Sing & Relax what does it mean?

A singer recounts her journey from burnout in opera programs to creating “Sing and Relax,” a personalized music education program focused on joy and well-being. She shares how she rediscovered the fun in music and built a program from scratch.🌈🎶🎤

What does it mean to sing and relax? Well, before I say that, I should go back about 18 years to graduate school when I was doing callbacks across the country for opera yap programs. I was a very blessed woman as I have an instinctive gift for music, and I had done quite well in the auditions, and I was bouncing from Minnesota to New York to Chicago, singing for anybody who wanted to take their precious time to hear me. And by the time I got to Boston, I got a look at myself in the mirror right before I went in for the next callback. Just gotten off a plane from all the way across the country, dressed in some bathroom at the airport, grabbed a taxi, and I didn’t recognize myself. was dressed the right way. I had the right look. The jewelry was protocol. The pantyhose were the right color. But something had happened to me, and I happened to be singing for a woman. I had sung for an undergraduate for another program who knew me, and she didn’t recognize me when I walked in five years later. So I sang. It wasn’t my best callback ever. It really wasn’t. I was exhausted, and I got in the taxi to go back to the hotel, and I heard this little voice say, this isn’t fun anymore, is it? And I knew that that was the truth. And there had been a bunch of other situations, too, that were a lot more dramatic, seen not the best come out of people as the higher level I competed. And I’m a pretty straightforward, gentle person. I’m very maternal, even if I am talented. And I didn’t have time for the nonsense and the malarkey I was seeing, including, with all due respect from some of the coaches. So we’re sitting on the plane on my way back to Kansas, and I heard a little voice say, you need to remember why you started to do this to begin with. And you need to go back to when it was fun, and you need to go back to when it was you singing with your foster brother and your best friend, you know, in the basement of a church after having spent 16 years being abused. If you sang at all, the freedom that came with that, the laughter that came with that, you’ve got to find that again, Jen. So I talked to my friend, actually, and my foster brother, and he said, yeah, you just got to get them to be able to sing and chill out. And I said, do you mean sing and relax? And he said, yeah, yeah, I do. And so, you know, on a shoestring budget of a grad student, a lot of faith, some help from this amazing woman named Paula. I’ll tell you about another time from Disability Rehab Services and my dear grandmother. We scratched it together to bring Sing and relax to life. 450 square feet in my studio, tiny little apartment while I went to school. A keyboard, which I still keep as a reminder of where it started and a whole lot of tenacity when I think about it now, and some faith. And I started from bottom to top, teaching the Littles, working my way to corporate celebrity contracts, realizing they didn’t know how to sing and relax, too, half the time, and that’s why they were here. And then in 2021, supporting essential workers. That led me to getting my certifications in music therapy. That led me to going to Forbes Business School. That led me to go to Copenhagen. That led me to nyu, and that led me to take all of those musical, colorful, beautiful things and these amazing opportunities I had and turn it into a mindset of play, structure, focus, and science. So what is Sing and Relax personalized music education to be able to find and free what’s lost? Because I can also tell you there’s plenty of singers like me out there who started doing this because they loved it, went deep into the industry, saw everything that was broken, and started to assume they were broken, too.