Yoga Is My Music Lesson

Use the force. I made a joke somewhere along these lines in yoga class yesterday. To avoid being a complete nerd, I held back on the rest of the line, something about "Let if flow within you." But it's such a good line. Use the force, not force the force. Let it flow within you, rather than crash up against it.

When I was a little kid learning to play the piano and trumpet, it seemed to come pretty easily. I flew through what were considered pretty "advanced" pieces on the piano. And there were times when my range and endurance with the trumpet became a source of annoyance for my brother, even though he was seven years older and music was his life.

From my perspective, speed, endurance, hitting the notes -- that was pretty much it. It all sounded correct to me. But my teachers... always telling me to slow it down. If I couldn't first go through a piece slowly and have it be music -- rather than just notes -- adding speed wasn't going to create music either. It might muffle the strain created by my lack of choice in the matter, but it wasn't going to make something beautiful. My ears didn't pick it up back than, but I could see it in my teacher's expression. And in the end it was my brother who played at Carnegie Hall, not me. He didn't always win, struggling to be patient with himself. But he made music.

Yoga is my music lesson now. Learning first to go slow enough to listen, slow enough to hear our bodies. When moving slowly or quickly is a choice, then we move how we want, with our intuition, connected to our selves. When it's not a choice, we may rush or jump a little from move to move (we're still doing the "moves" after all), but we may be hitting the notes without making music. We miss connecting to our selves.