This Trembling Life
'cause being alive doesn't always match the how-to guides
In 2012, I was singing the very famous “Flower Duet” with a lovely fellow at the Manhattan School of Music Summer Festival. In case you’re not familiar with the “Duo des fleurs” by name (although I bet you’ve heard it in many a commercial, tv show or movie), this is a selection from a 19th-century French opera called “Lakmé” by the composer Léo Delibes.
On the first evening we performed it in front of an audience, at a certain, glorious swell of all things coming together as sweet and painful and beautiful, musically speaking — the greatest indicated volume, the height of the notes, the crystal glory of the harmony, the emotional outpouring of the characters we were playing — something worrisome happened:
My abdomen tightened, my calves squeezed, my hands froze into claws, and I feared losing my breath.
But this was a show. I couldn’t pass out! The show MUST go on!
So, that first night I just sort of pushed past the fear and muscled my way through the song.
Afterwards, the director laughed it off.
“Yeah,” she said reassuringly, “I saw you do the claw, but it was opening night. You’ll be fine tomorrow.”
I wasn’t so sure. Because I knew things she didn’t know about crazy me and my crazy life.
Throughout my life, there have been many times I was walking in total and utter grace. This was one of those times, albeit not the most difficult among them.
This time, I was revisiting a long lost dream, living in one of the most expensive cities in the world, thousands of miles from my only comfort in life (my dog Henry, who had stayed in Los Angeles), trying to escape an exploitative, predatory “spiritual guru,” and avoiding a few others that were trying to recruit me (hey! I’ve got a type.) I was exploring what could be possible for me away from the “group” (cult) I was with. I had very little money, but I did have some support, and…
I was doing something you weren’t supposed to do as a grown up:
Change your life.
I had no idea what would happen in the next minute, let alone the next night.
But what happened at the next performance was:
Uh, oh. That same squeezing, at that exact moment in the song.
My calves tightening, stomach squeezing, heart racing, hands drawn into claws. I couldn’t stop them! I couldn’t force them open. I couldn’t unfurl them. My chin drew up to the spotlight as it shone down on me and—
I could not control this, I could not muscle through this, I just-
Was forced to-
Surrender-
WHOOOOOOSH!
Like the breath of angels,
a freer voice came through me and a sensation of all pleasure, all pain, all of what it was to be human emerged,
More than that, my entire body exploded - obviously not literally, I’m sitting here writing this at 7:27 am on a Wednesday some nine years later in Los Angeles- but it felt like a million bursts of joy and I could see my hands trembling and my body going into crazy tremors.
It was a spiritual, musical ecstasy.
As my voice teacher Gary says, “to sing is to pray twice.”
That was one of those prayers.
But this morning, I didn’t sit down to write about performing.
I sat down to write about trembling.
Because this performance is an example of a moment where all my egoic, psychological humanity, which I honor as very important in this world or else we/I wouldn’t have it, subsided into something else. Something… not nice per se, nor easy, but… transcendent.
It helps me to remember things like this, to recount moments like the “Flower Duet” when I am going through various levels of anxiety, frustration, depression, addiction, sorrow, sadness, numbness, fear. As I am right now.
I know, I know. The internet and social media are weird spaces. We’re all supposed to get real about our mental health (check!) but also be traveling to the most beautiful places on the planet (uh, I just got back from Minnesota, which is very beautiful?) with perfectly tiny waists (I mean, I am basically a middle aged woman, I’m doin’ alright) and nice plump bootys (hmm…) and injected lips (nerp) and zero wrinkles (yeah, never mind) and you can have silver hair but only if you’re a skinny fox and…
Well. You know what I’m saying.
I am a very real lady with a very real life, just like you are doubtless a very real person with a lot of life happening, too. Indeed, I hope so.
I wanted to get real here, a little bit, because so much of what I am personally going through is not really so terrible, but instead terribly stressful. That’s on the one hand.
And on the other hand, there is this series of monotonously, mind-numbingly, seemingly interminable BLOCKS. Obstacles and mistakes and “NOs” and shut doors. Boom boom boom boom boom.
So, yeah, a lot of not-quite-right-for-social-media experiences happening at this time.
Which is fine, even wonderful, since life is also lived beyond the vestiges of cyberspace.
To deal with it, I have recently been trying a “new” healing technique involving shaking and trembling. When I say “new,” I mean, somewhat new to me, but of course, known to nature since the dawn of mammalia, or the dawn of plants with leaves before that…
When little dog Henry (rest his soul) would go through an experience, happy/ scary/ sad/ any, he would…. tremble. Shake! That’s how he would release energy. I have watched my little two year old nephew shake when he gets really emotional. No one has yet taught him not to. No one has said, “okay, now you’re old enough as a human to go a little numb to get along in society.”
But I have. I may be weird, but for better or worse, I have also been trained into 21st Century rules of conduct for living within society.
And this doesn’t really have a lot of room for extreme emotions, even though to be human means to experience all of it (“from the mundane to the profound, the sacred to the low-down.”)
So a lot of those things just get shoved away, hidden in muscle tissue, memory, lost thoughts, so much mindless television, endless scrolling. And while I do those things and am not really judging myself for them, this last year and a half of the pandemic in which I have not been able to be a workaholic (because there was not much available to me other than my own creations) have shown me that- I yearn for something ancient and future at once- to breathe!- to shout, to sing, I AM! I AM! I AM!
And now society is “opening up” (what on earth do the oak trees think when we say the “world” is opening up, I wonder?) and I feel my hips going into their own lockdown.
But I do not want this.
So to offer myself a different experience, I have been:
Inducing trembling after each time I work out or sometimes in the evening, for the purpose of healing, through various exercise techniques.
Sometimes it’s me shimmying.
Mostly, it’s putting my body in a position where the muscles begin to shake and tremble on their own- passively- and then I breathe. I imagine that I can inhale right into those spaces where the shake is at its greatest, and see what happens. Notice if I laugh, cry. Sometimes anxiety appears. A memory may emerge. At times, I almost weep, recently I wept heartily.
And I feel:
Alive.
In places where it had previously been a little scary to be so frighteningly full of LIFE.
I wouldn’t recommend a person do this alone who has never gone through therapy before who might have extreme trauma. I happen to feel comfortable because of the gross amount of therapy/ guru/ shaman/ healing/ yoga/ energy work/ massage I have both trained in as a practitioner and received as a subject.
But what I am finding is:
I miss singing. A lot. I dream of singing at night, wild performances in floating laundromats and refugee camps; I wake up singing.
Anxiety can be relieved in many ways and for me, this is an interesting one.
Life will bring you sorrow, will bring you pain, will bring you trauma at any given point. We are never done, presumably, until we are done living completely, with pain. You never arrive anywhere, you are always a part of the great tumult and tide of being alive. And so what you choose to do with all that energy is yours, piece by piece, song by song.