always pay attention to what you are doing and how you are doing it. this means every second. if you are having trouble with paying attention, then you should be paying attention to that. if you are freaking out while playing music, then that is obviously what you should be paying attention to, because that is what you are doing; if more of your energy is in being nervous than playing music, then that is where most of your attention should be (this seems counter intuitive, but once your problem is alleviated, you will see that as you play music, and you have a hint of nervousness, it is illogical to place your attention on the nervousness, as your energy is all focused on playing). it is important that you not forget to pay attention to HOW you are doing, not just what you are doing, because without how, you will end up onlyexperiencing what you're doing (sensory processing), rather than paying attention (which is procedural).
there is a difference between not ignoring what you are doing and paying attention. paying attention is only one thing... it is active, it is not passive, whereas there are dozens of passive things that you can confuse with paying attention and are not.
attention is constantly moving, attention is SEARCHING. when you play, your mind should be in constant motion. rather than trying to NOT think, or trying to NOT panic, you should try to pay attention to what you are doing. eventually, all the distractions will fade away. if you spend your time on distractions, you will just get more distractions. this means that instead of putting your energy into panicking, you should put your attention ON panicking. dont stop the energy from flowing into panicking or being nervous, because it's already there... your nervous system controls the use of energy, and fighting that simple truth will only illicit more of the sympathetic (fight or flight) response.
you should notice your fingers and your hands and your breathing and the notes and the feel of the flute against your face and the pitch of the notes and the tension in your back and the resonance in your mouth and the position of the tips of your fingers and the bar you are in the tune. paying attention to your playing is like a sentence that never ends and goes back on itself. the subjections of the sentence are quick and fleeting: fingers, mouth, paying attention, fingers, mouth, nervousness, back, fingers, feet, nervousness, paying attention,mouth, fingers, tuning, back, ouch ouch ouch, back mouth fingers i-stopped-paying-attention-to-where-i-am-in-the-tune, nervousness, fingers, bar in the tune, back on track, a worry of whether or not paying attention is working.
you need to trust your mind and trust your self that if you just pay attention stuff will start to make sense. you've been forcing your body and mind to do things that it cannot do and it's been resisting. if you give up control, you'll find how much more control you have. it is the strict, worrying parents who get rebellious children. if you love and trust your children, while putting down guidelines and expectations, you are more likely to get respectful children. your nervous system is obviously freaking out against your will, so it is obviously doing what it wants, so why fight it? why continue to force it? if you trust it and pay attention to it, you will slip out of sympathetic panic response and go into parasympathetic relaxation. by definition, attention is relaxation, whereas panic is tunnel-vision-focus. the very act of paying attention will do more to end nervousness than anything else, because you simply cannot be nervous while paying full attention, and minimally partial attention is also partial panic, whereas no attention is full-on panic.
your body will obviously resist paying attention when you are nervous, as it is the opposite autonomic response. rather than giving up and just freaking out, pay attention to the nervousness and the jitters, because the act of paying attention in itself will alleviate the nervousness. if you do not trust that your body will calm itself down because of attention, then you will not allow yourself to pay attention and you will stay nervous longer than necessary--you cannot determine what is and what is not a threat if you are not spending any energy on determining. determining is a natural by-product of attention.
nervousness is good, its great. it's a natural thing. so pay attention to it. if you pay attention to your nervousness and wait it out, then your mind will process the threat, and then decide it is not imminent, and your body will calm down. sorry to say, if it is imminent, then you will continue to be nervous (like when you should ACTUALLY not be playing cuz its ticking some meanie off). if you dont pay attention, your mind will never process the threat, and you will grow nervous about being nervous, and pretty soon you will forget the original problem. even then, it is not too late to pay attention, because nervousness is not an incurable disease, it is a NERVOUS system response. if you never change how you think about it, then your body will never naturally change its response--it is impossible to change a behavior without paying attention to what you are doing and how you are doing it, and luckily for you, that is the very behavior you want to change! it actually fixes itself, unlike working on your musicality or learning a foreign language, which requires the attention plus the effort to work on whatever your working on.
eskin wrote:The way I figure it, either you know the tunes or you don't. Ego doesn't have to enter into it.
In the sessions I host we have a very simple rule: Play the tunes you know, don't play the tunes you don't know. That doesn't mean that if you don't know every tune absolutely note perfect don't play, it means if you're so unclear on the tune that your playing will distract others, lay out for this tune and wait for the next one. Seems like pretty basic courtesy to me.
If you come to the session and try to fake your way through a bunch of tunes, particularly on a loud instrument like a tenor banjo and then treat the other members like you're gods gift to trad, I take you outside, get in your face about your rude behavior and lack of courtesy to the other players, and you never come back.
both my grandma and her cousin fake their way through most of what they play, as well as doing their fare share of sitting out on tunes. you would never know they were faking any of the tunes, because they never fake a tune they cannot fake every note of. they have played their whole lives and learned from people who were doing just about the same. they learned by sitting in on sessions and quietly playing the wrong notes on their fiddles to themselves so only they could hear. they most certainly did not, and never have, played only the tunes they knew.
i myself have been taught to learn this way, with recordings and in sessions. i always remain respectful, which is i think the key word. if it is not appropriate in any given situation or tune, then i drop out and listen.
eskin wrote:
Not being all that far from pre-homo sapiens, we are basically survival machines. Since we are increasingly less threatened by physical factors, our minds often equate threats to our ego and point of view with physical threats, with the same physical reactions like increased heart rate, adrenalin, fight-or-flight feelings.
Learn to recognize your internal machinery and you can then make conscious choices about when and where you will allow your minds survival mechanism to choose what you do compared to making a choice.
even if you leave the sympathetic response (fight or flight), you're still not automatically going to get to that state you're alluding to where you can say "thanks but no thanks" to distraction. you're going to leave the panic response behind, but the same problem will still be there--albeit massively alleviated--which is thinking about music the wrong way. i dont like to get too caught up in terms, but it sounds like the worriers are thinking about music episodically (meaning with words, stories, "do this," "do that," "o my god what if this happens") rather than procedurally (kinesthetic/muscle memory, etc).
if you try to talk your way through music, you will always run into trouble. the only way to get better at music, any aspect of it, is to simply work on it. but talking in your head is the same as not paying attention to your music, which is nearly equal to not playing or practicing at all. it's like trying to have a conversation while watching a movie... you're not going to get very much out of it. it's strange to think that we understand that in watching a movie, most of your time is spent watching, and very little in thinking or talking, but that in doing other activities such as music, we spend most of our time thinking/talking in our heads.
this also means that when you play your flute, you shouldnt think about what you are supposed to do as "first i use these muscles in my face, then i use those in my abdomen, then i play these notes, etc". playing music is not a retelling of the last time you played music. every day is fresh and different. as you have no doubt gone to sleep at least once since when you played yesterday, your mind will have learned several new things from playing. that means you will have a whole new set of experiences to draw on to play music today, and you will not need to tackle the same set of experiences as you did the day before. this also means that the same things that were exciting yesterday, may not be exciting today. the thrill of discovering a new way to get your flute more in tune will be replaced with the want to achieve it again, which is not how you achieved it the day before. the trap lies in trying to recreate musical experiences rather than using them to constantly build a new foundation.
