Mindfulness Tools for Gender-Affirming Voice: Patience
Today we’ll be discussing another mindfulness pillar that can support you through the journey towards inhabiting your voice: patience.
What is true patience?
True patience can be best understood as the ability to open and relate to injury — of the mind, body, or spirit — with the insight to do so without anger or hatred.
There is a primal brain in us all which has kept us alive by learning to fight or flee from injury. To our ancestors, transient discomfort really was rather terrifyingly close to permanent death, so it’s only human that our nervous systems have grown accustomed to avoid it at all costs, and impatience today is born from that same urge.
Patience is an exercise of compassion: all it needs is a non-judgemental awareness of the pre-existing conditions that give rise to both the object of discomfort itself, and our own subjective experience of it. In time, our nervous systems can see the impermanence of these triggers, and our minds' response instinctively transforms away from a punitive one, to a supportive one.
Why it matters in voice training
There are going to be moments in voice training that feel awkward or unnatural. During these moments, it’s not uncommon to become very critical of your voice. This can sometimes lead to a heightened sensitivity to the elements of your voice that don’t yet align with your vision, leading to gender dysphoria.
Through these unsettling moments, we work as a team to build your resilience. Allowing us to sit confidently through discomfort as it arises, shapeshifts, and dissolves.
Activity for nurturing patience
We can strengthen our patience using a technique called Paired Relaxation. The idea is to gently pair dysregulating thoughts with relaxing action to reconfigure our nervous system.
Sit in a comfortable space. Let yourself think of something that often irritates you.
For a few seconds, describe the scenario objectively, acknowledging and accepting how it makes you feel (e.g. “It frustrates me that my neighbor often parks too close to my car.”).
Gently start to pay attention to the feelings in your body. Where do you feel this frustration? A tingling in the arms? A tightening between the shoulder blades? Maybe a shallowness of the breath or a heavy chest…
Focusing on one of these areas at a time, we’re going to tighten the muscles and then release. As you tighten, say “I welcome my frustration. I am human.” As you relax, say “you may relax, you may let go.” (to release the breath or chest, try breathing in deeply and letting go with a sigh)
Repeat 3 times for each area and finish by rewarding yourself with a relaxing activity.
