New Year New You 2018 – Week Seven: Glamour Magic is A Love Letter To My Body

I’m (once again) doing Miss Sugar’s New Year New You Experiment in Radical Magical Transformation because I find it’s a really good way to kick my own ass into getting things done. It’s a good mix of practical, magical, and thought-based exercises to help accomplish specific and significant change in your own life. If it’s relevant to your interests, give it a try!

Instructions: “This week, I would like you to think about how you’re presenting yourself to the world and how that’s affecting your own personal goals“.

A Lady of the Lake figure, with the torso of a human woman and the legs and tail of something more reptilian, holds a mirror in one hand and the full moon in the other. There is a great blue heron, wearing an amulet, in the foreground. In the background, a small boat carries a shrouded figure (possibly a corpse). Further back, is a very small island that appears to have a door in the side.
In the Wildwood Tarot, the Twelfth card of the Major Arcana is called “The Mirror”. More traditionally, it’s The Hanged Man.

Tarot Card: The Mirror.
I chose this card from this deck specifically because of the “mirror” name. We are talking glamoury and self-presentation, after all.
Elsewhere, the Hanged Man has been named everything from Intermission to New Vision, and they are all at least a little bit relevant. They all involve changes of perspective. They all involve pausing to reflect.
What I think is really interesting, though, is that The Hanged Man has connotations of being open, being vulnerable. I wasn’t expecting that. (I mean, I suppose if you’re literally hanging by your ankle, that’s a pretty vulnerable position to be in, but it still came as a surprise). And there’s a fair bit of that in glamoury. It’s not a mask. It’s not a false front. It’s you, shined up and gleaming and refusing to compartmentalize yourself for anybody else’s comfort. It’s you being your own velvet rope.

I have to admit that, after (putting off) last week’s prompt, I’m finding Week Six to be weirdly easy? Like for the first time ever (I’ve done this Experiment a number of times at this point) I’m not going into The Glamour Prompt feeling defensive or otherwise dreading it. Maybe because I’ve been doing deliberate glamour magic for something like 8 months now, or because I’m feeling a little more solid around stuff like “dressing your age” when I want and need it to mean something other than “dress like someone who works as an office admin” (even when I do, periodically, work as an office admin… and find myself woefully under-prepared in the clothes department for anything more than about a two-day contract).
Regardless, when I clicked on the prompt to remind myself what it was? I was relieved. Like “Oh. Glamour. Got it covered!”
And, on some levels, I do. My bras fit. I know how to mend my own socks and make/modify my own clothes (so they fit). I’m getting better at contouring/highlighting. I’m dressing with a certain degree of intention. I went back to dying my hair “bisexual burgundy” because I missed it and, even having done a pretty spotty job of it, I’m really happy to have “my” hair back. (This is what happens when you notice how many red-heads are in your personal Glamour Glossary and then land en excuse to go back to your power colour). I started (very recently) doing daily bendy-stretchy exercises to complement my preexisting core-strengthening exercises, and incorporating affirmations-as-spell-craft into the whole routine, in the interest of being – ha – open (and vulnerable) to everything from hot pick-up sex to the possibility that unexpected changes are not only not the end of the world, but might actually be positive. I described my own body, a week ago, as gorgeous and lovable.
Which I guess brings me to:

One of Ms Sugar’s suggestions was to write a love-letter to your own body. So I did.

Dear Body,
I love you.
I love us?

I love that we can get places on foot, even when they’re 6-8 km away from our starting point. I love that we can walk up five flights of stairs without feeling like our chest is going to explode. I love that we are able to mitigate our lower back problems substantially through physiotherapy done through the lens of very selective yoga poses. I love that we are getting stronger. I love that we have curvy hips and solid thighs and broad shoulders. I love our long hair and strong neck. I love that we’re singing and doing warm-up exercises again, because it’s good for our head (or seems to be, so far). I love that we are getting more flexible, too.

