Feeling into Your Instrument
As a singer, I know what it means to rely on my body for my art and my work. Understanding the intricacies of my instrument has been crucial to the success of my work, both as a performer as well as an educator. One concept that is at the heart of this is interoception.
Interoception is our ability to perceive – and, crucially, name – the sensations within our bodies. For example, the more accurately I can notice and describe the movement of my larynx, soft palate, tongue, jaw, abdominal muscles, intercostal muscles, pelvic floor, et cetera, the more control I can actually exert over these body parts. Particularly when we’re talking about highly demanding genres like opera, a minute shift of the jaw or the tongue can mean the difference between hitting that note or not, getting that gig or not. It can also mean the difference between protecting our instruments so they last not only for the length of a performance, but for a lifetime.
I first started thinking about interoception as a teacher of both piano and voice lessons. Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to work with a lot of neurodivergent students. I say lucky because 1) I’ve learned a tremendous amount from each of these students and 2) being neurodivergent myself, I’ve often found a place of kinship with them.
Years ago, one place that I ran into a stumbling block was with students who struggled to get their bodies to “obey” them, or complete specific tasks. Years ago, one of my young piano students on the autism spectrum was really struggling at the piano. He’d often try so hard, and fail, to hold his fingers, hands and arms just so. I could see that he understood the concept and the task at hand, but when he tried to execute it, his hands just wouldn’t do what he wanted. Another student of mine on the spectrum, this time a young adult, came to me wanting to learn to sing more effectively. But when I asked her to stretch with me at the beginning of our lessons, she struggled just to get her arms up and over her head, or to bend and touch her toes. Again, I could tell that she knew what it was that I was asking of her. It was as if her brain knew the assignment, but the message wasn’t making it to her body. If stretching was hard, imagine what it was like for her to notice and control more subtle movements, like with her tongue or jaw. For both these students, they especially struggled to describe any sensations they had, or to tell me anything concrete about their efforts to complete a physical task.
As so often happens within the differently-abled community, needs or hardships become apparent and we assume it’s because they’re different from everyone else. But the more I noticed these challenges in my neurodivergent students, the more I began to recognize them in my assumed-neurotypical ones. (I say assumed because without their disclosure, I can’t and won’t assume anything about the way their brains actually work.) As time went on, in lesson after lesson, I would ask my students – especially vocalists – to describe the sensations they were experiencing. In the operatic tradition in particular, we learn to rely on “secondary sensations” as a source of information to help us guide our performance. Listening to our own voice is not a reliable practice, both because of psycho-emotional biases, as well as the mechanical effects that singing has on our auditory system. As a result, we learn to rely on what we feel over what we hear. Locating incredibly subtle points of tension or discomfort in the body becomes a necessary skill if you want to learn to sing opera.
But what if, like most people, you have no experience consciously identifying bodily sensations? What if you’re someone who’s been told to ignore your physical sensations for most of your life? Many young women and girls, for example, are taught from early childhood to ignore sensations of hunger, or to cope with the distracting pain of menstrual cramps. Even boys are told in elementary school to “just hold it” when they have to use the bathroom, and so learn to suppress the discomfort and distracting thoughts that come with it. Not to mention the sensations we experience that act as a flare gun for our emotions; that tightening of the chest when we feel fear, the cold hard lump in the throat when feeling sadness or grief, the sense of a boulder in the belly when feeling anxious. Most of us don’t even register these sensations. Instead we react to the emotion once it becomes so overriding that it has hijacked whatever situation we’re in.
The inability to notice and name our own physical sensations leaves us at a huge disadvantage when it comes to having a say in our emotional responses. If our only option is to react once we’re flooded and overwhelmed, we’re left with few options on how to handle emotionally charged situations. And what does it mean for those of us who rely on our bodies for our work? Countless times, I’ve been working with a student who is striving to master something – a particularly high note, a longer than usual phrase, the awkward shift from one register to another – and voila! – they get it right. I’ll ask them, “What did you do this time? How was it different?” And invariably they will look at me as if to say, “I have no clue.”
One way to introduce interoception into your own work as a performer or educator is to start with an assessment. As with all things, leading with curiosity is your best bet. So take a look at this questionnaire I’ve made, and ask yourself these questions about your own ability to perceive and name what’s going on in your body. It’s short, simple, and will get you on the road to noticing the nuanced sensations happening within, leading to a deeper understanding and connection to how your instrument actually works.
