Reflections after a Mindful Music Making Workshop

Me and my instrument: a journey.

It’s nothing new: there is something really special when people gather - in person - and go on a journey together. A journey of connecting, allowing openings to happen, allowing each other to be seen in their grief and in their joy. Allowing themselves to be seen by the others - and by themselves.

There’s something so particular that always happens, when I (we) work with musicians. And I can feel it to the bones, because I’ve been in that classical music world long enough (for 20 years) and even though I „only“ studied music for becoming a teacher, I had all the stress and pain and psychological twists in my head and body that one can have. And with that: also the excuses for the pain and the pressure („that’s just how it has to be if I want to play well“). And then there is the fact that in that world it’s not so easy to come across alternative ways of being with the pressure and pain, leave alone daring to dream another way of music making and imagining a more human, benevolent (and non hirarchical non patronizing and non abusive) way of being accommpanied and taught on this multifaceted path of being a musician. (I was lucky to stumble across the Alexander Technique with 20, which saved me in many ways). But let me share what’s also possible:

So … what happens, when music makers come together - people who are feeling drawn to a workshop with us - even without exactly knowing what to expect?

Well in the recent workshop „Me and my instrument: a journey“ - what happened was: a lot of tears. A lot a lot of tears. Grief and relief. To share maybe for the first time in a safe space about the struggles and often this weird disconnect and contradiction between: My heart has actually a deep conection with the music making - and on the other hand there is this high performance pressure mode, which overshadows the essence of why I’m making music in the first place.

Very common … and felt in the body - when we give space to that. So many themes I could share now. But let’s leave it here. I just want to share how deeply I see (and feel) how needed - and possible this work ist. To soften, to reconnect, to go beyond competition, to see the human being who is playing, to listen as a human being to a human being and not as a highly skilled professional to another machine who might play a wrong note … yes. There’s work to do. And it’s so beautiful.

So beautiful what happens in these workshops and retreats. Such an honor to accompany humans - and to go beyond their „function“ as musician. Ah - such relief that happens in these circles. And from my perspective: such big work for the collective that people do there. Since the twisted and rigid musical world - at the end is also just a symptom of our twisted society.

So … what happens, when people, music makers connect and go beyond competition? When they sink back into their bodies, find a safe space within themselves, start dancing with and without their instruments again, when they are being truly seen mirrored and validated in their exhaustion? Well … what I’m witnissing is: realness, rawness, vulnerable direct deep connection, support, beauty and love.

May the taste of this needed medicine for our times have sweet and strong ripples into the world. Thank you for reading and feeling. With love, Susanne

pondering about "participation" and learning ...

participation ... (in "learning", life, "working on oneself" "being worked"…)

just pondering about participation.
what am i participating in?
and how?

a few days ago i had a little accident, falling and injuring my ankle, which brought up a whole lot of topics. personal ones that were stored right in that place from a childhood accident ... and then more inner movements, related to being injured, confusion as a child, the freezing of the body and natural expression through that. now being able or not able to do things that i usually am capable of doing, questions around supporting myself, supporting others - and the many things (conscious and unconscious) that are again attached to those themes, like branches or a web of roots …

and now ... as i was just walking around … slowly, slowly … i thought "oh, what am I learning here?" and immedeately recognizing that self optimizing tension in my body that can come with this question, when I believe there's something to learn, there is a teaching in there. a very small and subtle hint in my body, related to the story of having to learn from every experience - and to do it better the next time? (i’m not saying there isn’t a “teaching” in every moment, i just want to ponder the question of how we participate in this potential teaching.)

... and then i remembered an Alexaner Technique teacher (Tommy Thompson) who allowed me to understand, sense and somatically recognize something about learning - maybe a decade ago. he sowed a seed about my embodied understanding of: “embodied learning”. and in my experience today there was something about "participation". taking part, being part of something (already) that can be called "learning". and that participation in my own experience, with no pressure of “getting it” - but with curiosity and trust that as I’m being with it - just as I can and am already doing it … that the integration and “learning” will reveal itself to me. (same goes with participating in life and being part of the bigger web of life and Earth, but that is a different thread).

… what is happening as i’m becoming aware of having an experience?

back to learning. 

coming from a place (and society) - where self optimizing even crept into everything so called spiritual and also made itself visible in my work as an Alexander Technique teacher - and even though this work is so much about allowing and undoing, about non-doing. in my experience - also with other teachers - the subtle manipulation that can happen in this work of non-doing, was even more scary for me, because it could be so subtle. 

then - same thing as a partner (who thought, she needed to "work harder on herself to make the relationship work") - i guess you know your own versions of self optimisation, "not-yet-good-enoughness" and all that. it's an old topic and i guess people like Jeff Foster, Matt Licata and also maybe Ram Dass and many others have done and are doing a lot of work to point out, that striving for "higher vibration" (whatever people really meant by that) - usually puts just more stress and tension into the nervous system and can just keep us stuck in the same old patterns of striving, achieving, not being able to actually "be with" (first of all and again and again) with what is here. and even the idea of “being with” can become stressful, when i think i should - but am not able to “do” it - for good reasons.
where am I going with this? it’s all nothing new - but maybe it’s my encounter with the more and more subtle layers of “having to get it” “to learn from it” and those related thoughts that come into my head and aren’t necessarily “mine”.

back to the topic of "participating" in learning and other things.

am i participating in the already taking place of the learning? am i allowing the situation, the dream, the accident, the landscape, the vision quest ... "to work on me" or as they say "to work me"? am i recognizing the inevitable "already plugged-in-ness" in it all? riding the wave, being taken by the wave? and if seemingly not: am i using this as yet another excuse to judge myself? what if i was already participating, learning and without intellectual sense-making? interesting terrain i find - all of that. and i always find that when i'm sick or injured in what ever way, i encounter this inner terrain even more directly. 