I love that we can communicate. I love that we made the time to learn how to communicate and keep communicating. I love that when our sense-of-self dissociates, we know how to come back together again.
I love that we are a fully autonomous musical instrument, that we can send our sound up to two blocks away, farther if we are up high. I love that we have powerful core muscles and powerful face muscles and deep, deep, open lungs, to do this with and that we know how to do it on purpose. I love the notes we can hit and make them ring like bells. I love that we can sing things into being.

I love that our ears can pick up a tune, even if they can’t pick up the thread of a specific conversation.
I love our capacity for pleasure, even when our brain-side has a really hard time allowing us to get there and go there, especially with a sexual partner, especially while bottoming. I love that we’re capable of letting go like that. Of roaring and laughing, of coming hard and gushing. I love that we KNOW this, even if we can’t do it reliably (yet).

I love that we enjoy warm wind on our bare legs, hot sun on our skin. I love that hot baths help us come back together again and again.
I love that we recognize our own skin hunger. I love that we are snuggly and enormous, intimidatingly huge. I love that we can dance, and that we practice dancing in our kitchen.
I love that we’re comfortable being naked.
I love that we’re close enough to the current cultural standard of beauty that we can make a living off of how we look and move and stand in this messed up world. I love that we’re far enough away from the current cultural standard of beauty that we can make people stare at us just by standing up, and that we can question that beauty standard and interrogate it, even just a little bit.

I love that we love food and eating. I love that we are gluttonous. I love that we have a resilient digestive system, and that we enjoy the taste of all those home-made ferments that help us maintain it. I love that we love subtle flavours and can tease them apart, recognize and name them, because our tongue is clever and attentive.
I love that we have unexpectedly good aim, despite having difficulty focusing our almost-forty-year-old eyes on distant targets. I love that our fingers are strong and dextrous and can peel the meat off a bone ‘til its bare without a lot of trouble.
I love that we can manage without glasses… so far… even if we know they’re coming. But I also love that we enjoy adornment, that glasses will be annoying, probably, but they’ll also be jewelry for our face.

I love that we can breathe easily. That we don’t have to hunt for fragrance-free everything, and can enjoy heavily scented perfume oils and massage bars and bath bombs. I love that we’re aware of what working in that factory did to us, and that standing over a pot of melted paraffin may give us headaches now, but that we can make beeswax candles from scratch instead, which is what we like anyway. I love our lung capacity, the ways we navigate having a cleft palate and the mouth/nose/throat issues that’s given us our whole life.

I love that we are a water ape, that our clever, attentive tongue and nose can tell what is safe to keep eating and what is best left alone. I love that our fingers are long. I love that we have good (ish?) balance. I love that we can use our strength and grace and balance and flexibility to put food on the table by gardening and foraging and also by modeling.
I love that we are a spell, on purpose. That we can use our voice, our dancing, our touch, to move energy around and through, and that we figured this out through singing lessons but also, by and large, through trial and error and guess-work, and it WORKED.
I love that we are big enough to get things off the high shelves without trying.
I love that we dance in public. I love that we eat in public. I love that we take up all this space in all these many ways.
I love us.
I love you.
I love us.

New Year New You 2018: Week Two – Goals

I’m (once again) doing Miss Sugar’s New Year New You Experiment in Radical Magical Transformation because I find it’s a really good way to kick my own ass into getting things done. It’s a good mix of practical, magical, and thought-based exercises to help accomplish specific and significant change in your own life. If it’s relevant to your interests, give it a try!
 
Instructions:Determine what you want to accomplish in 2018 using both magical and mundane means, then break it down into magical and mundane steps that you can take.
 
Tarot Card: The Empress.
 

