Fall is a beautiful season, with softening air and wondrous colors. As your heart opens to this new season, I invite you to find more of your inner beauty – the beauty that always lives within you – while you’re practicing your instrument.
Inner beauty is what makes us beautiful on the outside. When you look at a wonderful old person you can see such beauty shining through their face. And when you hear a wonderful performance, you’re feeling the inner beauty of the person who wrote the music as well as the beauty of the person who’s playing it or singing it at that moment.
When you’re in the practice room, you can take time to receive beauty and to create it. And as you engage in both receiving and creating, your inner beauty will reveal itself.
You were born with the miraculous faculties of hearing and moving and feeling and noticing. Here’s how you can connect more deeply with these abilities.
First of all, beauty likes it when you take it slow.
Slow enough to notice how every sound feels inside your body. How it actually affects you viscerally, as a living human being.
And slow enough to notice how each movement you make with your hands and arms, or your breathing and lips, affects your entire body and being.
As we move parts of our body in different ways, we’re also using our mind – to notice how these movements feel. And If moving in a particular way feels good, we can take time to enjoy it, and that enjoyment will feed healthy energy into our whole system. If it doesn’t feel good, we can take a moment to breathe and then slowly explore other ways of using our body until we find something that feels better.
We all spend too much time rushing through our daily lives. We hurry to get things done on our to do list. We search quickly on the Internet for the answer to an urgent question so we can then dash off an email in time to get to the next thing. And then, before we know it, this beautiful thing called a day is over and it’s time to go to sleep so we can have another one.
Instead, we can actually use each day – each practice session, each conversation with another human being, and each moment of this gift of our life – to stop rushing. To stop and look out the window and see the light, colors, shapes, and movement that are out there, and to let them affect us. To stop and wonder why we’re feeling stressed out at a particular moment and to take a moment to breathe.
To stop and listen to our own hearts for the reason we’re doing everything in the first place.
You can play in tune if you let yourself listen more intently. You can discover the natural shape of a phrase without thinking too hard if you listen to each sound long enough to feel its effect inside your body before moving to the next one.
You can open up more of the gift that lives within you if you just take the time to perceive what’s happening – to really be there as the person you are at each particular moment, and to love that person and love that moment.
See what happens in your practicing and in your life if you let go of rushing and struggling, and simply take your time.
This is what the word mindfulness really means.
Warmly,
Madeline
P.S. If you’d like to explore your unique possibilities as a pianist with me, I invite you to schedule a complimentary consultation.