DATE: SUNDAY, MAY 16, 2010, 2:37 PM

FROM: MEASHA BRUEGGERGOSMAN

TO: NEARESTS AND DEARESTS

SUBJECT: HUMMING ALONG

Hi Wonderful Peeps,

End of the fourth week and I’m feeling pretty okay. I’VE BEEN HERE FOR A MONTH! I can’t believe that. As difficult as this experience has been for me, I honestly can’t believe it’s gone by so fast. I’m starting to think I might actually be enjoying myself . . . :-)) That’s when time flies, isn’t it? This week wasn’t nearly as emotional for me as last week. The body is starting to tighten up—which is just what happens. We were told to expect it, so I think it just means that I’m building more muscle, and my joints and cartilage are getting tense from all the activity. So far, I’ve practised 44 classes. The first sign of that fact is my left hip, and sympathetic to that is my right lumbar. I just have to be patient. I’ve committed to getting massages every Saturday, but believe me, they’re not relaxing. But it means I hit the reset button on the weekend and can actually continue to go deeper into my practice during the week—that’s the idea anyway . . .

This week also saw the beginning of ramped-up posture clinics. Senior teachers volunteer their time and come to teacher training to help us aspiring teachers get through the class dialogue. We take turns reciting the dialogue (hopefully memorized verbatim) while our colleagues do the postures. Each posture is about half a page to a page of dialogue, and of course everything has to go in the right order and with the right words or else the posture doesn’t make any sense to the students. This yoga IS the dialogue and how you deliver it. I think I’m getting progressively better, but it’s a lot to cram in, and sometimes I’m a bit discouraged that there’s not enough time to really get the presentation of the dialogue as good as I’d like it to be. I’m still very much concentrated on remembering the words. I spent most of the weekend memorizing dialogue, just trying to stay ahead so that I can get better. If I have a prayer request, it would be that over the next two weeks, I’ll be able to get the dialogue solid enough in my head and in my mouth (verbatim) that I’ll actually be able to work on its presentation so that I can take full advantage of the advice I get in posture clinic.

It’s all part of the process. There was an amazing teacher this week who was so warm and strict and funny and disciplined. She ended the class by playing Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young,” and everyone who wasn’t singing along at the top of their voice was getting a reeeally good cry.

So, when Bikram gets back, that also means the return of the late-night lecture and Chinese water torture–esque post-midnight Bollywood filmfests. This week we saw circa 1960s video footage of Bikram and his guru’s amazing feats of yogic prowess, as captured by the TV show That’s Incredible (do you remember that show?), along with other interviews. We also continued on with Mahabharat, the 92-episode low-budget Indian saga recounting the life of the young Krishna. I gotta say, although I’m not drinking the Kool-Aid, I do find these films quite entertaining in a kitschy kind of way. I mean, what alternative do I have? Heh. I know the whole idea of this “process” is to break us (or have us die to the self, so to speak) so that we can rebuild ourselves from scratch. The challenge is in trying not to plan and create expectations and/or to think you know what’s going to happen or how you’re going to feel. But I think (and I’m not sure about anything, mind you) the key is to just hear the words, and move accordingly. Anything else and you’re just going to frustrate yourself and poison those around you.

That’s all you can do. You do your best and that’s what leads to improvement. We’re only human, but we’re constantly underestimating ourselves—starting with our bodies. And it’s the mind that tells the body it’s not good enough . . . OR that it is. So is it the mind or the body that’s most important? Without the body, there is no mind, but the mind controls the body. Or does it? Too deep. Moving on.

I am truly grateful to those of you who have sent me mail. And regardless of whether you’ve been able to write, I know you continue to surround me with your thoughts and prayers, and it honestly helps me to focus my mind. I feel ALL of your thoughts and prayers, and my goal for this week is to let whatever is in store for us yogis in week 5 (!!!) just happen. Wow. Week 5. I mean, there are no guarantees that I won’t let my “Zen and the art of yogic torture” philosophy fall by the wayside the minute that Bollywood film comes on the screen, or after my third day in a row on 3 hours of sleep. So please just think of me in those moments cuz I want to learn to do more than the “right thing.”

Now I’m going to read a chapter from Proverbs and hopefully set my mind up right for the week.

Stay blessed and know you’re constantly in my thoughts. As a wonderful, loyal and dear friend of mine wrote to me, “There’s nothing more valuable than your peace of mind.”

Namaste,

Measha

I do believe you can have it all. But it requires patience and forgiveness. Patience for the time it takes for your hard work to be made manifest; for the words to crystallize; for the action you’ve learned to become second nature, to recognize, organize and seize the opportunities that add to your village and skill set. To wait for the gap in traffic before switching lanes. And forgiveness? Well, that’s for yourself. For the times you didn’t make it, you couldn’t be there; when you missed this, or couldn’t take advantage of that, or just plain needed to sleep or get over a cold or rebook a flight.

I’ve given up my dream of being cloned. But it was hard.

And because I want to dream big but also be patient enough to be thorough, and persistent enough to be successful (dear GOD, don’t let me give up too soon!), I like to have a solid plan. This way, if people ask me what I’m up to, I can have an answer in case they have some insight into or influence over how I might get closer to my goal. From my early education on the East Coast of Canada to my studies at the University of Toronto to completing my voice studies in Germany, I’ve always had some kind of five-year plan. Not to be confused with the seven-year itch I mentioned earlier, a five-year-plan is a hypothesis with a time limit. Goals attached to a best-before date. A bet you make with yourself. I’m not sure why five years, exactly. But it worked for me in my younger years—likely a measurement from a junior high guidance counsellor. For the goals I’m talking about, four years seems unreasonably short and six years seems too long. It’s always had a way of working out: I dated my husband for four years, married by five. I competed in international singing competitions over a very crucial five-year period in my early twenties, perhaps a bit longer. I lived and studied in Germany for four years and moved to Toronto in the fifth. It might be that a proclivity for five years runs in my family, as all the children are five years apart, but whatever the target, I believe it can be mastered in five years or less: weight loss, home ownership, a busy performance calendar, making or adopting a baby, or my current focus—debt freedom.

While it’s all fine and good to attach a realistic time limit to pursuits, a crucial ingredient in the art of knowing what you want is facing up to your mistakes. I’ve learned this the hard way more often than I’d like to admit, but my first career-damaging mistake woke me up fast: I had one week between finishing my degree at U of T and singing my first Verdi Requiem. I decided that, during that week, in lieu of going to my graduation or practising for my performance I would get married, instead. So after four years of emails, international flights and scraping together every penny we had to see each other whenever we could, Markus and I had a perfect wedding and an enthusiastic wedding night. There was just this little Requiem for me to sing and then we could leave for Spain on our honeymoon.

The house we rented in Mojácar was nestled inside a compound of beautiful flowers. It also had a view of the ocean, which was within walking distance. While growing up, I had never experienced those destination vacations where the whole family climbs onto a plane, then tumbles out in, say, California to glamp around in a rental RV. With the Gosmans it was a trip up the road for a Baptist convention or to summer camp. I had always wanted a beach holiday, so Mojácar spelled luxury to me, and because Markus and I were together all the time, eating and being sassy newlyweds, it also felt like the best Christmas ever.

And then I called home.

Since our Spanish house didn’t have a phone—and in 1999 neither Markus nor I had cell phones—I’d been out of touch with my parents for a couple of weeks. After a pleasant chat my mother asked, “How was Peterborough?” She had her Manager Voice on and her tone indicated something had gone awry. When she called my dad to the phone, I knew I was in serious trouble. An event I’d hoped to forget came rushing back in hideous detail.

After our perfect wedding Markus and I had travelled to Peterborough, Ontario, for me to sing my very first Verdi Requiem. It is a very demanding part (at any age), but in my mind at the time, I was thinking that this concert would position us nicely to fly out of Toronto to Europe—neither the first nor the last time I would use professional pursuits as a springboard for what I ultimately wanted to be doing with my own time. Frankly, I didn’t know the music as well as I should have, so I was playing a recording of it on the drive from the airport. I was twenty-one and I knew what the standard was, but I was hoping—just this once, please!—to fly under the radar and coast through.

One of the indisputable tenets of getting what you want is putting in the work. There are no shortcuts, there are no drive-bys and there are no small gigs. If there are ears present, it’s up to me to deliver my highest standard. Does this always happen? No. But am I the one responsible for having enough under my belt and between my ears to maintain the illusion? Yes.

This would be my first real-world career experience in which I truly came up short. Because of poor preparation, I was unable to dazzle the audience with how much better I was than the pool of professionals with whom I was singing, which was my usual experience. Instead, I weighed everybody down. I had been given this wonderful opportunity, and I had squandered it because of a sense of entitlement or overconfidence or some other hubris. I had taken my eye off the ball and used my wedding as an excuse to not be good at my job. Of course I hoped no one had noticed and that I had escaped unscathed. Now my father, who was my co-manager with my mom, was telling me somebody had indeed noticed.

“Your conductor from Peterborough called me. He was very angry and he had some serious words about your performance.” He told me this could do damage to my career if it got out, so we had to figure out how to go about responding.

Standing in the oceanfront phone booth, I could feel my face drain of blood as a proverbial fist punched me in the gut and the high-pitched whistle in my ear made it difficult to hear. I was so short of breath I was afraid I was going to faint. Was my career finished before it had started? I tried to explain why I had been so unprepared, even though the words rang hollow. Excuses are so lame! I could tell from the edge in my father’s voice that he needed to know the truth, even as his paternal side was trying to protect me against the hurtful things the conductor had said. The truth was, I had blown it.

I hung up the phone in a panic. Who can help me? I decided to reach out to John Hess and Dáirine Ní Mheadhra, the producers of Beatrice Chancy. Ours was a small community, and I wanted some perspective on how this might damage me and how I could improve my situation. Though I tried hard not to cry, the tears spilled as I confessed everything to them.

As I wept into the pay phone on the beach in the south of Spain, John and Dáirine were wonderful and provided balanced, candid counsel. They told me that the conductor’s assessment might not do a great deal of damage; however, it was important for me to accept responsibility for failing to live up to my own standards.

I was still devastated, still convinced that when I returned to Canada, the customs officer would snatch my passport: “We do not allow into this country those who have messed up their debuts in the great Verdi Requiem!” Thankfully, in the end, my reputation didn’t suffer. But I knew how deeply I had failed myself. This was my first deep wound of humiliation, and because I was just twenty-one, it wouldn’t be my last.

When I did return to Canada after my honeymoon, it was with new determination and dedication to my process. It was also without the groom. Even though Markus and I were now married, we weren’t spending the summer on the same continent. He needed money to continue his studies, which meant working as a security guard in Switzerland, while I was due in Toronto for rehearsals for a remounting of Beatrice Chancy.

