Practise Your Wellness: The Music Lesson

As students begin to trust in the value of their personal creative output, their sense of purpose is elevated in correlation with their wellness.

For the past 30 years, I’ve had the privilege of enriching student’s lives through the joy of playing a musical instrument. In that span of time, we have witnessed an acceleration in technology, with pertinent applications centred on social media. Running parallel, statistics have shown a consistent increase of mental health issues experienced by students and adults alike. Is there any correlation between these two trends as so often suggested, or might this unstoppable technological transformation be highlighting an imbalance that requires us to search internally for our own transforming wellness?

Revealing the seeds of a mental health pandemic that instrumental music teachers are by no way immune to, how might the tools and skills of our privileged work make a more positive impact on the wellbeing of our students and ourselves as we adapt to this changing external world?

The Lesson Inwards

Most lessons start with a greeting and asking how the student’s week went. We might be interested in their practice and progress made from the last lesson, but this also offers us a glimpse into their unique life. Not as trained counsellors, nor wish to be, effective safeguard training and DSL signalling allows us to value this unique insight for targeting and timing effective learning strategies.

On a professional level, we arrive to our lesson with a bag of music, instrument, skills, experience, and planning for a day of effective teaching. But we also carry with us a proverbial mixed bag of physical, mental and emotional pains. As professionals, we are conditioned to keep these two bags separate, although we have all experienced how our inner traumas can affect our external actions.

Do as I do, rather than do as I say, has always made more impact on teaching. This suggests that we may need to first look inwards on ourselves with more compassion, empathy, and understanding. We learn that external stimuli only test the capacity of our wellness, while a conscious inward journey of feeling and releasing has the potential to unblock our natural source of wellbeing. As with teaching, a conscious observation rather than reactive action builds more trust in this process.

The usual encouraging of students to reach their potential through goal setting, achievement and motivation highlight external actions, while inspiration and a connecting to a heartfelt intension of why we want to play is an internal force. Music resonates with such feelings, connecting our mind with our heart. Unfortunately, the learning process including technique and a focus on exam results can easily become mind oriented, losing sight of these heartfelt intensions.

As an external expectation, making practice the focus of progress will again only test the capacity of the student’s wellbeing. Our students do not show up on a level playing field. What some can do with little practice others would require so much more. Even their concept of practice is also varied based on their experiences and family culturing. As teachers, we can steer the learning process inwards for the student to enjoy and progress in their creative music making.  Here builds a platform for their abundant wellness to flower, where the seeds of inspiration are nurtured from within.

An Inward Focus on Three Traditional Teaching Strategies
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1. The student learns to work through a struggling passage in the music. The teacher guides the student through the right balance of what the student can do with effective strategies to improve what they cannot do. The accomplishment is external, but the building of trust in their ability to succeed with this process, cultured over a period of time is internal, supporting their wellbeing platform.
2. With effective repetition, the student learns to play with fluency. With mind no longer focused on the technical aspects, they begin to feel the music from within. The skills required are external, but the authenticity of their expressed emotions is internal. Driven by the musical experience, their heart opens to a freedom of expression revealing their passion.
3. Authenticity is taken to another level when they contribute their own interpretation, or play their own music, including improvisation. As they build trust in the value of their personal creative output, their sense of purposes is elevated in correlation with their wellness.

Holistic Wellness

In comparison with ensemble playing, the inter-connectivity of our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual bodies of wellness has the potential to create a whole much greater than the sum of the parts. Outside of the lesson and practice room, ensemble playing further supports the platform of wellness through the inter-connectivity and sharing in our heartfelt intensions. Ensemble focus tends to be more centred on the final expression of the musical performance while appreciating the process of our own and shared contributions.

Using a more holistic style of teaching, I find myself planning “less on” specific assessment outcomes, while exploring engaging strategies that can be drawn out of a piece of music to ignite inspiring links between the heart and mind. Our creative excitement to explore keeps us and our students enthused and inspired to play their best, leading to more enjoyable progress and practice.

As with practice, an inward journey into our wellness can become an important part of our daily routine. Wellness is not about being happy all the time.  It nurtures a platform from where we can navigate and process our life experiences with greater ease and flow.  Physical, mental and emotional pains that we hold are often triggered by totally unrelated experiences. Honing our skills through effective repetition, allows us to navigate through these often-painful releases, revealing our abundant channel of wellness from within. These skills can include conscious attention on the breath, a trust in the process, sharing with others and a freedom of expression; comparable skills that we practise when learning to play a musical instrument.

Phillip Brunton

Musician, instrumental music teacher and co-creator of MyMusicPB.com.
MyMusicPB is launching a series of online CPDs for vocal and instrumental music teachers, including Practise Your Wellness. 
For more information, please visit www.mymusicpb.com/CPD