After we’ve taken time to breathe and connect to our bodies, I lead workshop participants through a series of silly exercises. We scrunch up our faces and then stretch them really big to feel all those muscles. We massage our jaws, imagining they can open from the hinge. We do the motorboat: Rev your lips—brrbbrrbbrbb—feeling the vibration all through your face into the back of your head. We do roller coasters: use your hands and your voice together, start as low as you can go, then slowly climb all the way to the top of your range and then slide back down. We do hi hi hi’s and ha ha ha’s and other games and exercises that allow people to get over themselves and just mess around.
Once I have everyone warmed up and accustomed to making sound, we start to improvise. Begin with a hum, moving your bodies just a little, a wiggle or a bounce, feeling the vibration in your body, letting the sound you make fill up the bubble of personal space around you. Really listen to yourself, and allow yourself to take leadership inside that space. Don’t worry about sounding good. Allow yourself to explore, and learn to orient yourself inside the sound, attuning to the sensations and experience of using your voice.
From here, open up into a vowel sound, a small oooh, and let that sound move around, watch it evolve. The sound of a bunch of people doing this at once is kind of like an orchestra tuning up. Start to play with different vowel sounds (ahh, ohhh, oooh, eee), exploring range (how high can you go? how low can you go?), volume (how quiet? how loud?), and combinations of the three (what’s it like to make a loud low “ahhh” sound as opposed to a small high “eee” sound?). As we enter more fully into the sound, becoming aware of what our voices are capable of, we start to notice what those around us are doing, and we start to echo and respond to each other, weaving together a dynamic, textured fabric of sound.
From here, I can just watch the experience evolve. We can add in a beat, create a repetitive line that we hold and repeat, taking turns moving away, improvising and then returning to the group. We can start adding in words, riffing off each other. Sometimes there is a swell of volume and expression, sometimes the sound all but dies out but then transforms into something new. We can usually tell, intuitively, when it is time to end. I have done this with hundreds of people, in many different contexts, and it is always, always beautiful. The songs we create together are magical, real, totally strange and totally perfect.
There is often at least one person sitting there, singing, with tears streaming down their face. The intimacy in the space is tangible. People feel that they are sharing themselves, and experiencing each other, in a way that is extremely rare in this world.
Learning to access your authentic voice means taking up space in a way that is self-aware, self-loving, and generous. Singing can teach you to be observant of your self—your body, your voice, your thoughts. You can tell how present, how authentic you are in the moment, based on how your voice feels when it comes out. There isn’t one way it should sound, so if it doesn’t feel right, try something different. The more you use your voice, the more tuned in you will be to how it feels coming out of your body, and how it interacts with different spaces, people, acoustics, moods, environments. You can feel your voice at different volumes and intensities, see how it bounces off your environment, see how you’re impacting the world.
Give yourself the benefit of the doubt! It’s okay if it doesn’t sound good. Just keep trying. Keep focusing on singing from way low down in your belly, feeling the vibration, relaxing, and loosening up. It really is okay, even if it’s hard. Assume the world deserves what you have to give. You are giving your most special gift, yourself. People want to hear and feel it. By being your brave and authentic self, you give permission to other people to access that in themselves too. This helps create a more loving and giving world.
Why don’t you sing.
I mean really sing.
I mean do the thing your heart wants most.
It’s so close, it’s right here.
In the hum of the atmosphere.
Take those words, or some version of them, and make a song out of them. It can be sing-songy, droney, totally out of key, operatic, punk rock, meditative, whatever. Find yourself a place to be, maybe in your car, maybe in the shower, at the garden, walking down the street, and sing it. Sing it loud enough so that you can comfortably hear yourself, quiet enough so that you aren’t purposely invading other people’s space. Sing from your core, feel your gut. Your personal style is the combination of your influences, filtered through the specifics of your body in the moment. To let the body express itself without judgment while also being mindful of your environment, of the people impacted by the space you take up, that’s revolutionary.
My throat still hurts when I sing Hebrew prayers; I often still push myself too hard on stage. But now I also sing for meditation, I sing with friends, I sing impromptu songs as outgoing voicemail, I sing show tunes and 80s pop while I do the dishes. I hum and direct the vibration to parts of my body that are painful or tense. I’ve built up enough of a body memory that I can often remember to ground myself, breathe, relax, and feel my body, even when I’m on stage. As I’ve learned to be gentler with my own voice, I’ve confronted fears about taking up space, of not sounding good, of not knowing what I’m doing, of being embarrassed. And I’ve learned to enjoy myself and actually feel the moment.
I have a vision that some day I will be able to enter any space, with any group of people, and we will be able to sing together. We will make up spontaneous, joyful music, in which we each take leadership and give reflection to each other, where we are all able to shine, but nobody is the star.
