December 2, 2025
Are you feeling hopeful?
Even a tiny bit?
Are you able to generate openness in your body?
Even just a little?
This is my work this week: cultivating hope and openness.
I’m spending the first 24 days of December exploring how the body we need for singing can help us cultivate the spirit we need for Christmas, and vice versa.
Let me explain what I mean:
First, to sing well, we need
openness in the body
a grounded sense of being
effective breath support
comfort with vulnerability
That’s not all there is to it, but these Big Four definitely come first.
Second, Christian tradition holds that meditating on the themes of hope, peace, joy and love will help a person fully appreciate the miracle of Jesus’ birth: one theme per week, four weeks altogether.
Now, I’m not a Christian, but I’ve lived long enough to know that cultivating hope, peace, joy and love is hard, and I appreciate the opportunity to work on that during the busiest, and often the most emotionally destabilizing time of the year.
For me, these eight ideas fall into four natural pairs:
hope and openness
peace and a grounded sense of being
joy and effective breath support
love and comfort with vulnerability
This week is Hope and Openness Week. I’m contemplating
what could a better world look like?
why can I trust that a better world is possible?
where can I find more spaciousness in my body?
how can I sing in an even more open way?
how can I walk through the world, even more open to love?
What I’m loving about this practice is how these two ideas – hope and openness – are supporting each other.
Allowing hope into my body is increasing my capacity for it. Having “openness” on my mind is helping me to notice when I’m more closed. Stretching my muscles is helping my spirit feel more spacious, too.
This is what my program A Singer’s Advent is all about: we’re feeling and sounding our way through a calmer, more comfortable, more intentional December.
If you love to sing in the car alone, this program is for you.
If you love to sing with others, this program is for you.
The course materials and call recordings will be available until January 31, 2026, plenty of time to make use of them all.
Questions? Just send me an email – letters@mvmusik.com.
Warmly,
Michèle
