Tortoise Guitar

The Post about Therapy, Part Two

2015-01-24T07:13:00.000-08:00

In my last post I talked about how therapy has helped me to see that in almost any moment, I try to entertain people, help people, or (when it all gets to be too much) just lie low and hide. I wrote that I felt I lived in a hallway with only three doors.

Most of my life, my brain has begun to buzz as soon as my eyes opened in the morning: How can I make people glad to have me around? How can I line up the gold stars, the thumbs up, the gratitude and the applause? How can I earn my spot on earth today?

Later in the day, I'd start to fret: Did that friend answer my email yet? Maybe I was too brusque. Did my post on Facebook get some "likes"? Why aren't there more? Why can't I get anyone to come to this concert with me?

Of course we all want to be liked and needed. But I didn't know the difference between enjoying recognition from other people, and feeling like I couldn't survive without it.

I went after other people's approval the way a drowning person grabs for a life preserver. I fought for approval every day -- every moment -- as though I were drowning. I felt I couldn't stay afloat any other way.

I worked really, really hard to get that approval, through spells of depression, anxiety attacks, migraines, nail-biting and fretting.

I never felt I could do enough.

I'm not sure I would have understood this about myself, a few years ago. In college a friend said to me, "You act like your happiness depends on what other people think of you." At the time, I thought, Well what else is there?

The most fun, the most helpful

Talking to my therapist has shown me that I coped with life the way I did because deep down I have felt vulnerable and defenseless. If you know me, that might strike you as funny. I usually strike people as a problem-solver, an organizer, a take-charge gal. But all of that can-do energy was meant to hide the fact that I felt vulnerable and defenseless, as exposed as an earthworm in the middle of the sidewalk.

Imagine an earthworm, well-intentioned and hopeful, crossing a sidewalk. She has no way to protect herself from danger. No exoskeleton, no bones, no shell, no spiny quills. She has to rely on making people believe, as they walk by, that she is the most fun, most helpful worm they know. If she can do that, then people might be careful not to step on her. At least as long as she keeps up her daily routine of juggling, joking, and volunteering.

What has changed for me in therapy is that I no longer believe I'm defenseless and vulnerable. I have strengths. I have skills. I can protect myself, nurture myself and understand myself.

I’m not saying I'm bulletproof or self-sufficient. But my resilience and strengths are those of an adult human being. Not an earthworm. Not an infant. Not a child. An adult human being.

Space and time enough

Remember that hallway with only three doors? Those doors are still there -- but now I feel I can pause to consider what else is possible. If I take a moment before I grab one of those familiar doorknobs, my shoulders relax, my frantic brain quiets down, my eyes and ears tune into my surroundings. My intuition has a chance to speak up. I have space and time enough to see other possibilities.

That might sound kind of New-Agey, pausing and breathing, but I’m talking about very simple alternatives. For example, in the past, if a musician friend asked me what I thought of her new website, I would have made a few suggestions. Then I would have proofread the text, tweaked the photos, and showed her how to customize the formatting. I might have been more thorough than the professional she paid to build her website. My friend would exclaim that I was amazing. Mission accomplished! Someone thinks I'm all right! For now, anyway.

Now I want to pause and ask myself a few questions before compulsively suiting up in my Wonder Woman costume.

There are plusses and minuses to helping someone. What are they?

If I do this for my friend, what other thing am I not going to do? What am I giving up?

Do I have a good back-and-forth relationship with this person? Or is this a case where I’m usually giving and rarely getting back?

That’s it, that’s the more comfortable space I’m living in now. I still may want to be fun and helpful, but now I will try to pause, breathe, and consider more options. I'll weigh how my time, my energy, and my long-term well-being fit into the picture. Revolutionary!

Please don’t stop asking me for help, folks. That means writer friends, music friends, librarian friends, family, all of you. I mean it: I want you to ask me for help. Sometimes I'll say yes, sometimes I'll say no. The difference will be that when I say "yes," you'll know it's because I think it’s good for both of us.

My therapist is Sloan Gorman, LCSW, who works out of Milford, CT: sloangorman.com.

Sloan uses a therapy called DNMS -- Developmental Needs Meeting Strategy. One of the great things about this therapy is that it accepts that even a relatively normal childhood with well-intentioned parents can still leave you feeling needy and anxious as an adult. If you'd like to know more about my therapist, or the specifics of therapy, email me.

