By Madonna Gauding, Photography by Hilary Nichols

Chris McCall was born and raised in Detroit. She grew up in a large, musical family where everyone sang at family events. Today, at 54, she is a professional singer, songwriter, voice coach, life coach, and meditation counselor. She still lives in the Detroit area, in a cheerful, green bungalow in Redford Township, with her three rescued cats, Monkey, Kosmo, and Eilley. Over decades, she has helped hundreds of students find, free, and use their voice in all its fullness and depth. Her unique approach goes beyond the voice box and focuses on the whole body. Through mediation and other techniques, she helps students release long held emotions that cause contractions in the body that restrict the voice. Her coaching is available to anyone who wants to open and relax their voice, for whatever reason: singing, acting, public speaking or personal development. A long-time practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, and Vipassana Meditation, she brings her deep Buddhist training to her voice work, life coaching, and meditation counseling. Her studio is on Main Street in downtown Ann Arbor.

Madonna Gauding: Tell me a little bit about yourself, your family and where you grew up.

Chris McCall: I was born and raised in Detroit and I’m number six out of seven kids. My parents were activists. They worked hard to get Coleman Young elected mayor and I remember him being at our house. My mom was a music teacher and Catholic Church choir director. My dad worked at Ford, but he started out in show business. He was an MC at a nightclub in Windsor called the Elmwood Casino, a place on the national night club circuit. They had the Rat Pack in there, and people like Sammy Davis Jr. He knew people like that well and he had this whole life in that world. But, when I came along, baby number six, he took a job at Ford Motor Company, hung up his tuxedo, and put on a security uniform. He worked at Ford for 35 years.

Madonna Gauding: Did he work in security for his entire career?

Chris McCall: He started in security and retired as a fire supervisor. My parents continued to be activists and were committed to the city of Detroit. And there was music. There were lots of musicians in my family. Music was our life. That’s what our holidays were all about, usually revolving around the Church.

Madonna Gauding: You mean you sat around and sang in your family?

Chris McCall: We did, we actually did! (laughter) We sang when we washed the dishes, in harmony, I’m not kidding!

MG: That sounds made up . . .

CM: It does! (laughter) When the whole extended family would get together, every one of us had their special song. At some point in the night somebody would start calling out each person to stand up and perform.

Read related article: Singing on the Threshold

MG: Your family was so musical!

CM: I am really grateful for that. In my work, all the time, I hear people say they are afraid to sing, or they shouldn't, or someone told them they couldn't sing, and it upsets me. Shows like American Idol, or the Voice, promote the idea that only the very talented can or should sing. When I was growing up, everybody sang, and not everybody was headed for a professional career. My dad was a pro, so when he stood up it would be one thing, but there were lots of friends and family members who stood up to sing because they enjoyed singing. We loved every minute of it.

MG: Full disclosure: We’ve known each other for many decades. I’ve known you as a long-time meditator, Buddhist spiritual practitioner, as well as a wonderful singer, performer, and voice teacher. I am confessing now that I have always been intimidated by singing, and especially intimated by you and other people we know who can sing really well. It’s very emotional for me to say that. So, I think I am definitely a candidate for your work. My voice is so constricted, and my range is so limited. Can you help somebody like me?

CM: Oh, I think so. Yes.

MG: Someone like me who feels she can’t sing at all, who feels a tightness in her voice, even when talking?

CM: Well, there are a lot of things that can cause a tightness. When people feel they only have a few notes in their range, definitely part of that is physical, but when we go deeper, we find there is usually an emotional component creating that constriction. That contraction, we’ll call it, is very common. People will say they have a five-note range. They will sing a song and when it goes above that five-note range they opt for a lower note. They learned to do this to avoid embarrassment or “standing out” and have done it their whole life. They think they are tone deaf and everybody around them thinks they are tone deaf, but it’s really rare for someone to be tone-deaf. When I work with someone, it’s a process. We have to trust each other. You have to trust that I am not going to attack you or criticize you, and that I am really supporting you. We have to get you comfortable—easing into that higher range, and as you go into that higher range, all kinds of emotions and issues can get triggered. It is a terribly vulnerable thing to do, to sing in front of someone. It takes a lot of courage for someone who struggles with their voice. Sometimes we just sit and feel the contraction without making a sound, holding it in our awareness without trying to eradicate or “fix it” but observing through the lens of the heart, with a friendly curiosity.

MG: I have a lot of emotion around this topic. In preparation for talking to you today, I read an article you posted on your website SingAnnArbor.com. I learned that as a voice teacher you work with a person’s body and with their entire range of emotions. I thought voice training was a physical thing and had to do with training the vocal cords, the breath, the diaphragm, but what you are doing goes way beyond that. It goes very deep and has the potential to transform a person’s life.