so then the question is: what kind of "getting out of the way" is required (if at all)? … and what if I can't. what if i can't get out of the way? 

softening here.

slowing down.

how is your belly feeling? how is your heart?

when I was still in the middle of underworld land (where I spent about 3 years) - Bill Plotkin calls it Soul Canyon - and still not “done” (yes, i wanted to be “done” earlier). i had the idea that life would be easier, when i would be out of the Quest, “work again” - like “normal” people do. but i felt called to spend 40 days alone in a hut in the forest, in german winter. that was in early 2020. i had fire - it was always warm inside. but i had no electricity, which made the whole time an also externally extreme dark experience. water came from the little creek just beside the house. lots of fears arising that i didn't know where inside me - and around me. a longing to descend even deeper into my own self, to allow all the grief to happen and to meet myself even more fully. 

what if i can’t surrender?

but what i want to say here now is: the deep longing to become undone, to surrender made me bump against my incapacity to surrender. the biggest prayers, for days and days and days: like "here i am life, take me, i really WANT to surrender" didn't help. i just didn't know how to. (in my case the quest eventually did its work on me and the moment came, when i found myself naked on the bare ground of myself - but was i able to do that? did i do that? i don't think so. i was just able to listen to the strange calls of the mystery of my cells and bones and heart that put me in a place and space where it was possible to happen, what my deepest parts were longing for. but there was also no guarantee that it would happen. (and did it make my life easier? to be on that path of vision quest? well that’s a different story.)

so ... WHAT happens, when - even softening, and surrendering is not an option, when it is a psycho-somatic language that is not availbale to us? when “learning” doesn’t want to happen in the way we have learnt it?

as i see it: "undoing" is a form of "non-doing" - which my 20 years of working with the Alexander Technique has shown me - is based on very different principles to those that i've been growing up with. and when you’re reading this you might also not have been growing up with these underlying principles of nature.

so ... what does that have to do with "participation" and "learning"?

... there is something available to us, i believe, that is an experience of "becoming undone", "being worked", probably even "being dreamed" - which is of such an exquisite and i think natural quality that it might only be possible to express it in poetic terms. and that has to do with an already embodied participation in learning … can you relate?

i'm sitting here. the sun is out. the wind is strong, the sea is close, there are noises from machines and songs of birds, my injured foot is part of my whole bodily and multidimensional landscape and i ... i am part of this landscape here now, the land and the earth that i am here with. to awaken to the fact of belonging to the whole earth and the web of life, viscerally, was a gift from my first vision quest. the experience of the fact, that i already belong. no learning needed.

what about you, my friend?

what is it ... that you are feeling part of? what is it, that you are feeling you are paricipating in, taking part in - that you are being taken by, that you are belonging to? and what is it informed by, and what is the most natural way of doing, being this? you? i’m noticing i’m becoming curious - as i’m writing this: about you - about your uniqueness, your wild journey, your gifts, your longings and your scars … your story. what is your element? what is the rightness, where is the rightness of your place your "ecological niche" as Bill Plotkin calls it. and what if this is so exquisitely unique in your way of perceiving, being and living it ... that ... really no one, no external authority can ever have a say in that quality of being you - in your unique place in the weaving of this world ... no. this is yours alone and it's interconnected with us all ...

and in what way do you take part in the song of this exact place, that is you and that is yours ... ? and maybe this participation in the song of your life and yourself ... is a distant sound, a sweet or nagging longing ... 

and what is the image, sound, feeling that is given to you, when i aks this question? what arises from the place, where and that you already are. and what happens if there's nothing that arises? can that be ok to? 

with love
susanne

Are you someone ...

… who is curious, commited - or longing  to commit more deeply - to the place within yourself - which is uniquely yours and intimately interconnected with all life ..?

A place of truth and of remembering home within and as part of the big web of life. A place which by its nature - includes our Earth and Earth community … and which knows about the interconnectedness of all life. Integrity within and as all of you - and with all of life

The call to reconnect with this inner place - can reveal itself very powerfully, calling us into a way of being and living which is more fully and really home, here. As you. It is where there is integrity with and within ourselves and relationship to the world.

This call home into taking (more and more) fully our own seats as sovereign beings, can call loudly and can come as inconvenient shake ups in our lives. It can come in all sorts of ways …. where things seem to happen to us … loss, heartbreak, separation, an accident, grief … and also falling in love, falling pregnant … And: this place can also show up as a silent whisper, as a kind of something that that feels itchy or you’re feeling just “not right anymore” … you might already sense that this “change of climate” and this “thing” might be the most relevant thing in the world right now … but it’s still in the mist and clouds or living in the dark caves within your own depths or within your deep oceanic waters … sometimes coming as a strangely familiar feeling or ringing in your ear …

It can feel like a knowing which has its roots in all the veins of this interconnected weaving of life. Calling you, begging, seducing you … to find your original place. Your song. Your medicine. And to embody that, to live that. Quietly. Clearly. A place to come back to and a place to live from - when the world shifts and changes, when you feel all sorts of thing very strongly.

This - your place of belonging - is always part of the whole. What that means to you - experientially: only you can find out about that. Deepening into this connection within yourself. Where the knowing is already there.

It’s clear if the calling is there - as foggy as it might be. It’s clear, when it’s calling, it’s clear and mysterious in its way of presenting itself. It’s otherworldy but it’s not otherworldy - it’s deep inside and rooted here in Earth.

To find out about this mysterious place … is what these spaces and offerings are here for.