How is Your Breath?

Lately, I have been doing a deep dive into breathing. I recently had the opportunity to teach a class on Breathing for Singing and I’m also in the middle of a Yoga Teacher Training program. In yoga, a great emphasis is placed on awareness of the breath as well as pairing your movement with your breath. Because I’m spending many hours of my day consciously thinking about this topic, I have a question for you:

How is your breath? 

Here are a few breathing facts:

• Our lungs are housed within our ribs. The ribcage expands due to the movement of our diaphragm and our external intercostals (muscles on the inside of our ribcage), which in turn fills the lungs with air

• Our diaphragm not only helps our lungs inflate but it also gives us a little back and internal organ massage

• The bottom of our lungs serve to oxygenate more blood than the top of our lungs

Armed with this information, throughout this week can you take time to ask yourself: How is my breath?

Specificity

I just finished an amazing class at JWS Online called SHIFT. It’s all about shifting your mindset so that you can be the best possible version of yourself. One of my biggest realizations from the class is that in my life, when I lack specificity, I tend to grind to a halt. This specificity manifests in different ways for me: Specificity in my acting work, specificity in singing, specificity in what my fears are, specificity in what my dreams are. The more specific you are, the more the path forward emerges. The actions you must take to counteract the negative thoughts that come with your fears become obvious when you give those fears a specific name. The actions you must take for a specific goal emerge when you name that goal. The actions you must take to sing that one high note in the phrase are easier to figure out when you get specific on how it feels right now. As Brené Brown says “Clear is kind.” That doesn’t just apply to other people. 

What area of your life could benefit from more specificity?

Listen

In acting, listening is incredibly important. We’ve all heard that old chestnut “Acting is reacting.” So you’re reacting to the information given to you in either words or actions from the people and world around you. With the senseless murders of black people in recent weeks, the people and world around me are giving me some incredibly disturbing information to react to. So I’m committing to taking some steps: Listen more and listen better. Listening is the very least that I can do. I’m committing to my discomfort in listening to stories that are painful to hear and confronting racism within and around myself. I am seeking out books to better inform me in how to be an ally to and an advocate for my fellow humans. I am committing to using the platforms I have, such as this blog, to speak out against racism. I invite you to find ways that you can listen so that you can react in constructive ways to make this world a better place for all. 

I’m committing to reading the following books as a place to start:

The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias by Dolly Chugh

Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith

Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor by Layla F. Saad

Who Can You Steal From?

I just finished reading Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon and I am buzzing with inspiration. What I’m excited to be taking away from the book is that there are no original ideas, just original combinations of ideas. I’ve been noodling a lot lately on impostor syndrome. Sometimes the pressure to think of a new interpretation of a role or song can feel paralyzing. I can’t act or sing or be exactly like Julie Andrews or Kelli O’Hara or Audra McDonald. But I can study what they do and steal a little bit from each of them and become a better Meg Supina. The trick is observing. The trick is studying. The trick is giving yourself the permission to try something that you’ve never done before or stealing from unexpected places. So…who will you steal from today? 

Now the important caveat is that you aren’t plagiarizing. You aren’t copying every movement that Kelli O’Hara does in “The Light in the Piazza” and passing it off as your own.  But what if you look at how Julie Andrews sings “I Have Confidence” and steal a few gestures and put them into “The Beauty Is?” Combining ideas and making them your own. Stealing like an artist. 

What if giving yourself permission to steal from people you look up to is an antidote for Impostor Syndrome?  

Who's Your Running Buddy?

Today, for the first time in a long time, I went on a run with my fiancé. He’s a more consistent runner than I am and therefore is faster and has more endurance. Having run more in our neighborhood than I have, he knows some of the quirks of certain roads and which streets are less crowded, so he led the way. Towards the middle of our run, I was looking at something to my left and he pointed out to me that there was some uneven pavement in our path. If he hadn’t pointed it out, I likely would have lost my footing and tripped. 

Ok Meg, what does this story about you running have to do with singing? Well, who are you running with on this singing journey of yours? Are you running with people (this could be teachers, coaches, or peers) who will give you a heads up for uneven terrain, lead you down safer streets, check in when your breathing gets labored and cheer you on when you complete that metaphorical 5k? When you are the one who has run this road before, are you doing the same for your companions? No one can make it in this career alone, so find your running buddies who look out for one another and gladly offer help. Maybe more importantly, be that running buddy for others.

But I Don't Want to Practice!

What do you do when you aren’t feeling inspired to practice? It happens to the best of us. What do you do when you don’t have any deadlines, events, or auditions in the near future to practice for? You still want to practice and improve, but getting started is just plain hard sometimes. Here are a few suggestions of places to start:

• Sing a song that brings you joy! It could be from a show you did 3 years ago, it could be a pop song you listened to on repeat when you were 7, it could be a song that was written for a gender that you don’t identify as. There are no rules! Start there and see what rabbit hole that leads you down. 

• Set a timer for 25 minutes. once you have completed 25 minutes of focused practice, you can take a 5 minute break and set another timer for 25 more minutes of practice if you're feeling inspired to do so (a.k.a the Pomodoro Technique)

• Vocalize for 15 minutes and see if the act of vocalizing leads you to a desire or curiosity to sing something else!

• Do you have boundaries established with the people you live with? Do you know when they need quiet to get their work done? Do they know when you need privacy to practice? 

What ways have you found to nudge yourself forward into practice when feeling uninspired?

Practice Logs

Audition logs are a great way to gather data on how you audition and track patterns. My audition log tracks different elements of my audition day such as what time I woke up, what I sang, and how I felt in the room. By tracking these different parts of my day and looking for patterns, I can better set myself up for success. As our musical theatre audition season was largely cut short due to COVID-19 and my audition log grows cobwebs, I find myself brushing the dust off of another log that has been sitting dormant.

On and off over the past few years, I have used a practice log. Sometimes I use it to focus on my vocal technique. I note how long I’ve practiced, what I worked on, what I had trouble with, and what was going well. Likewise, when logging my practice time while focusing on acting, I have been better able to delve into the character. Through being mindful and really paying attention to what I discover while practicing, I have been able to make greater strides and get to know my voice even better

Have you kept a practice log? What have you noticed?