The Post About Therapy, Part One

2015-01-19T07:16:00.000-08:00

I feel a whole lot better than I did in August.

I feel better playing music. Going out with friends. Christmas shopping. Saying no to things. Saying yes to things. Cleaning up the kitchen before going to bed.

I wrote last August I planned to tackle my anxiety through guitar lessons. That is a bit like saying that I planned to get my finances in order by stacking the coins on my bureau, but whatever. It got me started.

Five months later, here's where I am:

I can practice and play music with focus. The part of my brain that called me names when I picked up a musical instrument has quieted down.

When I have a guitar lesson, I let my guitar teacher stay in the room with me and let him sit where I can see him.

I'm having fun on a new instrument, electric bass, which fits my personality better. (That deserves a blog post of its own.)

I feel better all day long: less frantic, more confident.

You may not be surprised to hear that the solution to my anxiety didn't turn out to be learning very slowly to play guitar. I turned the corner when I started seeing the right therapist and asking myself the right questions.

One the questions my therapist prompted me to consider was "What are my go-to routines for coping with life? What impulses do I act on, over and over again?"

Door Number One? Door Number Two? or Door Number Three?

People think of me as a resourceful person, a Wonder Woman. But for all my resourcefulness, I've only worked up three routines for getting through life. One: be entertaining, so people like to have me around. Two: be helpful, to convince people I'm indispensable. And three: when I'm worn out from being entertaining and helpful, lie low and avoid other people. Preferably under the bedcovers.

It's as though I lived in a hallway with three doors in front of me, and only three doors.

That is what I called choosing how to live my life: deciding which one of those doors to open, over and over again. Always the same damn doors. Helping people, entertaining people, avoiding people.

If this were a graphic novel, this would be the panel where a thought balloon explodes above my head saying, "What the ?!!#%&*!!!"

How's that for a cliffhanger? To be continued...

Sledgehammer

2015-01-08T06:42:00.000-08:00

I used to volunteer every week at Habitat for Humanity in New Haven. I wanted to pick up some fixer-upper skills. One weekend, a group of women from a local Episcopalian church showed up to volunteer. They were nice, slightly frail women in pastel fleece casualwear. It's possible a couple of them had their hair done the day before, in a place called a beauty salon.

Because I had a little bit more experience than these new volunteers, I was designated the crew leader of the Slightly Frail Episcopalian Women.

One of our jobs that day was to knock out a bunch of walls in a older house that had been chopped up into tiny rooms to create low-rent rooming house. We had to knock down any partition that wasn't part of the original house, to restore the hundred-year old floor plan.

This involved sledgehammers. None of the women in my crew had ever wielded a sledgehammer before. I asked them. No previous sledgehammer experience. There might have been some nervous jokes about manicures and osteoporosis.

We started knocking down walls. Within about four minutes, every single one of my frail church women team had lit up from within with enthusiasm and power. "Boy, it's amazing what you can do with a sledgehammer!' they all said, one after the other.

After forty-five minutes of smashing beams and plaster with a massive metal hammer, my frail church ladies were as flushed and charged up as if they had passionately tangoed with a handsome young man.

That's how I feel about playing the electric bass. It's fun, I want to do it, it makes me part of a team, and I love to feel that power in my hands.

Yesterday I bought a secondhand bass amp off of Craigslist. My musician friend Pierce came along with me to the guy's house in Wallingford to check it out. The amp makes a great sound, and it's only 20 pounds, a nice manageable size. The seller, a middle-aged guy with a house full of gear, seemed pleasantly surprised that I took a hold of the amp to carry it to my car instead of standing aside in my cute outfit to let Pierce do the heavy lifting.

I've always had cute outfits, and now I have a bass amp too. SLEDGEHAMMER.

True Confessions

2014-12-30T02:13:00.000-08:00

Confession: For the last month, while I tried to work out my "issues" with guitar, I've fooled around on the side playing the electric bass.

I borrowed a Gretsch bass and a small practice amp from a friend, ferried them home, plugged in and turned up the volume. The first week I had the bass I took it along to my weekly Beatles music class, and I managed to play the bass part to an entire song-- "The Ballad of John and Yoko." Nice and loud. That's no small miracle.