The Empress (Wild Uknown Tarot)
A flowering tree with a waxing crescent moon overhead

 
In the Next World Tarot, The Empress is a black femme with pastel purple hair holding a torch in one hand and a potted plant in the other. She’s wearing a flowing yellow skirt (probably not an accident that her skirt is yellow) and no shirt, hanging out on a rocky shore where earth and water meet, with a huge, “everything blooming, coming to fruition”, full moon in the back ground. In the Osho Zen deck (link goes to picture), she’s rising out of the place where the flowering ground meets the river’s edge. Her roots are in the water, she’s crowned with stars, and she’s reaching for the waning moon.
 
The Empress is all about the important stuff: Connections, interdependence, mutual care, abundance, sensuality, pleasure, and creativity. She’s all about making things happen, helping people grow and bloom, and making yourself grown, bloom, and happen, too. She’s the integration of all the queens: the hard-won wisdom of arrows and the water’s willingness to open and trust; the bones’ roots-home and rock-steady preparedness, and the adventurous energy and drive of keys.
 
This project is about opening myself up, rooting myself solid, and becoming my fullest, most integrated, femme self.
 
Which, tbh, is very similar to my over-arching goal during my first go-round of this project. But ANYWAY.
This year’s NYNY Project is very-much tied to the Glamour Practice that I’m doing via Miss Sugar’s Glamour Magic (yes, that’s a sales link), and a big part of that particular project – only slightly to my surprise – is getting it through my own head that my “scary” (physically and emotionally intense, powerful and confident, sexually voracious, innately sensual, in ownership of my own skills and talents and competencies) side is a feature of myself, not a fucking bug. Which brings me to the over-arching goals of my Empress Project.
 
A thing I noticed: When I first wrote down some of the major elements of my Empress Project, they were a lot of “stops”. “STOP doing X”, “STOP doing Y”. And I gather from… I don’t even remember where… from somewhere that phrasing things as “do not do”, as a stop rather than a go-ahead, tends to make them harder to accomplish, if only because you’re not actually giving yourself a road map for what to do INSTEAD of the thing you want to stop doing.
SO. Let me try this again:

I want to let my creative lights shine more publicly and receive more public recognition for my creative work.
I want to find and engage with even more people who are a great fit for both me socially and romantically.
I want to let go of relationships, activities, and (in particular) behaviours that aren’t good for my head or my heart while inviting and actually recognizing relationships, activities and behaviours that ARE good for my head and heart.
I want to focus on the good things already in, and being invited into, my life and to recognize how to maintain those things (those relationships, activities, and behaviours) while still presenting my whole, fully-integrated self to both the mirror and the rest of the world.
I want to recognize and know-in-my-bones that my “scary side” isn’t actually scary to people who are good for me.
I want to recognize and know-in-m-bones that all of me is worthy of love and belonging BY/WITH people who are good for me.
I want to recognize and know-in-my-bones that I have permission to ask for the experiences, care, and pleasure that I want and will really enjoy.

 
Okay. So those are my goals.
How do I make this stuff happen?
 
In the original run of this course, the project only lasted a couple of months. From early December until mid-February. It’s now a 23-week run and lasts just shy of half a year, but the original question remains: At this point in my project, what I can I do BY VALENTINE’S DAY – so in the next four weeks or so – to get this particular ball rolling?
 
Honestly, the first task is the easiest. I can just send my poetry out for submission, and see if anyone decides to publish it. I have four magazines and a selection of poems to send to each of them, and all the deadlines are before (or one day after, but I like to get things in at least a little bit early) V-day. I can keep writing glosas and blogging about it. I can push myself today and finish the remaining poetry drafts for my impending self-published chapbook, “A Lantern to Scry By: Seventeen Poems Inspired By The Moon”, and then edit that stuff ’til it shines. I can decide to drop the $25 table fee and set up shop at the Moon Market (February 13th) with bath kisses and poetry-inspired jewelry and my hot-off-the-self-publishing-press new chapbook about Relationship Feels and New Beginnings, then drop off a few copies at Venus Envy to put on their zine wall.
 
