Welcome to Music, Mind, and Movement!

Photo by Rich Blenkinsopp

We’re live! Phew. That was a schlep.

Welcome to the Music, Mind, and Movement blog! Here you’ll find musings, practice tips, rants, translations of current research, and more. I love writing a blog because it allows me, the blogger, to play with ideas and assess my understanding in forum that, because it’s somewhat informal, isn’t particularly high stakes. But, because it’s public, it isn’t no stakes either. With a blog the stakes are just right.

I started a blog about 3 years ago. It was called Let’s All Meet in Child’s Pose and it focused on music and mindfulness. I stand by (pretty much) everything I wrote back then, so the content is still archived on this site if you want to check it out. But, as one would hope, my interests and understanding have evolved since then, so the focus of the blog is a little broader now. You’ll still find lots of stuff related to meditation and mindfulness, plus posts about:

• Movement! Anatomy, biomechanics, embodiment, play – all that good stuff – and how these relate to…
• …self-regulation and the nervous system. I think a little nervous system education can go a long way towards helping musicians be more effective in the practice room and deal with performance stress. This stuff is so simple but so powerful.
• Musings and reflections on human learning in general and music learning in particular.

Really, I think all this stuff is related: How we work with the mind is not really separate from how we work with the body and the nervous system. How we relate to ourselves is often not different from how we relate to others. And, how we understand our interconnectedness is deeply related to how we understand our role as artists.

At least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Maybe you’re interested in some of this stuff, but reading a blog is not your jam. Fair enough. Poke around the site and you’ll find cool video content (and by "cool" I mean awkward but informative) and, very soon, a podcast! One of the things I don’t like about writing a blog is that it can start to feel like too much of only one voice (mine)…which I guess you could argue is kind of the point of a blog. But still. I wanted to create something that felt more like a conversation, so I am recording...well, conversations with other similarly-minded musicians, educators, and health professionals. Truthfully, this is a bit of a selfish endeavour since it gives me a chance to talk to and learn from folks who are doing some ground-breaking work in musicians’ health and wellness. And I love podcasts. But I hope you’ll enjoy it too.

So that’s about it! I’m glad you’re here and I hope you'll visit often. More soon.