I've been going to this Beatles class, led by Shawn Persinger, for over a year. I love to learn more about the inner structure of the music, and my love for the Beatles borders on the obsessive. But my even my Beatles love didn't inoculate me against my music anxiety. In class, I played guitar too softly to be heard. Sometimes I didn't play at all; I just sang, in a tiny strangled voice.

Skinny jeans, black boots

So how did I do with the electric bass? In class, I was a little nervous to play in front of other people, but somehow, bass in hand, I wasn't crippled by dread. That first week I played "The Ballad of John and Yoko" all the way through. Loud. Enthusiastically. Boastfully, even.

The following week I played the bass part to "Hello Goodbye." The next week I played standing up, like an actual rock band bass player, in skinny jeans and black boots.

Fun fact: Davy Jones of the Monkees
played a Gretsch bass the same size
as the one I've borrowed.

People who know about my struggles with guitar have said to me, "How great that you found an instrument you can enjoy. Bass must be 'your' instrument."

I see where they get that. Guitar has caused me all kinds of anxiety. Progress is slow. Then the first week I picked up the bass I was able to play it with the volume up, in front of other people, and had a great time. My skills on bass are primitive, but when I goof up, I don't spiral Into a sweaty panic. A flub feels like no big deal. I can dive right back in. In contrast, when I make a mistake on guitar I get flustered and have a hard time finding my place again.

Issues and tissues

I have a different idea about why bass is working better for me than guitar. I don't think it's just because it is a new instrument. Honestly, there is a lot of overlap between guitar and bass, so even though I just picked up the bass, my guitar skills gave me a solid foundation from the get-go.

I think I am having a blast playing bass because I've been working so hard in therapy since October. In a way that's a more boring explanation-- I've been working on my issues -- but in another way, that's cause for big-time celebration.

It's not all about the bass. It's about my inner equilibrium. I'm slogging away at understanding myself better and I'm starting to see results.

I promise I will outline exactly how therapy has helped me cope with my anxiety fairly soon. I started this blog to share what has worked for me, and I will.

And the guitar?

My guitar sounds better than ever to me, more musical and expressive. But bass is a whole nuther game. The bass feels like the Cowardly Lion: big, blustery, good-natured, a bit comic when he goes too far. The guitar is more like Glinda the Good Witch: shimmery, evanescent, showing up at unexpected moments to do magic.

This week on guitar I started to learn to play the Beatles "Blackbird," with the accurate Paul McCartney transcription. That song is Glinda through and through. It calls for a lot of mental effort, but the hard work is shot through with sparks of magic.

I don't know yet what song I need to learn on bass for my upcoming Beatles class, because Shawn hasn't made up his mind yet. Even if he decides the night before class, I will stay up late to learn the bass part because I want to be ready to go on Sunday morning, full throttle.

Playful notes

2014-12-17T09:58:00.001-08:00

I haven’t talked much about making music. You might think, well, making music is the whole point of playing guitar-- maybe she should have jumped ahead to the good part. Just skip the stuff about meditation and metronomes.

I didn't write about making music because I barely knew what that meant. I practiced guitar a lot. Most of the time I was not "making music."

Why do I say this, when I have years of "music lessons" behind me? Because following the steps of a rhumba with your feet is not the same thing as dancing. Memorizing a script is not the same thing as acting. And making notes come out of an instrument is not the same thing as making music.

Talking about music is like talking about love, or the Divine: I feel right away that words are too small. I have heard musicians say that when music happens, really happens, the player feels a connection to a flow of energy is bigger than her self.

Since Thanksgiving, I feel like I have just started to make that connection. The photo I posted where I am playing guitar at the Red Lion Inn was taken right as I turned in that direction. You can see how happy I am, how easy it seems to be me in that moment.

This seems like a good time -- this wobbly, baby steps time -- to outline a few specific things I've done to tap into that connection. I am a highly anxious, highly self-critical person. If you also feel separated from music by a wall of anxiety and self-doubt, maybe some of the practical things that helped me could also help you.

1. The first thing I did was to stop caring about whether I was playing music or not. In the classical music world I knew in high school, it was a truism that some players were "musical" and other players "only had technique." I believed that all of my strong points as a violist were technical. I could follow the conductor, play in tune, come in on the right beat. I never felt that I could play in a way that could touch someone's emotions. In other words, I wasn't "musical."