Not too difficult, although having a plan for how to be nice to myself when I get rejection letters, or in case I don’t sell a lot of stuff at the craft fair, might be a good idea.
 
A lot of the rest, though, is just… developing new habits:
Setting intentions at the New Moon for calling in new behaviours and releasing the old ones.
Remembering to put on my crown of light (see comments section) and my Witch-Queen Bombshell energetic, but sometimes literal, regalia before I go out.
Singing to the Full Moon and taking a bath in her light, calling healing into and out of my cells.
Making a point of being open about what I actually want, what actually will make me happy, and then…
Paying attention to who steps up and offers it vs who doesn’t, and teaching myself to stop chasing the people who don’t.
Taking myself out dancing and Wearing big heels, low-cut tops, and my hair down when I do.
Practicing honesty by stating real boundaries and noticing when that feels terrifying vs when (if) it doesn’t.
Smearing perfume oils across my delta of venus, or my sternum, adding rosewater and lavender and pine essential oils to the bath.
Breathing through the clamor that comes with sex and staying engaged with my partner, saying what will work better or what I need right then.
Practicing honesty a different way, by treating questions about my day, my life, my creative process as though the person asking was actually interested in the answer, as though the answers were actually interesting.
Scribbling affirmations on my body in hand sanitizer and onto my mirror in enviro-cleaner infused with calendula (good luck, constancy, love, respect, and all things associated with The Sun).
 
The things that stand in my way here are the things that always stand in my way. Self-sabotage, over-thinking everything, a tendency to dwell on what didn’t work before, rather than on what might work yet, a bad habit that I think I still have of giving up, or retreating to my hermit shell, when things don’t obviously work the first time.
A lot of the magical stuff in my above list is ways of dealing with those personal obstacles, teaching myself how to see, make, and pursue the ways around and the ways right on through.
 
Wish me luck.
I’ve got poetry to finish.

C is for Corporeal, D is for Dance – Pagan Experience 2015

On the off chance that you haven’t guessed by the time, I ‘m writing about embodiment for the Pagan Experience Challenge today. I’ve been a singer (14 years of lessons plus, admittedly, 14 further years of, like, singing in the shower or otherwise letting myself get rusty) since I was 7 years old. Which basically means that I was actively being taught how to Be In My Body well before puberty hit and all the social pressures to do exactly the opposite of that started cropping up.
I think that’s relevant.
I mean, yes, staying in my body in sexual situations where I’m not the one “doing the doing” is not the easiest thing in the world, and I don’t think that’s a separate issue, but I do think that learning embodiment, learning to pay attention really closely to what your muscles and feet and lungs and all the rest of you are doing at any given time has made it easier for me to be, well, naked, for a start, but there’s more to it than that.
A lot of my energy-work – whether that’s stuff like Grounding[1] or stuff like Sex-Magic/Laying-On-of-Hands or stuff like charging up a honey-pot – is centred around the bodily stuff I learned, ages ago, for How To Sing Really Well. As it happens, it’s also really centred around lighting up those big, straight-line, chakra points on your body – but I didn’t realize that until someone who could See that stuff told me as much when I showed her what prepping to sing looked like.
 
It’s… Art is magical. It’s an act of both creation and transformation, just because of what it is. But art as magical action can be used to do that whole “creating change at will” business as well. I was at a workshop on ritual, last October, and I said “I’m a writer and a witch, and when I write things down I make them happen”. Which isn’t true most of the time, but it’s proven on multiple occasions to push those odds towards What I (think I) Want, so I’m going with it. Likewise, when I sing, all those energetic chanels open up and I can Do Stuff – stuff kind of along the lines of reiki, I think? – that I can’t do, or can’t do as easily, when I’m quiet. Dancing, too, opens me up. I can be a fountain on the dancefloor. My wife says that I glow when I do that, and I’m inclined to take her literally as she’s one of those folks who can See that stuff, so.
 
Embodiment, for me at least, is the gateway to making energetic changes in the world. So there you go. 🙂
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.
 
