The Enduring Harm of “Breath Control”: Part 1
DON’T CONTROL YOUR BREATH, FOR GOD’S SAKE
“Breathing work is built upon the premise of the total unity of the human being. Its results prove the interrelation of body, mind, and emotions.” - Carola Speads (Ways to Better Breathing)
A note: I am called in this essay to share my personal experience with a paradigm shift which completely changed my singing, my music-making, my nervous system, AND MY LIFE. In order to do this, I need to also write about the inextricable relationship between breathing and emotions, but this became quite long, and so I made a Part 2.
Offering concrete breathing or singing practices is beyond the scope of this article, but for those of you who feel something like a “yes, finally, this is how I’ve always felt too!” and want to continue to explore on your own, there are names of books and teachers sprinkled throughout and I recommend these!
PART ONE - DON’T CONTROL YOUR BREATH, FOR GOD’S SAKE
Everyone talks about breathing!
“Connect to your breath.” “Take deeper breaths.” “Breathe low in your body.” “Breathe into your belly!”
What does it all mean?
And how does it relate to singing?
After all, the notion that we should all be breathing better is kind of a given. Common knowledge. It’s something we need to do for health and well-being, full stop.
This isn’t untrue! Breathing more deeply is important for health and well-being and clearer thinking and more robust physical ability. Breathing better is oxygenating, enlivening, nourishing, emotionally regulating, grounding, and can connect us to the present moment.
Breathing better is important when taking a walk, working out, when having tough conversations, when waking up in the morning, when thinking through difficult topics, when experiencing pleasure.
And when giving voice, i.e. speaking and singing.
Right?
So how do we do it?! What does it mean to try and teach ourselves to do something as primal and elemental as breathing?
Do you tell yourself to breathe into your belly and hope for the best? (Spoiler, that particular instruction never worked out for me.)
Do you enroll in Breathwork classes and try things like counting as you breathe…holding at the top of the breath…holding at the bottom of the breath…breathing in and out and with your mouth open and no break between the inhale and exhale…?
Do you take singing lessons and practice holding out your ribs or breathing through a straw in order to make sure you “have enough breath” available to sing the phrase?
Or perhaps you do Westernized Yoga (what I’m calling, for brevity’s sake, yoga divorced from its original context). Nowadays, many people do yoga. By this point, surface ideas about yogic breathing have infiltrated into the culture to become common norms. And most people who do yoga seem to conflate good and healthy breathing for yoga and with good healthy breathing for speaking and singing (and with good and healthy breathing in general).
I haven’t done a formal study on this, but informally every single student I’ve ever had who practices Westernized Yoga, consciously or unconsciously came into lessons assuming being a yogi is good for their breathing, speaking, and singing.
Nope! Au contraire!
They are shocked when I tell them that what would be so - much - better - for their singing would be to ignore the teacher’s breathing directions during class. In other words -
Do NOT coordinate your breathing with your movements - instead do the movements and let yourself breathe whenever the F you breathe.
Do NOT only breathe through your nose at all times - sometimes you might need to yawn or otherwise breathe through your mouth - so do that sometimes too.
Do NOT try to extend your exhale by using your abdominal muscles to press out all the air in your lungs. Instead, don’t press from your belly, but soften your body as you imagine exhaling more, or dangle some tight part of your body - the tightness is likely holding your breath back - you don’t need more force, you need less.
Or go ahead and follow all the breathing instructions, but at least know it’s not for the sake of your free(r) singing!
At best they’ll offer your system a new experience that will momentarily expand your own sense of what’s possible and break you out of stagnant breathing habits; at worst they’ll cause your system to continue to associate effort, commands, and mental control with breathing, therefore making the real thing more elusive.
So what is the real thing?
A paradigm shift! An understanding that breathing is not to be controlled but to be allowed! That breathing better is not about learning how to breathe, but about learning how to stop interfering with your breathing!
There is a different way, and it doesn’t involve pushing and prodding and squeezing and lengthening and commanding your body to do things!
Please know: this article isn’t intended to completely denigrate all other breathing practices - which have their place and have helped so many people!…Well, okay, maybe a little denigration. But, no, no, just kidding! My primary intention here is to add a perspective that I believe is majorly missing from the Mainstream Voice Teacher worlds, and the, for lack of a better term, Consciousness worlds.
My “Yoga” Story
Back to Westernized Yoga for a moment. Why am I talking about Westernized Yoga so much? Because I used to teach it (many years ago!), so how breathing (pranayama) showed up in those communities has informed a lot of my personal journey around breathing. I vividly remember one of my colleagues practicing ujjayi breath constantly. (I’m using ujjayi breath as an example, but I could also be talking about myriad other pranayama practices I learned from the yoga and meditation worlds.)
