Having posture utilizing tan tien is challenging. The body’s prior habitual tension deter this. Downcast head and sunken shoulders encourage hips to move backside. The taut myofascia and chronic muscular tension means that deliberate efforts to place tan tien are usually challenging.
Achieving good tan tien should be seen as a continual postural alignment process and removing the bad postural built-up tensions.
When sitting, make sure not to put pressure on the lower back. Pull it in.
This is a part of the body above the sexual organs, that Chinese thought says is the focus of energy. It is located very close to the source of kundalini energy (Indian thought).
If you’re able to tuck your tan tien proper, your posture will straighten immensely. My initial perception is that this can increase highs because proper posture alignment helps to send the sound up through the sinus cavities.
Tucking in the lower abdomen will also solve the lower backache problems (because less continual tension on lower back muscles and ligaments–continual tension is usually the source of lower backaches), prostatitis pain (as explained, much of the pain of prostatitis is from the muscles surrounding the prostate), sunken chest, acid reflux, excessive saliva while singing).
Does Zen apply toward singing? VocalPosture.com has not found any evidence of historical Zen Buddhism applied toward singing. Does anyone know? Please inform us.
Is it reasonable to assume then that Zen can be applied toward singing? Recall, Zen Buddhism is really a derivative of Chan Buddhism (Chinese), and Buddhism started in India, which was and still is Hindu. One would expect these Eastern cultural techniques to have been applied toward singing; and perhaps we just don’t know anything about it.
So, is it reasonable to assume that Zen is applicable to singing?
Well, consider all the other influences Buddhism has in Japan– Zen in tea ceremonies, Zen in archery, Zen in sumo wrestling, Zen in samurai, etc. It would be surprising that Zen wasn’t applied toward singing.
Buddha was known be love singing.
There are some Western singing instructors who also teach compatible approaches to VocalPosture. Alan Green’s “The New Voice”, and Mark Baxter’s “Rock and Roll Singer’s Survival Manual”, both published by Hal Leonard, both advocate first establishing vocal structure and posture. Both don’t believe that the usage of learning to sing by hearing one’s singing is productive. VocalPosture’s difference from these is that VocalPosture suggests that once the posture is correctly formed, the vocal structure will automatically form, then self-hearing is correct, and for most people, then their divine singing capacity will emerge (as Zen Buddhism would suggest).
Zen Sayings:
Zen in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one’s being and it points the way from bondage to freedom. D.T. Suzuki (a famous Zen teacher).
What is bondage and what is freedom?
Bondage is usually some form of repetitive behaviour, a circular behaviour that yields the same negative results. Freedom is the ability to choose behaviour preferred.
The clearest examples of bondage are compulsions, also frequently known as addictive behaviour. For example, certain forms of compulsive eating, depression, sex addiction, resentment, the world is filled with compulsions. Indeed, VocalPosture believes that it is compulsions, more than any other emotion, that drives the world.
If compulsions are driving so many of one’s actions, what makes you think that compulsion isn’t driving your voice? Indeed it is! All kinds of contrary compulsions prevent you from reaching your vocal capabilities. Is this true? VocalPosture will follow up with a description of hearing, which is needed to explain how compulsions prevent your great singing from blossoming, like the lotus flower.
Chen Sun
www.WebAndNet.com
The lotus flower is symbolic in Buddhist art. The idea is that the lotus rises through the mucky muddy waters, to have a straight stem and then a large, beautiful blooming flower. If you’ve ever seen lotus flowers in bloom in a pond, particularly lotus flowers blooming about 4 feet or higher in air, you’ll understand.
The symbolism is that the flower is inherently beautiful; and that it simply needs to rise up straight through the mucky muddy pond water to express its beauty. Similarly, in VocalPosture’s Zen-derived analogy, the divine voice is in itself beautiful, and the objective of VocalPosture’s singing pedagogy is to allow the divine voice itself to arise from the muddy waters of past emotions, bad habits, tensions, to straighten its spine (stem) such that the beautiful flowering (the singing) can be heard.
Zen (actually Buddhist and Hindu-derived) philosophy enables VocalPosture to make all its speculative claims on how posture is able to create a beautiful blossoming voice.
The significance is that VocalPosture’s view is that most of learning how to sing deals with how to restore-straighten the spine to enable the voice to express its innate beauty. This is a vastly different approach to singing pedogagy than practicing scales to polish-up-create a beautiful voice.
Chen Sun
Ancient Japanese Zen art, architecture, pottery, etc. frequently have imperfection built-in. A tea cup that is not symetrical, a house with an irregular window, etc. The Zen way of looking at life realizes that life has imperfections, and builds this into art, and admires imperfection as part of the living experience.
Western art strives instead for perfection–symetrical, balanced, geometric. These arise from Greek ideals of perfection.
In singing though, audiences frequently prefer the living life and its imperfections.
Until one reaches perfect singing (very difficult for most), it is actually better to acknowledge one’s imperfections in voice, understand the audience frequently wants to hear this imperfection, and utilize this.
Chen Sun
As people age, they seem to lose some of their singing tonal qualities and pitch range. Why?
Athletes need muscles, which is prime in the mid 20s, so we can understand why athletes tend to be in their prime in the 20s. But is this true for singers? The amount of athleticism involved in singing is miniscule.
Singing is more akin to acting–very little athleticism to accomplish a goal. The youthful muscles might not be key; emotional maturity makes a big difference in acting, as well as in singing.
Drinking, smoking, acid reflux–yes, these will all degrade the voice, possibly permanently. But, suppose someone didn’t do any of these, why can’t he or she sustain a lifelong great voice, as good as younger and possibly better?
VocalPosture.com speculates that this is somewhat possible. All that a voice is is a vocal tract in action. As long as the tonicity of the muscles in the vocal tract is intact, there is no reason why an older vocal tract can’t produce sounds as well as an younger one.
VocalPosture.com speculates that it is primarily due to a process called shortening of the muscles due to aging and injury that the vocal tract muscle tone is thus degraded.
Thus, to reverse much of the effects of aging, as it relates to the voice, the objectives are: to keep posture aligned so that shortening is reduced; to then stretch what has shortened
To better understand how microexpressions (which I claim the name doesn’t explain its causes well, as are many terms in the “subconscious” terminology) affect singing:
To sing an emotion, basically the vocal structure needs to be formed in a certain way…. whether it is sadness, anger, happiness. This means that there are large muscle movements that cause a sad face, an angry face, an enthusiastic body, etc.
Microexpressions are frequently subconscious reflexes, and my claim is that these are imbued within the tonicity of muscles and the myofascia tissues. This is less of a nerves issue, but is instead a failure in the nervous system complete circuit.
What happens with the microexpressions is that they prevent the larger muscles from fully extending itself. Hence, if one has suppressed sadness, the imbued sad tissue-tension counter the happiness gestures. So, if one tries to sing happy, and is feeling sad unconsciously; yes it will work, but not nearly as well as if the microexpression sadness wasn’t there.
Singing and posture--see Categories, About, Launch 4-2014 