Emotional Stress

If you find yourself in emotional stress and you feel like your throat and your whole body

is closed up then here something for you to try. It is powerful and works!

Sit on a chair that allows you to feel your sit bones. Align yourself.

Straight spine. Feet hipwide apart. Hands resting on your knees.

Lips apart from each other. Relax your face.

How deep is your breath? Feel your spine straight, the soles of

your feet connecting to the floor, the top of your head is like an open lid

connecting to the ceiling. Use your sits bones actively and push upward by

rooting down your tale bone until you feel you have a spine that is straight and flows.

For this exercise you will need to have a pitch fork or any other instrument that makes a lingering sound and fades out slowly. Once again relax your face. Relax your jaw. Keep the forehead

friendly and easy. Imagine sunlight is shining onto your forehead.

Once you feel that your breath goes deeper into your belly you can start.

Play any pitch on your instrument. When you hear the pitch try to listen for different sounds, overtones. Can you hear lower and higher frequencies within the same pitch? Listen for the overtones. Do you hear them? If not try again. Keep repeating the same note and try to enter the note as if you would be able to travel inside of it. Once you can easily hear the higher part ( I call this the silver shimmer ) and the lower sound within the pitch you can start asking yourself how fast that pitch vibrates.

To give you a visual: Imagine a metal string which is plucked. Let's say you play

the harp and you pluck the short very tight strings. Those strings don't move

much thus their amplitude is not large but they vibrate very fast. That is how high notes are

produced. Other strings, the low notes, are much thicker and less tight. The amplitude of

those strings is larger. If you play a very low note and you dive into

the note with your listening you can feel how fast the vibration is swinging and also

get a sense of it's height or amplitude. Take your hand and move it a little up and down

in the speed that you perceive the vibration of the pitch to be. You can dive into the sound more easily. You want to immerse your whole being into the sound like you dive under water rather than just dangling your feet in it. Merge with the sound. Imagine you ARE this string that

is vibrating inside your body. You might not feel this way at first but if you repeat it and really listen you will start to feel it very strongly. The more your brain becomes a conduit for the pitch

and vibrates with it the more you will feel that your stress eases.

Your eye muscles behind the eyes will relax. Your brain will lighten up and "lose weight".

Your lower jaw will soften and the jaw joint and the breath will fall into

the belly through an open throat.

You will probably feel the effects already after a few days. The moment it opens up your mood will lighten and your body will feel more at ease. Another area is the brain. When we are happy we feel light and bright inside the brain and when we are not and we worry or stress the brain feels tight, very dense and has no flexibility. You can do body and breath work such as gentle yoga and combine it with the listening exercises in this post.

As a nice side effect you will find that your high notes when you sing will be available to you with much more ease.