My colleague ujjayi-ed during brunch and at dinner and while hanging out at her house talking. Day in, day out, that gentle tension in the throat to create an oceanic sound of the breath. Interestingly, to me her voice came out sounding tight and forced.
(Okay, of course I don’t actually know any yoga teachers who believe they should be doing pranayama all the time. We are all guilty of getting extreme when something is new and exciting. I use her as an example, but in fact, most Westernized Yoga teachers do not have particularly free voices despite much pranayama practice. That’s my opinion and I’ve been trained for years in functional hearing1 (hearing what’s occurring inside the person’s physical body as the speak and sing) through my primary lineage - the Libero Canto School.
I was born with an ability to hear sensitively into people’s systems through their voices, and then I trained that ability. This doesn’t make me infallible either, of course. For examples of folks who speak and sing with an on-the-breath freedom, listen to: Claudia Muzio, Alma Gluck, Tito Schipa, Joan Baez - early years, Dr. Morton Cooper, Mahalia Jackson, Martin Luther King - to name a few. Another essay about functional hearing forthcoming one day!)
Okay, but isn’t yoga and chanting more about the nervous system than about freeing ones’ voice, you might be wondering?
Yes. My point exactly!
Though I should point out here again that for me, at the time, these practices didn’t help my singing OR my nervous system. It’s different now, but at the time my body was so tight and held, that adding more tightening and holding on top of what was already going on compounded my issues. In fact, being an anxious person, trying to get breathing right made me more anxious. Also, the slight tension wasn’t that slight for me because I couldn’t figure out what slight meant - and so my body would tense more trying to get it all right. Sigh.
As far as how ujjayi breath helped or didn’t help my breathing for speaking and singing, I can say with certainty that it did not help at all, and probably harmed me.
And my experience with the hundreds of singers I’ve worked with is often similar: they come to me to work on their breathing and what they think might soothe their system does not. There are many ways to access a parasympathetic-dominant state, and trying to control one’s breathing on top of an already hyped up nervous system and a muscularly tight body does more harm than good most of the time.
I’m using ujjayi breath as an example, but I could also be talking about other pranayama practices I learned from the Westernized Yoga world.
I could also be talking about the myriad breathing practices I learned from the traditional singing world. Because, around this same time, I was studying with the best of the best voice teachers in and around the conservatory I went to in New York City. While the breathing practices I was learning in Westernized Yoga and meditation were kind of different from the ones I was learning in voice lessons, they all seemed to fit together in service of the same overall concept:
Expand your lung capacity and breathe better by learning to control and command your breathing in various ways.
You see, even this overall concept betrays, to me, a way of looking at the world and at our bodies that is Objectifying. Unless one’s attitude is infused with curiosity and even playfulness, this idea is just another example of how our society objectifies life itself. Once again, something as primal and elemental is breathing is to be controlled! What might the deeper repercussions of this objectifying mindset be...
Okay, so it’s likely that part of the reason my own system may have been so sensitive to these kinds of instructions is that -
My breathing story
For me, breathing was always a challenge. The thing is, I had some serious emotional traumas that I believe stuffed themselves into my belly and impacted my ability to breathe. I had panic attacks as a young person, and chronic pain, and brutal, inescapable insomnia as a teenager. My jaw was tight to the point where I had TMJ, couldn’t open my mouth sometimes, and would have regular dreams in which my jaw was locked shut and I couldn’t speak. And my belly was so sucked in and held to the point where I remember that during a yoga teacher training in my twenties when we were asked to gently place our hands on and rub our bellies, I immediately felt so nauseous upon even pressing into my own belly that I froze. Finally I left the room, went into the bathroom, and sobbed. I couldn’t even touch my own belly with gentleness without an extreme reaction like that.
The belly and the jaw are two areas that must be able to soften and let go for baseline healthy breathing.
My breathing was shallow and held. Despite the well-meaning-ness of my teachers, any instruction I received from the voice worlds or the breathwork or yogic or meditation worlds seemed to make everything worse. That instruction then compounded my problems, because I felt so confused and ashamed that what seemed to be so easy for most people, and what was clearly an organic function of the body, seemed so especially difficult for me.
In voice lessons, my teachers tried to “help” me by giving me all sorts of mechanistic directions to manipulate my body - pull this in here, open your pelvic bowl there, align your head, tuck your chin, don’t tuck the tailbone, there inhale NOW. Inhale through the nose, keep your palate lifted, you’re running out of breath! keep your ribs out, don’t collapse the upper chest, breathe into your belly!
My poor body! And my poor psyche! Why couldn’t I figure this damn thing out?
Was something wrong with me?
