How Feeling My Vowels Softened My Heart
I spent many years emotionally guarded without even knowing it. I regarded myself as a typical “Type A” personality—always on the go, hyper-intellectual, quick-paced, and super-organized. In truth, I was masking anxiety as having a Type A personality. Physical attributes that came with this were breathing into a tight chest, racing thoughts, and a tight jaw.
It wasn’t until I opened my mouth to vowels in the embodied voice work created by Arthur Lessac that I first felt freedom and my heart sing.
Here’s how it happened: there are eleven dilute vowels that maintain their sound and lip-opening shape whether you are yawning in a big “good morning to the world” way or simply feeling a minimal yawn space in the mouth when you speak. Say “cool” while yawning and still be able to make the circular lip opening and be understood. You cannot do this with the word “peace,” a Y Buzz word (you can find information about the Y Buzz here). Try saying “peace” while yawning and it will turn into “pace,” thus, it is not a dilute vowel.
I felt the freedom and magic of vowels at the end of my first Lessac four-week summer intensive. I was in my final private coaching session with a certified trainer and we were exploring a short verse of Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The last two lines of the verse were:
“Blasted with ecstasy: O, woe is me, To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!”
When highlighted for the structural vowels:
“Blasted with ecstasy: O, woe is me, To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!”
The more I let myself open up to these lip-opening shapes and sizes, the more I connected with the character’s distress. My heart moved and I felt vulnerable but in control. It was amazing.
The trainer said, “Isn’t it wonderful how you can feel like her heart is moving through her mouth in her grief?”
It was the first time in my life that I had felt a connection between my emotional life and my vocal life without feeling out of control. I felt myself the whole time and I felt healthy, balanced, and free. If I could feel this with text, I could feel it in my daily life.
It’s fascinating, freeing, and one of the most beautiful benefits of speaking with an awareness that I know. To be able to choose to open my heart freely based on how I feel my vowels means I can become vulnerable, but grounded.
I can stress something important to me without losing my cool. I can be tender without being weak. I have a range of vocal and emotional dynamics available for me based on how I feel the elasticity of my lips and cheek muscles and also how I feel my breath and connect with my listener.
This all happens at once and I do not have to plan any of it. I am free and connected.
Today I feel this freedom in my everyday speaking, whenever I am reading aloud to my daughter, and while I teach a group. I can affect how they hear me based on the rhythm of my speech.
My listeners feel my true self--my heart--as I speak and they know I am truly connected to them.
You can feel and develop your connection to vowels in my online course “Embodied Voice: Feel Dynamic.”