happy Canada Day yesterday,  happy 4th of July coming up!

As summer moves into the lazy days - it gives time to reflect and ponder...

One of the ongoing questions I ask myself and my singers is this:

How does your voice make you FEEL?

How do you FEEL about your voice?

Sometimes we are so busy PURSUING,  so focused on DOING,  so caught up in the HAVE TO, that we forget about how it FEELS.

How does it FEEL to sing?

How do I FEEL when I sing?

Does my voice feel like me?  What is that?  Can it inhabit my physical behavior or is it faking?

Is it my voice?  Am I mimicking? Am I pretending?

Can I summon my voice at will or does it just do its own thing under pressure?  Good, bad or indifferent?

So many thoughts,  so many feelings.

Guess what?  No value judgment on feelings.  They ARE.  What you DO with them is then crucial and how you put that energy into motion.

How you feel about your voice,  reveals your psychology.  And the psychology is constantly morphing, so tapping into your feelings is crucial here.

All the stereotypes of voice come from a kernel of truth about a psychology.  Stereotypes are then over-developed and often satirized,  but the reason we laugh is because there is truth in there somewhere.

What IS that truth for you and how do you give it agency in order to develop fully and not become a stereotype or a cartoon character?

How do you feel?

Your voice might give you different feelings depending on the repertoire you are singing;  depending on the area of the voice you are singing in;  depending on the genre you are singing;

ALL ARE LEGITIMATE FEELINGS.

Discover the difference between the FEELING and the description of your voice.  Don't worry about what it is doing,  how it is behaving,  what you want to change,  excuses etc:  how does it make you FEEL?

ALL the feels.

We often forget, or don't develop the honesty and truth about how we FEEL about our voice.

Go slowly...if it's a new concept,  and I really think it's just an underdeveloped one,  you don't want to overwhelm yourself.  Go from the general to the specific.  Notice when you start to describe your voice instead of acknowledging the FEELING it evokes in you.

Feelings then will reveal the psychology that you truly have to inhabit in order to allow the behavior of your voice to become honestly authentic.

Or,  acknowledging the psychology will give your feelings an honest place to reveal themselves in order for you to accept,  relish, explore and get excited about your voice and recognize the feelings it evokes.

There is no right or wrong;  no value judgment;  just your truth - should you seek it out.

Those singers who truly touch us,  are willing and able to access the feeling,  the psychology and the behavior.  They make no excuses.  They just DO.

Start wherever you are.  Be there fully.  Feel it.  It's safe to go there because it's going to reveal YOU to YOU.  That's more important than anything else.

Feeling just has to be real.  Real is what you choose to reveal. TO YOU.