You can take your fitness seriously, but not yourself. That's the most difficult part: not to relax. That's the most difficult challenge I'm facing every fight.
An athlete learns how to hold her breath, but that doesn't work in singing. You have to learn to relax.
It struck me that the popularity of Christmas is a matter of web-like consciousness. Childhood conditions us to relax and expand at Christmas, to forget petty worries and irritations and think in terms of universal peace. And so Christmas is the nearest to mystical experience that most human beings ever approach, with its memories of Dickens and Irving's Bracebridge Hall.
At home, I relax by gardening, or just pottering.
Glory relaxes often and debilitates the mind; censure stimulates and contracts,--both to an extreme. Simple fame is, perhaps, the proper medium.
The only time I can really relax is up a tree or somewhere outside. I love being outside.
When you trust your director completely, then you can relax, be spontaneous, be malleable.