At the end of the summer of 1999 I enrolled in the Goethe-Institut in Düsseldorf, billeted in a woman’s home while I learned German. As well as wanting to speak my husband’s mother tongue, I knew that German was a language I hoped to use the whole of my career. I also knew that being able to speak the language fluently would cut down my workload (efficiency or bust!), since I wouldn’t be spending all my study time doing translations. It seemed easier and less time-consuming just to become fluent. Here is the first piece of advice I give to young singers: Learn your languages. Don’t be satisfied with simply doing translations.

I think it’s imperative to get the flavour of the language in your mouth so you will sound more authentic, because the devil is in the details and every language has its “tells.” For German, foreigners tend to make the closed e too narrow, or roll the r at the end of the schwa. For English, a good non-native-speaker “tell” is whether someone has mastered our odd consonant and vowel clusters, like the voiced and unvoiced th, as in the difference between through or though, which includes knowing that those vowels are u and o, respectively. Any language will have its syntax, its own natural rhythm chained together with unimportant filler words and connectors. Mistakenly stressing what is inconsequential also gives you away as a non-speaker.

Markus and I would be reunited in Düsseldorf at the end of September when my German course finished. That’s when I would begin my graduate studies with Edith Wiens at the Robert Schumann Musikhochschule, while Markus would study art history as a prelude to taking over as my manager from my parents. Turns out art history was not my husband’s bag, and he would later switch to studying international business management.

Though Edith Wiens had already accepted me as a student, I needed a certificate guaranteeing proficiency in German before I could enter the Robert Schumann Musikhochschule. After that, all my classes would be conducted in German. I was nowhere near ready to have my entire world switch over to a language I’d only been “speaking” for a month. But I was determined, because I knew I wanted to understand what was going on and have access to a culture that was not my own. Language is the passport to other worlds. Sure, you can visit places, take in the scenery and eat the food, but you’re not really there unless you can render yourself invisible. A culture’s language reveals the character and regional divides of any country. Germany was no different and I wanted total access.

Markus and I have always enjoyed an ease of being together. I’m generally annoyed by most people, but Markus has a very calming disposition. That’s not to say he’s a peaceful person. It just means he has a streamlined approach to things—something I’ve always admired. He can also make people nervous with his silence. It’s not his intention to make people nervous, of course, but over the years, I’ve learned to employ an “ears open, mouth closed” approach to any uncomfortable situation, if only to see how the situation evolves and resolves itself. Markus, perhaps in complement to me, has learned that “small talk” is just as much about making the other person feel comfortable—and showing that you have a genuine interest in having some sort of exchange—as it is about controlling the narrative and not letting tension set in where, were it not for the silence, there would be none. I’ve learned that the Swiss Germans are perfectly content to allow whole minutes to pass without so much as a peep, while us Maritime Canadians fill every millisecond with chatter. Markus and I each welcomed the other because we’d both been at either extreme for our whole lives.

We moved into our Düsseldorf apartment, our first home as a married couple, mere days before we both started school. As soon as I walked in the door, I asked Markus, who had found the apartment on a short break from his job in Switzerland, “Where’s the kitchen?”

Markus replied, “In Germany you don’t get kitchens with apartments.”

“Wait. What?”

“You bring your own kitchen, and then you take it away with you when you move out.”

News flash: Kitchens do not come standard in German apartments.

I also discovered that I still couldn’t meander through German culture on broken English or what I’d learned at the Goethe-Institut. I needed Markus to open a bank account, figure out where to buy things, read our rental agreement and tell me what an Immatrikulationsbescheinigung was when my university asked for it. (It’s a certificate of enrolment. Obvi!)

Having someone take over all the logistics that come with setting up your life away from your parents—in a new time zone, continent and language—was a big departure for me. In Fredericton Markus had been essentially living my life, in my culture, my language, my hometown. But in Düsseldorf we were in his linguistic and cultural wheelhouse. He was also more travelled than I was with all the vacations and adventures he’d had with his family while growing up. I came to trust him more as the head of the house and as a provider.

I also discovered how handy Markus was. Though we had been together four years before marrying, we had never lived together, so we didn’t know each other’s skill sets. I felt proud of how adeptly I had drilled an Ikea coat rack to the wall . . . until it ripped itself out of the wall when I tried to hang actual coats on it. Once Markus attached it, we could have both swung from it at the same time. If I assembled a piece of furniture with the raw side out, I artfully shoved that exposed section against the wall. No one could ever feel confident sitting on a chair I had put together.

After more trial and error (and badly assembled furniture), we learned that I was better at picking out and arranging the rugs, the art and the side tables, whereas Markus was better at executing their assemblage. I also took over the cooking because Markus eats for the fuel of it, whereas I eat for the fun of it.

During our four years in Germany, Markus and I lived on Canada Council and Chalmers performing arts grants, a New Brunswick Arts grant, a Sylva Gelber Music Foundation Award, plus income Markus earned during summers and money I made singing concerts and winning competitions. This amounted to about $30,000 annually, which seemed downright luxurious to me at the time.

I felt proud walking through the doors of the music school. Even though it was intimidating to know that if someone approached me and started rattling off in German, the chances of me understanding what was said (let alone being able to respond) were slim to none, I was still tickled that I was actually living in Europe. Germany! ME. The girl who grew up in Nashwaaksis was now walking through the doors of a German music school (where they spoke German!) to start not my first but my second degree as a classical singer. I remember my mind being completely blown.

Though Düsseldorf was an old industrial city, I liked what it taught me about German life. People walked instead of drove. The Germans were dependable. The bread tasted better. Düsseldorf had boutiques instead of big-box stores. The super-fancy Königsallee featured a landscaped canal lined with designer shops selling sophisticated European brands I’d never seen before. Since I’ve always possessed a supreme adoration for makeup—the skill required to apply it, its transformative powers—I was thrilled to discover a mega MAC Cosmetics store standing like a proud beacon to beauty in the heart of the Königsallee. A big moment for me was when I walked up to the counter to make my purchase with my MAC professional discount card—one of the originals from Canada.

Markus and I found a wonderful church, full of young people, offering many community programs, such as weekly ballroom dancing. Given my travel schedule, we probably made only one or two of those classes, but they were one of the only husband-wifey things we ever did as a couple, and it made me feel I might really have a chance at something resembling a normal life. And while I was away, Markus created such strong community that he was eventually asked by one of the new friends he made to be the best man at his wedding.

Life in Germany moved along swimmingly, but one very intimate event revealed an important difference in modus operandi between Markus and me.

Rewinding to the previous spring . . . Three weeks before our wedding, my dad had taken me to our family’s pharmacy in Fredericton to pick up my birth control pills. I was going to be having sex for the first time, so I needed to be proactive about contraception. Or as my father put it, “Measha, you’re a woman now, with a very busy schedule, and we need to make sure that you have everything in order.”

Six months into my marriage, now living in Düsseldorf, I said to Markus, “This is odd. I have my period and it isn’t in my one-week break.”

Markus asked, “What do you mean, your ‘one-week break’?”

I replied in a patronizing tone, “Well, let me explain the birth control pill to you. I take a pill for twenty-eight days, then I stop for a week.”

In complementary opposition to my own approach, Markus wisely read the instructions on the box, which I’d never bothered to do. Now, in full possession of the manufacturer’s point of view, he informed me, “Taking a week off doesn’t mean going without pills. This box contains a week of sugar pills to keep you in the habit of dosing during the break in your cycle.”

That’s how I discovered that Markus and I had been having sex for six months with me taking sugar pills I thought were birth control pills, then skipping a week, then sometimes forgetting to take any pill at all. Hence, me getting my period smack dab in the middle of a cycle of pills. My body had no idea what was going on.

That first year was a bit of a blur. There was so much newness and discovery. So many firsts: first year married, first language from scratch, first apartment, first trip to Ikea, first power drill! I couldn’t really keep track of the fact that time was even passing, because there were so many things to absorb and interpret.

The strongest voice in my head for four years running when it came to vocal technique had been Mary Morrison, and now I had a new mentoring voice in my head in the form of the voice teacher for whom I had made the decision to continue my studies in Germany: Edith Wiens. New terminology, the uncovering of technical shortcomings that I’d managed to squirrel away, exercising humility and exorcising bad habits. That first year was a bit of a diagnostic reconnaissance mission for both Edith and me, and it felt like I was starting all over. I was the first student to have come from such a distance to study with Edith, and she was getting her bearings as a mentor. I have distant memories of pangs of frustration and confusion as we both deciphered our bearings in our new lives, mixed with strong memories of breakthroughs and complete clarity.

After that first year in Düsseldorf, Edith accepted a teaching position in the south of Germany, so Markus and I packed up everything we owned and drove south to Augsburg, Bavaria. There was nothing for us in Düsseldorf, since I had moved to Germany to study with Edith. The possession I most remember bobbing along in the back of our van was our money tree—a generic houseplant with a braided trunk and big leaves that grows and grows and grows. We bought it at Ikea. Though it would flourish for three years in Augsburg, it did not survive our return to Canada. After its demise we bought another money tree, also from Ikea, which has since travelled in all our moving vans, dying and resurrecting as required. It’s a great plant . . . and a loyal friend.

Though I had enjoyed Düsseldorf, it wasn’t until we moved to Augsburg—a university city with cobblestone streets and a history going back to the Roman Empire—that I discovered what Germany was supposed to look like to my Canadian eyes. Our apartment, a fourth-floor walk-up, was twice as big and half as expensive. Plus, Bavarians are super fun!

The reason for our move was a pragmatic one: I wanted more of what Edith had to teach, so I would have followed her wherever she went. The change also worked for Markus, who wished to switch from art history, which he hated, to international business management, which would prove handy, since he eventually became my manager.

Who was this Edith Wiens, the voice teacher who had lured me from Canada and now across Germany?

A very striking, very blond, very charismatic and very successful recitalist and soprano is the easy answer. Born in the Canadian Prairies in 1950, in Saskatoon, daughter of a Mennonite pastor, she sang her way up through church and beyond her small-town roots—very much as I have. Though Edith would tell you she didn’t have the voice of the century, she carved out a career in which she was universally heralded and deservedly respected. She made her operatic debut at Covent Garden—no baby steps for my Edith! She performed her last public concert at age fifty, the soprano soloist in Mozart’s Requiem with the New York Philharmonic in what was then known as Avery Fisher Hall (now David Geffen Hall). Out on an upswing and with a bang. That’s my Edith.

I was there, and she was the absolute best. Kurt Masur conducted and I don’t even remember who the other soloists were. That was what Edith brought to the stage. You couldn’t look away from her and you didn’t want to, because she was giving you everything you needed—musicianship, authenticity, presence, generosity.

