2020-02-20 – Greetings from cold, grey Central Pennsylvania.

The Link Between Meditating and Music Practice

 

One of my goals for the new year was to pick a very small list of things that I will do every day. It took most of January to settle on a list. It was worth the time and effort.

 

Here are two of my daily practices that I chose to do:

 

1. Daily music practice
2. Daily meditation.

 

What I have discovered is that these two practices develop life skill muscles that will make anything you choose to do more fun and more productive.

 

Let me give you an image of how your mind works that will explain both meditation and music practice.

 

I learned this image from a discipline called the Sedona Method. Here is the idea – it helps if you actually do this as I describe it. Take a pencil or pen and pick it up with one of your hands.

 

Hold the pencil with your hand, palm down, knuckles up. Now grip it tightly. Feel the tension in your hand. Now relax and open your fingers. The pencil will drop.

 

The hand is your conscious mind. The pencil is a thought. You can practice doing this process with your mind. Relax your mind. Let it loosen its grip on the thought it is holding. The thought will drop out of the grip of your mind.

 

Your mind will want to pick up another thought. Take a deep full breath and appreciate the feeling of relaxing that can happen in the space between holding one thought and picking up and holding the next thought.

 

This is basic meditation. The people who developed meditation knew that the mind would restlessly look for the next thought to pick up and hold so they developed the idea of a mantra (literally “mind tool”). A mantra is a sound, syllable or phrase for your mind to pick up and hold on to while you focus on relaxed full breathing.

 

In this kind of meditation you practice loosening your minds grip on any thought except the mantra. You then are free to enjoy the experience of an alert mind in a relaxed body.

 

This is one of the most powerful life skill muscles you can develop. For example: you probably already know that worry is a misuse of the imagination. If you see worry as a thought that you can drop like a pencil, you can buy yourself some time to come up with something better for your mind to pick up an hold on to.

 

This kind of meditation is about practicing the ability to let go of thoughts.

 

Music practice is about developing the ability to hold on to a musical thought until you can create it on your instrument.

 

You use your creative imagination to come up with a vivid and clear musical thought. Not just a scale, but a scale that is full of rich tone, alive, full of life energy.

 

You go about dissecting the physical process of creating this scale on your instrument. Now that you have a clear powerful image to work toward, all of the resources of your subconscious mind swing into action to help you create that strong powerful rich sounding alive scale. Or riff. Or melody.

 

When you screw up playing the scale a couple times in a row, take a deep breath and return to the rich multi-sensory musical thought you want to express through your instrument. Sing the notes to make sure you know what they are. Play the music in your mind perfectly. Slow down a little.

 

Now try again.

 

When you find yourself generating poisonous thoughts like “I can’t do this” or “this is driving me nuts”, or re-playing your screw up in your mind as a form of self-punishment you know what you need to do. Practice letting go of those thoughts so you have room to hold the musical thought you are working on.

 

Now try again.

 

This kind of practice is much more effective than mechanically banging away at a riff or scale over and over, screwing it up half the time.

 

I’ve been experimenting with these music practice ideas and I can tell you that they work for me. The time I spend in mental rehearsal cuts down the time I have to spend in physical rehearsal.

 

Plus I can do mental rehearsal without a musical instrument. It gives me something to do besides worry or react to the news or whatever drama is swirling around me.

 

I’ll be writing more on this topic so if this speaks to you, stay tuned there is more to come…

 

Harpe Diem!