Every Breathwork practice I did around this time frustrated me further. There was so much pushing and prodding and trying to get things right. I was supposed to breathe into certain places in my body, but it felt like so much work! Things like Wim Hof breathing were interesting and I could appreciate the lightheaded, psychedelic effects at times, but the process itself still confused me with its “breathe into the chest, then the belly, then out, then again” - like, okay, do I just push out my chest and push out my belly? What about when my chest doesn’t go up without arching my back? What about the kind of cramp I would get up under my collar bone? What exactly does breathing into my belly mean in this case? And what about breathing into my back? How do I even do that? Does it mean to expand the muscles in my back as I’m inhaling? Does it mean to become more concave? (The instruction to breathe normally while lying facedown on my stomach was the only calming instruction at this time. My back was able to soften and participate authentically in my breathing when I did this. Ahhhhhh.)
Why was breathing so hard?
I was especially ashamed because I was a singer, so people would often say things to me like, “you must have great breath control!” - I’d think - “do I? Do I have breath control? I can certainly hold my breath for a while. I guess that’s control….”
Control was all the rage. Control meant mastery. Control meant ability and strength. Control meant safety. Control meant being in charge. Control also, in this case, seemed to mean instructing my breath with my mind.
But of course this is all an illusion. Control from a brain that isn’t working together with the body is control that is tightly held, wound up, - and easily snapped. There is no control when operating out of a binary paradigm - seeing the body as something separate from the mind and vice versa. Commanding the body to do x, y and z continues to perpetuate that false binary.
Commands like this are, at best, a bandaid and, at worst, a way of training yourself to suppress and repress. And doing this with breathing? The most basic primal function of aliveness? The brilliant autonomic function?
Control your breath and you control your life-force!
The body will usually speak out about being controlled in this way through expressing symptoms such as chronic pain, illness, insomnia, etc. I’m obviously not the only person to say this. There are scores of books and papers written on the topic of the ways the body tries to be heard if you ignore it!
My body tried to be heard, but at first I didn’t even have a single point of reference for my experiences. I experienced all sorts of crazy things that no one could explain to me. (For example, I used to have a strong buzzing sensation right over my third eye. I didn’t know it was my third eye at the time. This sensation was like an itch I could never scratch. It got worse at night. I had to bang my forehead with a pillow constantly or touch it to get it to calm down. This lasted for years! It was absolutely maddening! I remember asking my tenth grade biology teacher if she could help me understand what was happening. Of course she had no idea. Neither did my pediatrician. Oh well. More about this story and its resolution another time.)
“Breathing is not a technique…”
It wasn’t until I met Deborah Carmichael that I was invited into an entirely new way of relating to breathing. I was taught in these voice lessons that rather than breathing being something I needed to learn how to do well, it was an innate function that I could learn to allow.
Now, mind you, it’s not that everything changed and suddenly I could breathe deeply and well. Not at all. I had LOTS of issues and even some particular disagreements come up in relation to what I learned about breathing from Deborah.
However, the most important initial transformation came from me being taught to listen to my body instead of command her. Boom. Huge. Step one. So important.
In Edvin Szamosi’s essay, On Breathing, he writes,
“Breathing is not a technique. Phonation (giving voice) is not a technique. Breathing has no technique and no method. Phonation has no technique and no method.
Breathing is: LIFE. Life has no technique, no method. A human being has the ability to breathe from the moment of his birth. Because of this, he has the ability to give voice from the moment of his birth. But he does not know: HOW? He is simply able to do it. This ability is inborn and spontaneous. Breathing is: LIFE.”
What?! Inborn? No technique? What about counting my breaths? What about making them deep and even? I needed to learn to get out of the way? To do less controlling, not more? If I could do that, my breathing would find its own way?
These ideas in and of themselves were life-altering. And what made this even more radical was that it was coming from a singing teacher. Because sure, some people might say, breathing at rest is inborn, but you do need to learn how to breathe in a specific way if you want to do high energy activities such as singing.
The Szamosis said, well not exactly. They wondered, what if your breathing will calibrate and organize itself on its own in relation to the activity you’re engaged with? What if it’s not about learning how to breathe and then applying that to your music, but what if it’s the other way around? What if breathing for singing is fundamentally a co-development between your body and the music? What if breathing isn’t mechanistic, but imaginative. If so, then as a matter of process, you could learn to breathe better for singing by literally focusing on hearing the music in your mind clearly and in real time.
Then through your ability to imagine (hear in your mind) more and more challenging music, the demands on your breathing become greater, but it is your body that will learn on its own how to meet these demands. By strengthening and clarifying the connection between your mind (imagination of the music) and your body (responsive, engaged in the act of listening to the music too) you are teaching your body how the music goes. Then your body has something concrete and musical to aspire to, to reach for. To desire! Like a child learning a language - hearing and hearing and hearing, and then attempting, first one word, then another, until full sentences are possible, the more we hear in our minds the music we are singing, the more our bodies will learn to breathe to meet the requirements of the music.