I first met Edith when she gave a masterclass during my third year at the University of Toronto. I was thrilled I had the opportunity to sing for her, and more thrilled later when she accepted me as a master’s student at the Robert Schumann Musikhochschule.

Edith was building her reputation (her tool chest, if you will) as a teacher, and I was the first of a wave of Canadians who travelled to Europe to study with her. (One of the reasons my German ended up improving so rapidly was that I was there with her at the beginning, before there were other English speakers to talk to.)

Understandably, Edith’s knowledge of the repertoire was nowhere near as extensive as Mary’s, but while developing her own style, she gathered knowledge like a foraging ant, visiting other teachers, discussing what I had learned from the people I’d studied with and importing experts for masterclasses at the Hochschule. We would discuss vocal technique for hours on end. I was in total heaven as we articulated the role of the hard palate in the generation of hard consonants, or whether the jaw should hinge or drop and if the motion depended on the physiology of the singer. These techy talks were interspersed with a healthy dose of career designs and strategies. The German word schlau connotes a mixture of clever and savvy. That was Edith.

When I first entered Edith’s studio, my breath support was so screwed up that my abdomen shook. She knew that had to be the first thing to go. I also knew she wouldn’t stop until a solution was found, which endeared her to me. Anyone who has met the force that is Frau Doktor Edith Wiens knows that you are better off aligning your desires and goals with hers, because chances are she will outwit, outlast and outplay you even with her dying breath. But more on that later . . .

Edith was and is an impeccable musician. She taught me to prioritize the text and use all that the voice has to offer, in order to paint a picture through the words. She always served the music and left her pride at the door, because sometimes the colour you need might not be the prettiest, but it is the most effective and appropriate. She was the first voice teacher I studied with who concerned herself with what the audience would see or feel because of what you, the singer-performer-communicator, had to share. And according to Edith, singing is an act of servitude. “People can see you!” she would declare. She would enjoin, “Tell me what Schumann heard and saw in you when he decided to write this song cycle for you.” She used this image of a mama hippo pouring water into a baby hippo’s mouth: a massive stream of water flowing into a much smaller space. She would say, “The audience wants the music you have to share, but you have to make the current big enough for it to flow into their mouths and hearts. Your musicianship must get past the footlights of the stage and to the very back row of the hall. You have to fill all the entire space with YOU.”

She taught me how to choose music that spoke to me. Regardless of difficulty, the piece should feel like it was written for me. I was to be a muse—a vessel from which music flowed unobstructed. That meant I had to be in sync with a piece with regard to my vocal strengths, my brand of charisma and my technique. Edith also taught me that a performer’s power is the ability to show his or her personality while paying homage to the accuracy of the composition. It’s the cooperation between both that creates the synergistic electricity of the live classical performance. Otherwise, you might as well stay home and listen to the recording.

Today I don’t have to hear a piece of music to know whether it’s for me. I look at the tempo and the range and how many notes there are. Because frankly, at this point I know that singing fast is not my jam. This isn’t to say that I avoid coloratura. I just think there are singers who do it much better than I do. Since my strengths are colour, range, risk, humour, diction and drama, I discard songs that are just pretty or pyrotechnical and opt for the good story and interesting soundscape. Ditto if I see a lot of sixteenth notes above the staff. There are singers just dying to get their hands on those high sixteenth notes. But not this one. Show me an adagio tempo marking with plenty of long, sad, slow, meaningful space into which I can expand and I’ll look closer at the text and decide if I have anything to say about the subject matter. I can also do “funny”—something else I learned from Edith—which can mean creating a moment of unexpected irreverence, providing relief from all the sadness, releasing the pressure valve when you’ve elevated everything to a fever pitch.

Edith was the reason I became primarily a concert singer rather than an opera singer. I knew opera would be there when I felt ready but that the art of the song recital required a precision that I used my studies in Germany to explore, expand and embrace. I also knew I could never learn from a better source than Edith, because she also had the career I wanted. Her concerts were all about charisma, magnetism and energy-driven intimacy. She could have programmed the phone book and people would be on the edge of their seats, hanging on her every word. Like Edith, I wanted people to not only enjoy my singing but to also feel that when I stepped out on that stage, I was the only singer they wanted to hear . . . and see. That, by conveying my truest self and strengths as a singer, the audience is getting more than just the notes. They’re witnessing where investment meets artistry and vulnerability meets risk.

While I have nothing but praise for Edith’s skills, I also observed that she had a highly emotional dark side. Whereas I’d been trained by teachers who were all about the work, Edith was quite skilled in psychological warfare. Though she knew how to kill with kindness, she did not respond well to resistance. She could get inside people’s heads and make them do her bidding. It reminded me of this quote from Goethe’s “Der Erlkönig” that hung on the wall of a voice teacher I’d studied with at the Boston Conservatory: Und bist du nicht willig so brauch ich Gewalt! “And if you’re not willing, I’ll have to use force!” (It’s what Goethe’s Erlkönig says to the young child when he refuses his advances.)

I was sympathetic to the struggles a strong personality confronts when faced with the wilting flowers who sometimes walk into your studio. What does an ambitious career singer who has been to the mountaintop even say to an eighteen-year-old who’s doing a singing degree “for fun”? Or to the mousy, sexually confused tenor who only wants to sing loud and high? I do believe that people who take up a space in a performance degree program should do so knowing that they’re taking that space away from someone who’s potentially a better worker, hungrier and shows up with fire in the belly. Early on, Edith had time for those people with fire and borderline contempt for anyone else. I did not get sucked into Edith’s force field, because frankly, I agreed with her. I would say we were allies as much as anyone can be in a teacher-student relationship. I kept things professional because I saw our interaction as a means to an end, and I think she respected that. Plus, I wanted what she had and I acknowledge that we share a lot of the same characteristics.

Like Edith, I can get people to forgive me for all kinds of crimes because I’m loyal and they believe what I contribute is worth the price. Like Edith, I am goal-oriented and ambitious. Edith is a champion who knows how to win. She recognized that same animal instinct in me—a characteristic I had previously downplayed, perhaps to appear more humble. It’s likely a Canadian thing. It’s definitely a Maritimer thing. Through Edith, I learned that I could climb to the top using my own ladder. And I didn’t need to look sideways to do it. I could keep my blinders on and just keep going up and up. Edith encouraged the champion in me and had little patience for students without that killer instinct. In those early days of her teaching career when I was with her, she left wreckage in her wake, though I know she evolved to have a broader empathy. She now teaches at the Juilliard School in New York City. The top of the mountain. Where she belongs.

It was because of my teacher Edith’s encouragement that I entered and won so many international competitions while stationed in Germany. This included taking it all at the inaugural 2002 Jeunesses Musicales International Musical Competition held in Montreal; the second prize in the 2003 Queen Sonja International Music Competition held in Oslo, with a special prize for my interpretation of Edvard Grieg; the highest prize at the Wigmore Hall International Song Competition in London; and the highest prizes at the George London Foundation in New York, the Robert Schumann Wettbewerb in Germany, the ARD Music Competition in Munich and the International Vocal Competition in ’s-Hertogenbosch in 2004.

From a young age, I have loved competition. It’s connected to my respect of a formula for success: be charismatic, be precise, be good. And for goodness sakes, know who’s on the jury! Don’t pound your head against a brick wall, trying to prove someone wrong. The fact is, not everyone is going to like what you do. If you’re a heavy voice, don’t go compete for a jury lined with light-voiced Lieder singers and expect to be the first heavy voice the jury ever liked. No one is objective, least of all classical musicians. If you’re a counter-tenor, don’t go to a competition that has never given any prizes to a counter-tenor. I did not go to competitions to protest and fight or to prove a point. I went to competitions to get paid. We are all human, and often we want to see ourselves—or the selves we wish we were—walk away with the money. So pick your tribe, compete in front of them and then get yourself to the bank.

For the first round at these competitions, a contestant was usually asked to perform one piece from a particular era of classical music; for the second round, the jury might select the piece for the contestant; for the third round, the contestant might be given the opportunity to present a mini-program, with various components; and for the final, sometimes with orchestra, the contestant, in addition to core repertoire, might also be required to sing an imposed or commissioned work from a living composer. I never went into these competitions with anything but the safest of repertoire, within reason. Safe for me might be risky for you. Modern for me might be downright weird for you. I might be John Cage, while you are Korngold. Your Schubert might be my Brahms.

Among my happy competition memories, I have one very unpleasant one. During a competition in Zwickau, in the former East Germany, I was competing in the Robert Schumann International Wettbewerb with Tobias Truniger, an all-round great guy and the pianist from Edith’s studio, who now coaches at the opera in Munich. Zwickau also happened to be hosting a Trabant car convention. The attitude of some of those who’d come out to fawn over this Communist-produced vehicle was disgusting. I felt safe while at the competition, but fans of the Trabant were so rude to me as I walked from my apartment to the venue that I feared something dangerous might happen.

During a free afternoon, Markus and I attended a marathon of the horror movie franchise Scream. A group behind us began throwing popcorn at me, touching my hair and shouting insults in German: “Black garbage!” “How do you expect us to see through all that hair?”

I said to myself, You know what? I deserve to be here. Bolting up, I told them in perfect German, “I understand what you’re saying to me and you should be ashamed of yourselves.” My German was even good enough to add, “Stop being a bag of assholes and let everyone watch the movie!” (I had just learned the German word for bag—Tüte—and was pretty proud to have used it here.)

This incident was so hurtful because I had come to like the Germans, and living in Germany, so much during my years of study. And I still do! But I had to go all the way to Zwickau to experience my first incident of overt racism, and it will always be associated with that culture and language, unfortunately.

My time in Germany also gave me the opportunity to get another kick at singing the Verdi Requiem—which I had messed up in Peterborough—this time conducted by Helmuth Rilling, in Bonn, Stuttgart and Berlin. Maestro Rilling had insisted that I replace the soprano originally contracted to sing the gig. The Requiem remains one of my favourite works, and you can bet that I know every part with my eyes closed, inside and out, forward and backward!

I am pleased to be able to look back on all the times that I failed or suffered some private embarrassment, because I know that these usually came down to not being prepared. It’s liberating to put my finger on the problem instead of trying to convince myself that external factors were to blame. Whether it was the problems that would emerge in my marriage, getting my babies to kindergarten on time or showing up to the first piano rehearsal with the conductor, I know that the success of any given event in my life is directly linked to how much time and effort I put into being ready for it. And I share this not only to encourage you but also to illustrate the nature of forgiveness. If I hadn’t forgiven myself for so royally screwing up my first Verdi Requiem, I would have never made room in my heart and mind for the promise of redemption with one of the world’s most legendary conductors. I don’t believe in luck, because it takes too much of my power away, in addition to robbing God of His sovereignty over my life. Luck leaves too much to chance. Through a series of missteps and bad judgments, I have come to believe in preparation leading to opportunity. And I have the receipts! I learned my languages, I used my summers for work not vacation, I put the granola bars that my babies eat for breakfast on the way to kindergarten in the car the night before, and I try to memorize useful Bible verses to keep me from losing my cool when push comes to shove. I have to be prepared for battle, ready for the fight and forging victoriously forward into the career for which I believed I had been groomed my whole life.

