Your Song: Wake Up to the Spiritual Gesture Living in Your Voice

by Shannon Boyce

Recently, one of my singing students commented, “I don’t feel alone anymore.” I was so stunned that I got goosebumps and wanted to cry with joy. She had encountered a deep connection to herself. Her voice had begun to resonate with her personal life force and the harmony of vibrant embodied selfhood.

When I first met her over four years ago, she struggled to sing in tune and had a very small range. She also often showed up ill at ease, stressed, and a bit anxious due to the busyness of the day. Yet she has consistently transformed during our sessions, evolving from frazzled to relaxed. Her memory has strengthened, and she has been able to sustain this consciousness more and more. I have had the joy of watching her transform through the healing power of the sung tone.

She does not live near and we have never met in person, so all her lessons are online. Her first big breakthrough came one day when it sounded as if she had a pet bird in her home. It turns out that the birds were singing outside her window (even from afar, over the internet and speakers, I heard the birds). So, I told her to listen to the birds singing more than to herself singing. She relaxed and became much calmer in herself and started to sing in tune.

We were doing a simple exercise based on the renewed art of singing cultivated in the School of Uncovering the Voice, founded by Valborg Werbeck-Svärdström (18791972), underpinned by her 11-year relationship with Rudolf Steiner.

Now I’d like to tell you about myself and what it means to be an anthroposophically-inspired voice teacher.

I’ve been singing in front of audiences since I was 13, and my passion led me to pursue two degrees in vocal performance, including one from a renowned institution in New York City. When teaching voice lessons for children, teens, and adults at a small, after-school music program, the director introduced me to Waldorf education, which led me to anthroposophy. Even with my degrees, I still felt uncertain about my teaching. It was then that I delved into studying the foundational principles of music out of anthroposophy and discovered Werbeck’s work. Initially skeptical, I entered the training to improve my teaching skills, particularly for my students from the Waldorf school. Little did I know that this journey would not only make me a better teacher and singer, but also a better human being.

As a singing teacher, I am acutely aware that most people allow their ideas about what it means to sing interfere with the process of singing itself. And why is that? Because humankind has fallen prey to materialism, which also entered the art of singing. The average person just opens their mouth to sing and quickly realizes that it doesn’t come out as they imagine they would like their voice to sound. Singing no longer comes as naturally and as easily as it once did. It has mostly been relegated to the land of the professional. Since the invention of recorded music, people have become consumers of music more than makers of music, neglecting a vital means of spiritual connection. Even congregational singing has diminished.

Singing is a most intimate expression for a human being. The vulnerability of singing is great, and I believe this is why fewer people are singing today. The voice is the barometer of your soul, and it does not lie. Even science has a way of measuring the voice to detect patterns of possible onset of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease nearly ten years before symptoms appear. When we are disconnected from our core sense of self, it shows up in our voices and can often lead to illness. Our voices are also the greatest expression of our personalities.

We must learn to lift ourselves and our voices out of the hardened nature to which they have fallen prey. And just as Werbeck says in her book, I, too, believe that everyone has a singing voice and everyone can find their way to a more beautiful, realized, free voice no matter what style of music they want to sing.

But how? By consciously recognizing the hindrances in the way of your perfect natural voice. Your voice is always longing to be free, and the path to vocal freedom is naturally spiritual. And it takes work and practice. Even Werbeck says you have to “work like a lumberjack.” It is joyful and pleasant work because we always start with connected relaxation. As we wake up dormant parts of our selfhood, we no longer feel alone, as my student so eloquently shared. Werbeck describes this experience as being kissed by the angels. What an experience of cosmic humor it is that you must work like a lumberjack to be kissed by an angel!

As human beings, we can often experience ourselves as being overstimulated, overwhelmed, and overburdened. Ideally, when we sing, there is no ‘over’. There is just freedom, full of love-consciousness, and equanimity. This is what we practice in the singing school. The school is actually divided into three phases that take the student on a journey to develop thinking, feeling, and willing. It begins with an approach to breathing where we learn it is not about the need for conscious breathing as was practiced in ancient times, but about the need to forget that we are breathing so that it can work naturally for what is needed for the times we live in today. Then we start to recognize how the sound streams on the flow of the breath and wake up to how it moves through us like a gentle breeze blowing through the screen of an open window - all along working to become transparent beings for the sound. As Werbeck says, “We don’t make the tones, but we create the conditions for the tones to move through us.”

As one progresses through the schooling, we then build upon this transparent sound by learning to widen and open up to a fuller sound that is embodied but not bound up in the body. And in time, a reflected sound that is free enough to earn a kiss from our angel. It’s the holistic nature of this approach that builds our relationship to the spirit, and by nature, it is a healing path. This idea of removing hindrances extends throughout one’s life, so it is a path of schooling that anyone can begin at any point in one’s life. It’s a schooling that offers vocal practices that nurtures the whole human being.

Being human is knowing yourself, knowing your voice, and knowing your song.

Shannon Boyce is the director of A Supple Voice, an anthroposophically-inspired singing school working out of the principles of Valborg Werbeck-Svärdström’s School of Uncovering the Voice. If you would like to try some of the basic exercises and join the list to be notified about new in-person and online classes, visit www.intro.asupplevoice.com