The Answer Was on the Kitchen Table

First you just try to be a good teacher.

First, you just try to be a good teacher.

You show up, you teach good lessons, you help people. You carry the knowledge you’ve been given, and you pass it forward carefully, faithfully. You trust the lineage because the lineage is brilliant and you are new to teaching, and the gap between those two things is humbling.

That’s where it starts for all of us.

But if you stay in it long enough — and if you stay awake in it — something begins to shift. The book knowledge gets quieter. The theories stop feeling like answers and start feeling like maps. And maps, as any traveler knows, are not the territory.

After years of teaching, I started putting the maps down.

I began listening differently — not just to my students, but to something in myself. My mentors were still there, their voices always present, their brilliance undeniable. But they grew quieter. And in that quiet, another voice started to come through.

My own.

That was the unsettling part.

Who am I to start reframing what the masters taught? Who am I to question exercises that have existed for generations? The weight of that lineage is not a small thing. I felt it. I still feel it.

But I kept listening. And the more I listened, the louder my own voice grew.

And then one of my students brought me to the edge of everything I knew.

She had been everywhere. Not casually — seriously. Teacher after teacher, method after method, always studying, always searching, always doing the work. She was the kind of student every teacher wants in the room: committed, intelligent, and willing. And she had one problem that nothing, in all of that searching, had been able to touch.

The tension in her throat. Always there. Insistent, like a pain that won’t go away. She had learned to sing around it, through it, in spite of it. But it never left. And she knew, the way singers know things they can’t always articulate, that it was the thing standing between her and the voice she was supposed to have.

I had tried everything I knew.

The standard solution — the one in every textbook, the one passed down through generations of voice teachers — is the yawn. The logic is sound: the yawn drops the larynx, opens the throat, creates space. The masters used it. I had used it. But it had never sat fully right with me, and working with her I finally understood why.

The yawn opens the throat — but only for a moment. The first few seconds, yes, something releases. And then the full yawn arrives, and with it comes the tense stretching, the jaw straining, the throat gripping again at the finish. You’ve traded one tension for another. The very thing you were trying to release comes back in through the back door.

I kept thinking about it. Turning it over between sessions. There had to be another way in.

And then one afternoon, reaching for something completely ordinary, I found it. It wasn’t inside some vocal technique, it was sitting right there on the kitchen table.

To your vocal freedom,

Cari Cole

caricole.com / Work with me

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