BREATHING

               “Without risk there is no faith, and the greater the risk, the greater the faith.”

                                                              Soren Kierkegaard

In this new year of 2001, the actual beginning of the new millennium, we have the opportunity to break out of our old rut and start taking some risks. Proper breathing is taking a risk. What if we dare to lose the baggage we’ve been carrying around for longer than we like to admit? Being too careful is as just as unproductive as being too carefree. Let’s see how this affects our breathing.    

Breathing is an act of faith. Proper breathing is the secret of great singing. Why is it such a problem? We have to breathe to stay alive, so it would seem we already know how to breathe. However, the problem is more complicated than that. It is complicated because we have altered the breathing pattern we were born with. A baby cries—makes a lot of noise for such a small body—and doesn’t seem to suffer any hoarseness from it. Ever notice his stomach during this process? It’s the “before” picture for an advertisement from your local gym. Our young Buddha doesn’t have an hourglass figure, which is what we are all urged to aspire to. Stomach in, chest out. That’s the motto. The ego at a young age pays no attention to this. Even so, by the time a child is two or three years old, there is already a tightening of the abdomen. Why is this happening?

The abdomen—the solar plexis—is our emotional center. Herein lie our joys and fears, our laughter and our crying, our loving and hating, all our emotions hinge on this area of the body. When we are taught not to cry, a tightening begins. We must start growing up and not express our inner emotions as a baby would. This is a necessary evil, and can be done without us locking our feelings away, but most of the time the orders are very restrictive and controlling. We obey these words because they are coming from someone 10 times our size. We begin to lock our feelings away little by little. If we don’t, we learn the feelings of shame and abandonment. We become fearful, and this tightens our solar plexis even more. We are beginning to substitute our faith that all is well, with fear. We begin to lose our joy.

We are born with two fears. They are noise and falling. All other fears are taught to us. If we are brought up with fearful parents, we soon learn these fears. We adopt them as our own. Even with no experience of them, our subconscious stores them away in our memory bank. Later, when we begin to study singing, all too soon we develop vocal fears. Our information is coming from another authority figure, and hopefully not restrictive and controlling, or else we’ll find ourselves in the same predicament as when we were growing up. Fear of high notes, fear of low notes, fear of running out of breath are all examples of erroneous thinking by our conscious mind. The conscious mind now feeds this information into the subconscious. The subconscious does not care whether we live or die. It does not question the “facts” that we deposit there. We have fed it much erroneous information that will stay there until we challenge these false beliefs.  Then we can have an awakening. It suddenly dawns on us that something is wrong—singing should be easy. The things we were taught don’t seem to “sit well” with us anymore.  Without really knowing that our subconscious has false information, our intuition tells us that all is not well. It is the wake-up call for examining our information in depth. This feels like we are falling apart, because it is how we have lived our lives. Here’s that important moment when we begin to question not only what someone else is telling us, but also questioning our own storehouse of information. 

Very early in our lives we learn to be fearful and hide our feelings away. Where do we hide them? They are locked in our bodies. The suppleness and buoyancy of the very young begins to harden at a very early age. We have learned to control many things in our lives by the age of six, and now believe that this controlling is the only way we can survive in this world. These are very real fears, for being abandoned or shamed because of our unique thoughts or feelings is too much for us to bear. We now become model children—modeled in the form of our parent’s beliefs. If we’re lucky we have been allowed to question our authority figures. Usually this does not happen, and we become the rubber stamp of our parents—surviving with false beliefs.

        “Those who were permitted to react appropriately throughout their childhood—i.e., with anger—to the pain, wrongs, and denial inflicted upon them either consciously or unconsciously will retain this ability to react appropriately in later life too. When someone wounds them as adults, they will be able to recognize and express this verbally. This need arises only for people who must always be on their guard to keep the dam that restrains their feelings from breaking. For if this dam breaks, everything becomes unpredictable. Thus, it is understandable that some of these people, fearing unpredictable consequences, will shrink from any spontaneous reaction; the others will experience occasional outbursts of inexplicable rage directed against substitute objects or will resort repeatedly to violent behavior such as murder or acts of terrorism. A person who can understand and integrate his anger as part of himself will not become violent. He has the need to strike out at others only if he is thoroughly unable to understand his rage, if he was not permitted to become familiar with this feeling as a small child, was never able to experience it as a part of himself because such a thing was totally unthinkable in his surroundings.”

       “For Your Own Good”     Alice Miller

Certainly I don’t think anyone who is thinking of having an artistic career as a singer is going out and murder someone—but the above paragraph emphasizes the fact that we are very much influenced by the way we were treated as children. Music, and especially singing, is very tied up with, and dependant upon, free expression. If we are kept from free expression as children, then we must open that door for ourselves later in life. In singing or anything to do with the arts, this is a prerequisite to become an artist. So much of our art today is an expression of the bottled up anger the “artist” has, and therefore the art itself becomes the subject of violence—performed violently. We seem to have accepted the fact that our visual arts, our paintings and drawings, are nothing more than “outbursts of inexplicable rage.” I guess it’s better to murder a painting than murder another human being, but now it becomes a crime against great art, not society. Has our society sunk so low that we no longer think of this age of ugly art and outrageous outbursts of noise and obscenities from our current popular “singers” as not a crime? How did we get to this place?   

