PATHWAY TO JOY AND HEALING

Last evening, I had my guitar lesson and during this lessons I had this awareness about how my brain works when I am learning to play music.  This is particularly enlightening to me as music is my first love, and I have been playing the piano since I was eight year old.  I have lived with, loved, and played music most of my life, and now I composed music as well.

When I was a child, I played piano in many public recitals and auditioned before judges. Many of my public performances did not go well, and I have always wondered why.  Last night, I figured it out.  This is how my brain learns to play music.  The initial phase of my learning is in my left brain that is I learn the fingering, play the notes as it is quite methodical and sounds more mechanical to the ear.  As I begin to learn the music and become familiar, it becomes more muscle memory in my body that is how it feels to my fingers, how my arms are involved, and the rest of my body feels.  When it shifts to muscle memory, I begin to play the music with my right brain when my music become more fluid and more expressive.

This is why we must first learn to be familiar with the notes and fingering before we can become expressive and musical in our interpretation of the music.  What happened to me when I played piano as a child is that when I became nervous, my muscle memory failed to kick in, and as a result, I played with my left brain during my recitals and auditions.  This simply cannot work as the feelings and expressions we put into our music comes from the right brain.  In operating through our right brain, we are playing almost on autopilot with only our expressions or feelings of the music as the focus.

Whenever we are not playing well or unable to perform, it has to do with nervousness that causes muscle memory to falter and the right brain cannot create effectively.  The right brain cannot function in nervousness but only through peace and fluidity. Therefore, in order to create as a musician, we must feel calm and peaceful before we perform or we will essentially be playing mechanically through our left brain.  Just some insights on how I create through music, Brooke (Copyright 2014 Kundalini Spirit with All Rights Reserved)