In December 2004, I made my recital debut at Carnegie Hall with Roger Vignoles. By then, I had concluded my studies with Edith Wiens, and Markus and I had moved from Augsburg to an apartment in Toronto’s High Park neighbourhood. Markus was my manager and my career was our baby.

On the morning of my first recital at Carnegie, I knew enough to wake up terrified. No matter how much I tried to convince myself otherwise, this was not just another hall. I let myself feel that terror instead of pushing it down, then gave myself time to regroup and conquer. My art and my responsibility to an audience mattered too much to allow any unnecessary self-indulgence. It might seem strange to say this, because as an artist and storyteller, I’m meant to be conveying raw authenticity, but to do my job effectively, I have to shut off personal emotions. In classical singing the impression of emotion is what is most effective. Its actual manifestation is unhelpful because it impedes resonance and cripples breath control. The audience is meant to feel what I am conveying, while I, on the other hand, am not. I guess it’s called acting. I am describing an emotion with my voice and my body, commenting on it in words. Being it, but not experiencing it. Even thinking I am sad will give me the posture and approach I need, the inflection that allows the audience to feel what I can’t allow myself to feel. This was something I had to learn—that less is more. It came from realizing the strength of the music combined with my stage presence and how sucked into me people already are, allowing me to ration my output rather than stretch myself beyond the footlights. Economize. To always leave a comfortable 20 percent in the tank.

Before my Carnegie performance, Mary Morrison coached me into my comfort zone by warming me up on the Carnegie Hall stage just like when I was a teenager and we were in the bowels of the University of Toronto Faculty of Music. I was so happy to be sharing this moment with Mary. It was exactly how I’d hoped my Carnegie debut would go, because my respect for Mary Morrison is on par with my desire to please my parents.

This pivotal concert was also enormous because Jim Myles, my high school musical director, had organized a bus tour to travel to my New York debut from my hometown of Fredericton. It was such a generous gesture that I still don’t feel as though I’ve ever fully expressed my gratitude to him and all those New Brunswickers who invested the time and money to be in New York City for me. It remains one of the most singular moments of my career.

Jim died suddenly of a massive heart attack during the writing of this book. I was sitting in Westminster Abbey in London, England, waiting to sing for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and members of the Royal Family for the mass celebrating International Commonwealth Day. Fifty-two countries—the member states of the Commonwealth—were represented and I was chosen to be the soloist to start the festivities. I was to sing an unaccompanied spiritual on the centre steps of the sanctuary, and as you can imagine, it was a highly pressurized atmosphere, so when I felt my phone vibrate with the news of Jim’s passing, I didn’t want to engage. I would deal with it later. I had to deal with the task at hand. This was not the time to get emotional. My performance was being broadcast worldwide by the BBC, live on television and online. But my phone kept buzzing. People wanting me to know about Jim, or wondering if I had heard, or offering their condolences. All I could think of was his family—his wife, Carmel, and their four boys, the youngest of whom, David, a singer-songwriter, I admired and had collaborated with. I couldn’t think of how best to harness the grief that threatened to surface, and then I remembered how much Jim loved the Queen. I thought of how tickled he would have been that not only had I made it to Carnegie Hall and he had witnessed it but also that I had been hand-picked to represent my country at Westminster Abbey and sing for the Queen and her family. I know Mr. Myles was there, too. He just had a better seat.

Just like in Westminster Abbey, thirteen years earlier at Carnegie Hall I experienced a nauseating mixture of pressure, glee, acceptance and singularity. The girl who grew up in the Maritimes and went away to do something strange that few people understand. I feel completely displaced most of the time and did then, but here were these familiar faces from my community, led by Jim Myles, cheering me on in this exotic and reputedly exclusive concert hall. I wonder if it was weird for them watching someone they had taught or babysat or spoon-fed or directed or gotten plastered with walk on that stage. I wonder if it perplexed them or if it made perfect sense, like a circle completing itself.

My recital program was Maurice Ravel, Joseph Marx, Xavier Montsalvatge, Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland, William Bolcom. At the end of the recital, the hometown crowd draped a New Brunswick flag over the first balcony of Weill Hall.

Fan-bloody-tastic.

I sang three encores, and afterwards a reception was held for me at a nearby restaurant, hosted by Pamela Wallin. Lorna MacDonald, head of voice studies at U of T and a fellow Maritimer, was there. I sometimes picture them all gathered together: Lorna, along with Edith Wiens, Wendy Nielsen, Dianne Wilkins and Mabel Doak. My life’s Royal Family. With Mary, of course, as the Queen Mother.

This is the monarchy that has governed my craft.

When I look back at my career during the first decade and a half of the 2000s, it’s a haze of significant firsts and golden opportunities for which I worked extremely hard: repeated recitalist and soloist in London’s Wigmore and Royal Albert Halls, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Spivey Hall in Atlanta, the Kennedy Center, Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, as well as halls in Oslo, Helsinki and Reykjavik, all over Europe, and eventually all the halls in Carnegie. I sang the major festivals of Edinburgh, Bergen, Tuscany and Verbier.

I would share the stage with Bill and Melinda Gates during the 2006 opening ceremonies of the XVI International AIDS Conference in Toronto, and in March 2006 an invitation to appear on Bravo TV’s award-winning Live at the Rehearsal Hall allowed me to create a musical partnership with Aaron Davis, who would become the lynchpin in my non-classical career. For the televised collaboration, I split the program into a classical half, in which I collaborated with Jacques Israelievitch on violin (may he rest in peace) and Cameron Stowe on piano, followed by a non-classical half of hymns, jazz standards and selections from the Canadian Songbook, with Aaron Davis on piano, Marc Rogers on bass and John Johnson on woodwinds. For our live-to-tape performance before a studio audience, I wore a gorgeous black-and-white, all-feather bolero by Canadian designer Wayne Clarke and jewellery by Myles Mindham.

Aaron and I worked together once again, for the 2008 Junos, when I sang his arrangement of the Oscar Peterson–Elvis Costello song “When Summer Comes.” The band was stacked. Through my musical relationship with Aaron, I have met and worked with so many of the gigging, studio-recording, go-to living legends because he knows them all and they love working with him. In addition to Johnny Johnson and Marc Rogers, I’ve breathed musical air with Rob Piltch, George Koller, Kevin Turcotte, Davide Direnzo, Carlos del Junco, Marty Melanson and Dave Burton, to name but a few. I love them all and I have Aaron to thank for meeting them all.

I have had what could best be described as an obsession with Aaron Davis since high school, when Geoff Cook and I would carpool home from the Sunday-evening service at Brunswick Street United Baptist Church, blasting the Holly Cole Trio’s album Don’t Smoke in Bed, with Aaron’s solo on “I Can See Clearly Now” on repeat. That Aaron and I would go on to work together for over a decade is nothing short of a dream come true for me.

I wouldn’t have explored to the artistic depths I have if I hadn’t had Aaron underwriting my choices and taking for granted that I was simply qualified and deserving of these opportunities to expand myself vocally and compositionally. I honestly don’t think my career would have even led me to writing this book if I hadn’t first set my sights on making him like and respect me. I have revered his gentle genius since I was a teenager, and his uniquely warm but funky aesthetic has grown to inform so many of my own musical choices. Quite simply put, he gave me wings to dare to define myself as Artist, instead of caving to tradition and confining myself to Soprano.

Not long after starting to work with Aaron, I rang in New Year’s 2007 by singing “Auld Lang Syne” for a crowd of forty thousand in Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square. At the composer’s request, I sang Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now,” as one in a group of three artists invited to induct her songs into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame that year. I’d always admired Joni’s passion and was deeply honoured to have been tasked with interpreting “Both Sides Now” for the televised CBC broadcast. I won my first Gemini for that performance. During the private hang afterwards in Joni’s suite at Toronto’s King Edward Hotel, I found myself sandwiched between Joni and Chaka Khan, who, along with James Taylor, had also been summoned to Toronto to sing for Joni’s induction. Chaka had been accompanied by Herbie Hancock (this was where we met for the first time). I recall him sitting at the end of the suite’s luxuriously long couch on which we all found ourselves laughing, drinking (except for Herbie, who is a Buddhist) and reminiscing. I did not contribute much in the way of conversation because I wanted to be sure to remember every millisecond of this privileged, fly-on-the-wall evening. Chaka was reciting lines from Joni’s songs, and Joni was chain-smoking and laughing her lusty, smoky laugh. Herbie was grinning like he’d been given all the punchlines beforehand, and I remember thinking, I hope I never think this is normal . . .

In July of that year, I made my debut at the Royal Nova Scotia International Tattoo, singing “Con te partirò,” the duet made famous by Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman. The snobs among you might wrongfully judge this plebeian, but you sing anything with three full brass bands, hundreds of bagpipes and a full chorus to a sold-out arena and get back to me with how powerful that feels.

Later that July I debuted with the New York Philharmonic in Central Park. Sir Andrew Davis conducted. After pouring crazy amounts of rain, the sky cleared and sixty-five thousand people turned up. I remember being preoccupied about how to address my conductor: Sir Andrew? Sir Davis? Sir Andrew Davis? I settled on “Maestro.” He could not have been kinder to me. I wore a hopeful purple-and-green dress (designed for me by Canadian designer Rosemarie Umetsu) and sang arias by Catalani, Massenet and Weber, along with “Summertime.” My photo would be published in The New York Times with the newly announced chief conductor of the New York Philharmonic, Alan Gilbert, the successor to Lorin Maazel, and an old buddy from our times at the Verbier Festival in Switzerland.

Despite its international context, the classical world is pretty teensy. For my debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, I performed a program of songs from Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn conducted by Jaap van Zweden, who would succeed Alan Gilbert as chief conductor at the New York Philharmonic.

The crowd in Central Park was breathtaking, but I think the most eyes had to have been on me when I sang the “Olympic Hymn” in the opening ceremonies for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games to a stadium of sixty thousand people, plus a TV audience of 3.2 billion, I remember every second, every syllable, every emotion.

