Feel the Feelings, Do The Doings

Chapter 8

This post is a chapter of the book It Ain’t Gonna Lick Itself: Housekeeping In Spite Of It All by Hanne Blank Boyd.

Click here for the full table of contents.

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Illustration by Elizabeth M. Tamny

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Housework is a lot more like yoga than it is like singing, and this is a useful thing to know.

One of the things I learned from my years as a professional classical vocalist is that you cannot simultaneously be a good singer and have strong feelings actively happening in your mind and body. Emotions have the rather amazing and sometimes wholly inconvenient propensity to trigger particular physical responses. Anxiety and fear can make you hyperventilate or tremble. Sadness and anger and grief can all provoke tears. Rage makes it hard to control your actions and turns the volume on everything up to 11.

Music is emotional. It’s literally created on every level specifically to evoke emotional responses. But you can’t sing properly, especially not in the very particular ways demanded by classical vocal technique, if emotion means you can’t breathe well, if you’re all snotted up from crying, if you’re shaking, if your throat is choked up, if rage is making all your muscles tight. It simply doesn’t work. Where classical singing is concerned, you cannot simultaneously feel the feelings and do the doings. All that passionate vocalizing you see on the operatic stage? That’s called acting. In order to sing well, you have to become good at what therapists call “compartmentalizing”: your emotions go over here in this box, and the other stuff goes over there in the other one.

Soprano Lise Davidsen doing the Tosca thing at The Met.

More recently, I started learning yoga. I’m not a particularly talented yoga student but it turns out to be helpful in a lot of ways whether or not I’m good at it. (A lot like housekeeping, honestly.)

It’s also taught me some useful things, one of them being that unlike with classical singing one can, in fact, simultaneously do yoga when there are strong feelings coursing through your mind and body. In fact, yoga will sometimes trigger them. Just as emotions have the amazing, sometimes inconvenient ability to trigger physical responses, physical movements and positions can sometimes have a similarly astonishing (and yes, also sometimes inconvenient) ability to trigger emotions. Fortunately, the physical control needed to do yoga involves much larger muscle groups and far less precision than classical vocal technique.