Why I do what I do.
One of my biggest dreams was to be a performer.
When I was 23 I witnessed my Alexander Technique teacher sing with the same control and precision as some of the greatest opera singers of our time. She'd never taken a singing lesson in her life. I became certain that the body was a singing machine, and that in its ‘optimal’ state the voice comes through with consistency and ease.
Regular singing technique didn't work for me. I have a dip in my ribcage which means the breathing exercises were a lot harder for me than the average person. I also felt allergic to anything mechanical that didn't work in harmony with the body. Regular singing technique felt like something unnatural that I was trying to teach my body to do, and it felt wrong.
Very nice, Daniel, but you can't return to optimum just by clicking your fingers, and you have a show tonight you're terrified for because your voice might be full and powerful... and it might be thin and weak. You know 100 different things to do while singing that sometimes work, but nothing consistent and reliable. You don't have trust that you can sing how you need to when you need to.
They say that grief takes your voice away, and that's certainly what I found. My parents passed away when I was young and I had severe insomnia. The sleeplessness also meant I rarely had the energy in my body to sing with power.
After 8 years of struggling I found MDH breathing coordination, a method at the cutting edge of vocal pedagogy. The founder, Robin de Haas, could barely form words until he was 8, and now taught on The Voice in Switzerland and was one of the most incredible singers I'd heard. I studied privately with an MDH teacher, simplified the complex mechanics that took me a couple of years to understand, and combined it with my years of devotion to spiritual and emotional freedom work, energy healing and Alexander Technique.
I have now developed breathing exercises that help calm the nervous system and return my pelvic floor, diaphragm and ribcage to near-optimum in 9 minutes. I use a timer. It's literally 9 minutes.
