🌊 Go with the flow?

DO I WANT TO GO WITH THE FLOW?

When do I ride the waves of change?

When do I resist the waves of change?

My teacher asked our group this question in a movement class recently, and it made me think about when I feel at ease in myself and the situation, and when I feel resistance or strain.

And now I’m bringing this question to you.  

Here is my lens (what’s yours?):

We are self-regulatory beings, designed to meet moments of resistance and adapt.  

We are designed to discern what is happening, integrate what we need, allowing us to adapt to a new situation, and discard what we don’t need.  

“Adaptation/learning underlies the literal physical adaptations our system is constantly making to our lived and imagined experiences. We are talking about adaptations on every tissue level  from genes in our cells to neural network connection and pruning--- WHOLENESS.”

Babette Lightner, Wholeness in Motion

Every need or desire is paired with a corresponding resistance (#wholeness).  By bringing gentle awareness to our resistance, we can learn more about how we learn and what’s meaningful to us.  

Perfectionism is an example of resistance AND support.  Am I overeager to learn this new piece of repertoire perfectly? How is my resistance impacting my learning?

How is my resistance supporting my learning? What function is my resistance serving?  Perhaps it’s a message from my system to slow down; maybe I’m rushing through this too quickly to really integrate these new skills, for example.

Resistance is Assistance

Change (a.k.a. learning) involves a letting-go process, and acknowledgement of what is impermanent (thank you to Babette for introducing this word as part of the learning process).  

This can be challenging when we’ve been holding onto our habitual patterns for a long time, even if we have outgrown them.  Letting go of “trying to be right” tendencies can be a challenge because we are so used to being perceived in a certain way, predicting outcomes, etc.  Trying to be “perfect “has probably served a very important purpose up until now.  

(If you’re curious to dive a little deeper into our familiar “trying to be good/right/perfect” routine, and how it impacts our experiences with learning and performance anxiety, check out this great article, Good For Whom? by Elizabeth Garren on David Gorman’s Learning Methods website.)

What is your experience of going with the flow?  How do you experience your resistance to change and impermanence?  In what situations?  How is this process present in your learning, teaching, and facilitating?

When is your resistance assistance?  

How are you aware of your students’ or clients’ resistance?  

How can you support their process?

What is Supported Singing?

What does Supported Singing mean for you?

Do you think about your breath?

Your diaphragm? 

Your ribs?

Your bones and muscles?

Your larynx?

How about your back?  or your legs?

(Spoiler alert: all of these aspects of Supported Singing are CORRECT if they support your ability to sing with joy, freedom, and ease.)

Many of us have our own understanding of what “singing with support” means to us.  Often this understanding emerges from our early voice lessons, from ideas passed down from various teachers over the years, from our own lived experience and exploration.  

There was a time when I didn’t have the tools to connect with my inner wisdom about what worked for me and what didn’t, what was true for me and what wasn’t.  I looked outside of myself to my teachers and coaches and music directors and peers to fix what I thought I was doing wrong.  And I wasn’t always supported in the vulnerable, messy moments of my learning.  I was even hurt sometimes by the feedback I received.  However well-meaning and unintentional, these statements hurt me.  They burrowed into my body and festered into inaccurate beliefs about my abilities and worth as a singer and as a human.

Thankfully, I was also gifted with knowledgeable, compassionate mentors and colleagues who understood the complex art of whole-person pedagogy.  And my experiences learning with and from these magical unicorns continues to shape the way I create, lead, and teach today.

To me, in this moment in time (subject to further inquiry and exploration), Supported Singing requires an unwavering belief that the student has the information about their voice and body, not the teacher.  I don’t have that information unless and until I ask for it.  Only when I gather the information from my student can I suggest/offer/observe/update.  (And of course Supported Singing also includes: technical knowledge, anatomical understanding, stylistic sensibility, musicality, etc. - voice teachers have many finely-tuned skills!)  

In my studio, I understand Voice and Movement sessions to be a shared, co-created experience between myself and the student, where I defer to the student’s in-the-moment experience rather than imposing my own beliefs/opinions about what something should look or sound or feel like.  Breathflow, soundflow, and movementflow emerge from this foundation.

So, what does Supported Singing mean for you today?  

The Target Practice Approach to Learning

“When learning a skill you have to go off target to learn the coordinations, synaptic connections, neural pathways that let you learn the skill or hit the target.”

Babette Lightner, “Learning - Target Practice”

I’m going to begin with a bold statement:

There are no such things as mistakes.

Okay. We’ll come back to that later.

Learning is target practice

We aim for the bullseye, but we likely won’t hit it right away.  The bullseye - or learning goal - keeps us on track and allows us to chart a path.  Or more accurately, your wholeself notes “okay, that’s not the target” and adjusts accordingly (click here for Babette Lightner’s article, which goes into more detail about the other-than-conscious, systematic adjustment process of experiential learning).  

The juicy part of the learning process actually happens during the process of taking shots at the target and missing.  These off-target moments - “mistakes” - are what teach you where the target is and where the target isn’t.   

