For those readers that are not singers, I don’t think you’ll get to bored with shop talk. Just insert your profession/life as needed. I am sure it will still make sense.
I have been living inside the epiphany from my last blog for a while, and things are simply amazing. The flood of unrestricted understanding of the way my voice works and its relationship to how life in general works is incredible. I am not working to pat myself on the back, but I am quite impressed by this recovered ability to simply allow myself to create the proper conditions and get out of the way. These words are borrowed from my former teacher, Inci Bashar. She is an amazing technician, and she would always discuss the ratio of solid preparation to success during our lessons. At the time, I didn’t get it. Now, I am so glad I remembered it!
We are now into runs of the production with Mobile Opera. I learned long ago that I have to be careful ‘marking’ (not singing fully in rehearsals to save voice, or for other reasons) during this process. I believe that the voice responds to the information it is given…a lot of marking does not prepare the instrument or the body for the effort required in creating true performance-level singing. In fact, the instrument becomes misinformed and can be impacted negatively. I was in a fairly high-profile performance in which the title character never sang out in rehearsals for nearly ten days. When the performance came, the voice was gone within 30 minutes, and there was still quite a bit to sing. I do not wish this discomfort on anyone, and certainly never plan to be in that position! As usual, it may seem that I digress…here comes the point.
During the darker times I became very afraid of my voice, and truly began to not trust it. I spent years learning how to sing, but that was of no import. I became a scared singer, and would mark excessively based on that fear. I would buckle down and make it work once down to the wire, but it was a force of will. How many times, in career or in life, do I hold back the flow of good that is available because I do not trust the outcome? How often do I hesitatingly step out and find nothing to be afraid of? How often do I try to protect something that is innate to my being… how often do I simply allow myself to ‘mark’ my way through every area of my life?
Now, I find myself singing fully in much of the rehearsal process, much as I did as a young singer. I will mark at times, but I have learned that I must not get stuck in that mode. I make mistakes, figure it out, and move on. These are the action steps to which I refer: I choose who/how, then I operate in my day with that in play. Today, I will probably take it a little easy; I did quite a bit of singing yesterday, and much of it was not from Don Pasquale. My voice needs the time to reset, and I am okay with that. The important lesson for me in this is the power of knowing it is my choice that so heavily influences outcome. How I think of myself, how I treat what I have been given, how I treat the people in my life that I love…all up to me, and all choices made inform the next series of choices to be made. Clearly put: Everything in my life is a series of choices based in the Truth I hold about myself, immediately followed by the consequences of those choices. The current result of this realization takes me to a place of freedom I haven’t felt in a long time. I now go, give all I have to a project/audition/meeting, and move on, knowing that the Highest Good for me will come forward.
This may sound a bit airy to some of you… to me, it is just tapping into my inner (formerly dormant) savvy.
A hint of what is to come: I have felt this shift turning itself powerfully toward my brilliant relationship with my partner, Warren. I cannot begin to imagine how this will manifest, but I am nearly giddy with the prospects!