The Enduring Harm of ''Breath Control": PART 2
Pushing out or holding back emotions in singing and therapeutic practices
This is a two-part series on the enduring harm of “breath control”. In Part I wrote about wanting to share a paradigm shift around breathing for singing (and for Westernized Yoga and even Breathwork). 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.
I ended Part I noting this: a large part of the work of breathing better lies in learning to be with/not repress or suppress your emotional life. So now I bring you:
Part 2: CAN YOU BE MORE SPECIFIC? YES, IF YOU ARE WILLING TO HEAR MORE ABOUT EMOTIONS!
By its nature, breathing is not separate from the psychic, emotional life and spiritual life of a person, so any process of learning how to breathe better must not attend only to the physical body.1 A large part of the work of breathing better lies in learning to be with/not repress or suppress your emotional life in the actual moment your emotional life is happening.
Once again, breathing is not separate from emotional life.
Learning to be with your emotions does not have to mean becoming a highly emotional or overtly expressive human. It might mean that, or it might not. (If you know me you might assume that, ha!) But the truth is, all of us are so different, and how our emotions move through each of us is completely unique.
By “allowing our emotions through,” this does not mean fabricating bigger emotions than we actually experience, or trying to elicit ones we don’t. We always go at the speed of our own bodies and follow the lead of our own bodies. If our bodies reveal to us that there is emotional holding and repression that wants or even needs to be released, we will know. How will we know? If we pay attention, our bodies will show us during our process of letting voice out and singing.
This is also where creating a container (contained space) for feeling can be important. And/or teacher/guide who isn't afraid of their own emotional life. This guide creates the consciousness container for the energetic current of the emotion. You can also do it for yourself, but that’s harder, especially at first. It’s also important to make sure you know you always have a choice about when and where we want to engage in this kind of “allowing emotions” work.
EMOTIONS ARE LIKE WAVES
One of the terrifying thoughts people have about allowing their emotions out, goes like, “if I let them out even a little, I’ll completely lose control. I’ll be so mad, I’ll never stop yelling. I’ll be so sad I’ll never stop crying. I’ll be so ashamed I’ll never stop feeling nauseous.” And on and on. And in some ways this is true, because at first, allowing out years of repressed emotions can feel completely overwhelming. (Go slow, take your time, no rush.) There may be a chapter of time - and it may be long - in which the emotions do just keep rolling, over and over and over again.
So I’m not suggesting any of this is easy or that there isn’t a rigorous process involved.
But the thing about emotions is that when we do learn to allow them through in a way that is united with the body, they tend to have a natural, wave-like rhythm. They move through. “Move through” means - come and go in their natural oceanic, wave-like rhythm.
Similar to the concept of stimulating the natural functioning of the breathing I described in Part 1, when our emotions are stimulated, there is an organic movement of those emotional energies within and through our systems. We can study this movement and learn, over time, how to allow the emotions to move through us with less and less interference from our bodies. With less interference comes a more obvious emotional cycle: emergence, growth, cresting, and waning. By detaching ourselves from our stories about why the emotions are happening, we can be directly with the experience of the emotions themselves and, surprise surprise, they don’t need to hang out that long!
If we, instead, ignore or these emotional activations, we are suppressing. I think of large waves in the ocean freezing in place.
It can be hard to imagine this until you’ve experienced it, but there is a way to allow emotions to be organically expressed (through voice, through crying, through moving, through shaking) that can feel satisfying. I didn’t say “big”. We cannot know ahead of time how big or how small an expression wants to be. Our body will show us as we go.
An example - someone is in pain and starting to sob. If they DO let that sobbing happen, there is a release of breath and voice, and there is physical movement that happens in the body - shoulders heave, neck folds, face takes expression.... This is the body’s way of embodying that emotional experience.
But what if you didn’t feel safe sobbing in that moment when the sobbing wants to come? In an effort to keep that sobbing inside, the muscles of your throat probably constricted, you most likely swallowed (back the emotions), your tongue pulled back into your throat blocking the airway, and the movement of your diaphragm constricted. Your breathing probably became shallow or held, because your body knew that a release would allow the sobbing to come. But in this example it’s not like the need to sob went away! You just held it back! So where did the sobbing go instead? It embedded itself into your tongue and diaphragm and jaw and throat. You reified the habit-pattern in your nervous system. You -unconsciously and for good reasons! - perpetuated the pattern that tells your body: when sobbing begins, I’ll tighten my throat and hold my breath. Eventually you might stop noticing your body even needs a sobbing release. Over time, this becomes a nervous system pattern that lodges in our body and becomes how we operate.