CM: A few months after I started teaching private lessons, I realized I had to keep a box of tissues in my studio. We would start working and right away people would start crying. When I thought about it, and because of the person I am, it was like, “Yes, of course you are going to cry.” But as a voice teacher I had to ask myself, “Is it okay to follow where this is taking me? Is it okay for me to talk about this person’s emotions, to create a space for this? Am I qualified to do this?” Eventually, I stopped questioning and I allowed my teaching process to unfold naturally based on what my students needed. In the beginning, I had some students, really kind students, who sensed that I wasn’t quite sure if I should comment on things, who said “It’s okay, you can go ahead and tell me.” I remember this one young adult I was working with years ago gave me permission to do that.

MG: Can you tell me how your process works now?

CM: Part of what I use is called the Realization Process, which is something Judith Blackstone teaches. It is an embodiment practice, a process of inhabiting the body and attuning to the space inside the body. To attune to the space inside the body is also to attune to the space outside the body, which imparts a feeling of unity. She is also a psychotherapist, so she teaches a process of attuning to the psychology, or the mind that was in play at the time you developed a contraction in your body. So, let’s say you’re feeling tightness in your throat. There is a process in which you attune to that contraction or lump in your throat or maybe a pulling sensation in your stomach, or a holding in your shoulder. In this process of attunement and being present, you might become aware of a quality of mind, an emotion. It may be a quality of mind from when you were five years old, or twelve, or whatever it might be. You may explore certain events at that time, or maybe a feeling you had at that age, or your relationship with your parents. Through visualization and other methods, I help you to become more versed in the language of that contraction.

MG: So, the contraction is embedded in my body. Its origin is from a particular event or time in my life and you help me learn to talk about it, feel it, describe it, and understand it.

CM: And to feel the movement of the contraction. For example, if someone was criticized a great deal, they may feel a lot of contraction in their solar plexus, a kind of bracing for something to come. They may find any kind of stimulation might create that kind of contraction. Over time the contraction can move and maybe they develop some tension in their spine around the vertebrae right behind their solar plexus. It’s very mechanical as well. It’s not imperative to identify an event or situation that triggered the contraction but with presence and practice, the emotional content reveals itself to you without any effort.

MG: Because of an event or experience in your past, a contraction is expressed mechanically in the body, in the bones, the organs, the facia?

CM: That’s right. There are layers upon layers of—and I hesitate to call them stories, but I want to call them stories with golden lettering—because I don’t think they are something to be dismissed. In Vipassana meditation practice, we do not look into our stories, we just try to be present with our experience. Sometimes that is a good place for me to go, but in this case, when dealing with contraction in the body, I feel like the stories really need to be honored and met with gentleness.

MG: It seems Realization Process is doing something different than Vipassana.

CM: Judith Blackstone has talked about how in certain meditation practices stories are considered negative. That was interesting for me because I started Realization Process first and then went to Vipassana. In Vipassana, I can see also how helpful it is to let the stories drop, because they can just be a mental exercise, a kind of grasping. If you are doing Vipassana practice and you are in your head having this mental exercise, that’s one thing, but if you are inhabiting your body and encountering unconscious material which is having an effect on your physical body and your physical being, that is something else and it might require a different approach.

MG: And that unconscious material has an effect on my voice, and if my voice is constricted, it involves my whole body.

CM: Yes, that’s right. The contraction is not just here (pointing to her throat). Understanding this helped me surrender to being a teacher who does not just work on the voice box alone.

MG: I was looking at your website and the services you offer, and you mention coaching. Do you do life coaching in addition to working with the voice?

CM: Yes. I wasn’t sure what to call it. For lack of a better term, I call it life coaching or sometimes I call it meditation coaching. In my working with voice students, we would sometimes morph into this kind of work. With some people this is all I do. We meet online and it’s similar to a therapy session for 15, 20 minutes or a half hour, then I’ll do a guided meditation for a half hour or forty-five minutes, using the Realization process or Vipassana practice. Or sometimes it’s just a matter of being present with someone while they are feeling their feelings. That doesn’t sound like we’re doing much, but we are doing an awful lot.

MG: I understand what you are saying. In my own life, it has been very powerful for me to have someone witness what I am going through and provide a safe container for me to explore my feelings.

CM: It’s so very difficult for people to just feel their feelings. We wonder why a beautiful talented singer has imposter complex and can’t bring himself or herself to take the next step in their career. It takes so much courage to really stop and decide to just feel. And if we do pause to feel, the first thing we want to do is to fix it, or make it go away. Mostly, we don’t want to feel. We will use anything we can to distract ourselves from feeling, including spirituality and psychology, so good luck to us!

MG: In your article, it was a revelation to me when you talked about befriending my feelings, to befriend my anger, befriend my fear. I tried that and it felt really good. I offered myself acceptance and I felt so much better with whatever I was dealing with at the time.

CM: When you are talking about befriending your fear or befriending your anger, in many spiritual communities, fear and anger are considered the worst emotions you can feel, along with attachment. If we do something out of fear or anger, we are supposed to feel shame—not technically, but many of us feel like we are off track spiritually when we are feeling these heavy emotions. That causes shame and judgement which creates more polarity. It’s a real problem for those of us trying to work on ourselves.

