Why play the violin? I spend a lot of time as a teacher working on technique, but in every lesson I try to stress that everything you do when playing the violin should be something that makes your body feel good.

I used to have a somewhat adversarial relationship with the violin: I would have some music I couldn't play or something I couldn't do, and then I would lock myself in a practice room for hours at a time, trying to conquer whatever piece or technical item it was that needed conquering. Sometimes I would be successful, and sometimes not, but it always took a lot of practice time. These days, post-MS, I don't particularly feel like wasting time doing tedious or painful things. Violin practice has to be a comfort and a joy for me to want to spend time doing it, and I want my students' practice time to be the same way.

Playing the violin transforms me. I can be having a crappy day, be exhausted from teaching high school, and come home dreading the 5 violin lessons I have yet to teach that afternoon. But then I pick up my violin, and do some breathing exercises, and gently warm up. And 30 minutes later I'm in a wonderful mood, am energetic, relaxed, and ready to teach. One of my adult students said to me one day, "no one is allowed to talk to me when I come home from work until I've played the violin." Exactly.

Breathing, posture, setup...all of these things make playing the violin so much easier than it ever was for me that I feel like I can really start to express myself through the violin, like it's a part of my own body. I see it in students and call it the "woohoo" moment, when everything just starts feeling comfortable and the music sort of floats through the violin, as if the violin is just a vehicle for expressing human emotion. That's what it's all about, isn't it?

What if the only reason you play the violin is to make the fingers on your left hand happy? If you've mastered the basics of posture, this simple visualization exercise will take you to the next level.

For this to work really well, you should have mastered Sandwich #1 and Sandwich #2.

1. Think of something small and lively and cute. Puppies falling all over each other in excitement, for example.
2. For whatever you've just pictured: those are your fingers. The most fun thing for them in the world is to run all over your fingerboard. As you play something, the most important thing is to let your fingers keep having fun.

This is so simple that it sounds silly, but making my mind shift from "this is work" to "this is fun" suddenly gives me twice the energy in my fingers. Try it and see.