Singing: The Judgmental Mode vs. The Free Energetic Flow
1429 - July 2021
1. PLEASE TALK ABOUT THE SUBJECT TITLE AND LET US KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS?
Well basically, the state of being in the moment of singing that allows for the Free Energetic Flow of energy to happen, is a state of being that is free of judgment. The Judgmental Mode can be described as getting into a state of being where you are passing judgment on what you are attempting to do, sing or create and classifying it as either good or bad or shades of good or bad. This, for some people, especially beginners or people who have somehow had injuries to their voices and are recovering can be a very painful, frustrating and debilitating time in their pursuit of learning to sing. Being in the Judgmental Mode can tap into whatever judgments you may have had about yourself from other experiences.
Because singing is so physical, any negative judgments you might have about your body or judgements about the current sound of your voice can surface. Critical comments from people who have heard you sing or try to sing or family members or school music teachers can stop an aspiring singer in their tracks. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a singer begin lessons who really wants to sing who believes they cannot because of some random comment from someone that stung and it stays in their mind and just paralyzes them.
2. WHAT DO YOU SAY OR DO WITH STUDENTS WHO BEGIN WITH THOSE BELIEFS?
I usually listen and let them get the whole story out and let them explain why the person who said that has had so much influence over their idea that maybe they can’t really sing.The next thing I do is ask if the person who said that was a qualified voice teacher or someone who is actually speaking from authority. There have almost been zero people who have come into my studio that I have met who were criticized by someone who actually had a fact based opinion. It has usually been someone who is also operating from a judgment based on their own critical thinking who doesn’t understand that there are multiple entanglements that can prevent someone from accessing their voice. Once given the chance and the correct information real miracles can occur for people and their voices. I’ve seen it so many times. And once these entanglements are removed or at least understood, even the most unlikely singers who have never even experienced what their voice can really do, can get to a state of Free Flowing creative energy and also really sing!
These judgments still haunt some singers, and can come up and block your progress. As I believed I may have mentioned on an earlier podcast, if you really think of it, at the core of a singer’s performance is the individual’s energy. If it is free flowing, the singer is able to sing without obstacles or entanglements and energetically pass along the full performance to the listeners. They are able to get into a zone which allows for the transfer of feelings and excitement, images and the unblocked clarity of energy which is at the heart of all the wonderful things that make listening to someone sing such a great experience for us all.
If, on the other hand, the singer is caught up in a state of being that is judgmental while they are trying to sing, that free flow can all go away very quickly. The personal power of a performer uses the vehicles of song, notes, vibration, language, feelings, rhythms and a vast array of tools but, if there is a blockage in any area of any one of these things, there is a slight or perhaps large blockage of everything across the line. While you are learning to sing, it is essential to have a safe place to explore, free of negative influences. Otherwise a free flow of energy will always be a bit beyond your reach.
When we train, ideally we train to disperse all the blockages that we are able to and give the best performances that we can, considering how much we have released and how much still remains to be released. All of this ideally goes on behind the scenes. Either you do it with someone’s help or you do it by yourself and it is a job worth doing. Since this is a lifelong task and life is always in flux, releasing blockages of any kind, becomes a constant and a foundation for a performer to learn what they can and cannot do at any stage of their training and performance time. It is part of a process that all artists go through as they work through their music and get it ready for performance.
That is why it is so valuable to learn to leave the Judgmental Mode behind and learn to allow the energies to flow unobstructed by the judgements and opinions of the mind or the individual challenges we might have on any given day. The worst thing when we are performing is getting into a state of thinking about what is not working and simultaneously trying to deliver a performance. It can happen to the best of performers and it can be quite painful. Just like any athlete, you train as much as you can and then it is showtime. Hopefully you can then let go and give the audience what you have to give and try not to think about what you would have liked to give instead.
3. HOW DOES SOMEONE GO ABOUT DOING THAT?
Well, it helps to have understanding about what it means to Judge and what it means to Be Aware. We live in a society that really values judgment. We are all judging things all the time. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. As far as singing is concerned, you do have to deliver recordings and performances, sometimes under intense pressure on big stages and tours. You do want to present the very best that you can. That is much easier if you have prepared yourself by working through all the kinks, being prepared and releasing entanglements and judgment and then just performing.
