Why this matters
Because musicians need a compass that cannot be bought. The dissociation between mind and body is one of the quietest and most costly phenomena in musical training. It does not make noise. It can go without giving obvious signals for a long time. And yet, it is there – shaping careers, voices, blocking expressions, draining meaning and stifling something that, especially in professional classical music is not well known: the joy of making music.
There is a type of singer, or musician in general, that almost everyone knows: disciplined, studious, always present, never complaining, never questioning. A student who is often perceived as ideal, exemplary. He always seems to be “right” and accepts everything we propose.
And yet, there is something that doesn’t quite resonate.
Sometimes it has to do with musical skill and sometimes with something more difficult to name: presence, musical congruence, those moments when music ceases to be just an acoustic phenomenon and becomes an emotional expression.
I myself was that singer at different times when I tried to join paths desired and traveled by others, without asking myself if I really wanted it, or without listening to my answers.
The high performance trap
In the world of high performance sports it already has a name, and in music -especially in singing- it is rarely named: high performance as a mechanism of dissociation.
It seems difficult, but it’s simple: the body learns to perform despite despite what it feels. The performance, almost mechanical, becomes a shield. And the voice -which is an intimately bodily instrument, the only one that literally lives inside the musician- is trapped with its expression behind that shield.
The highly functional singer -or musician in general- does not have visible crises. At least, for long periods of time. He manages his music from a place of control that, paradoxically, prevents him from surrendering to the sonic vulnerability that making music implies.
From my own experience as a singer, I recognize this pattern with a clarity that still makes me uncomfortable.
I learned to dissociate in order to perform. There were times when my “good performance” was exactly that: management.
I knew what to do with my voice.
I didn’t know what to make of what my body wanted to say.
Separation of mind and body
Functional dissociation is not a clinical dissociation, but a learned adaptation.
In some cases an aspiring musician learns, often at a very young age, that his or her sensations and emotions can be an obstacle. That the tremor in the voice, in the finger, in the knee are a defect to be solved. A stain to be removed. That feeling too much “distracts”.
Thus, the nervous system learns to divide itself: there is a “technical I” that acts, and there is a mind that silences the expressions of those sensations and emotions that manifest themselves in the body.
This separation has an enormous energy cost. The body stores everything that the mind tries to forget: the chronic tensions in the larynx, the sometimes unexplained respiratory subtleties, the stiffness in the jaw, the recurring difficulties. More than problems of musical dexterity, these are responses of the nervous system. They are the body speaking the only language it has left when it is not allowed to speak otherwise.
In twenty years of teaching, I have not encountered any recurring “technical” problem that did not have to do with some acquired defense mechanism, some form of dissociation that had gone unnoticed for a long time. Often it is something very subtle: some technical concept, past experiences, stories that the body was holding, and that needed to be acknowledged before integrating new skills.
Depending on the tools we have at our disposal, the nervous system – which learned to dissociate from something that could not be digested that moment, which learned to protect itself by shutting down just at the moment of greatest vulnerability – can also learn to open itself to the risk of sounding.
The desire that is not ours: mimetic desire and a borrowed musical career
There is another phenomenon I want to mention, because I think it is at the heart of much of the suffering I see in singers and musicians.
The philosopher René Girard developed the concept of mimetic desire: the idea that human beings do not desire things for their intrinsic value, but because someone else desires them. We want what we see others want. We imitate the desire before we know whether that desire is really ours.
In the world of music -classical music above all- this can be devastating. The student does not learn to sing and relate to his own vocal and musical resources, but develops the voice, the musical career that the model, the tradition, the musical environment desires. He imitates the admiration he feels for a singer, or the approval he seeks from his teacher, and builds his vocal identity on that mirror.
I want to be clear: imitation in itself is not negative. It is a natural part of learning, and at its best it is inspiring – it whets our curiosity and appetite to discover ourselves as musicians and as humans. The danger is in staying there… In the “right” sounds and steps that have no roots.
There is a moment in my training as a singer when the question changed. It stopped being what do I have to do to move forward and became something more uncomfortable: do I want this thing I’m singing, or am I wanting someone else’s desire?
Running away from mimetic desire does not mean rejecting the influence of our environment. It means passing it through a filter in order to integrate who we are with what we do. In the language of the nervous system this is called integration: something that feels congruent, consistent. It is not the absence of difficulty, but the presence of curiosity to discover and the ability to be open to experience, to the next challenge.
The illusion of linearity
Traditional vocal and musical pedagogy -and here it is good to review ourselves as teachers- usually operates under a linear logic: we learn A, then B, then C. We follow a syllabus. We go up a level. We accumulate skills. We advance.
