Imagine if you will that you are a student in your last year at conservatoire. You have not only just won your college concerto competition but a prestigious national competition. You are elated. You are inundated with concert opportunities. Your career is about to take off. Nothing could be better. And then the pain starts. First, it is a nagging pain you ignore, but then it becomes more severe. A pain that that starts shooting up through your arms whenever you play. A pain that will not be ignored.
You go to your teacher in panic. Your teacher tries to reassure you. You have an excellent technique. It will soon blow over. Take the weekend off. But the weekend comes and goes and the pain in your wrists becomes more intense. Your panic grows. Everything you have been working towards is here ready for the taking – and yet, your body will not rise to the challenge.
It is a painful scenario, but not an uncommon one. So what to do. First, you deal with the symptoms and all the practicalities of upcoming commitments. Then is the time to face it from every angle and ask why? What happens when we get stuck, what happens when we hit the glass ceiling?
It is important at this stage to consider the possibility that there is a relationship between our minds and our bodies. When pain comes seemingly from nowhere, we will almost invariably be contributing to the pain as performing musicians, by what we are doing with our bodies. This may be extraordinarily subtle, almost invisible to the naked eye. What fuels that imperceptible shift in our shoulders or elbows and what precedes the miniscule tightening in our wrists comes down to one thing: thought.
Our thoughts are powerful and are connected to our emotions and how we feel. We give scant attention to them thinking that we need simply to deal with the physical. But the physical is inextricably linked to the emotional thought patterns, and one affects the other.
Here is an example from everyday life. You see a friend unexpectedly on the other side of the street. You wave and say hello animatedly. She sees you but responds with a flat “Hi”, and walks on. You immediately read emotion into your friends reaction and attach meaning. What is the matter, is she upset, maybe she doesn’t want to see me and so on. Her tone of voice comes from a thought which propels an emotion. Her body follows the emotion and delivers through her voice tone a ‘flat’ greeting.
In order to play our instruments well, we need to be free in our body, mind and emotions. Therefore, understanding the body-mind connection is essential. We need to be aware of this connection and that we need to harness it to work for us and not against us. It is something that we need to cultivate, a skill that needs to be learned.
In the case of the student, there are clearly mechanical issues needing to be addressed so that she can play without aggravating her pain. But it is also important to find out what is behind the mechanical issues. Imagine freeze framing all the movements just before engaging in playing. If the wrist has a voice what would it say in that split second? This is where we find the unconscious thought fed by a feeling, hidden well away from our conscious minds. Those thoughts can take many forms: “I feel so under pressure, I am so tired, I don’t want to play, I am scared I will mess up, I feel unprepared” and so on.
Once we know exactly what the emotional driver is behind the mechanical problem, we can bring that up to our conscious awareness, and we start to have a much greater control over our minds and feelings. We can substitute that emotional driver for a different driver and this in turn improves our performance.
The detective work I describe above is an example of the way I work in performance coaching sessions. Please click here if this could be of value to you or anyone you know.
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