Mindfulness Tools for Gender-Affirming Voice: Awareness
Voice Training, much like the strengthening of the body or the transformation of our habits, requires true resilience. Unfortunately however, the conversation around resilience is often wrapped in layers of thick-skinned endurance.
The true resilience we speak of in voice training doesn’t refer to a quality of unshakeable determination to achieve an immovable goal; it does not refer to the hard-set mentality we often hear from rise-and-grind gurus. Endurance — the rigid mindset of withstanding at all costs — is not the source of resilience, but its opposite. True resilience comes from much softer virtues: gentle awareness and acceptance.
Let’s explore some accessible starting points with actionable steps that can help you to start nurturing the mindfulness tools for voice training, whether you are brand new to mindfulness or have some practice under your belt. Today we’ll look at gentle awareness.
Developing Gentle Awareness
What is gentle awareness?
Our mind is two: our “Doing” mind and our “Being” mind. The Doing Mind refers to the part of us which is engaged in acting and reacting, analyzing, remembering, planning, etc. The Being Mind refers to the part of our mind which simply and factually observes those thoughts and experiences, from judgment or involvement. If Doing Mind is the part of us which lives the movie, Being Mind is the part of us which watches it as just that; a movie.
Why it matters in voice training
Being Mind is present in all of us, though it can definitely take some practice to learn to disentangle it from our direct lived experience and the feelings that arise from it. In the context of voice training, gentle awareness (a more passive form of the Being Mind) helps us by serving as a kind of copilot for our voice: passively observing in the background, simply noting our patterns and habits of speech.
Having this objective “blueprint” of your personal cadence, pronunciation, conversation style, etc. passively present in your mind is an incredibly helpful tool for helping you to organically and intuitively apply the techniques you’ve been working on with your coach. Bringing gentle awareness can also help you achieve something truly liberating: untangling those parts of your voice which feel foreign to you from those which bring you affirmation, confidence, and joy.
How to strengthen gentle awareness
Activity journaling — take a short moment at the end of the day to simply note with pen and paper all the little things you remember doing that day, as if it were an activity log.
This exercise really is about recognizing the little things: brushing your teeth, eating a snack, making your bed, watching youtube, etc. The idea is to get the mind used to being aware of the little actions we often do in autopilot, without attaching meaning or a subjective value to them.
5,4,3,2,1 — this one’s a simple and quick one, though it requires a little practice at first. Sit down comfortably. Take a deep breath in and sigh it out. Now name in your head 5 things you can see with your eyes: a plug on the wall, the gap between floorboards, your knees. When you’re done, go ahead and note 4 things you can feel with your body: heels against the floor, hands on your legs, hair on your neck, etc. Continue with 3 things you can hear, then 2 things you can smell, and lastly, 1 thing you can taste.