In order to carry out the process efficiently, though, it is helpful to get as specific as possible about your desired outcome.  “Sing the phrase correctly” isn’t as specific or achievable as “sing the interval of a 6th accurately in measure 6.”

Once you clarify your learning goal and consider the learning context, you are empowered to assess whether you have the appropriate tools to actually achieve your goal in this moment, or if you need to hone some side-skills first.  

You might consider the following questions as a way to get more specific about what you want to assess:

How familiar am I with this song?  

Have I sung a 6th before?

Do I know what a 6th sounds like?

Are these pitches in a comfortable range for me today?

This line of inquiry may seem pedantic, but it’s amazing how often we set about trying to achieve a specific outcome without checking our tools first (i.e.: preexisting knowledge and experience). Imagine walking into a dark room to find your phone without turning the light on first. You could bumble around for several minutes, crashing into things and banging your toe five times, without changing how you are searching for your phone. Or, you could turn the light on first, survey the space, decide how and where to search, and then move accurately and efficiently toward your phone. It’s less about doing things the “right” way, and more about having choice and intention.

The target practice model can be applied to your learning process in this way: 

clarify your specific goal - decide to aim for the bullseye - see above re: 6ths or finding your phone

aim - see the bullseye - have your specific goal in mind

take action - pull back and release the arrow toward the bullseye - take action toward your goal

assess the result - note how close the arrow landed in relation to the bullseye - note how close you were to your target

decide what to do next - am I satisfied with this outcome?  If yes, choose a new target.  If no, reassess your goal and allow your system to adjust before going again.

take action again - lather, rinse, repeat

Cozy up to failure: understanding your response to “mistakes”

The other important piece that can get in the way of how we respond to off-target moments is the negative value judgements we ascribe to making a mistake, often internalized from some earlier experience before we had the agency or lived experience to assess outcomes for ourselves.  

Remember: the moment of being off-target is the rich, fertile learning moment when you are most available to awareness, potential, growth, and change.  

We often want to rush through this off-target moment because it’s accompanied by an “ugh” feeling, which may be unpleasant, and can even be downright anxiety-inducing.  “Ugh, I made a mistake!  Now everyone will laugh at me and see the truth: that I’m stupid/untalented/a fraud!”  Because maybe at some point in your history, you went off-target and someone did laugh. Or mishandled the moment in some other unhelpful, unsupportive way.  And no one was there to remind you that going off-target is a crucial part of the learning process, and that that person’s laughter says more about them and their value judgements around “mistakes,” than it does about you or your juicy learning process.   And so you internalized the belief that “mistakes are bad,” and maybe even, “if I make a mistake, I am bad.”

No wonder your system may respond to off-target moments with “ugh” or discomfort or fear or anxiety - it made sense in that long-ago moment. But does it make sense now? What is different now, in this moment of being off-target? How are you different now? What supports, knowledge, lived experience do you have now that you didn’t have then, that tells you a different story about your worth and value?

See what happens when you slow down to attend to what happens for you when you go off-target.

You could invite a new sort of inquiry that might look something like this:

What happens in my body when I realize I’m off-target?

What sensations am I aware of?

What thoughts come up?

What feelings come up?

What support do I need in this moment as I sit with these sensations and thoughts?

How old do these thoughts and feelings feel?

Whose voice do I hear speaking those negative/chastising words?

Radical Courage and Radical Curiosity

It’s fair to say that this approach to learning - allowing all sounds and outcomes to be welcome and encouraged - takes GUTS.  It takes courage to allow and accept unfamiliar sounds and sensations.  It takes courage and patience to sit with the “ugh” response to being off-target.  It takes courage to trust your system’s ability to course-adjust to support your learning process, to trust that your only job is this: to intend - aim - do - assess - adjust - do again.

Letting go of “being right” takes a heck of a lot of GUTS.  Being vulnerably, fully, wholly YOU takes guts.  This type of radical courage allows curiosity and creativity to emerge. And it makes sense in a new way when you consider, this might just be how learning happens.

Here’s the bold statement I opened with:

There are no such things as mistakes.

What do you think about that now?

What happens in you when you allow this possibility: it’s the off-target moments - what you used to misdiagnose as “mistakes” - that allow you to assess whether you have honed the necessary skills yet, and allow you to constantly reassess your path toward your learning goals. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Many thanks to Babette Lightner for framing Dr. Leon Thurman’s learning research into a fully embodied learning experience for singers, teachers, and conductors.  Her article “Learning - Target Practice,” which inspired this post, can be found here.

Thanks also to David Gorman for the clarity of his Learning Methods approach to systematic inquiry.  His article “What’s the opposite of perfect?” speaks to the effort of striving and how it interferes with learning and creativity, and can be found here.

Being Human

Empathy.

Difference.

Presence. 

Wholeness.

Bradley’s article is about fish, but it’s also about being human, I think. 

