Archives for Nov,2020

This blog was originally published here.

Finding the voice is like meeting with the true core of one’s identity.

Finding the voice as an opera singer is a true parallel to finding the voice in career, relationships, self-development and even spirituality. I did not know what path I was on when I took my first voice lesson. The quest for the perfect sound became a lot more than that. It forced me to research, to heal, to dare and to expand. My becoming an opera singer was like the quest for the holy grail: I had to meet myself and rise from within to get there. And what does happen when we get to the holy grail? Well, it’s just the beginning of a new quest.

“Easy for you, you have a passion. You know what your thing is. I would like that, too. I don’t have any talent. I don’t know what my place in the world is.”

I have heard those words many times throughout the years… We do not get to choose what we are made of. We choose what we do with what we have received. We were born with gifts and defects, and sometimes what we have received is not so fun to handle. Likewise, the singer can’t choose or change her voice, just like your voice is here and has always been here. At the end of the journey, when our faces are wrinkled like crumpled paper and our hair so white it becomes translucent, what will matter the most will not be the holy grail, but everything we learned and all those we met on our way to it and from it. We can’t hold the holy grail, because the path to the core of the self is eternal. As it is often the case, we are on our way to ourselves unknowingly. Challenges present themselves, and we grow and expand as we overcome them.

My mastering opera singing made me the Indiana Jones of my own life!

The actual voice is the sound produced by the air passing through the vocal cords as we speak, sigh or sing, and the vocal cords are 2 short muscles attached to 2 pieces of cartilage. I will always remember my first voice teacher telling me that it takes at the very least 10 years to make an opera singer from a naturally beautiful voice. I was 12 then, and 10 years seemed like an enormous amount of time… Tuning a piano requires technique and experience applied to that very type of instrument. Even if there are slight differences from one piano to another, tuning a piano is basically always the same process.

How do we get to tune the instrument called human being?

The human instrument is a unique artwork made of flesh, emotions, personality, and life experience: Your very unique flesh and bones; Your emotions and sensitivity and how you deal with those; What you’ve been through, what happened today, what happened 20 years ago; Your self-development and your own growth; What you understand about yourself and about the world; Your knowledge; Your qualities and your values; Your goals: why you do what you do, where you want to go next… On top of it, humans are ever-changing beings in an ever-changing world. As much as we are ready and willing to explore ourselves and the world, the quest is endless. In other words, there is no finding the voice, only exploring throughout our interactions with our environment to allow the truth of the self to unfold.

There is always another holy grail to run after.

The opera singer learned very early on that the goal of practicing is to free the voice. There are countless books and voice teachers talking about the liberated voice. What they fail to explain is why we need to take on this journey. Is your voice in jail? Where did you go wrong? You did nothing wrong, you are simply human…

In some ways, the simple fact of being human puts your voice in a cage.

A child constructs her models interacting with others, and we shape our reality based on the environment we grow in. Just like we learn that the sun is called sun, and red is called red, we learn what is right and wrong, and how to please others. Our voice – physically and figuratively – grows all the same in a frame. Both a tense body and the beliefs we hold on to limit our expansion. By re-learning how to move our body, we are able to free the tensions accumulated over the years, and to build the forgotten deep muscles that support both our breathing and our voice. Similarly, transforming our belief system can free a doorway to the most amazing life.

In my early twenties, I got the privilege of spending some time singing with an internationally acclaimed soprano. She surprised me with this one sentence:

“The more talent you have, the more work you have to do.” — Natalie Dessay

We may only express and develop a talent by digging deep down into our inner core, deep down into our fears and wounds, to rise into our own fire. No sublimation can happen without something to sublimate. We have to have patience, compassion, love and imagination to tune our human instrument. Think about it: there is no reference in matters of freedom, by definition!

The talent – the gift, if accepted – forces one to go on an endless journey to beauty through pain. Isn’t it what the difference (defect) is all about, too?

A popular belief is to think that if one has talent, one clearly knows what to do with her life because it was given meaning from the start. None of this is actually true, and we all get to choose the direction and meaning we want to give to our life depending on the present circumstances. The talent is NOT the result, the talent is a path among others to the truth of the self.

Most of the times, people disregard their talents because it requires too much work to master, or simply because they are not passionate about it. There is a common confusion between passion and talent. Exploring a talent is unavoidable to those who have something to escape from, or some puzzle to solve. But why bother when you were born in an emotionally safe environment? In my case, singing gave me an acceptable frame to unload the heavy charges, to RELEASE my emotions when I had no other means. It is not a passion, it is part of my identity, and I struggled with choosing what to do with my talents just like I struggled with my innate defects.