In his essay, About Breathing, Edvin Szamosi writes,
“What happens to these emotions, which the person was not able to express, which he had to swallow? These suppressed feelings are very painful, very hard to bear. They do not disappear, they are not destroyed, but the person does not want to feel these things constantly. Therefore, probably unconsciously, he drives the feelings from the nervous system, where they first arise, into the muscular system. This causes a loss of elasticity in the muscles – it causes them to become stiff.
In the animal world, when the immediate threat has passed, the animal stops holding its breath. With humans…the behavior pattern of holding the breath continues.
The holding back of breath and emotions, locking them away in the muscular system, requires a huge amount of energy, especially if it goes on for a longtime. The constant tension in the nerve and muscle systems creates a psychological illusion of inner security.…And people have a very hard time giving up this false sense of security.”
When we hold back our breath, we hold back our emotions. When we do this repeatedly, year after year, those particular emotions get lodged in the body. Then, when we begin releasing our breath (or our stiff muscles as Edvin writes), decades of held emotions might make themselves known. It does absolutely no good to wish the emotions away. They exist.
When emotions arise, we can learn to work with them, and this isn’t the same as forcing or trying to elicit emotions…
CATHARSIS? Depends…
The process of working with emotions can be quite rigorous. You’ve got to notice where you’re falling on that spectrum between pushing and holding back at the level of your body.
You’ve got to learn to notice and feel your own body at all.
And to practice integrating shame when in the presence of embarrassing emotions you’d rather not feel.
But sometimes what happens today in certain healing modalities are therapeutic instructions that try to elicit emotions by saying things like - ‘go on, embody your child self - how would she have felt - no you’re not really going there - embody her! yell! cry!” Or - “big” emotion practices such as primal screams so we can finally express all that is pent up inside us! And I’m not saying there isn’t a place for instructing this kind of thing! Sometimes it can be such a surprising and new experience for someone to finally make a big sound AT ALL! Sometimes just the very act of acknowledging to yourself or in the presence of another human you have emotions at all (!) can be wildly healing. Sometimes what’s happening here is also that you are connecting mentally and emotionally with a version of yourself that hasn’t been seen - and that can be healing in and of itself.
However, in these kinds of approaches there is usually something majorly missing. What is that? The ability of the practitioner to perceive the body of the person before them. Or the ability of the person to listen to the energy movements in their own body. When the practitioner is encouraging big emotional expression as an idea divorced from the actual reality of the human standing in front of them, the person’s body is not leading the process. If that’s what is happening, the whole thing is going backwards.
First, emotional energies must organically emerge (usually from a softening and a letting go in a space of safety), and then they can be expressed. And I said earlier, who knows how they will want to express? We must listen and we may be surprised by where our bodies want to take us.
This is an actual practice of embodying the concept of non-attachment.
Unless the practitioner - who might know a lot about the psyche and even about emotions and practices for emotional regulation - also understands the movement of physical and energetic and emotional patterns through someone’s body (or unless the person themself has an innate or already integrated connection between body and emotions) they will be working in a dis-integrated way.
With voice specifically (yelling, crying, screaming, talking - all of this requires voice!) if someone does not know enough to notice when the body is tightening or holding or pushing in relation to the emotions that are trying to vocally express, the emotions might be happening, but they aren’t actually moving through the system in a nourishing way. They are just getting stuck and reifying themselves. This usually occurs when we try to artificially perpetuate them beyond their natural wave cycle or when we are “in our stories”, meaning we aren’t staying with our body and witnessing the experience with our minds, but are instead allowing our mental stories to egg our body on. As in: “That person was horrible!” “I was so wronged,” “Remember that word they used, what a horrible person they are.” (I’m not immune to any of this, by the way!) Our fun task is to learn to stay with the feeling but without intellectualizing that feeling.
In cases of perpetuating a feeling longer than it’s actually happening in the body, the experience might still be momentarily euphoric, but it is not long-term satisfying, and it isn’t really creating new neural pathways in relationship to one’s emotional expression. Just because someone experiences a huge one-time emotional release, doesn’t mean they are also learning how to work with their emotional channel in subtle and sustainable ways. When the body isn’t able to learn a new, healthier, more integrated way of expressing emotions - you might scream and blow past your own armor, but nothing is “moving through”. Armor isn’t really meant to be blown past. Yet when we are numb and seek to feel, sometimes blowing past is the only way we think we can feel something.