At almost forty, I feel blessed to be able to look backward and forward. I have had incredibly fond experiences singing Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mi with Daniel Harding, on tour with the London Symphony Orchestra, and Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass, also with the LSO, with Michael Tilson Thomas—a loyal collaborator, visionary, maverick and pioneer; and a force I am privileged to call Friend, along with his beautiful husband, Joshua. With Franz Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra, I sang and recorded Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 and, later, Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, which would be nominated for a Grammy, which I would lose to Cecilia Bartoli (not that anyone “loses” to Cecilia Bartoli). I didn’t go to the actual Grammys because I was giving a recital in Spivey Hall in Atlanta on the same day. I found out at the intermission that I didn’t win but was grateful for the singular experience of being nominated—I simply hadn’t expected to win.

When he exploded onto the international classical music scene, Gustavo Dudamel, whose conducting genius was groomed and nurtured by the incomparable El Sistema program in Venezuela, and I made our respective conducting and singing debuts with the Israel Philharmonic performing Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. Gustavo and I would go on to collaborate at the Hollywood Bowl for his inaugural concert as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Here, I would be reunited with Herbie Hancock, who was also on the program!

I sang Mendelssohn’s Elijah with the Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal and Yannick Nézet-Séguin the night Barack Obama won his second term as POTUS, and I did an international tour with the Ensemble Intercontemporain and the composer and conductor Peter Eötvös, singing his Snatches of a Conversation and Luciano Berio’s Recital I for Cathy, with Jeff Cohen on piano.

That’s a bit of a highlight reel, and I’m grateful that on and on it continues to go.

During all my travels, I’ve learned to allow twenty-four hours to recover from jet lag, thanks to the in-flight air that is usually several decades old. It’s honestly my Achilles’ heel. I’ve lived with the knowledge of my singing voice from age seven, and I used to take its resilience for granted. When cigarettes were banned from bars, I honestly did a little jig because it meant I could finally spend time in them without fear of damaging my voice. Other kinds of vocal kryptonite for me include screaming (no theme-park roller coasters or overly outraged parenting), cold air (no long winter walks for me, thank you) and boisterous sex (a massive sacrifice).

Dryness for any voice is death. The voice loves to be wet, so a humidifier is essential. When none is available, I run the shower. An apple, orange, grapes or any juicy kind of fruit or plain salted chips are what I snack on while warming up because they activate the saliva and lube everything up. Some singers can’t eat before they sing. I am not one of them. Nothing annoys me more than going onstage hungry. If I could eat and sing, I’d honestly have it made. Praise the Lord that I’m not cursed with acid reflux! I know opera singers whose careers have ended because of it, and others who are forced to sleep in an upright position to avoid it.

But let’s be honest. No one would ever describe me as the Queen of Healthy Living. My attention to those details has fluctuated during my career. I’ve gone through periods where I’ve been resentful of the sacrifices I’ve had to make for the health of my instrument, and thus have let the pendulum swing a little too much in the other direction. This rebellion increases my pre-stage anxiety but expands my quality of life and keeps me connected to my humanity by helping me stay connected to things I really enjoy, like swimming in a public pool, drinking coffee, talking in a loud place, boisterous sex (because who wants to live without that) and the occasional smoke—a pretty common practice among opera singers, believe it or not.

I love singing, and I love making my living as a singer, but sometimes I feel like I spend so much time working against my baser inclinations, which are to procrastinate, drink lots of wine and smoke weed all day. I know I can’t be the only human—let alone classical singer, woman, parent or Christian—who feels this way. My desire to make my life all about my job has ebbed and flowed throughout the years, and as I get older, I understand that the strength of character that fuels the artistry is just as crucial as the art itself. You can’t possibly hope for the audience to believe your humanity if you don’t in fact live as a bona fide human. There is a kind of exchange of empathy between me and my audience that has come to influence me more than anything the so-called music industry has to say. It might have something to do with being on the brink of forty, having thirty-three singing years under my belt—and very few f***s left to give.

Part of the magic of feeling free in this job is making sure you have the right representation. I get asked a lot about how to secure artistic management. The answer isn’t easy, because a classical singer should be looking for a general manager with whom he or she can envision clear long-term goals. You are to audition them as much as they are to court you. Never pay a retainer, under any circumstances, and take your time until you find someone who gets you. I’ve switched agencies once in my whole career and I wouldn’t have switched if I hadn’t been forced to. The larger agencies offer name recognition to get your foot in the door, while the boutique agencies have the strength of personally pounding the pavement for you and building customized brands. I went from the first one to the second one, and after a brief period of panic at the prospect of being adrift with no one to represent my professional interests, I found the glorious Alan Coates of Keynote Artist Management in London to spearhead my classical music interests worldwide.

To tell it from the beginning, my journey to management started in 2003. Shortly before I left Germany, I auditioned and was accepted into the Steans Music Institute, the Ravinia Festival’s summer young-artist program. For three weeks we received masterclasses by musical luminaries and private coaching from an internationally renowned faculty. I chose to feel excited rather than threatened that I was in a group of peers who forced me to raise my own game. Such a choice required almost daily reinforcement.

Ravinia—a young-adult summer camp for the exceptionally talented—proved to be a crucial touchstone in my career. Most notably, Bill Palant, then working for IMG Artists—one of the largest agencies—heard all of Ravinia’s young artists and chose me and one other Canadian, Joseph Kaiser, as potential artists for his roster. Bill and I courted each other for about a year before he heard me sing Liù in Puccini’s Turandot with Cincinnati Opera. After that he became my loyal agent for all things classical, someone invested in proactively building a career rather than expecting it to just happen. The preceding professional hit parade was brought to you courtesy of Bill Palant’s belief in my artistry.

Bill Palant also connected me to Deutsche Grammophon, the Holy Grail of classical recording companies. In 2007 I released my first DG album, Surprise!, featuring cabaret songs by William Bolcom, Arnold Schoenberg and Erik Satie, sung in English, German and French, respectively. I preferred this personality-driven overture to the international classical recording scene over the more traditional debut album of “opera hits.” Surprise! won more than a few awards, but I have a soft spot for it winning the 2008 Juno Award for Classical Album of the Year.

Bill would eventually leave IMG and start his own boutique agency. Despite many conversations and the hope that what we’d built together would be enough to sustain his transition to a smaller collection of artists, he chose to not take me with him. I was shocked and devastated. I am fiercely loyal and had expected the same in return. But sometimes our destiny is presented to us through a process of elimination. As it turned out, Bill’s dropping me from his roster forced me to reacquaint myself with an industry with which I’d had to have very limited contact on a managerial level because I’d always believed where I was had roots deep enough to weather the storm of a changing industry. In fending for myself, I became aware of the remodelling of the classical landscape. Plus, it was a little over ten years since I’d been “on the market,” and big agencies were taking on more artists but not more managers. It had gotten to the point where people who had been interns for less than a year were suddenly in charge of entire artists’ calendars and careers. Cost-saving measures were overriding the traditional, impresario-like priorities of the old-school classical agent. I know more than a few managers who left their large conglomerates to start up outfits that allowed them to add the personal touch that had attracted them to classical management in the first place but that had all but disappeared from their workplaces. This shift in the industry has provided a bastion for the reputably unique, nonconformist classical artist or ensemble. It has also forced some pretty big fish into smaller, more personalized, pools where, believe it or not, they’re able to actually swim more freely. I am one such artist.

My agent Alan Coates and his colleagues at Keynote Artist Management could be the poster children for the wave to quench the thirst in the industry for managers who will cultivate a roster of artists from various disciplines at various points in their careers, invest in their long- and short-term goals and stick by them to facilitate their artistic objectives. Alan came along right when I needed him, and I pray that if someone picks up this book twenty years from now, that person will read this, smile and say, “Aha, so that’s how their story started.”

The same can be said of my non-classical management. Evan Newman of Outside Music, Steve Zsirai of Zed Music Inc., and Tom Kemp of The Feldman Agency handle all my intangibles: the “dream projects” that I try to keep off the radar of the super-judgy subsection of the classical world—lest I muddy the waters for the purists. Well, the cat’s out of the bag, because these guys are too good at their job! All the folks in my camp, classical or otherwise, are ready and enthusiastic about working together. They understand that the unclassifiability of my output IS my brand. That the career I want isn’t one that exists yet. Meaning, I’m hoping to break the mould and empower other artists to do the same. I can’t be the only opera singer who wants to do chamber music on tour in non-traditional venues at different times of day in order to attract a new audience or just shake things up. I can’t be the only soprano who is influenced and inspired by non-classical music and is willing to work just as hard to be as stylistically correct in other genres as I am in French mélodie or German Lieder or Spanish canción. For all my touting of nonconformist liberalism, it really all comes down to using the appropriate voice at the appropriate time in the appropriate place with the appropriate instrumentalists and singers. I am deeply grateful that the management I have now understands and celebrates that.

Beyond having a team who understand me well enough to facilitate my professional designs, I have to give them something to work with. The quality of my singing works in tandem with the strength of my appearance, with the ultimate goal of creating a complete package. Thankfully, I was raised to be a bit of a clothes horse. I come by it honestly, because my parents have always taken pride in their appearance. To this day I’ve never seen my father anything but clean-shaven. He is always immaculately dressed and presents himself to the world with self-respect, dignity and good posture. Additionally, my mother is my sole icon of beauty. She has a closet full of clothes that she presses, hems and tailor-fits to her petite frame. She also has flawless skin (“the best accessory,” as makeup artist Jackie Shawn once told me) and knows to never throw anything out because it will always come back in style. She made all my gowns in my early career. The truth may have been that we didn’t have the money to buy new, but the consequence was I looked better and stood taller than anyone next to me, because I was the pride of my parents.

As a result, part of my professional armour has become my wardrobe. It could be that I believe it is entirely possible to “fake it to make it.” As in, if you look good, you will be good. If you smile, you’ll be happy. If you keep your legs moving, your lips talking, your eyes focused and your hands steady, you’re halfway there. Good posture communicates so much to the world around you because, as I often tell singers who lack confidence, the audience sees you before they hear you! Your posture can project confidence and make people think that you know what time it is. Sometimes that’s all you need to get in the door . . . or the club. An appropriate, self-reflecting wardrobe—and the confidence with which you wear it—is essential to your undercover mission of Total World Domination (TWD)!

My foundational style is dictated by comfort and convenience. About seven years ago, during a concert with Maestro Robert Spano at Symphony Hall in Atlanta, I realized I couldn’t feel my feet. My tight shoes had cut off all the blood circulation to my tootsies. Throughout my final measures, I shifted back and forth from foot to foot, trying to create more blood flow. It didn’t work. I knew that once the music ended and the applause started I would have to bow, extend my hand to the conductor and hold his hand while we bowed together. Next, I would have to shake the hand of the concert-master and—somehow—manage to walk off the stage. I remember thinking, I’ll have to exit doing that weird hot-potato dance—hoo hah! hoo hah! And that’s exactly what ended up happening.