 
[1] For a given value of “grounding” – I’ve got my feet in the river pretty much all the time. I’m what sometimes gets called a “cement head”. I can bring people back to earth, and/or their bodies, when they get lost. It’s part of what I’m for. How cool is that? 🙂

W is for Womanhood – Pagan Blog Project 2014

Okay.
So many years ago I tried to do a religious studies degree on Goddess Spirituality as an alternative paradigm for viewing and understanding embodied womanhood as powerful and holy (as opposed to icky, messy, gross, less-than – as defined by The Patriarchy).
Except that (a) I was looking specifically at Blood Rites and the imagery of Maiden-Mother-Crone, and (b) I hadn’t heard the word “cis” yet, and had no fucking clue how to talk about this stuff without somehow excluding trans women from the category “woman”.
I wound up stopping my degree part-way through for a lot of reasons, but one of them was that I didn’t think I could ethically talk about womanhood in the context of a religion that has bodily autonomy and self-definition at its heart while limiting that word to cis women.
 
Now here I am, almost ten years after the fact, wanting to talk about Maiden-Mother-Crone and how… it just doesn’t work. Not really. Not even for cis girls. Not even for cis girls who choose to be parents.
 
I remember, years ago, taking part in a Goddess Group where we all got to slot ourselves into one of those three categories and then talk about why we’d put ourselves where we did. And it was… sad-funny to see how many of us made our choices based, not on where we felt we fit, but on where we *didn’t* want to get *put*. The women who’d chosen “Mother” had chosen it because they didn’t want to be “put on the Crone Shelf” and ignored because they were (or looked) “old”. The women – self included – who’d chosen “Maiden” were doing so predominantly in resistance to social pressures to start raising babies. The women who’d chosen “Crone” did it for the same reason – because they’d spent so many years, often in (lieu of) childhood, taking care of other people’s kids (frequently their numerous younger siblings), and they no-longer wanted to be defined in any way by the role of “child-care-giver”.
I’ve watched so many women – with and without kids – trying to twist the goddess-category of “Mother” to mean something closer to “career woman” or “manifester of creativity” or something because – duh – being defined by our capacity to make – or not make – babies is not actually all that empowering when it’s used as justification for treating our bodies as civic/public property[1].
 
Many, many years ago I came across a book called the Women’s Wheel of Life.
I have a copy on my shelf, because it influenced me a LOT.
It is deeply rooted in cis-based biological reductionism. Which sucks. BUT. It’s also the first (though YAY not the only!) goddess spirituality piece that expands on and changes up (to some extent) the limited options offerred by the Maiden-Mother-Crone paradigm.
 

Spring: Daughter – Maiden – BloodSister
Summer: Lover – Mother – Midwife
Autumn: Amazon – Matriarch – Priestess
Winter: Sorceress – Crone – DarkMother

 
As you can see, it ain’t perfect. “Blood Sister” could just as easily have been called “Comrade” or “Chosen Sister”. “Dark Mother” could have been “Guardian” or “Crossroads Keeper”. But it’s a start, and I’ve been glad of it for a very long time. (It being my 35th birthday today, I would put it at about… seventeen years?)
 
That said, my lovely wife once asked me – around the time that Z Budapest was choking on her own feet at Pantheacon – why it has to be about bodies in the first place.
And it’s a valid question. (And the answer is: Because we *are* our bodies. This is not a meat suit, this is *us*. We can’t choose how we’re made, or how the rest of the world is going to treat us because of it, but we can find ways, make ways, to make ourselves at home in our own skins. For some of us that’s a hell of a lot easier than for others of us. But it’s there, and it matters. You are not a thing for other people to make decisions about. Neither am I. We are ours, and we are holy. Full stop. No question).
None the less, and in spite of that answer, I do agree that an alternative paradigm (or three, or four) would be damn good to have available. Handily, they’re available!
An alternative that I (just now) came across, called the “Woman Breadwinner’s Wheel of Life”[2], offers the following:
 