Sometimes, all we have to do is fall into the black hole to find ourselves, again, and again.

Remember, it’s the journey that counts, not the result. Talents, and differences, compel one to go on an inner journey, that’s all! Whether we acknowledge our talents or not, we are all in the same balloon, in transit to the immaterial truth of the self and the core of life. Be at peace with what you received to grow and rise in this world. Instead, ask yourself: “What can I do right now with what I have and where I am from?”

That is what being enough truly means. Stop looking, it’s time to embrace and love the pieces of you that you know. And, who knows, you might discover another treasure tomorrow.

This blog was originally published here.

Mind, heart, and the power of breathing – a new perspective on breathwork as a way of life. 

“It takes a very long time to become young”.
— Picasso

You may wonder why I, an opera singer, would quote the painter Picasso. A child will grow and his knowledge will expand. He will come to accept certain rules, to impose certain structures upon his mental development, and, unavoidably, he will lose some spontaneity and freedom in his creativity. The young opera singer will try to act and sing like his idols, to find a perfect sound reflecting his own idea of his voice, which he only hears from within himself. When I was fifteen, I was told that it would take at least ten years of hard work to be an opera singer. I was shocked. Only much later was I able to understand what it truly meant. As one is trying to find a sound and trying to reach some perfect ideal that one has in mind, one misses the essential point.

The sound is already there. The perfection has always been there. The hard work is to allow them, simply, to be.

The path of an opera singer is a quest for truth and a long life of questioning. I was lucky and started my vocal education at the very young age of twelve, with a wonderful, caring teacher. In the following years my teachers were afraid to put undue stress on my voice: they made me sing and understand how to move my ribs and lower back muscles, but did not really teach me the bel canto art. It was quite late for me, and after some years spent in engineering, that I met people able to guide me in using my whole body as an instrument, beyond the natural voice. Along this path I found some of the answers in my quest for truth, just as I often found more questions as well. It is as if one went deeper and deeper within oneself, within one’s mind and soul, which entails a deeper understanding of life itself.

In classical singing, it takes years to learn how to breathe, until one finally realizes that it is as simple as letting one’s whole body, one’s whole self be part of the game. It takes years to learn how to breathe like a baby. Look at a baby crying and shouting: he does it with his full body for hours and hours without damaging his vocal cords. But we, the adults, have lost this ability with pressure, anxiety, and fear brought on by education and society. Real breathing is like real love: full, devoted, trusting, spontaneous. Real love knows exactly where to go and what to do. Real breathing works in the same way.

Real breathing and real love have to be learned or re-learned, as strange as it may seem, and I often think this process might be the very reason of our existence.

From a technical point of view, the beauty of the voice as an instrument resides in the harmonics obtained by the coexistence of chest resonance and a high spot in the cranium. This is quite literally the union of the head and heart through a tiny path made possible by the power of breath. The whole body has to be a soft and flexible mechanism where every single cell of it is breathing.

It reminds me of birds flying in the sky in their coat of feathers: the perfect mix of strength, confidence, and letting go.

If the body has the slightest stiffness, some quality of sound is lost and, more seriously, the emotion and the art lose their interest too. It means that any fear, any doubt will lead to failure in auditions and competitions.

Nobody truly wants a second Maria Callas, Tatiana Troyanos, or Luciano Pavarotti. What they want, rather, is to be surprised. Embracing our uniqueness is the true secret. Those who succeed are fearless, as curious and open, as arrogant as a young child, despite their knowledge. I witnessed famous opera singers talk about the energy emerging from their solar plexus when they perform. They explained the vibrating crown they feel around their head, and the global well-being that singing provides them. I, too, have been feeling this for years now. I needed to let the fear of not being enough at the door of the audition hall. By successes and failures became the best friend of the child within me: it is always this child who wins when I do well, whereas it is the adult that makes the mistakes. The ability to connect heart and mind means saying “stop” to negative thoughts. This happens through full consciousness, meditation, and breathing.

One’s brain has to serve the heart, as one’s heart has to serve the brain.

The miracle of opera singing lies in the connection between the head and the chest and, concomitantly, between the mind and the heart, by the power of breathing and letting go.

The miracle lies in daring to be, and in daring to love.

Do you have a breathwork practice? Let us know in the comments below.