the floor of my studio. “I’m going to demonstrate an exercise known as the dark breath, originally taught to me in the late ’80s by my mentor, Richard Armstrong.”
I lie down on my daughter’s faded blue yoga mat, nestle the back of my body into its thin rubber skin. Opening my mouth, I invite air to flow all the way into my lower torso, swelling right where my belly displays and betrays … where Buddha softens. Falling in love with gravity, I softly release muscle past pubic bone to vagina, perineum, and anal sphincter. Each inhale silent, gentle, expansive. The work of it does not look or feel like work—it is pure pleasure.
Receiving air encourages me to stay present to myself, stay true to today’s challenges and gifts. My goal is not to impress you but to allow you to see me in process; no “measuring up” under the microscope of someone else’s gaze. Follow your hunches with regard to what you see in my body, what you feel responding in yours. If my sound is sad, mad, or glad, you are allowed to note and name it. I am not the emotional expert … we are.
I ease my sacrum into the mat with each exhale, melting further into earth. My legs and pelvis come to life. With each “out-hale” soft undulations sluice toward toes. I feel a ripple up my spine as well and allow my head to move as it wishes, skull loosely weighted to the floor. The slow wiggle through my neck bones is a more recent development, led by my body’s gentle intuition as it accounts for the remains of a frozen shoulder. Arms release wider still as I turn into a single-celled creature in love with primordial ooze. For the moment, a persistent tendency to take on too much slips away. I swim in what is current.
Exhaled breaths tumble out smoky-audible: unvoiced sighs from behind my sternum, birthed at the base of my trachea. I ask my body, “What’s up? Now … and now … and now.” My inner animal awakes, responds with a touch of phonation, vocal cord on vocal cord, sound within the smoke. Preverbal exploration further loosens breath, allow- ing my voice to fall in more deeply with gravity … to darken.
I think of earth, of where my food comes from. I picture my youngest brother’s organic farm, the dirt on our boots when we return from a visit. Chris and his wife, Denise, practice permaculture—a cooperative, indigenous agricultural tradition that returns the land to itself, invites plant and animal species to be true to their nature and to collaborate with one another. This appeals to my mind and heart, but it is the taste of the food and the feeling of deep well-being after a walk on the uneven trails in the woods behind his barn that leave my diaphragm freer. This memory of wholeness encourages me to follow my body, hear what it has to say here on the mat.
Lying in front of you, I am both specimen and breath whisperer. Besides today’s earthy memories, I learn that I have been defending myself under the covers. Clutching my ribcage through the night “from the inside out” has left me with a painful ache where floating ribs and diaphragm meet. I note that the opera I recently produced and sang is over, but much as I can let those responsibilities go, I seem to be dragging my feet when it comes to releasing my character’s trauma. (She suffered a brain injury and then killed her ex-lover … not the most relax- ing of times.) I am also holding on to the less operatic, but equally epic, stresses within which my real-life partner and I have been mired for longer than I’d like to admit. Getting out of bed anything but refreshed, our impasse clings to my early-morning body. Allowing my diaphragm to pull wide “involuntarily” as I demonstrate for this new student has clarified where my current physical and emotional stories meet while reminding me of breath’s capacity to renew and heal.
Please take your turn on my daughter’s yoga mat.
I will talk you through.
ENDORSEMENT
“With a radical mission in a gentle tone, Fides weaves together elements of wellness that often stay apart—the nervous system, our anatomical components, and our most primal urges and desires…. This book is a personal and professional gem that explores and restores our individual and shared human landscape. There is no-body that won’t benefit from reading this.”
—JILL BODAK, M.OMSc, clinical osteopath and anatomy educator