So if you have trained yourself to shift from that state of judgment and away from wondering if something is either good or bad, suddenly you are free to experiment. You are in a state of process and not necessarily product. As singers, we are trained to listen to ourselves and make an assessment of what we are hearing. This increases our awareness. And this is essential to the process of learning and mastering anything.
Once you put aside the judgment and move into awareness without necessarily judging…you are free to create and explore and see what shows up. You can decide to keep or discard what you choose. Then there is no longer that voice inside that criticizes everything that is perceived as a mistake. Mistakes are usually some kind of entanglement anyway. Once you release the entanglement, that is usually accompanied by a revelation and a move in the right direction.
When you have to deliver a performance, then, of course, all bets are off and you just have to step up and deliver. So before that, it is most useful for you to give yourself the blessing of time without all that pressure. Once the Judgmental Mode is removed and you move into process and awareness…everything that you sing, any sound that you make, is an opportunity. You now can accumulate valuable information about what you are actually doing.
In process there is no good or bad, there is only useful or helpful or not useful and not helpful. Then you can play. Then joy returns. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you created an environment for yourself or if you were taught in a way that it was ok to make any sound that you make and just let it be that as you learn how to make it better? Then you could later decide if those sounds are what you want or if you will spend the time and energy to go after a different sound that you might prefer. That may mean more study or more practice and taking more time. That is a huge part of the creative process and much more effective without all the judging. As your awareness shifts and becomes how you observe yourself, you move out of a negative space into a creative space.
4. YOU MENTIONED ENTANGLEMENTS, WOULD YOU EXPLAIN THAT A BIT MORE?
When I first heard my Acting teacher for Opera, Wesley Balk, talk of entanglements interfering with your voice and your acting of a piece of music, it was such a revelation for me.Before that, I had always just thought of things as mistakes and they were either wrong or right… right was good and wrong was bad. When you are singing, and something comes out of your mouth that you don’t care for, calling it wrong or right doesn’t give you enough information about what just happened. Calling them a mistake, although there is an argument there that that is what it is, if you instead realize that it is just an entanglement, now you have something to go on, something to look for. Why did the note or phrase come out the way it did? You can ask questions and get answers.
Entanglements can be physical, mental or emotional. Actually, many things can cause an entanglement. You can be going along singing really well and suddenly get distracted, and things get jammed up and you experience yourself getting all entangled by using a muscle that is not what you intended or forgetting a lyric etc. and then you get lost. You meant one thing and another thing showed up. Through the awareness of a mistake or rather an entanglement without the judgment, you are now able to be making the sounds and also be aware of the process that you are engaged in while you are making the sound. You now can find where you went off the road…so to speak. Now you have task oriented information to work with. Without good and bad, you can now access an accurate description of what is happening.
5. WOULD YOU GIVE US AN EXAMPLE OF SOMEONE RELEASING AN ENTANGLEMENT?
First, we can talk about releasing a physical entanglement.
For example, you begin to sing, You begin to sing. Your shoulder starts to tighten. You observe your shoulder tightening and instead of getting upset and judging, you simply release your shoulder. It becomes less engaged and as a result, less entangled. You relax your shoulder. You begin to sing again and your shoulder engages again. Now you can release it faster. As you keep repeating this over and over, the shoulder begins to not engage. It remains still. You are relaxing it again. It then begins to stay still while you sing. It is no longer entangled. Your shoulder learns that it does not have to engage because you d not need your shoulder to make sound. It no longer reacts when you sing. You have freed this part of your body. You are now ready to move on to another entanglement. There are as many entanglements that are possible as stars in the sky. If you do this without judgment and stay neutral, you move more quickly towards the beautiful voice and the free flowing energy that you are trying to achieve much faster.
6. WHAT WOULD BE AN EXAMPLE OF ANOTHER KIND OF ENTANGLEMENT THAT SOMEONE COULD RELEASE?
Well for example, there can be emotional entanglements. We already mentioned blockages that come from comments that were not supportive. For some singers, and singers are exceptionally sensitive, these words are hard to shake. Some people have been subjected to intense criticism. Some others are very hard on themselves and are their own worst critics. There are multiple avenues for addressing these kinds of issues. There are many books about discovering the self and learning how to stop the inner critic from its endless assault within your inner landscape. Then there is the proof of hard work. As you learn and discover what you can do, the voices often trail off and the former critic loses their grasp.There is much to study about emotional blockages that is very helpful for aspiring artists. Meditation and other spiritual practices are most useful for quieting the mind. There are also studies to be had with professionals who work on healing the inner self addressing the wounds of former experiences such as childhood wounding and other types of inner exploration. Most artists spend at least some time confronting issues of all kinds to free themselves one way or another to be able to freely perform.
