Power Poses

Years ago I began to explore yoga postures while singing and I recognized the potency of what I was doing immediately because my voice would get freer in some postures. I brought some ideas into voice lessons and they were very helpful for my students but I couldn’t figure out why things were working. For a while I helped students find their “power pose,” a posture where their voice would spontaneously become more resonant and free, but I really wanted to be able to tell my students, “this pose works because it targets these muscles.” I eventually stopped combining yoga with voice work in lessons because it felt like it amounted to a series of tricks, but not to actual lasting improvement despite the glimmers they provided.

Learning about nonlinearity has been a key to understanding what I couldn’t before.

The body is a nondeterministic organism filled with non-Newtonian fluidic fascia, that learns in a way different than the mind - without logic or reason but through experience(s) and intention. Nonlinearity is written all over our form. 1+1≠2, and Newtonian physics do not apply. Teaching in a way that resonates with the nature of the body will help it adapt to the intentions you give it.

I recently brought yoga postures back into my studio. Instead of looking at these postures as corrective, they are suggestive. If, for example, a student sings in chair pose and gets a great result, it suggests a potent pathway for continued exploration. Maybe that would lead to a one-legged chair to see if there’s a certain leg that continues down the path - it’s almost guaranteed that weight on one leg will help the voice more than the other.  Though, maybe it was the arms raised up... Every posture will shift the voice in some way if you attune to that potential and allow for the system to respond to changing factors.

The conversion from yoga as tricks to yoga as somatic education is in following the body’s responses. Those responses are heard through the sound of vocal freedom or vocal effort.

Working in this way reveals more possibilities and potential. The best part is that all you have to do is notice. Notice glints of vocal freedom, fullness, and effortlessness and follow where they lead.

There’s nothing to lose and only to gain - even when you find pathways that are less efficient, that is a part of the process of learning for a complex adaptive system. The only important information is that which is coming from the senses.