As we began to protest against authority in the 60’s and 70’s, the other side of the coin became, children were taught nothing. Their parents, the first authority figures, were too busy with their own lives to give any time to them, so the children had to fend for themselves. Usually the parents’ guilt about this was so great that the child began to dominate the parent with his control system and became a rather uncontrollable monster, although looking unconsciously for someone to help him out of this dilemma. Originally godfathers and godmothers took some of this responsibility. Favorite aunts or uncles could also serve as mentors and role models for children. However, the mentor became the TV set. Sesame Street became the accepted way to educate a child, but as helpful as that idea was, by the time the child went to school he expected Big Bird to be the teacher. He wanted to be entertained. As TV or computer learning does not involve the student, but simply pumps out information, there is no understanding of human communication. Communication is a dialogue between two people. Information can only become knowledge through this communication. The TV does not require the student to do the work, and when confronted with the fact that he/she must be involved and responsible, a whole new dimension is introduced. This new dimension is very disturbing to the child, and the parents, not wanting their child to be disturbed, begins attacking the teachers and the school system. The school system therefore began to change its demands to accommodate the parents and children. Now we have poor reading, writing, and arithmetic skills. If we were enraged about too much discipline in the past, now the demand for no discipline has led us to a place of great information, but little awareness of the deeper internal connectedness of this information called knowledge We are now enraged again because of poor performance capabilities. Balance. That is the key. Too much discipline is the fear of not being perfect. Too little discipline produces mediocre, self-serving results.

This is why breathing is such a problem for all of us. If we have too much discipline, the conscious mind understands how to control things—such as breathing—but doesn’t understand that through this discipline the body has forgotten how it breathed as a small child. We have altered the natural breathing process and are unaware that we have substituted shallow breathing in its place. In the case of the undisciplined child, now adult, he/she may not have altered the breathing pattern, but the conscious mind has not been taught to understand much of anything. Having the discipline to put that still natural breathing pattern to use is beyond them. They were not taught any discipline in their lives, so learning to sing correctly is not needed either. The small world that many of our present day superstars are living in is a tragedy. Their convoluted lifestyles and machismo have created a whole new junk culture that serves neither themselves nor the public. It simply makes money. Millions are being made by these unfortunate “performers and musicians” who have never grown out of their early upbringing—or should we say lack of upbringing. Freedom to them amounts to not obeying any of the rules, and yet the road to true freedom is a very narrow one. There are many rules involved, and it takes a lot of time and patience to uncover our true selves and our true sound. At the present time, excellence has sold out to success and excess.  

Working with the totally undisciplined student is next to impossible. Since knowing a little about something is to them the end of the line,--especially when they are grandly rewarded for it--this is not their lifetime to wake up and become the best they can be. Mediocrity is so prevalent because it appeals to the majority of the population. Working with the over-disciplined student is at least possible. But even the student who is willing to examine himself down to the core of his being will succeed in this process of great singing. Since this Newsletter is about the breathing that brings this about, it’s about time we take a deep breath and get to the subject at hand.

The above discussion is to point out why breathing correctly is so difficult and yet should be so easy. For the disciplined student, it is the process of unlocking the muscles that are holding the energy inside the body, and not letting it work. Since the body was locked by mental suggestions, the key to unlocking the body lies in an entirely different set of suggestions to counteract the old information. These new suggestions are so foreign to our way of thinking that it takes a long time to convince the mind that it’s O.K. to let go of the body and allow the energy of our emotions to go through us without stopping them. In the body are energy centers called chakras. Some, usually not all, of these centers can be clogged. Our job is to locate the blocks and allow the energy to flow through them.

      “The physical body is a living machine through which our higher bodies express themselves. In blocking off your physical body, so do you block the expressions of your higher self. You can feel or think a good deal, but if you deny physical expression or action you become frustrated and subject to further problems. Problems which manifest in the physical body as aches, pains, or illness are simply the result of blocks preventing the expression of higher bodies.

        The physical body is composed of cells marked by their own individuality. We should not keep these cells under a conscious control or dominating control, but a loving one. If one considers the physical body as a universe unto itself, each of us is “god” of our own universe. The physical body has two parts, the dense and the etheric; the etheric is closely connected with our nervous system.”

                  From Kundalini and the Chakras—A Practical Manual—Evolution in this Lifetime

                                                Genevieve Lewis Paulson

The voice also will have aches and pains and eventually illness if the breathing is blocked and energy cannot move through our bodies. In breathing for singing, our goal is to get in touch with our etheric body. The etheric body is the childlike, joyful, lighthearted body. In learning to breathe we have a desperate time letting go of our dense body. Many are taught to use the dense body--“take” a breath and hold it! This is called support, or vocal prop. Many large and foreign words are used to describe breathing, and our intellect loves to throw these words around, but unless one experiences correct breathing, it is nothing but an intellectual exercise. There are no words to describe this phenomenon. Telling you what an olive tastes like or an orange smells like is just about as futile an exercise. One must experience the feeling for himself. Again, breathing is an act of faith. It must be accomplished with love, not fear.

            “Some days I feel invincible in the air; I float and am weightless.

                        I feel like an angel is holding me.

                Other times I weigh a ton and fall like lead.”

                               Luis Cabellero

       A quotation used in the book “Learning to Fly”  Sam Keen

Since we are so used to using our dense bodies, the job is to take a risk and dare to break free of the barriers we have placed in our way. The body loves to be efficient. On this path, there comes a time when the conscious mind stops controlling, and the body returns to its God-given freedom. The body will start becoming efficient and signal the mind when you are abusing it. The body will then begin to teach you, and the conscious mind has no recourse but to listen to the body, probably for the first time. Even the conscious mind will quit abusing the body once it has been tuned in to proper breathing. It’s such a relief to quit pounding your head against the wall—it feels so good when you stop. Using the etheric body is truly an act of faith, so go ahead and start taking the risk of letting go.

Attached to this Newsletter is an article from the September, 1980 edition of Opera News called “Heavy Breathers.” Hope the New Year will bring you new and wonderful insights, and a whole world of enlightenment will open up for you. Wishing you all the best for 2001.