However, masking entanglements of this or any kind, renders them unconscious and therefore unavailable. For example, some people are really afraid, for whatever reason, of making mistakes. So, if you are really so afraid that you are going to make a mistake that you have to cover it up, you are really just hiding the source of the mistake from your awareness. All you are feeling is fear and that blocks your awareness so the problems you might make will repeat themselves. And round and round you go. If, on the other hand, you forgive the mistakes and have it be ok that that is just a part of learning, you can get the knots out in your thinking and be freer. By letting go of the judgment and the criticism, you allow the blocks to surface and then begin to deal with releasing that particular entanglement and replacing it with new, more instructive and positive information.
7. LET’S TALK MORE ABOUT THE ENERGETIC FLOW
We live in a vibrational Universe. The scientists have told us in many different ways that everything that you see, touch, feel, and experience is a vibration of some sort. I first heard this when I became a Practitioner of the Radiance Technique, the Real Reiki Program, a long time ago. This is an ancient energy healing system which has been known and used for centuries. Dr. Barbara Ray, who was the first person in the United States to learn of this ancient healing system and who has just recently passed away this year, told us in the first class that I attended that “All things are Energy and that all things are vibrating all the time”. I was amazed by this and began a long journey to learn and work with this concept and this healing system. I have used it for many many years and it has become very clearly evident to me that energy is either flowing or it is being blocked from flowing. Blockages build up and cause problems every time. Just think of the tanker that recently got blocked in the Suez Canal. That created a blockage of great magnitude that could be felt around the world. Once the tanker was freed and that blockage was released, the whole world was restored to the normal flow and the energy caused by that incident began to move freely again.
All of us live in our own vibrational body system and the energies within and around our bodies are usually in varying degrees of flow and blockage. There is always movement of one kind or another. Blockages on a physical level, can cause some very serious problems. Just think of trying to sing when you have a cold and you can easily see how a blockage of free flowing air can bring a wonderful show to a halt. So too with the energetic flow of our feelings. And the singer lives and breathes energetic feelings.
Energetic flow and the free movement of energy that happens when a singer is in their zone is a beauty too behold. Think of anyone who you regard as a great singer and you know exactly what I mean. For example just consider a singer like Luciano Pavarotti. He is one of the most beloved singers of all time. However, most of the people who have listened to him sing have no idea what he is even singing about. Of course, there are people who have studied this music and who know, but, in general, most people had no idea what he was singing about and didn't even care. When he would hit those big powerful notes and unleash that glorious voice and open his heart that was as big as the cosmos, people would get so swept up in the energy and the sound that they would go nuts!! Even just listening to his recordings, many people who never liked Opera and have no idea what it is, love when he sings.
8. CAN ANYONE WHO SINGS LEARN HOW TO RELEASE AND FLOW AS YOU HAVE DESCRIBED?
Energy and authentic emotion can flow freely from anyone. A person who already is or who wants to learn to be a singer, studies this constantly. It is a path and a process. It is not an event. The understanding of and willingness to experience the range of human emotion and energy is a call to the very brave and adventurous. It is an invitation to learn how to truly "Be in the Now'' as they say. It is an invitation to learn how to modify and channel your state of being so as to use it as a tool for feelings and communication. In my view, singers are portals of energy who channel human emotion and the many shades and colors of life that we want to hear about in song. Sometimes when you are going to sing, the circumstances are off and the situation is far from ideal. The answer to that is to use the truth of that experience and through feeling all that you are feeling on any given day… just sing and give it all back and out to the audience. Whatever kind of day you had, give it to the audience. They are having all kinds of feelings out there too and they will appreciate the honesty of a truthful and open performance. I truly believe that anyone can learn to do this. I've seen it happen so many times.
9. CAN YOU SHARE WITH US ANY OTHER PERSONAL MEMORIES FROM LEARNING OR TEACHING THIS?
Audio contains examples of personal memories and working with students.
10. ANY ADVICE FOR OUR LISTENERS ABOUT ALL THIS?
Everything is always in flux and ever changing. Your voice will always do that too. You can only sing with the voice you have today. Let it flow without judgment. Be determined and consistent. Allow yourself to play and express and open up to the music… you won’t regret it at all.