ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the role of breath and consciousness. Throughout 2007 to 2008, different international conferences hosted by major voice organizations in the US and UK offered workshops and presentations combining Anglo-American voice pedagogy with Asian principles and practices. Although training approaches differed in combinations of practice, similar "problems" continued to emerge. It proposes one principal reason for the difficulties: the different ways these modes of training link breath with the "self" of the practitioner. The role of self within practice helps determine how breath is conceptualized and trained. The involuntary breath can be understood as an "unconscious response by the diaphragm to a need for oxygen," an act of the body's autonomic system. Breath is not a universally understood physiological process able to be reduced to lung function. Also, breath understood subjectively is equally problematic, in part because the "lived body" is heavily influenced by the sociocultural understandings of self and the place of body as self within practice.
