Author: valeriecameronmerritt

I’ve had more experiences than I can count of certain themes circling back around in my life, each time a little different, and I’d like to think improved in how it appears and in how I respond.  A good portion of this post was written in 2020 and saved as a draft until now that the topic has circled back around with significance at the end of 2025:

I had several voice teachers during high school and college who all had different ideas about the best practices in singing and each one would take you through warm ups of melodic lines based on his or her own training, peer influence, and personal insights.  My second voice teacher in high school approached singing from the German school of thought, valuing a round, darker quality in the voice producing a lot of resonance in the chest.  To create this sound, you can get a feeling for it by pretending you have a whole orange or a golf ball in your mouth and say a line, any line.  If you’d like to reference performances of Wagner’s works (i.e. Tristan und Isolde), you can hear more of that quality in recordings of professional singers.

Of course, my next teacher a few years down the road was not a fan of that style at all.  She preferred the Italian school of thought: Bel Canto.   With bel canto or beautiful singing, one focuses on a lighter quality with more fluid agility , pointing the sound towards the space above the hard palate, stretching up to the point between the eyebrows.  You may want to reference Bellini and possibly Cecilia Bartoli who is a well known practitioner of the style.

In my relatively long ago experience of moving from the one approach to the other, I was given the assignment of singing “like a witch” for two weeks straight.  I suppose my voice teacher thought two weeks could override two years of previous practice. Singing “like a witch” meant that I had to sing everything in my nose and record it as well as listen back over whatever that sounded like followed by journaling on the experience.  Truly, this voice teacher set me up for the spiritual reflection process that would be important to my current path.

The assignment was an over exaggeration calling me to work in the opposite direction for sound produced in the mask of the face.  It felt beyond weird and sounded worse.  However, after two weeks I was completely out of the golf ball territory causing me to almost swallow my sound under the soft palate and I could comfortably access a different internal focus, right above the hard palate of the mouth, in the nasal cavity.  If you’re not sure about those, you can feel the hard and soft palates by flattening your tongue out against the roof of your mouth behind your front teeth and sliding it back towards your throat.

So after two weeks of the one and two years give or take of the other, I could better understand how to access the space in the middle of these.  When I was asked to send my sound towards the middle of the brows, accessing a midway point felt relatively easy.  She was correct that two weeks was enough time for her desired change to take hold.  With more time dedicated to this new placement, I learned to send sound out in an arc between my eyes or up through the crown of the head. These points are also spoken about in Kundalini Yoga as triggers for awakening to your spiritual self which made it much easier to access when I found myself in those practices.

These vocal explorations led to momentary success in producing what the current teacher desired to hear. It also felt lighter and easier to sing this way.

I went on to teach public school music at the elementary level with a volunteer chorus offering in the mornings.  Early on in teaching public school, I was asked to take on private students.  I decided to only work with adults that wanted to give singing a try.  However, later I did begin to say yes to working with singers of all ages in the private studio with the understanding that we would only learn melodies that they liked together and sing to sing. I found myself refusing to train anyone in a specific way or other. If I saw a singer doing something wonky (unhealthy or stressful) in their sound production we would find ways to address that with movement and visualizations but otherwise the rule was to “let your voice be your voice” and don’t worry about sounding a certain way. Looking back on it, mostly I was encouraging better postures, relaxing muscles that were tight, and giving students visual tools that would help them get out of a self sabotaging mind. It was called a voice lesson but often times it was leaning towards a meditative practice.  Maybe I was on the tip of the iceberg I find myself on the underside of these days.

After about seven or eight years in the public system, I was done. I didn’t feel like singing anymore or pretending that I had some remarkable answers to making the best sounds. I thought, “anyone can tell someone else to drop their jaw and release tension”.  I stopped working with people on this topic and focused on my family. When I did come back to sing again, it was through mantra that was part of a yoga practice and my voice was half what it used to be when there at all. I was a mother to two young children, not sleeping well, and not singing much so that makes sense but I knew it was more than that. Some say singing is the truest expression of spirit and mine was lost it seemed. I was only interested in quieter forms of expression for a long while and I began to rely more on a home kundalini yoga practice to feel connected to myself. Thankfully, that grew into feeling connected to something more than me and with that, my sound in mantra became more steady and purposeful.

And now, I find myself a few days out from a vocal session with a former operatic singer who leads sessions in connecting to the voice for healing.  She works with anyone who is open to her work and shows the voice as the key to wellness. She incorporated the bel canto with tantric yogic practices in our session and I found myself laughing a little as I felt like a dog chasing my tail for the past 25 years — always searching for something, you know.  I haven’t been to a vocal class of any kind for at least 15 years and certainly not one focused on myself as the singer.  I attended this session not because I was actively seeking it but through yogic training with the teacher being a guest speaker.  I swear, Life always has so much fun with me and it’s a blessing to feel that way.  The more I notice meaning and synchronicity, the more they appear. The other participants in my training have not previously trained as singers and it was so beautiful to witness them engaging with singing in this non judgmental, healing, and joyful expression of connecting to the pelvic floor and root chakra while letting gentle sounds move through their vocal folds.  We were in a virtual environment and muted apart from the teacher, which in this case seemed to provide the participants ability to make sound freely though under the gentle care of this teacher, I imagine they may have felt this regardless.  I found myself in tears a few times actually, because in a flash my entire path felt connected and purposeful.  I felt a larger hand at play.  How lucky  are we who experience standing directly over our unwitting threads revealed as a more intentional tapestry?

Wahe Guru! I bow my heart and head to the Infinite Teacher.