That experience taught me one thing: no more shoes; it’s not worth it. Why should I suffer for the occasional peek of footwear from under my floor-length gown? Far better to lengthen my skirts so that the hems pool on the floor, hiding blissfully comfortable bare feet, than to subject my fans to more hot-potato dances.

The way I see it, in this life there is enough discomfort to endure. You don’t have to invite it on yourself.

Once I started travelling more and doing higher-profile gigs, I saw my relationship to Canadian designers as my own mini Canadian ambassadorship. Early on when I was still heavy, I usually wore a basic black velvet gown, splashed with colourful shawls that I would switch at intermission. This style developed because in Germany I was no longer available for fittings with my mother, my original gown maker (though to this day she would still only claim that she “does a little sewing”). The black dress provided a neutral canvas for the versatile shawls—made perhaps of chartreuse satin or a fuchsia silk blend—which I draped in ever more ingenious ways, pinning the shawls precisely in place to avoid a wardrobe malfunction or any fussing with them. They also taught me discipline, since I needed to train myself to never touch them while performing. I’d learned early on how distracting fidgeting can be, and it became one of my biggest pet peeves to see classical performers mess with their clothing onstage. Hello? We can see you. And that shawl or scarf or tie or jacket or bead of sweat or fallen hair curl is not who I bought tickets to see, so for the love of all things right and just, please stop making it the star of your show!

On the last birthday of this decade, when I was going through a particularly rough time, I decided to dye my hair platinum blond. I think I’d always wanted blond hair, but for a black girl from the dark side of Fredericton, it seemed a little ridiculous. I had originally planned to shave my head clean but thought better of it once I did a little reminiscing about the Britney Spears green umbrella incident, where she spiralled into more than a few well-documented cries for help. So I backed away from the head-shaving option. I kept the length and changed the colour, instead.

If I’m being honest, I think I needed to hang on to the femininity that is traditionally associated with long hair. I’m not saying Jada and Halle aren’t droppin’ it like it’s hot. I just mean that I wanted to feel like I could stand shoulder to shoulder with them before I did the chop. Things were kinda raw then in the Brueggergosman camp, and I didn’t want to cut my hair out of desperation. I wanted my choice to be completely rooted in style and not because I was trying to make my life simpler. At that point in my life, given everything that was not working, I clung to everything that was workin’, honey.

And thank God I did! I had no idea the year that I was in for. Despite the success in my career, my personal life was on fire. My marriage had broken down (for the second and, what looks like, final time) and I was shocked to discover that I was broke. I had never had anything to do with our finances, and the realities of getting a divorce and taking over my house given my dire money situation was beginning to take its toll. I didn’t even know what a heat pump was or how to pay a cell phone bill—let alone where the money was going to come from to pay it. Then there were the implications of starting to parent my boys on my own—one of whom is gifted, with anger-management issues—while also maintaining my career (because it was sure not the time to get sick or stop making money). Putting out fire after fire after fire was overwhelming me.

All this to say that during the hard days of my thirty-ninth year, a simple compliment about my hair was sometimes all the encouragement I got. Something that might seem so superficial, from a stranger or a colleague, could douse the flames of self-doubt and panic that were threatening to consume me. Please consider that the next time you want to compliment someone but think better of it for whatever reason. There is never a bad time to give a compliment. You never know. It could be the one thing that keeps the recipient from giving up. Your compliment could be the perfectly timed push he or she needs to make it through that day. For me, there were some days when I was so close to not getting out of bed. Yet I knew I would because there was no way forward but through. And the compliments on my hair made me feel fierce for the fight!

I refused to lose hope. And circumstances that I could not have foreseen (or afforded) entered in. As I type on my seven-year-old MacBook Pro in a poolside room in the mountains at Tree of Life Cabinas in southern Costa Rica, I am humbled by the expanse and variety of my life up to this point. There is no way I can afford to be here on my own, but somehow, I am listening to the jungle sounds while I try to keep from sweating to death. How can I not think everything’s going to be as it’s meant to be? When the receipts are read, the “it’s complicated” wife of Markus Bruegger and Mama to Shepherd Peter and Sterling Markus stayed juicy, adventurous and imperfect the whole of her life. And she wrote this book that let her lay herself bare and hopefully helped other people do the same.

Yes, my husband has moved out of our home, my finances have blown up (in a bad way), but my artistry is redefining itself (in a good way). On balance, my heart has expanded several times, my heart has broken several times, but it has also been strengthened every time in the healing. Rinse and repeat. That has essentially been this banner year for me. How I experience and react to all “the stuff” is at the fore of my mind. “Stuff” like touring what I consider to be my most personal album to date, Songs of Freedom; singing for Her Majesty the Queen of England (again); defending Madeline Ashby’s Company Town all the way to the finals of a national book show called Canada Reads; and ending it all by making sure my babies were well taken care of so that I could take my newly blond half-shaven head to Costa Rica for two weeks and put the cherry on the sundae of this period in my life. Being here at my friends Ben and Nate’s slice of heaven on earth ties a big red bow on a year that has been a verifiable shit-storm of all that could possibly burn up and take me with it in the process. But I remain standing and so will you. Whether the storms are here or their arrival is pending—some hurricane, tornado or firestorm hits us all eventually.

The most extreme emotional, financial and spiritual battles I’ve had to face to date have helped me to see how my mother’s example of not throwing any quality article of clothing away would lead to an accumulation of clothing (and cosmetics) that has sustained me in my job and my life, since I have no money to buy anything new. I believe what we choose to wear, in addition to being a reflection of who we are, can also tell the story we want people to believe. I have known true discomfort, and at least where my wardrobe is concerned, I don’t see the need to experience it while doing the job I love.

I’m confident that the unpredictability and instability of my thirty-ninth year will leave me standing in a truer version of my Self than I’ve ever known. The process of getting there won’t be graceful or neat. At least, it hasn’t been so far. One of the things I love about the teachings of the incredible Christian scholar and orator Bishop T. D. Jakes is that he states there is no way to be both effective and pretty. In his words: “The only way to become a wise woman is through the stupid things you’ve done.” And if you’re thinking, If that’s true, then I should be Solomon by now, then you’re my people. Everything in my life right now is an open wound, and I’m not going to keep stitching it up, because I’m coming to believe that I’m the most effective when I’m the most broken. I have to believe God can use someone who isn’t a perfect parent, or who has survived divorce, or who is under a crushing debt load. What keeps me from total despair is that I can’t be disqualified from grace because I cheated on my husband or have back taxes to pay. I refuse to lie down and curse myself for the sins of my past. Besides, I’m too busy building an empire to feel ashamed and guilty all the time. I am not defined by my mistakes, and instead, I will use them to encourage as many people as will listen, because the presence of dirt in my life is also the presence of Truth and Beauty.

Once you come to a place where you acknowledge your worthiness and create (or even elbow into existence) the space you need to move forward, ready and hungry for your purpose, how do you go about reaching your goals? Accomplishing your desires? Hitting your mark? Fulfilling your destiny?

How do you get what you want?

However you phrase it, I hope you’ll forgive me for simplifying, but . . . well . . . you ask. The act of asking is in itself its own first step. It requires precision, succinctness and articulation.

Who do you ask?

Whoever’s got the power to give you what you want.

This may require some courage. This may require a good look in the mirror. This may also be where opinions might diverge, because this could also be a chance to get all existential, which might result in you doing nothing since what would be the point in fighting the inevitable? What I hope is that it results in the realization that no one has control over anything. Including who you think might have the power to control your own fate.

But then, who is in control? I mean for sure, for sure. I know what I believe, but I can’t say for sure. No one can. So then, perhaps it’s best to deal with the here and now. Oprah (can you hear the angels sing at the sound of her name?) once said that one way to accomplish your goals was to map them and retrace the steps from your destination to your current starting point. And then perform them in reverse, starting with the one closest to you. This simplifies the situation to a series of locks and doors. Locks that need to be opened and doors that need to be walked through. Questions that need to be asked and answered. A road map. If you want to be a mechanic, you don’t show up at a garage, point at something and say, “I’m here to repair that.” You would likely be escorted out rather quickly once they realized you were serious. Several steps were skipped before walking into that garage, all of them necessary. Licence, diploma, school, money for school, interest and someone’s car are just a few.

Don’t nitpick with me. I may not know the exact trajectory of the career mechanic, but I do know it doesn’t just happen. Just like anything you want. The sandwich doesn’t magically appear in your hand while you binge-watch Scandal. You have to make it. The point I’m trying to illustrate is that the goals we set for ourselves, no matter their motivation, can be mathematical in their execution. The steps, no matter how tiny, all have an order. To skip any would lead to a different result. You’ll have choices and distractions. I’m not saying there won’t be variations to the plan, or even that the plan won’t completely implode and need a reboot. Sometimes it will feel like you have no options but to go in a direction that feels backward. I would challenge that it is still forward; it’s just the second or third or fourth time you’ve been there. But you’re not the same. That would be impossible, since change is constant, no matter how minute. The destination can change, depending on the path you take. There will be surprises. Hell, sometimes the bottom will fall out completely. What will ultimately steer your course and ensure its inevitability is how you react. There are several paths to the ocean, and you have to have faith that they will all eventually end in water.

To be clear, I haven’t come close to achieving what I believe my deepest contribution will be. My children are young, my voice and body are constantly changing, and no one knows what the future will bring. I could use the illusion of early success as my most concrete evidence and my most alluring deception. It could be perceived that I was getting everything I wanted, and in some areas of my life that was true. But I have to be sure I’m giving value to the right things or, in the end, I’ll come up empty.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Luke 12:34) Your heart and your treasure are always found in the same place. Without fail. They mutually define each other. If you find the statement confusing, maybe you’ve been forcing yourself to believe something that isn’t true about your job, your relationship, your finances, your kids. For my part, every new day is an exercise in prioritizing the sustainable and irreplaceable. I fail regularly, but I keep trying because I will have nothing to show for all my efforts if I don’t enjoy the bumpy journey to wherever it is I’m meant to be going.

This is why I say to you that when you ask what it is you want, don’t forget to listen to the answer. And if you don’t get the answer you want, ask again. And maybe again. And then check your ears. Because maybe you’re only hearing what you want to hear. The answers may sound the same, but I assure you, they’re not. Get all the information you can possibly gather and then change. Small variation, big variation. It doesn’t matter. Change something. Because the definition of insanity is repeating the same thing and expecting a different result.

There may be a fine line between persistence and perseverance, but it all ends inelegantly. Messiness and inelegance are important distinctions. Witty repartee versus a shouting match. Fries or frites. Scolding a child or shaming him.

