Becoming Aware Of The Breath (with Michaela Bartoskova)

Christopher: If there’s one thing that will strike the most fear into the heart of the average musician, it’s not scales. It’s not being asked to play something you haven’t prepared. It’s not even being asked to improvise.

Those can definitely all be scary! But for many musicians, one thing is scarier than all of them: SINGING.

What if there was an easy and natural route into starting to sing that didn’t even begin with you singing a single note?

In today’s episode, I’ll be sharing a clip from a recent masterclass which reveals exactly that. Here we go.

So, in our last episode, we had our mini-interview with Michaela Bartoskova, one of our Guest Experts here at Musical U. And you got a sense of where she’s coming from as a voice teacher, a singing teacher, and her really holistic perspective on the human voice.

Not just “how can I sing songs and get the notes to come out right”, but really this very deep and personal thing that our voice is, whether we’re speaking or shouting or singing.

And it sets the scene, I think, for what I want to share with you today, which is a clip from the masterclass she gave for our members.

And it was a tricky one to pick a segment from! Some of our masterclasses, you know, I can pick any five or ten minute segment, and it’s packed with all these interesting things, and we can just pull that out and it works great.

This one was such an immersive and progressive experiential masterclass, it was actually impossible to pick a section from the middle because you wouldn’t be prepared for it, you wouldn’t have done the exercises building up to it and so on.

So I’ve chosen a section right near the start, where Michaela was just starting to bring attention to the process of breathing.

Even in this introductory section, though, there were two fascinating nuggets, quite aside from the power of the exercise, which I hope you’ll follow along with in a moment when we dive in. But there were two fascinating nuggets.

One was around overcoming performance anxiety, and the other was about breathing and the emotion of singing, bringing emotion into singing and how the breath affects that.

So pay attention for those, and please do join in with this exercise if you’re able to. You’ll get the most out of this episode if you go along with it and you actually pay attention to the things Michaela is inviting you to. Here we go!

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Michaela: The whole masterclass is based on the experience and even though I will talk at the beginning a little bit about the anatomy and everything, it’s based on experience.

And the reason why I’m saying this is do take care of yourself. Do take care of yourself. Do take care of your voice. If you feel there is something you don’t want to do, then just watch and relax. It’s much better to listen to your body than to go against the body’s instincts.

But also try to challenge yourself if you want to. So you can find the balance between relaxing and following and challenging if you like that.

So, yeah, do take care of yourself. And I don’t think I will mention that anymore because I won’t remember it. So now the responsibility is yours taking care of yourself. And I think that’s all I wanted to tell you.

So let’s start with a little bit of relaxation so you can lean back wherever you like to. You don’t need to adjust the camera, just lean back. If it’s okay to have your feet on the floor, you can close your eyes if that feels safe and you are willing to close your eyes.

Sometimes people don’t want that, but if it’s okay, you can lean back, relax your arms, relax your jaw, relax your belly, and just notice what is happening with your body when you inhale. What is happening with your body when you exhale.

So it’s not about fixing anything, it’s not about controlling, it’s not about making the inhale longer or exhale shorter. Just observing what is happening, mostly with your torso, when you breathe in and when you breathe out. And also notice how your body is intelligent, that it knows when your lungs took enough air and you start to exhale. So notice the transition between inhaling, exhaling, back to inhale.

And if you want to, in a second, I will ask you to drop an “s” sound onto your exhale. So it’s like we are going to be hissing out. You go as long as you want to.

So you are going to breathe in through your nose and then hissing out on the exhale. And then try one more time on your own and notice what’s happening with your torso when you are hissing out.

And then let’s go over this exercise slowly. You can open your eyes and I will tell you just a few details about breathing. I don’t like to talk about breathing too much because from my experience, I feel people. I don’t know, it feels like people get overwhelmed.

People don’t want to know about breathing. They are like “girl, I’ve been breathing my whole life!” Like, what is like new? What’s new there? So I won’t talk about breathing too much. But there are some things I think I’d like to tell you.

The first thing is: I see, maybe you notice that as well, our society, we don’t have time for anything. We always, there’s something to do, we always need to do more.