Spring: Visionary
Summer: Adventurer
Autumn: Receiver
Winter: Wise Woman

 
While, again, it’s not perfect – I’d have liked to see creativity/creation alongside cultivation as the Summer bridge between inspiration and completion – it allows for a much wider range of activities, paths, and fulfillments than a model based on what we’re “supposed” to do with the reproductive organs someone else is presuming that we have.
I think this alternative paradigm allows for high-femme aunties (like me and like my wife), empire-building career-artists; raging grannies & student-activists (possibly the same people, I do realize); trans dyke mamas; sexworking professors; and all the rest of us.
 
The goddess in me greets the goddess in you. You are all my sisters. ❤
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.
 
 
[1] Forced sterilization of indiginous &/or disabled cis women… "just 'cause", apparently; forced (manditory – until barely a couple of years ago, in my province – if you want to get an F on your ID) sterilization trans women; infringement and harrassment over access to birth control and abortion services for cis women; stealing children from reserves and poor, frequently racialized neighbourhoods coupled with opinions voiced by (usually white, usually cis-dude) people in power that poor women should just not have kids (see: "welfare queen"); implying that women who have "too much" and/or "the wrong kind of" sex (poly-kinky chicks AND sexworking chicks AND queer/dyke chicks) are unfit mothers and/or shouldn't be around children "just in general"; street harrassment of every possibly itteration; "Mommy Wars" and uninvited touching/discussion/advising of pregnant women (and, one suspects, people presumed to be women given their pregnancies); pressure for (cis) women over "a certain age" to have their reproductive (and sex-drive-inducing) organs removed ("cleaned out" – actual quote) now that they're not likely to result in further humans; non-consensual surgeries on intersex bodies to make them conform more to what "women" are "supposed" to look like "down there" as prescribed by a cisnormative, heteronormative, system that prioritizes the presumed desires and preferences of a het-cis male gaze; etc, etc, etc. 😛
 
[2] As someone who bakes the bread, but who doesn't earn a lot of money; as someone who is offspring-free but who holds the cultivation of my own chosen family in high priority; and as someone who doesn't see "career woman" and "parent woman" as mutually exclusive… I'm not thrilled with the name for this one. But I can work with it.

X is for Xaphtig – Pagan Blog Project 2013

Okay, okay, having put it into google, I’ve realized that it’s really spelled “zaftig”, but work with me here. “X” remains a tricky one.
Zaftig means “pleasantly plump” or “curvy” and while you can look at it one way and see one of the many ways we, as a culture, try to make “fat” and “hot” mutually exclusive categories (Boo!), I can look at it another way. Zaftig (or xaphtig) is big, meaty, fat, curvy, lush, voluptuous. It’s the shape that – much to my irriation (see above re: body-shaming) – gets termed “Goddess Sized” on the sarong racks at KG. It’s the shape that I am as a healthy, happy, adult.
It’s the shape I was when I learned to belly dance. It’s the shape I am now that I’ve been modeling for half a decade. It’s the shape I became when the woman I eventually married made me feel safe and wanted and beautiful.
 
So much of Goddess Spirituality is rooted in undoing body-shame. All kinds of body shame. Culturally inflicted shame around menstruation and (if you look at the roots of it) women’s sexuality in general. Body-policing and (typically) fat-shaming. Social expectations about being “too much woman” (if you’re a queer cis femme, a poly-type, a sexworker, a mother of “too many” children, a trans woman who routinely gets read as cis[1], a straight chick who likes sex) or “not woman enough” (if you’re butch, an out dyke, a trans woman of any sexual orientation who doesn’t routinely get read as cis, if you can’t or don’t want to, have kids).
 
So here. Have a look at this. I’d have liked to see women like Isis King and Calpernia Addams included in this picture from Wirligigagogo, I think it echos some of the aimed-for body-positivity of “thou art goddess”.
 

