A"gite" (guesthouse) at the Roy Hart Centre Artistique, Internationale in France

I'm currently in France teaching and studying the voice work of the Roy Hart Theater.  During my voice lesson today I had the same trouble I had in a class last year with world renouned voice teacher Kristin Linklater.  When I tried to open up my sternum to the archetypal brassy tenor "princely" sound, I began to feel nauseous, my throat wanted to close up, and I started coughing.  While singing, I kept fighting through the impulse to close my throat, and for a while I was coughing up a lot of phlegm and ready to bolt for a window in case I needed to vomit.

But finally I felt my heart chakra open up a bit, (non-believers, you just have to take my word for it that it's possible to feel such things) which caused my spine to unlock at that spot.  There was instant relief and the sound came pouring out of my body.

After class I felt dis-organ-ized.  I laid down to meditate, and the message came to me that my heart is broken, and has been for a very long time.  I knew this intellectually— in 1999 several friends, a boyfriend, and even a beloved cat took their leave of me.  I felt very alone.  For a few years a new friend infused some mending stiches into my heart, but he moved away  three years ago.  Since then I have been very lonely, and have been coping with some major unpleasantness of various kinds in my workplace.  This year work was particularly demoralizing.

And today, my body "told" me that it’s time to truly acknowledge my broken heart.  And be kind to myself. 

Before coming to France, I picked up Geneen Roth’s book Women, Food, God.  In it, she makes the point that whatever our woes are, the worst has already happened to us, when we were children.  We couldn’t handle it as children, and created ways to divert our pain.  As an adult, if we use these same ways to divert pain, we are not acknowledging the pain, and we are reverting to our child psyches and reliving it all over again.  We need to learn that as adults, we can handle our pain.  We don't have to divert it anymore.

Or, as my friend Jay, the Director of the Roy Hart Center says, “if something is not satisfying, you can never get enough.”  Which is to say, that if you don’t articulate the now, and continue to feed yourself crap (whatever that may be, whether food, relationships, material objects, the internet or any bad habit), the crap will not sustain you.  It will not satisfy.  You will be caught in a wicked circle of self-defeating behavior and pain.

Jay and Roth have the same message for me:  “Acknowledge the now.  Feed yourself what is satisfying.  Give up childhood coping devices.  Be kind to yourself.  Feel what you are feeling.”

So I must be gentle with my broken heart, and hold it with great reverance in my open hands.

text and images copyright 2010 voicegal