Back to singing, and singing lessons. When emotions come up in mainstream singing techniques, it’s not usually that they are denigrated or discouraged. But they are often seen as something separate from the vocal technique itself. As in - “first let me get my technique under control, then I can focus on allowing my emotions into the song.” Or “I’ll go cry over here. Now I’ve had a good cry and I can go back to singing.” But if you’re holding back your crying while you’re singing, you’re constricting the movement of your diaphragm and, therefore, also your singing. The body is the one singing. These things are not separate.
Okay, what does that look like in a session?
Oh goodness, this can look so many ways. I hesitate to give prescriptive or codified ways - repetitive exercises if you will - about how to do this process since, as I’ve written, it’s more about how to stimulate a natural process to unfold. But I will share some general principles and then provide a few examples of how this might look.
Some principles:
I already mentioned non-attachment.
Let’s add:
Going at the pace of your body
There is no hierarchy of emotions
Differentiation equals development
Non-attachment looks like - well, sometimes my student will spend an entire session writhing on the ground as emotional energies in their bodies are releasing and alchemically surging through, moving their, coming out as voice - while I am the witness, creating a gentle container of allowing.
Other times my student will release one muscle, their breathing will free and an emotional surge will suddenly come, but that’s it, it doesn’t last long, and we continue on our merry way, perhaps tending to the music, paying attention to harmonically or melodically or rhythmically, looking at the text - freeing the breathing and soul that way.
Or even other times, nothing emotional happens at all! We work on music. We play around! That’s fine! The body shows us where she wants to go. And we may practice listening - again and again and again. We may learn to stimulate and allow rather than to command and demand and push and prod.
(Non-attachment goes for sound of the voice too. Some people - while they practice singing - are always aiming for the sound to be better, less breathy, more forward resonance, more chesty, etc. But that attachment itself gets in the way of the organic process of singing to unfold. More about this in a different essay.)
Going at the pace of your body means listening and paying attention. It means, as I’ve said already, not eliciting emotions that aren’t present in body or mind. When our bodies are ready to be with or express what has been held or repressed or just not conscious, we will know. We will notice tears coming, we will notice shaking wants to happen, we will notice the heat of anger as a somatic sensation or an energy we become aware of. If it’s there, we can attend to it.
Methodologically, when this begins to happen, the important thing is that the teacher/guide be able to sense what’s going on, and to transmit energetic signals to the student’s emotional and energetic body that it’s safe to FEEL here. Then there are probably infinite creative ways to work with the energy of feeling. There are musical ways to work, there are imaginative ways to work, there are physical/movement-specific ways to work, etc.
Some examples:
Channeling those energies into music by singing an aria (or musical phrase, or children’s song, or improvisation) while directing the feeling into your singing whether the feeling is related to that particular song or not;
Observing the energetic movements of the emotions with one’s mind (as sometimes happens in meditation);
Having a conversation with between the part of you that is feeling and the part of you noticing that feeling (a la “parts” work, though I’d add here that it’s important to engage in conversation like this while also deliberately NOT holding back or pushing out the breath, so doing things such as such as tapping, head shaking, jaw dangling, leg swinging can be helpful to keep the conversation genuinely embodied).
Of course you can also always make the choice to NOT “go into the feelings,” but to contain and soothe them instead. Totally valid!
There is no hierarchy of emotions means bigger is not better. Crying is not better than laughing and laughing is not better than crying. Grief is not better than boredom. Even numbness can be treated as an emotion. Much of my own embodied understanding of this lack of hierarchy has developed through my studies of neo-Tantra and Tantra, and my background as an actor alongside the deep work somatic work with Libero Canto. (Much much later, I have also found some kinship for this principle in Authentic Relating/Circling/integral theory2 contexts.)
If there is no emotional hierarchy, this means that as a matter of process there must be a deep practice of “unshaming”3 emotions. We feel what we feel and the first step is recognizing without shaming or self-hatred or wishing it away. (Then other steps can follow - beyond the scope of this essay for me to write about.)
Finally, differentiation equals development means that as the body differentiates (tongue from jaw from neck from diaphragm, muscular system from nervous system, etc.) breathing becomes easier and singing gets freer. This is where specific physical practices that work with the jaw (my students all know about the dangling jaw practice), the tongue (we stick out the tongue and wiggle it back and forth, inviting a separation between jaw and tongue movement, for example), the neck (we might shake our heads yes and no as we sing and speak), the belly (gentle massaging of the abdomen while giving voice can allow holding in the abdominal muscles to let go so the movement of the diaphragm takes the lead), all this can be helpful in developing more coordination in your system. Emotions can move through your more differentiated system more easily and with more specificity because you are literally developing a more coordinated and subtle physical and energetic body in which emotions can be experienced.