Be fair to yourself. Recognize when things have gone well for you and take your bow. Acknowledge your sacrifice and bask in how it paid off. Toil, struggle, fight and bleed. But take a beat to raise a glass and hip hip hooray yourself. Take up the space you’re going to take up on this earth. There is enough room for everyone. Strut your stuff. Give yourself a high-five because you bet on you and won. When it’s earned, be blessed enough to say, This is mine. I own this. I deserve this. I worked hard to get here and this is my moment. No one can take it away from me. I will not be robbed. I will be who I deserve to be and people will gravitate toward the generosity and empathy that seep from my pores. The meekest among us shall be protected by the strongest above us. All are safe. All are worthy. I am special because I know this and I serve this. I am a frequent loser but a good and generous winner.

The wisdom in any moment is that the difference between the winning and the losing is of no consequence if your mind is right. For me, that means my mind is fixed on Jesus. That doesn’t make me anywhere near perfect. But it does make me highly favoured.

I believe there are circumstances in which you can feel enough contentment from having the weapon that you don’t even need to preoccupy yourself with winning the war. Because if God is the weapon, then the war is irrelevant. It ceases to exist. The struggle is useless against an opponent who isn’t even fighting because He has already won. We don’t need to fight or struggle or tie ourselves into knots. We’ve already got the prize. If God is for us, who can be against us? Our job is to persevere. Our job is to work. Our job is to pray without ceasing. To build the bridge to the other side, even if the other side is ablaze. Throw the lifeline anyway. Because if you’re on the winning side, you have the answer to a question that, in its asking, always leads to the same answer. So, go ahead. Ask a question with the expectation of an eternal answer. I dare you.

And even if you don’t believe what I believe. If you’ve cultivated the knowledge, the resources, the discipline and the mental wherewithal to articulate what it is you really want out of life, or even just what you want out of the day, then for heaven sakes, don’t give up now! Go do it.

Don’t overthink it. Go do it.

Because something is always on fire, I had a series of career highs starting in 2010 while also suffering devastating tragedy in my personal life. On the one hand, I sang the “Olympic Hymn” at the Opening Ceremonies of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics and released my second Deutsche Grammophon album, Night and Dreams, with Justus Zeyen on piano and compositions by Brahms, Liszt, Duparc, Debussy, Strauss, Schubert and Mozart, among others. My Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, with Franz Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra, would also be released over the next couple of years on the yellow label. On the other (much heavier) hand, Markus and I had reconciled our marriage after a rocky year or two. Shortly after getting back together, we got pregnant and then lost both our twins, one at ten weeks and one at twenty-one-and-a-half weeks. To this day, the grief of that loss chokes me, but at the time, I honestly had no sense of where my life was going or if I was even going to get there.

Still on the mend, and two years after I sang in the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, I flew back to Vancouver and made my way to Merritt, British Columbia, in search of healing at a ten-day silent Vipassana meditation course. By then, through displacement, heartache and busyness, I had accumulated so much calcification in my emotional joints that I was ready to try something radical. I was also in my first trimester with our first son, but Markus and I were not ready to go public.

Vipassana is a silent practice of meditation. The first course—the sole method with which you can initiate yourself into the practice—is a full ten days. Ten days of total silence. From the minute I’d heard it described to me, it sounded like paradise. My Bikram yoga practice had been leading me toward this type of meditation—justifiably described as extreme. But . . . nothing ventured nothing gained. I had done a cross-Canada audition tour as a judge on Canada’s Got Talent from the fall of 2011 into 2012, and we finished taping right before I took the Vipassana plunge. The show was exciting and glossy and cacophonous and relentless, in a good way. It was a huge, ridiculous party and I loved every minute of it.

My husband and I had started trying to get pregnant straight away after we lost our second twin, August David, in August 2011. By December 2011 we were expecting, but after our double loss, I was pretty gun-shy about letting the cat out of the bag. I also wasn’t sure I’d have the willpower to go my whole pregnancy without drinking. My wine-loving, alcohol-appreciating pregnant ladies and mothers out there know what I’m talking about. (You’re just pregnant. You’re not suddenly a different person.) So, when we finished the audition tour for CGT, to illustrate the disparate personalities of the judges, Martin Short went to record voice-overs for a Doritos ad campaign, Stephan Moccio went to Turks and Caicos with his family and I went to be completely silent for ten straight days. Just me and the baby in my belly.

Something was definitely on fire and it was me. The entire ten-day journey felt like I was being dipped repeatedly in a detoxifying inferno: painful and beneficial, uncomfortable and empowering. Some targets for detox were old lovers, my emergency open-heart surgery, the remorse of my marriage almost ending (the first time), losing babies. All of it had to be revisited, seen for the power it was having over my life and future, then put in its rightful place: either in the past for good, or tucked into a place where it could rest, remain a part of me but not do any damage. I had to mine deeply because I’d been pushing all that stuff down for a long time, pretending it wasn’t there or underestimating how sad and powerless it was gradually making me. This was my time of being good to myself while also facing my darkest moments again. I had to find my way back to who I was and what I wanted.

Vipassana is a difficult process even when you don’t have all that stuff to exorcise. It was the first trimester of my second pregnancy, so I spent pretty much every waking minute of the first few days trying not to fall asleep. Unsuccessfully. When I would come up for air, my energies were spent pushing distractions out of my own mind, and bringing the guidelines for the practice in, and trying to ultimately create space for everything—but never being able to be truly still. Try meditating when you’re gassy and hungry all the time. It’s pretty difficult to achieve a state of Zen if all your concentration is being used to stifle a fart.

Though I knew that Vipassana, like hot yoga, was an extreme Eastern discipline, I didn’t really understand what I was embarking on when I boarded the bus for the three-hour journey from Vancouver into Merritt to the Vipassana centre. Located on fifty-six acres in a pine forest, it consisted of a four-winged, two-storey building with sexually segregated accommodations for about sixty people, a meditation hall, a dining hall, and bathing and administration facilities.

Vipassana means “to see things as they really are.” Based on techniques taught by the Buddha 2,500 years ago, it defines suffering as the result of craving, aversion and ignorance. Theoretically, eliminating these sankaras through mental purification leads to balanced living and, ultimately, Enlightenment.

Because Buddha himself taught orally, his meditative techniques were thought to have been lost. However, an upsurge of twentieth-century interest led to the discovery that they had been preserved by the monks of Burma. In 1955, S. N. Goenka, a Burma-born industrialist, may he rest in peace, used these techniques for mind purification, incidentally curing himself of severe migraines. In gratitude, he founded the Vipassana International Academy, outside Bombay. That was in 1971. Now Vipassana is taught and practised all over the world.

As a new student, I was committed to completing the course by complying exactly with my teachers’ instructions without addition or subtraction. Specifically, I was to refrain from the killing of any being, from stealing, from sexual activity, from lying, from indulging in intoxicants. This extended to all drugs, cigarettes, tranquillizers, sleeping pills and other sedatives. Even my blood pressure medications had to be reported to my teachers.

Because Vipassana claims to be non-religious, all forms of prayer, worship or ceremony were banned for the duration, including fasting, burning incense, counting beads, reciting mantras, singing, dancing and yoga. Any student who had brought any religious items, including rosaries, crystals, talismans, crosses, was to deposit them with management. Musical instruments, radios, recording devices, cameras, reading and writing materials were also banned.

From the first day of Vipassana until the morning of the last full day, I was to observe Noble Silence, which meant refraining from all forms of communication with other students: speech, touching, eye contact, gestures, sign language, notes. I was allowed no outside communication except in an emergency, which meant no letters, phone calls or visitors. Cell phones, pagers and all other electronic devices had to be deposited with management.

The only sanctioned exercise was walking during designated times in designated areas. Clothing should be modest and comfortable. Simple vegetarian food would be served.

The strictness of the environment reflected the discipline of the practice.

The cost of Vipassana, including all meals and accommodation, was zero, with a voluntary donation, according to one’s means, only after completing the course. To preserve Vipassana’s purity, the global program receives no institutional or government grants, and the teachers and organizers are unpaid. As it was explained to me, this is so that we “householders” (essentially, anyone who owns anything) can temporarily take the Buddhist vow of poverty and temporarily live off the generosity of others.

According to the schedule, I was to rise at 4:30 each morning and retire, with lights out, at 9:30 p.m. I would receive a breakfast break, a lunch break and a tea break (in place of dinner). I would meditate for a total of nine hours and forty-five minutes every day, sometimes in my room, sometimes in the group hall. The cardinal rule was to meditate as if alone—with mind turned inward—while taking care not to disturb anyone else and ignoring any distractions caused by others. I could ask questions of our teachers during designated periods—which was the only time I could speak. Each evening I would hear a forty-five-minute teacher’s discourse.

Because of the timing of Canada’s Got Talent, I arrived at the centre the day the silence began. I was relieved that I didn’t have to make pleasantries with strangers and could just merge into the process undetected.

Once in the meditation hall, I was assigned a permanent place where I was to sit on cushions in a comfortable upright position. Though crossed legs were preferred, stretching them out was also allowed, and because I was pregnant, I could lean against a wall for support.

We received our instructions for meditation via video and audio recordings by S. N. Goenka. We were told to concentrate our minds by observing our breath, which is the link between our conscious and our unconscious. Specifically, we were to focus on the tiny space between the tip of the nose and the top of the upper lip. I thought, Okay, I can do that. Oh sure. Though seemingly a simple task, it’s nearly impossible for prolonged periods, given the uncontrolled mind’s desire to wander. How could I fill ten days with silence? I struggled to stay awake. Silence is so unusual in our noisy lives that it cued my mind to sleep. Conversely, the snoring and restlessness of the students with whom I was sharing a room caused me strong nightly annoyance, even though I knew overcoming these distractions was part of the process. I was grateful when, after three days, I was offered a single room. Being pregnant has its privileges.

I discovered that I liked the regimented schedule and the comfort of always knowing where I had to be. The meals were adequate for survival, but the absence of my beloved coffee seemed harsh.

As the days passed, Goenka gave us further video instructions for perfecting our meditations, allowing me to gain deeper insight into my behaviour. In the language of the practice: I typically suffered from the sankara of boredom, which meant that I was always looking to the promise of the future instead of being satisfied with what the present offered. To increase emotion, I created drama, leading to unnecessary hardship.