Umwelt is a word German biologist Jakob von Uexkëll created to mean “the surrounding world.”  As Bradley points out in his article, “Do fish dream?”, a fish’s surrounding world is fundamentally different from ours: subaquatic and fluid.  Is there something enlightening for us in trying to understand their world?

How might it change me to try to imagine someone else’s umwelt?  

I see this as my work and my responsibility teaching Voice and the Alexander Technique, and as a therapist. 

Even if I don’t get there, how might I be changed by the process of listening, receiving, seeing, feeling, trying to understand someone?  

How might this receptivity support my student or my client?

Read the full article here.

Alignment vs Alivement

*** Calling all my fellow “Type A” companions! ***

Alignment vs ALIVEment

Alignment = arrangement in a straight line, or in correct or appropriate relative positions

Alivement = opening up to the world around you and allowing your beautiful coordinating system to balance you as needed

Let me be VERY clear:

I am someone who wants to get things RIGHT.  Usually immediately.  (Hence the type A reference.)

I often try to arrange myself AND MY LIFE in a straight line, in an appropriate (correct) position in relation to ideas, people, tasks…literally everything.  I like my work space to be orderly - if not tidy, at least organized in a way that makes sense to ME.  I like when plans go according to, well, plan.  

My penchant for organization CAN BE one of my superpowers.  But it can also make me rigid, unspontaneous, tense, stressed out, and tired.  And just overall lack-lustre.  

When I try to organize my body with the same fervour with which I try to organize my life (hint: THEY ARE THE SAME THING), things just don’t work the way I want them to.  For example, I get back pain when I try to “align” my spine “properly.”  My breathing feels shallow when I try to lift my sternum and “open my heart.”  My voice is thin and my sound is pressed and edgy.  

Alivement is a choice.  

Alivement is a moment-to-moment CHOICE I make to LET GO of my fixing.  I choose to RELEASE my heart in order to allow it to open.  I choose to RELEASE my neck and shoulders in order to allow my whole torso to open as my breath moves.  

I choose to RELEASE my holding, my trying to be right, forcing outcomes, my “correct alignment” in order for my beautiful system to coordinate itself.  

I choose to release in order to allow an opening.  

Friends, this is NOT EASY.  Choosing to let go and fully experience my aliveness in response to the world means also feeling the less pleasant sensations and feelings.  I read somewhere that in order to feel joy we have to feel pain.  I’m learning to trust that.  And my back pain is gone.  And my voice is full.  

🦒 Unscrunch Your Neck🦒

When you spend as many hours in front of the screen as you’re doing these days, it doesn’t take long before you’re feeling stiff, stuck, and in pain.

Your shoulders are up around your ears, aren’t they?

Your head is reaching out toward the screen, right?

Your brow is furrowed, for sure. 

One simple thought can help you get unstuck: UNSCRUNCH. 

Remember: your head rests on top of your spine, roughly behind your nose. (Yes, waaaay up there!)  

Do this: 

Take your hands off the keyboard. 

Stand up. 

Look out the window so you can see far. 

Let your shoulders release away from your ears. 

And unscrunch your neck. 

Pause. Unscrunch. Each moment is an opportunity to start fresh. 

Special thank you to Cathy Madden for originating this wonderfully helpful (to me) word: unscrunch.

🌱 How You Take Care of Yourself 🌱

The Gestalt cycle of experience demonstrates the process of how we take care of ourselves. It is a process of self-regulation, outlining the steps we take - conscious or unconscious - to find and maintain inner balance.  

Needs can be emotional (belonging, safety, connection) or physical (hunger, thirst, too hot/cold). 

The self-regulation process moves from becoming aware of a need (i.e. thirst), mobilizing toward meeting that need (getting up to get a glass of water), recognizing when that need is satisfied (no longer thirsty), and withdrawing and moving on (checking in with yourself to see what else you need in this moment). 

Some needs we can meet on our own (grabbing a snack when hungry), and some we will require outside support (setting a broken bone at the hospital). The type of support will of course vary from person to person (a toddler may need help getting a snack, while an able-bodied adult may be more self-actualized). Our ongoing work is to recognize when “I got this” will work (self-support), and when to ask for help (environmental support). 

We are constantly changing and growing. Our needs are constantly shifting. As our self-awareness develops, and we gain more life and interrelationship skills, we become more resilient and interconnected with ourselves and the world. We become more able to ask for help, and because we are more supported, we can show up to support others. 

To learn more about how to use your body sensations and awareness to take better care of your whole self, book a chat with me today:

https://alisonjanetaylorstudio.as.me/free20minconsultation

🦥 Relaaaaax

Relaxation is a common misinterpretation of the sense of ease and efficiency.

Babette Lightner

Relaxation and collapse have their usefulness! One of my Alexander Technique teachers once said, “sometimes you need to take a good ol’ SLUMP!” And I do. Choicefully and mindfully.

What I teach is a clarification of the SENSATION of relaxation when a student moves or sings in a way that feels easy and efficient, especially if what they’re used to is the sensation of EFFORT (heavy, tight, strained). Links to Babette Lightner’s Wholeness in Motion work HERE.