Click the image to go to the original post by Whirligigagogo, where you’ll find even more “We Are Beautiful” posters and pics. 🙂

 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.
 
 
[1] See Julia Serano’s essay “Skirt Chasers” for more on the idea of trans women as “deceptive”.

Moving Right Along – Warming Up My Body (and My Voice!)

Okay. Last Summer, I did yoga. I signed up for a yin/yang (that’s “yin” – for joints & connective tissues – and “yang” – aka “hatha”, for muscles) yoga class at the studio down the street and learned how to do a bunch of poses, and then did them pretty-much every morning at my own house after a couple of weeks.
And then I went a got myself a temporary day-job and that meant that I basically dropped yoga like a hot potato.

And now here it is, barely a week away from March, with (Maple) Sugar Moon starting to grow (new moon was yesterday, iirc), and I’m basically going “Okay, self. Time to get back into the routine of things.”

Which means doing yoga again every morning chez moi – even if it’s only 20-30 minutes (though I’m aiming to work up to about 45/morning) – and doing vocal warm-ups at the same time.

This is a big deal for me.

I can feel myself expanding when I do it.
And, yeah, maybe part of that is because the weather’s been ridiculously warm the past week or so, which has had my body craving yoga (rather than craving curling up in a ball under a blanket with hot chocolate, for example) – specifically downward dog, for some reason. I don’t even like downward dog (so I dunno). Or maybe it’s because I spent last night having A Conversation with my sweetie about getting my sadistic groove back, which seriously helped me out – I’ve been feeling crunched up and squashed and coiled up inside myself (like I’ve been making myself small and unnoticeable or similar) and, when my Ghost asked me what I want to get out of S/M and what I enjoy about it, and basically a lot of “Use Your Words Luke Miz Syren” plus a chance to be all me-me-me[1] about a type of play that typically gets preached as being all about the bottom, not the top.
It was really good.
However.
I also think that I’m breathing more easily and and feeling more open because I let myself sing, let myself go through the decades-familiar work of arpeggios and scales and other simple warm-up exercises, filled my lungs all the way and didn’t worry about (a) bothering the neighbours[2] or (b) staying within what I currently feel are my “limits”[3].

I need to watch myself, because the frequent up-and-down of yoga often leaves me feeling a little light-headed. That combined with the deep-breathing, long breaths, and more-intense-than-I’m-used-to vocal activity, means that I need to be careful.

So, for now, I’m doing about 20 minutes of yoga + vocal warm-ups (mostly at the lower end of my range). As I get back into the swing of things, I’ll be able to yoga for longer periods, hold poses longer, and get myself into the upper end of my range without feeling like I’m damaging myself.
By the time Actual Wedding Season hits (June, maybe a little earlier, around here), I should be in Good Form (vocally and physically) and, with any luck, on track with practicing Actual Repertoire as well as doing daily warm-ups.
One can dream act, right? 🙂

TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.

[1] Do not even get me started on how hard it is to actively and healthily be all me-me-me rather than doing it silently and full of resentment. I’m just saying. Seriously. Half of Syrens is all about that stuff.

[2] I spent three years – the last three years in-which I took singing lessons – getting harrassed by neighbours (who were everything from indifferently-clueless to actively, nastily hostile) about my singing. Because I practiced at home. Which apparently drove everyone in the building(s) nuts. I moved three times. That’ll do a number on a gal.

[3] I’m trying to be “gentle” with myself on this. There’s a gap between what I could do ten years ago and what I can do now and, while it’s not actually as wide as I originally feared it was (I still have my high b-flat! :-D) it is still a gap. I get tired quickly, because I haven’t done warm-ups like this in years (with the exception of when I learned a piece for my cousin’s wedding last summer), and I don’t want to push myself so far – which, really, isn’t all that far – that I end up having to take a day (or two, or three… you see what could happen there) off to recover.