The first six days I wanted to crawl out of my own skin . . . when I wasn’t dozing off. But, somehow, these occasional five-second stretches (usually less) emerge, and you find yourself suspended in a golden stillness. In this space, no matter how small, you renew yourself. Something rebuilds from the inside out. You get a glimpse at what a clean house might look like. It’s a satisfied exhale, a glass of wine on a comfy couch after a long day; it’s a date with yourself where everyone gets lucky. And then it’s gone. It’s fleeting, but it’s everything and nothing simultaneously. I don’t mean to make it sound like magic, because it’s the presence of nothing that gave my mind and brain the relief it was so desperately seeking. Eventually—and with the requisite frustration and sense of failure that comes with it—you string those few seconds together into a longer succession. And then it’s time to get thrust back into the noisy outside world. Where, praise God, there’s meat.

Buddhism teaches that the suffering of the world and those who inhabit it is created by a desire to make the good last forever and to end suffering as soon as possible. Since everything always changes, equanimity is attained by freeing the Self from both an aversion to the negative (suffering) and an attachment to the positive (pleasure). The understanding that both are temporary allows you to enjoy the good and to accept the bad. This does not mean detaching the Self from life in an apathetic way, but freeing the Self from false desires and projections in order to engage more deeply.

Because my singing career is built on the breath, Vipassana’s emphasis on breathing was very helpful. My yogic practice had already taught me that strong emotion, either good or bad, changed my breath. With fear, we typically hold on to it, stopping its free flow. When singing, how I take a breath is directly related to the phrase that will follow and its length—how full of tension or devoid of tension my musical choices will be—because of the quality of the breath I have to work with. Vipassana also taught that the further I was from consciousness of my breath, the further I was from awareness of myself and the acknowledgment of how I felt. This was one of the big lessons that I took from the course, and that I still carry with me.

During my interviews with one of our two mentors, I found it difficult to articulate the confusion caused by everything swirling in my head. When I did formulate a request, it was along the lines of, What should my process be when I leave here? Where is all this leading?

Typically, I was wanting to know the future rather than being content with the present. Once again, this was my sankara of boredom, manifesting itself in goal-oriented ambition. At times during Vipassana I did experience the true breadth of stillness, which gave me insight into its antithesis, which is my norm: the desire to always be moving. This helped me to understand that my feelings of breathlessness were not related to my blood pressure but to a spiritual condition requiring me to take a deeper spiritual beat and relax already. I needed to expand my spiritual lungs, which would also strengthen my physiological lungs, creating the oxygen for a full breath. The cleansing path to stillness is narrow, allowing room for only one person, and I found it hard to get to that solitude with its prescribed singularity. At least I now knew that the channel existed and that to be a fully formed human I must make that effort.

I hit a bump on day six. I could not believe I had four more days to go, locked inside my head, talking to myself. It helped to walk outside, doing the meditative shuffle, though what I really wanted was to throw myself into a snowbank and roll around—so I did that a few times. This was motivated not by joy but by my desire for a release through contrast. At the same time, I knew I had to let this impatience wash over me and trust in the process to do its work in me.

Vipassana was challenging in so many ways but ultimately highly powerful. Its ripple effects have changed the way I warm up for singing, as well as how I live my life. It has instilled in me a sense of control, so that now I experience both joy and adversity more objectively, as if viewing them from a greater distance. Since my volatile schedule doesn’t allow me to practise every day, I have brushed up with a few one-day Vipassana courses.

Half a decade later, I understand the unfolding layers of that experience more and more. My triggers, my pitfalls, my deficiencies are held in a context of me never wanting to be bored—the illness of restlessness. If I’m not careful, my need to be entertained will force me to jump from sparkly thing to sparkly thing. Which is a problem for me, since now I have kids. Falling prey to an inability to live in the moment means I could miss a lot of moments if I’m not careful. To be motivated by an aversion to boredom means that I have avoided being still for any reason and by any means necessary. By not allowing the natural cycle and rhythm of life to deepen my experience, wisdom and humanity, I risk banishing myself from the engagement of being a parent.

To be fair and balanced with myself, I also see this sankara as a hunger for life. It’s the insatiable nature of my ambition that gets me home on fumes of sleep so that I can see my sons for as long as possible. But sinking deeper into the consistencies and commitments of the day in, day out realities of my children’s needs is a challenge for me. I’m not naturally wired for it. And I’m supposed to feel guilty about it because my ambitions were meant to suddenly morph and align with those of my children’s as soon as I gave birth? Screw that. Yes, the stakes are higher because I now have two sons I plan to raise into men. But, Shepherd and Sterling, if you’re old enough to be reading this, Mama was a card-carrying member of society before you got here, and now you’ll fall into step behind her until you can light your own torch (when you’re old enough to play with fire). At that point, you’ll light your way and mine. Because eventually, my offspring, our relationship will be reciprocal. You’ll be raising your own babies by then, but yeah, eventually we’ll be friends. If I like you.

(At this point in their lives, my sons are fully entitled to the entire scope of all the love I have to give. No questions asked.)

Being a full-time opera singer, performer, artist, narcissist and mom means strengthening the important connection between my restless desire to be everywhere at the same time and my deeply rooted dissatisfaction, because as strong as my hunger is for success, I’d like to think my hunger for healthy spiritual growth is much deeper. The older I get (the thirty-nine-year-old stifles a chuckle), the less apologizing I do for my attraction to sparkly things. Do I still feel guilty and ashamed and like I’ve missed important moments? Absolutely. But if I don’t live long enough for cloning to become a reality, I have to make my peace with (and find the joy in) being where I am and who I am.

My Vipassana experience solidified the value I place in isolation: carving out your own place in the world and taking up the space you need in order to recharge. The goal of meditation is to accomplish this within the Self, but practically, my fix for satisfying my inner isolationist was to move to the country as soon as I could after the birth of my first son. Beyond the logistics of being close to my parents, my primary goal in life was to not have neighbours or be able to see any public road from my house. I wanted an oasis of space in the hope that my busy mind might take the cue and relax.

My environment has so much influence over my state of mind. I have incredibly thin skin for someone who makes her living being looked at and listened to. And, as I’d established, the teensiest sparkly thing could veer me off course. There are already enough cooks in the kitchen of my head that I really needed a place for them to all spread out. Without this expanse, I become tense and insecure. My breathing becomes shallow and I don’t laugh as easily. It’s not that my problems don’t follow me home (because they do), but there’s something about having more than one room to walk into, or a kitchen to cook in, or a fireplace to build a fire in, or a proper place for everything, or my own wine to drink, that gives me at least the illusion of control. It’s not even about sleeping in my own bed or wearing my own clothes. I rarely unpack, actually. It’s more about the buffer that exists between me, my sons and the rest of the world.

I also like being able to get my bearings from my space, from the heat pump turning on, to the creaks of the structure, to the weather against the windows, to positioning myself in the day based on the comforting constant of CBC Radio. There are no errant car horns or voices or sirens or machinery. I find it very calming to be able to identify every noise in my environs. I’m that much of a control freak. But it makes room for the sounds I should be taking in: my boys laughing or crying, the eagles on my lake, the voice telling me to stop procrastinating or the voice asking me, How could it be procrastinating if what you’re cooking will feed your family?

Like the clothes you wear, the food you eat and the voices that get inside your head, where you choose to live can determine the ease with which you radiate from the inside out. Obviously, for some the opposite is true. These peeps are turned on by action and options and a consistent blanket of sound. I have friends who can’t sleep without traffic blaring all night long. They recharge to the subway thundering outside their window. My point is, even superheroes need a place to regenerate and quiet the voices vying for supremacy over their motivations. You can only be expected to maintain the illusion of invincibility for so long.

This raises a question: Where does strength come from? When I’m singing and am expected to make you “believe,” or am inviting you to the well of music for a deep, long drink, what am I telling myself to get myself to go beyond the notes on the page and into your memory forever? I’m so glad you asked.

In the fall of 2014, I gave a Walrus Talk on “The Art of Conversation,” at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. In the talk, I maintained that the ongoing conversation or dialogue we have with ourselves is arguably the most important exchange we’ll ever have. It is the well from which all motivation springs. For instance, if before a performance I was to think, I am going to crash and burn, this is going to be awful, there’s no way this is going to go well, then I would spend the entirety of my time onstage trying to prove myself wrong. Whereas what I choose to believe is, This is going to be amazing, your lives will all be forever changed, and you will leave from here, cure cancer and instigate world peace.

I have a lot of conversations with the dead. Barely any of the composers I sing are still alive. In fact, they’re likely to have been dead for close to a hundred years or much, much more. They can offer no audible advice save for what’s left behind in the written score. Consequently, my stylistic decisions are informed by context and experience, and in the arena of technique, my mind has much to tell my body before I even make a sound. Backstage before a performance, I’m usually talking myself off the ledge, trying to convince myself to move forward, swallow the fear. I check to make sure there’s no lipstick on my teeth, that my hair isn’t going to fall in my face, that my dress is on properly, that a bra strap isn’t showing, a boob isn’t hanging out, my Spanx are hiked and doing their job. Any number of things that could go wrong I expect will go wrong. And then, I come out, I see all of you, and I am immediately calmed and assured (and reassured) of my responsibility to you. Reassured, because I know I’m fulfilling a purpose. I choose to believe it is the purpose of God’s will over my life, and that takes off a tremendous amount of pressure, because I know I am called to do my part and anything after that is up to Him. I come to my spot. Sometimes my pianist is about to start playing; sometimes the conductor is about to indicate the downbeat for the orchestra.

For my part, I am focused on looking pristine, like I am in total control . . . I’m also wondering what the first words are. And then, there is breath, but before the breath there is posture, and within the posture there is alignment, and with alignment comes a good breath, and when you take a good breath, it has to be well timed. It has to be perfectly in time. It has to be devoid of tension but purposeful. It can’t engage the jaw. It can’t involve the tongue. It has to raise the soft palate. And then, you have to think about the consonant. If there is even a consonant. Sometimes there’s a consonant. Sometimes there’s not. Sometimes everything begins with an open vowel; sometimes the vowel is closed. Sometimes it’s a mixed vowel involving the tongue and the lips; sometimes it’s an open ah, which for me is the worst thing ever.

All of that is running through my mind as you watch my pristine, immaculately put-together, beautiful dress, and you know from the expression on my face exactly what it is I’m trying to tell you, and you are sucked into me. And that’s my responsibility as the artist whose name is on the ticket you bought. The conversation that I’m now making you privy to would otherwise be none of your business, because I’m meant to make you feel like I’m in total control . . . which I am. As your singer, the things I command myself to do are relax, have fun, give nothing away—you, in concert with the music, are enough. Breathe. Repeat.

I would encourage you to examine the nature of the conversation you are having with yourself. How do you talk to yourself? Are you constructive? Are you discouraging? Are you realistic? Would you say the same things to yourself you would to your best friend, a child or someone you love?

Answering these questions goes a long way to steering the most important conversation you’ll ever have in the right direction and will reveal what you want and how to get it.