Music aside, more broadly speaking what Edvin is saying above is that We breathe because we Are. We Are, therefore we Breathe.
Breathing is not separate from life itself!
Welcoming involuntary bodily responses
There are other great teachers who have seen things this way. Carl Stough, do you know him? The genius choral conductor who was recruited to bring healing to emphysema patients? Who was asked to work with Olympic athletes to train them in developing their lung capacity? His work was likewise based on the principle that the body knows how to breathe. He was discussed in some depth in the recent bestseller book called Breath written by James Nestor.
And then there is Carola Speads (a student of Elsa Gindler) who wrote in her book, Ways to Better Breathing, :
“Breathing varies continuously, automatically and perfectly adjusting to our activities, provided we do not interfere.”
“Via negativa.2” Non-doing. Meticulously practicing getting out of the way. And this is a meticulous practice. There are ways to practice non-doing, believe it or not.
Carola Speads also wrote:
“…Breathing is basically a self-regulatory function. You cannot possibly exercise something that is self-regulatory. Only willful actions can be repeated or ‘exercised.’
“We cannot ‘make’ breathing as we can ‘make’ a movement. Breathing can only be provoked, coaxed, induced to change on its own. This can be done by certain beneficial stimuli. After providing a stimulus, we must try to let the reactions to it develop as freely as possible. These reactions will be involuntary. They happen to us: we cannot make them; we can only try to let them through….”
In other words, we stimulate the natural functioning of our breathing. Then we allow it to do its thing and to take us where it takes us. There are almost infinite ways to stimulate the breath; Carola offers many in her book. They include things like tapping on our rib cage to send vibrations into our lungs that stimulate deeper breaths, and other things like putting our bodies into a stretched position to make more space in our torso which thereby also stimulates deeper breathing into the lungs.
We stimulate, then do our best to allow all the involuntary bodily reactions to that stimulus to happen. A reaction might be yawning, or maybe some shaking, maybe what she calls a “heave” (an inhale with sound)… all of these are often initial responses as our body is reorganizing and restructuring itself.
So what does this mean? Once again this means that our focus, as humans who want to breathe better for Life, health, well-being and for singing must be primarily on the not interfering part.
Easier said than done, I know.
Since we were children many of us modern-folk have been conditioned to interfere with the naturally functioning of our bodies. The notion we must control our bodies is deep. Freud said there are dangerous and bad impulses that live in our unconscious and that these impulses must be controlled at all costs. Even if we don’t consciously think this, it’s a line of thinking that lies at the center of much Western thinking.
Now, don’t jump immediately in your thinking to a conclusion like, “but, if we don’t control our bodies as children and as adults, chaos! anarchy! We’d be unsocialized! We would be unable to exist in proximity with other humans.” No, this binary thinking exposes the exact same underlying core belief - that without the control of our minds, our bodies are inherently untrustworthy, unruly, and chaotic.
There is something that transcends this way of thinking and it’s hard to write about because words are so limiting. Maybe poetry would express it more clearly. Or something like a zen koan. Or something like, as Niels Bohr said, the opposite of a truth is a truth.
Our bodies are infinitely wise and Whole. Inherently amoral, but completely True. (In using the word body, I include the brilliance of our brains, which are in our bodies.) When we serve our bodies, when we learn to be in listening relationship with our Whole Selves, we will see how much we can learn. In listening relationship, in studying ourselves, that is how we learn what it feels like, in a concrete sense, to not interfere.
With singing, now, I’m NOT controlling my breathing in the usual sense as I sing. I’m practicing letting go into the music or the moment or connecting to the energy of expression that lives inside me, and allowing my breathing to do what it does. In turn, I’m often told by listeners that I have “control”. And, yes, in a kind of roundabout way, I do experience that I am in more possession of myself now than I used to be. I experience that I have more access to deeper breaths than I used to. And that when I don’t “have enough breath” for a certain musical phrase or musical piece, my mind is still at peace instead of jumping to figure out some way to force my breath to do what I command. I listen and sense instead.
If all this sounds annoyingly obtuse, I understand. So -
PART TWO - CAN YOU BE MORE SPECIFIC? YES, IF YOU ARE WILLING TO HEAR MORE ABOUT EMOTIONS
Finally! The fun part!!! Read on here:
Edvin Szamosi wrote, “When most people…listen to singing, they pay attention to the sound of the voice…The task of the teacher should be to perceive, to hear the nature of the vocal function - when, why, in what way does the student incorrectly interfere with the functioning of the various throat muscles, the root of the tongue, the tongue itself, etc.?”
Thanks to my Uncle Tom, for this reference.
Very interesting - thanks for writing this - you are integrating many things I often think about and include as part of my "practice." Keep up the good work!