I’ve been singing for over 20 years. Since I was a pop punk-loving, skateboard-riding high schooler. But only recently have I started liking my voice.

That’s because of meditation teacher Stephen Levine. His “soft belly” practice is refining my singing voice. It’s also helping me during hard, uncomfortable conversations. It’s even helping me relax on dates.

“When the belly is hard there is holding,” Levine wrote in his book “Guided Meditations, Explorations and Healings.” “Some degree of fighting or posturing is resisting and hardening to the moment, attempting to control.”

Maybe where you tense up the most isn’t your stomach. Maybe it’s your shoulders, chest, or forehead.

But Levine’s point is that letting go — over and over again — is the key to living life to the fullest.

In fact, some 80 percent of information that travels between the mind and body goes from the body to the mind. Relaxing the body relaxes the mind far more than the other way around.

(There’s a reason so many of us tense up our midsections, though. This society pressures us to have flat stomachs. Fat shaming is American as apple pie and racism.)

At 15, I wanted to be a rock star on MTV. I wanted to sound like Mark Hoppus from Blink 182. I wanted to impress the girls at my band’s shows.

In college, I wanted to sound like Jim Morrison and appear a tortured, madman poet like Bob Dylan.

At this point, I want to be plain old, boring me. Inspired by Levine, I’ve been relaxing my ab muscles as I sing. Before, I was squeezing my throat, narrowing myself down to sound a certain way.

Now, I breathe deep and let my body do the singing, whatever comes out. And I’ve been digging my voice. It’s… me.

If singing isn’t your thing, when do you feel vulnerable? Public speaking. Talking to your boss. Having sex. When do you put on an act?

Whatever it is. Except for, maybe, Pilates. Softening your stomach will help.

Levine’s “soft belly” is a practice. “You may have to come back to soft belly dozens of times an hour,” he wrote. “The belly needs to be reminded that it has unconsciously tightened to that which we wish to remain unconscious of.”

I’ve realized that my stomach is a thermometer for my closed-offness. When it’s tense, I know I’m armoring myself by trying to come off a certain way. Trying to manufacture a certain outcome. Trying to get people to like me. Trying to avoid discomfort.

The irony is, trying to avoid discomfort is uncomfortable. It’s exhausting trying to be someone I’m not. It keeps the boat from rocking, sure. But it’s so damn unfulfilling.

“Don’t you want to be all used up when you die?” Natalie Goldberg, the writer and Zen meditation teacher, once asked at a retreat I attended.

“Yes!” I thought.

Living with a soft belly — whether singing or talking or loving — is using myself up. Which is why it’s scary. It’s taking the armor off. Living fully this limited vessel that is my one and only life.

It’s so fucking hard to let go of the outcome. To just be. To just be myself. As flawed and broken as I am. Knowing, somehow, that I’m also beautiful.

Levine, who often counseled people who were dying, once wrote:

Most fight death as they fought life, struggling for a foothold, for some control over the incessant flow of change that exemplifies this plane of existence. Few die in wholeness.

Don’t you want to be all used up when you die? I know I do.

“Soft belly” is my cheat code for doing it.

I’m a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. My weekly emails will help you bring mindfulness to work, relationships, and politics. Subscribe here.

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In his book In Love with the World, the Nepalese Buddhist monk Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche writes about “adding wood to the fire”:

“Generally, people go through life taking note of those experiences that recurrently enflame our anger or anxiety or fear—and then we try to avoid them, telling ourselves things like, I can’t watch scary movies. I cannot be in big crowds. I have a terrible fear of heights, or of flying, or of dogs, or the dark.

But the causes that provoke these responses do not go away; and when we find ourselves in these situations, our reactions can overwhelm us. Using our inner resources to work with these issues is our only true protection, because external circumstances change all the time and are therefore not reliable.

Adding wood to the fire deliberately brings difficult situations to the forefront so we can work with them directly.”

In other words, we can’t escape painful feelings, so we might as well try to work with them when they appear. We might as well move in their direction rather than resist them. We might even want to try to put ourselves in situations where they’re bound to come up.

Back in 2012, as the Occupy movement was fizzling out, I went to the first meeting of the Washington, D.C., reading group for the socialist magazine Jacobin. I walked in with a big ego, thinking I knew a bit about the problems with capitalism.  

But it’s D.C. Everyone was not only brilliant but also well-versed in socialist history and all the various tendencies of Marxist thought. There were a handful of experienced organizers and even PhDs in the room.

I didn’t say a single word and left feeling horrible—so small, uninformed, and insignificant. Part of me wanted to give up the whole politics thing and stay with what I’d spent the last decade doing, singing in a rock band.

Yet, another part of me sensed that, yes, this is exactly what I need. This is the only way to grow.

Eventually, I got in politics doing what I love, writing. Countless moments of letting my ego get gut punched no doubt helped me get there.

The Zen priest angel Kyodo williams calls this becoming undone: “We’re not trying to become something; we’re trying to un-become. We’re trying to undo ourselves.”

Usually we do the opposite by ignoring fear, anxiety, grief, and other painful feelings. We try to appear a certain way to others. We numb ourselves with Netflix or Facebook or drinking.

Psychologist Sheryl Paul writes, “You can resist the call and numb the pain, or you can walk through the center of the fear-storm and surrender to the most transformational ride of your life.”

Now, sometimes the pain is too strong, and it overwhelms us. We might need help from other people, like a close friend or therapist, especially when working with trauma. 

But we can learn to be with many of our feelings by practicing mindfulness meditation.

We’re sitting and we notice a tenderness in the middle of our chest or a lump in our throat. We feel its raw sensations. We notice that our mind is telling stories about it, trying to figure out why we feel the way we do.

Following the practice’s directions, we then let go of the thoughts and bring our mind’s attention to the tenderness, to its raw sensations. We let it just be there, even if it grows and fills our whole body. Eventually, like all feelings, it goes away.

What we’re learning is the priceless skill of adding wood to the fire, of allowing rather than resisting the substance of our life.

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