Midweek Meditation: Five Minutes to Focus by Steve Grives In this entry, I’ll take you through a guided meditation that I’ve developed for use with choral ensembles. While my meditation practice is a spiritual practice, one designed to cultivate both wisdom and compassion, the basic tenets of mindfulness meditation can be used to build life […]
Wellness
Midweek Meditation: The Inner Critic
In my previous blog post, I wrote a bit about perfectionism in the context of my career as a teacher/conductor. I recalled conducting a concert and mentioned that as I was conducting this performance, an inner voice was assessing the concert in real time. As I reflected on this, I realized that this voice was […]
Midweek Meditation: Letting Go of Perfectionism
With this post, we welcome choral conductor and certified meditation teacher Steve Grives in his first post for a bi-weekly blog entitled Midweek Meditation. This blog will address issues pertinent to choral professionals through the lens of mindfulness and meditation. He will write about his own meditation practice, share some stories from his professional life, […]
The Conductor as Yogi: Lighten-ing Ways
As I write this, it is 5:47 AM on a Saturday morning. It is light outside and has been for a while. While I prefer sleeping in a little later, there is something about these longer spring days of earlier sunrises and later sunsets that creates an expanded sense of space and time. We can […]
The Conductor as Yogi: Living Ahimsa
Early on as a blogger, I posted “Living Your Namaste” in the wake of violence that escalated on a national level in late spring of 2020. It was a way to reflect on the moment and bring something from the yoga practice to inform our thinking so we might move toward a better life in […]
The Conductor as Yogi: It’s Time for Savasana
The season and academic year are ending. The concerts will be finished. We feel a sense of accomplishment, relief, and celebration, colored with the bittersweet realization that it is still an imperfect world both in and out of our choral lives. Our limbs may feel heavy, our energy is drained, and our exhales are getting […]