So our breathing is very shallow. And if you experience ever performance anxiety, also our breathing gets very shallow. So it’s good thing to breathe, take time to breathe.

If you take away something from today, that would be enough. Taking time to breathe. Because people just don’t have time. They just breathe in, breathe out, just taking time to inhale and taking time to exhale.

And if you want a little tip for the performance anxiety, longer exhales calm the body down. I often say counting in, counting for three for inhale, and double the number. So counting till six on the exhale, it calms the body down. It affects the parasympathetic nervous system.

So that might be something you might, or maybe whenever you feel stressed and overwhelmed, just longer exhales will bring you back to the present moment. So that is a little bit about breathing.

And the last thing that I think is very interesting about breathing. There are two types of breathing.

One type of breathing is involuntary. It’s for surviving. It’s the one that you are using right now. When you are listening. You don’t need to think about it. The body does it for you.

And the second type, it’s intentional, is voluntary breathing. It’s mostly experienced when we do breathing exercises, also when we visualize, imagine things. Also performance anxiety, right when we are in the room on our own, but we are already thinking about the terrible stuff that can happen, our breathing is affected by it. And also the intentional voluntary breathing we use when we speak or sing.

And for speaking and singing, the best thing is to use both types of this breathing.

The voluntary, so we know when we want to breathe in and when we want to breathe out. But also the involuntary, the survival breath, if I can name it, if I can say it this way, it brings all the emotions.

So if you sometimes experience singing and you didn’t feel much, it was mostly based on the voluntary breath. When everything is a little bit rigid.

So we need the involuntary surviving breath to bring in the emotions, to bring the emotions into the voice. So it’s good to connect both.

———

Christopher: What did you think? How did you get on? Did you take part in the breathing exercise? Did you become more aware of what your torso was doing? And this idea of the voluntary and involuntary breathing?

There were two really fascinating tips there, I think.

One was this idea of extending the exhale to calm down the nervous system. That alone can have a massive impact if you get nervous about performing or get nervous anywhere in your life. Just that idea of breathing in for three and out for six, or whatever the count may be, is a really powerful one, one I make use of regularly. So do take that away and put it to use.

And then the other, that there are two types of breathing. And it’s kind of obvious when you stop and think about it. But have you ever stopped to think about it?

And if we only focus on the voluntary, intentional breathing when we sing, we’re actually missing out on the emotional connection that comes from the involuntary automatic survival breathing. I thought that was really fascinating. Really cool.

So from there, in the masterclass, Michaela went on to cover more body awareness with breathing.

She explained some of the anatomy that’s at play, and then she took people into humming. So this was a really clever approach, I thought. And I said in the masterclass, I felt a bit silly because I’d spent so many years with singing teachers doing a lot of humming but then forgot about it for 20 years!

But it’s such a powerful route into singing because you start to really feel the resonance of the sound, but it’s somehow less exposing than singing out loud. And so she brought people through various humming exercises to feel the resonance and start to explore, and then varying the pitch, starting to play with vowel sounds.

You know, we really love “so simple, it can’t fail” approaches here at Musical U. And, for example, when we’re helping people learn to sing in tune, we have this “Jeff the Robot” exercise, which I think I got from George Bevan at Monkton school originally, but turned it into a robot thing.

And the idea is, if you think you can’t sing a note, even just to say, if your name is Jeff, you say, “my name is Jeff”, and then you just extend that last word, “hello, my name is Jeeeeeeeff”. And that monotone sound, that’s a note.

So anyway, that’s an example of a “so simple, you can’t fail kind” of approach. And what Michaela presented in this workshop with the progression from breathing (which undeniably you can do!) through to starting to add sounds like that hissing, through to humming, through to starting to sing – it’s just, it’s kind of infallible. It’s going to get you singing. And from there, it’s just a matter of getting better and better at it.

So I loved the way she brought our members through that progression in the masterclass. If you’re a member of Musical U, that full masterclass recording is available for you inside the membership right now. You can pick up where you left off and continue with those exercises.

You can learn more about michaela at michaelasound.com, we’ll have a link in the shownotes.

That’s it for this one. Cheers! And go make some music!

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