Feeling it in the body

How can I describe how it feels in the body when doing yoga or singing? How can I measure the intensity of the sensations? How is today’s practice feeling different in the body from yesterday’s? For a cerebral someone whose day job is working with data, these are not easy to answer questions, yet my appreciation of body sensations is so essential in my singing learning that I’m applying myself everyday in wordlessly exploring this whole world. Yesterday the luck of the draw pointed me to record ‘Connais-tu le pays' as an offering for the Wednesday Showcase on Gillian Gingell Wormley ‘s The Voice School Hub Facebook group. This is a 5 minute aria with a middling range and long-ish phrases. I opted to sing it from memory but kept tripping on the words, so found myself doing at least 4 or 5 takes. When I was finally sure of the words, it was getting to the end of the lunch hour, so I recorded one last take, complete with a false start from missing the very first entry, which was telling me that my concentration was starting to wane. But when I stopped singing, I noticed for the first time ever after such a tightly packed session, there was no hint of any vocal tiredness. Instead, it felt like my body had a proper workout. This is unprecedented for me. Ever since I’ve started singing, I’ve had sore throats on the left side after any intense practice, whether in a choir or solo. The soreness from an hour of practice could take days to get better. In the previous decades I even sometimes had trouble speaking comfortably after a rehearsal. Retrospectively I am putting that down to poor habits that were embedded in practicing too much in the very early days of my learning singing, when my enthusiasm was far ahead of any understanding of what singing was about. It’s only since returning to singing in the recent years that I’ve begun the journey of progressively reversing these habits. With the level of detail we are now bringing to our work in Virtually Vocalise, I’m finally finding that the habits of tension in my tongue and jaw on the left side are beginning to shift. Despite all the amazing 3-D animated anatomy footage we can find on YouTube, my understanding of what really is going on in my throat when I’m singing is still incomplete, but there is now an innate body sense of ways to prevent those tensions from arising in the first place, that I could not possibly put into words!