MG: I forgot who came up with the term “spiritual bypassing,” but it sounds like what you are talking about. In some spiritual communities you are encouraged to transcend or excise negative emotions, get beyond them, and by doing that you never really understand or deal with them on a deep level. We are encouraged to eradicate negativities which is a kind of violence toward the self. I think you find this in any organized religion. In your work, you allow room for people to feel what they are feeling, to accept and befriend those feelings, and understand how they manifest in the body and specifically in their voice.

CM: I remember telling my friend Kathleen that I kept using the word “love,” and I was asking myself if it is okay for me to use the word love when I am teaching people. I worried that love is not professional, (laughter) and that I shouldn’t use that word. But I do use the word love in my work, although in the beginning “kindness” works better for some people.

MG: So how does love manifest in your teaching?

CM: When people are starting out, they will be very nervous about singing in front of me. So, they will go through a lot of machinations before they can bring themselves to sing just a little bit. They want me to know they already know that they are not very good, and that they had a cold last week, and they don’t even know why they decided to do this, that it is stupid for them to even try. So, I suggest to them that their desire to sing is a natural part of being a human being. That even babies sing. But something happens along the way that causes this contracted throat and the idea that “I can’t do this.” I tell them I’ve seen this in other people and that I respect that deep desire to want to open up your throat and let your voice out and feel free. That some part of them must feel that way, too. And maybe we could offer some love to this contracted energy and this part of you that feels you aren’t good enough to do this just here in front of me right now. And maybe if we loved that energy a little bit it will relax. We might feel into that, so if someone is open to that, I might suggest we just feel into the throat, and have the person put their hands on their throat where they feel tightness. Maybe it feels like it is right around the trachea, a tenderness in the muscles there, and maybe a tightness in the shoulders creating this kind of girdling energy. We can sit and feel that for a few minutes with love. I always start with love. In my experience, when you bring awareness into the body, and love isn’t present, the body is going to shut down. It’s not going to work. Mary Oliver calls it the “soft animal of your body.” That’s how we approach this interior work, the way we would approach a soft animal, with tenderness. Sometimes people don’t know what love feels like.

MG: If you are doing some kind of relaxation exercise in a group and someone says bring your awareness to your hand, and now to your arm, and so on, are you are saying if you don’t do this with a conscious feeling of love toward yourself than it doesn’t do much of anything?

CM: That’s my experience. If we don’t have love as the motivation, or the impulse to integrate and love this contracted energy we are feeling, whatever it may be, then usually we are bringing a mental energy, a desire to change whatever we are experiencing, to subtly to push it away. And underneath there may be fear. If fear is there, then there’s going to be this desire to control what we find inside. What I am talking about is my personal path. I found I couldn’t get anywhere with anything in my life without loving myself and making love my path. Nothing worked until I committed to that. I felt like I would put on spiritual costumes. “Okay, I’m going to be this kind of meditator or that kind of meditator.” With my spiritual costume on I would say “I’m going to meditate, I am going to eat right, and I am going to do all these things for all the right reasons.” But what was really going on was I was rejecting myself and I was anorexic. I told myself that this was my spiritual path, my spiritual practice, but there was no love for this person. No real warmth for her and her struggle. I think many of us reject ourselves in similar ways. So, if someone is feeling this constriction and they can trust me a little bit to witness and they decide to look inward and feel it, and they think someone is there rooting for them on the side of love, then things start to happen.

MG: Does the voice then begin to open?

CM: Yes, it does. There can be some very quick results, but usually it takes time and practice. The mechanics of all of this constricted energy causes constriction deep, deep inside. It’s a process of releasing and letting go. And there are vocal exercises. We have to expand what we do with the voice. And each step along that path can bring another kind of triggering. I may tell a student “We’re going to try to sing a little higher today than you thought you could.” Or I ask them to sing “Aw.” Important to all vocal lessons is being able to sing “Aw” because it’s the most open sound. If we sing “Aw” and we travel up our range, and we are not trained, most of us will reach a point where we make a sound we don’t like. We’re going to have to make this adjustment and we won’t like how it sounds. Then we have to decide, to once again, love ourselves, and accept this person who is not able to do this today, who makes this sound that we don’t like and just be present with her.

MG: What are your plans for the future?

CM: My goal is to continue to help people as much as possible in whatever way I can. I had somebody come in recently, a mature vocalist, a woman in her late 50s, who came to music lessons within the last ten years and who really committed herself to them. She is a great student who has really excelled in her guitar playing and her singing. She came in and started singing “Imagine” by John Lennon. And as soon as she started singing, I could feel the emotion behind it. It’s very common for me to cry when I hear my students sing. Crying is also something that I thought was unprofessional, but that’s how I am. I’ve accepted it. So, I closed my eyes and started to listen to her, but she had to stop because she was crying. We had a little conversation, and then she went back and sang through the whole song. It felt like that was the whole session, both of us crying about this song and what it means for the world. When a student captures that emotional content, that emotional gift in a song, I feel I’m in the presence of an artist. And that is amazing to me. You don’t have to have a perfect voice to touch a heart.