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Personal Growth
Name: Leo
City: Ithaca
Province/State: New York
Country: USA
A Discovery Question that I’ve found stimulating is: What or who helps you capture the wonder of it all?
An openness to learning helps me capture the wonder of it all – in this case, my growth as a singer. Even better than the word “learning” are the words “relearning” and “unlearning” that Robert Wicks uses in his excellent book, “Seeds of Sensitivity.”
Recently I began the long-term, challenging process of changing the way I breathe. For most of my life, it appears, I’ve been using too little of my lung capacity. I could probably have continued to ignore this, blissfully breathing shallowly. As a voice student and vocalist, however, I’d come to realize that I’d need to learn to breathe differently in order to move to the next level. But how does one relearn something as fundamental and unconscious as breathing?
With the help of a new voice teacher, I began to understand mentally what I needed to do. But getting my body to cooperate was excruciating. I practiced the exercises, which left me breathless and hyperventilating. I began to feel panicky; I could no longer breathe my old, comfortable way, but the new way wasn’t working, either. My body rebelled; I seemed to be experiencing one relentless asthma attack. I woke up at night, gasping for air. I nearly fainted in the shower. And sing? Forget it. I could hardly get enough air to keep myself upright. I was hitting the wall and didn’t know how to turn back.
Fortunately, I’ve been through other growth spurts in the past, where hitting the wall – as awful as it is – doesn’t mean all is lost. It just means that I’m learning something new, and that a breakthrough is getting ready to happen if I can only be patient and faithful to the process.
Rather than panic about my difficulty breathing, I kept returning to the exercises my teacher had recommended — not only when I was troubled by my breathing, but whenever I had some down time: waiting at a red light, standing in line at the post office, and so on. In fact, in cases where irritation might set in, focusing on my breathing offered an additional benefit. Ah, a good learning: I was finding physical and psychological benefit when standing in line!
Slowly, my body began to get used to this new breathing. My body sometimes remembered to do it even when I wasn’t consciously telling it to.
How often to I breathe properly now? It’s hard to say, because now so much of it is unconscious. Experts have told me to expect it to take six months to really sink in, so I have a ways to go. Which is OK, because I’m trusting the process and not worrying when I seem to forget what I need to do. The willingness to unlearn something so basic has made this daunting challenge seem much more manageable. And in that unlearning, great possibility is waiting to be discovered!
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