The structures are good. They give us security. But I rather like the structures that contemplate the non-linearity of learning, of the brain, of emotions, of life…
Because no human evolution is linear… Musicians are not spared from this either.
Here in Germany the ideal path, for example of the classical singer, is very well laid out: the singer enters a university to study, comes out with distinction, wins a couple of competitions, enters an Opernstudio with his first permanent contract. At some point he takes the leap, stops being a stable member of a soloist cast, to work as a freelance soloist in different theaters, just singing what he “really” wants, with the promise (borrowed also) of earning more money.
Many students jump on that train of desire, only to discover later that they prefer to do independent projects, sing only contemporary music, sing in a chamber or opera choir, teach, do opera for children, dedicate themselves to Lied or jazz – infinite possibilities that were not seen during the years of mimicry with the sometimes tacit desire of the environment.
Our stages of apparent regression or stagnation are key moments to reflect on all this. In highly functional musicians these cues can be subtle. The phases of apparent regression are actually expansions for the brain: there are times when studying “loses” something we had – control, confidence, musical skill, motivation, inspiration, desire, clarity. That is not a mistake or a failure, but a sign that something deeper is forming. New neural networks are making sense of the “new” thing we are doing. The feeling of disorder and confusion, when the nervous system is reorganizing, is actually a good sign that we are learning.
If we forget this, we run the risk of pathologizing the process – reading as a lack of talent or personality what is actually the nervous system expanding.
It does not mean that anyone can make a career as a professional musician or that anyone can achieve anything. It means more than anything else, that from my place as a process accompanist, I can offer a student not only vocal or musical skill, but, above all, a framework of understanding for their own process. The ability to tolerate non-linearity. To trust that the road has curves that are not detours, but part of the road itself.
Thus the musician gains independence and becomes his own best teacher. It does not mean that he does not ask for help, that he does everything on his own. Rather, it means learning to listen, see and feel his impulses, needs, preferences, interests.
Start assembling your compass.
This is what we call resilience: opening space for what appears in us and keeping alive the curiosity to discover it. With small experiments. With whatever is possible today, now.
The body speaks in a slower language than the mind. It needs time for observation, time to feel and synchronize: musical movement, sensation and emotion.
It’s the alternative to just working. It is an alternative full of possibilities.
What do we do with all this as teachers?
If we teach singing or any instrument, these questions are of direct concern to us.
Are we perpetuating models of mimetic desire without realizing it? Am I my own best teacher? Are we reading our students’ blocks as technical problems or lack of talent when they are actually nervous system responses that want to be perceived? What do we do with what we perceive? Do I feel less qualified as a teacher if my student (or client, already a professional) does not follow the expected paths of the music industry?
It is not about becoming therapists. We cannot, and it is not our role. But it is about broadening the view within the musical endeavor. There is always someone behind the voice, behind the instrument. The voice, the music is an integral phenomenon -technical, emotional, somatic, relational. If my proposals go only from the operation, I already have half of it, but the other part of the instrument is missing.
Trauma-sensitive pedagogy – to the nervous system – does not imply avoiding challenge or demand, but creating the conditions of safety in which the nervous system can learn – that is, risk reorganizing itself.
It is recognizing the next safe danger, as business coach Ben Swire calls it. It is discovering when a student or client is dissociating, in order to accompany them back to a state of greater congruence and openness.
It also means reviewing our own place as authority figures. Because the mimetic desire does not occur only in the student: we too, as teachers, may be transmitting our own unseen and unnamed desires, instead of accompanying the deployment of a voice, a sound, a musical expression with individual resources, which are not our own.
To close: back to the body
Not the body as a machine to be optimized for high performance, but the body as a place of congruence. As the first instrument. As the one that knows, even when the mind does not want to know. As the house that houses feelings and allows us to go through them without being trapped in the frustration of something that did not turn out as we expected, the shame of not fulfilling others’ expectations, the guilt for not having invested more time in some work… you go on with the list.
The separation between head and body is not a character flaw, nor a lack of talent, nor a psychological weakness.
It is an intelligent adaptation to environments that have not always been safe to digest the vulnerability of some challenges.
The musician who dissociates learned to do so for good reasons. The job is not to judge that adaptation, but to accompany – with tools that show the way back into the daily musical work.
Our musical habits generate in us a visceral response of trust and openness, or they create a visceral response that leads us to dissociate ourselves from sensations and emotions… information that comes from our body, valuable for decision making.
Thus we open the way to music recreated from emotional agility.