Even if you can't sing well, sing. Sing to yourself. Sing in the privacy of your own home. But sing.
— Rebbe Nachman
Why does the spiritual teacher encourage us to sing?
Isn't it because there is nothing quite so effective as singing to get what is inside of you out? Nothing better expresses your feelings and attitudes to the world, whether or not any of the world is hearing it.
The point is not the hearing; it's the singing.
Singing creates a habit of moving inner feelings to accessibility, to a place where other people can share them. And in order to move them out, you have to encounter them, forge them into words and melody, and send them forth in all their harmony and beauty. Or in all their off-key cacophony. No matter.
When we are awake to the moment, when we are aware of ourselves, when we remember who we are, we will sing: a melancholy ballad, a soaring saraband, or a droning dirge; it depends on what is inside. Sing in the shower as you prepare for the day, in the car as you drive home from work, during your morning walk. Sing to your children, or with them.
One of the reasons I love musicals — that most American expression of theater — is the way characters, in an unselfconscious and unlikely way, burst out into song at all the right moments. Maybe we all would love the freedom to do that.
— David Kundtz in Quiet Mind