The Layers of the Back - Spinal Support

A View of the Voice

Another week brings you yet another drawing! I hope you’re enjoying your summer. I’m going to enjoy a relatively teaching free weekend and try to find that blend of walking, enjoying the outdoors, and not dying from heat stroke. It’s a fun game that sure beats winter in NYC!

One of the recent things I’ve had fun with is the Alexander Technique exercise Hands like Feet. I have a small teaching space but I managed to arrange my mirrors so that I can see my back while I practice it. It’s a terrific way to check in on the width of the back. I’ll be sure to write more about this as I’ve completed the basics of my anatomy drawings but if you know what this game is, I strongly recommend you try it out with 2 mirrors if you have the space!

To the Drawings!!!!

Just as a reminder, I’m making these drawings so that you have a better mental image of what your structure is. It can help you Inner Sherlock as you traverse yourself and think Alexander’s directions…

Allow the neck to be free

So that the head is balancing forward and up

So that the spine is lengthening and the torso is widening…

I’ll stop the directions at this point so that you know just where we’re at in our series of Dumb Drawings.

Your torso has layers of interwoven muscles that support various activities. Last week I chunked them up as:

1. Breathing

2. Spinal Support

3. Everything Else

I then shared a drawing covering the musculature for inhalation:

colors is fun

Today I’d like to show you one view of the musculature that supports the spine. This view is not something that I created out of thin air or got from an Alexander Technique book. I went into my anatomy app and looked up the tab called Spine, Musculature. I’ll share more drawings from this next week, but I’d like you to check out a specific view of the musculature of you spine…

In the drawing above, you are basically seeing a full view of your voice. All of these muscles play some role in supporting the lengthening of your spine. The highlighted red zone is part of you larynx.

In F.M. Alexander’s essay Evolution of the Technique from his book the Use of the Self he describes his personal journey of recovering the use of his voice and dealing with a variety of general injuries. He does not give his directions in the succinct manner I have written above, but he does say lots of things like:

… there was the same depressing of the larynx that was associated with my throat trouble…

…I found that the best conditions of my larynx and vocal mechanisms and the least tendency to hoarseness were associated with a lengthening of the stature.

I’m grabbing these quotes a bit at random for you to illustrate a point. When you think about freeing your neck, you must include the voice. When you think about lengthening the spine, you must include the voice.

It makes a lot of sense for any of us with “back” problems to consider the full depth of our speaking apparatus. It’s not that the Alexander Technique is designed to benefit singers and actors, it’s that your voice plays a role in supporting the length of your spine and the balance of your head.

The Exercise

Remember my post about the Whispered ‘Ah’? This is allegedly one of the few activities that FM Alexander considered an exercise (at least this is what I heard through the grapevine). It’s never a good idea to do anything in a robotic manner, but the Whispered ‘Ah’ is doing much more than simply helping you become a better singer; it is training your spine to lengthen.

Another fine activity to try is humming or speaking any old thing that pops into your head. One of the drawings I shared earlier with you was

I may not have explained the purpose of this drawing in full 2 weeks ago, but when you go to hum you can feel the resonance of your voice within the chamber of the red voice zone. You can also choose to pay attention to the resonance of the voice in the yellow and orange zone.

Sometimes when I hum, I can feel pockets on the left or right side of the voice where there isn’t much resonance. This can be an indicator that muscular tension is blocking the voice from functioning at its best. Typically within a few minutes, I can find a particular way of allowing tension to release so that there is more resonance.

Get In Touch

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If you’re in NYC, you may learn more about my private teaching practice at johndalto.com.

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