In connection with these principles, the possible ways of working are endless.
WHY DOES THIS MATTER? Objectification.
Who cares? Well…ME! If you, like me, have sometimes found it inexplicably difficult for you to “get” Breathwork, you probably care?
Or - if you’re a singer who has become disillusioned with the idea of singing as a space of constant control rather than a space of real letting go, you probably also care?
If you’re someone who already naturally feels lots of emotions and knows you have a hard time expressing them, maybe that also makes you care about this!
More broadly, I care because I believe that the way most people in the communities I move in go about working with breath and voice are betraying an attitude of obectification towards their bodies. (Surprise! Capitalism!) Objectifying our bodies as breathing machines translates to objectifying Life itself! Objectifying something so mystical and wild and human and alive and masterful as singing translates to objectifying Life itself - sometimes even under the guise of becoming a better singer in order to more properly and fully connect with Life itself!
If the attitude is inherently objectifying, whether that is intentional or not, then the practices themselves are imprinting that objectifying attitude in your very own body! This imprinting impacts the entire way we see and move through the world!
I believe in the beautiful, life-giving, life-changing, world-healing impact of learning to be in a less objectified relationship with our own bodies.
Breathwork and regular old vocal practices are not all bad, there’s a time and a place and a moment for everything. If someone approaches any practice with an attitude of playfulness and curiosity that goes a long way in preventing negative repercussions. AND - it is also my belief that it becomes much more possible to engage with breathing and singing practices of “doing” after someone has first understood and embodied some of the principles I’ve shared here. I think of it like working to heal the soil before doing the planting. The first step is bringing healing and Wholeness to the soil, the dirt, the body of the land. And then the land is more resilient no matter what is thrown her way.
So, too, with the body. First step, nourish that yummy yummy body-soul-Being soil. Then, sure, go out and try whatever you want!
(Anyway go out and try whatever you want anyway, of course!)
But what if instead of breathing into your belly, you asked your belly or your low back to soften as you breathe - and then you notice what happens?
What if instead of making sure to breathe more (which usually translates to taking a bigger inhale), you put into your mind the instruction, “don’t hold back the breath,” and then notice what happens?
What if instead of taking a big inhale before you sing, you soften your body, imagine (hear in your mind) the music you’re about to sing, and notice how your body responds to what’s in your mind?
What if instead of thinking the way to breathe better is to do some sort of breath control practice such as breathing in to a count of four and holding for a count of four and breathing out for a count of four, you stimulate your breathing by tapping gently on your upper ribcage as Carola Speads has people do, and then pause and see how your body responds?
This requires patience and willingness to go slow and observe. This is a lot of specific non-doing.
My teacher Deborah Carmichael wrote this to me in an email in 2011,
“The most important thing…is that when we are working on the body, it is never about what to do. It is always about what not to do. It is always about letting go of the superfluous tension and effort. It is never a direct instruction to use the muscles of the vocal and breathing organs in a particular way. With this in mind, I do think that the physical gesture can lead to the emotional core sometimes. It can happen either way because the body and the soul are one. Ours is a fundamentally holistic approach.”
It is always about non-doing. Or non-doing first, out of which Doing emerges.
Soften your belly and don’t hold back the breath!
Working directly with the physical body will automatically affect the other “bodies” (as Rudolf Steiner refers to the various layers of being a Human), since the physical/emotional/psychic layers are all part of a Whole. Rudolf Steiner labels the various earthly bodies - physical, etheric, astral, and ego. Rudolf Steiner was an Austrian esoteric dude living at the end of the 19th century who is responsible for a prolific number of things including Biodynamic Farming, Camphill shared living for social change, Waldorf Education, the social threefolding movement and more. His writings and ways of seeing were formative in my life when I was in my early twenties.
Circling/Authentic Relating is a practice, modality and maybe even a kind of worldview for learning to skillfully relate to others with authenticity. Some people describe it as meditating in a group. I have regularly Circled for years and have found it to be an unbelievably transformative space for doing my personal practicing.
David Bedrick (brilliant therapist), has created an entire approach around learning to work with deep rooted shame and internalized oppression of the parts of ourselves that try not to be seen. He calls his work “UnShaming” and it is a first step in healing.