When I picked up guitar again this summer, that labelling kicked in again. "I'm not a musical player," was the old self-criticism I had to jettison. Instead of worrying about how or why I wasn't musical, I just allowed myself to to focus on technique... for weeks at a time. I didn't forget the distinction between music and technique, but I needed to stop putting myself down. So I stopped judging myself and just practiced.

This may sound all wrong; it’s as if I said I had writer's block, so I practiced typing. Typing is not the same thing as writing. But I knew that finding my voice, musically, might be a slow process. In the meantime, I could at least work on my chops.

2. I memorized the pieces that I was learning -- at least, the first 90 seconds that I had gotten under my belt. Once I had memorized phrases and transitions, it was much easier to feel what notes needed to be brought out as important, or what moves I needed to polish and smooth out. I could play with my ears and heart working more closely together. When I didn't have to look at the sheet music anymore, I had a little more focus for making the connection to music.

3. I took my guitar to a professional for some minor repairs. He told me the buzziness in the sound I hated so much wasn't entirely me -- it was also due to the previous owner wearing down the frets over years of use. The trouble I had with barre chords was at least partly related to how high the bridge had been set. When I got my guitar back, it sounded richer, played easier, and felt more like an extension of my body. Totally worth the $125.

4. I bought an app that makes it easier to play along with recorded music. It lets you slow down the speed without changing the pitch. Remember how a 45 record got all groggy and low when you played it at 33? This app lets you slow down the speed but the sound of the notes stays the same. It’s as if Paul McCartney said to the other Beatles, “Okay, let’s run through that again, but this time at two-thirds speed. Take it easy, guys, because Anne is new here.”

This app is called the Amazing Slow Downer. It is a game-changer. I can feel what it is like to play with other musicians: to make my part work through the other players, against the other players, supporting the other players. I get to feel a sense of musical teamwork without the anxiety of meeting with real human beings.

5. When I was a little kid, a teacher would sometimes put on a record in class and tell us to draw what we heard. “Maybe you picture a forest... maybe the music makes you see a butterfly coming out of its cocoon…” That always struck me as silly. Music didn’t paint pictures in my mind, it created a sense of energy. Building, falling, repeating and changing, lifting up, crashing down. That was hard to get down on paper with crayons.

Well, now I see a way to make that kindergarten assignment work for me.

The classical piece I was working struck me as pretty boring because it began and ended with the same melodic phrase. We don't go anywhere in this piece, I thought. We’re back where we started. Dull.

Then it occurred to me the whole piece was like the arc of a romantic evening. The first kiss of the night might look a lot like the last kiss of the night, but those kisses mean totally different things. When I envisioned the music as the soundtrack to a hot date, from the first yearning gestures to the content cuddling at the end… then the notes of the classical piece turned into music for me.

There's a theme to all of these suggestions, a theme you'll find in books from Aristotle to The Inner Game of Tennis: you master an activity when you train your muscles to act consistently, and turn down the volume on your noodgey, kibitzing brain. The five suggestions I've listed are my take on what a person can actually do to get a little further down that road. I would love to hear whether you have routines you've discovered that I can add to my toolbox.

When your brain calls you names

2014-12-09T08:35:00.000-08:00

In my last post, you could listen to me playing a snippet of music by John Fahey. This took everyone by surprise, especially me. Posting a one-minute audio clip on a blog isn't headlining at Carnegie Hall, but still, when did I get to be such an exhibitionist?

All along, the Tortoise Guitar project has had two goals. To be a better guitar player, yes, but also to be a happy and confident musician. There's a lot of advice out there on performance anxiety, but I had it worse; I even felt panicky when I played alone, at home.

In the earliest days of my Tortoise Guitar project, I was so distracted by my inner critic, it was difficult for me to practice at all. The more my inner critic put me down, the clumsier I played, and (believe it or not!) things just went downhill from there. It felt like trying to practice while someone yanked on my hair.

Today's post is for anyone who wants to know how I am dealing with anxiety: what worked a little, what worked a little better. Spoiler alert: nothing on this list "fixed" me. But it all helped me cope, and move forward.

If you picture anxiety as a flood of water in my house, I would say the water was so high at the beginning I could just barely breathe. Three months later, the flood hasn't completely subsided, but ... it's receded. Now it's only waist-high, maybe.

When your brain calls you names

Some of these coping techniques might sound heavy handed. Yep. I needed a heavy hand to make my name-calling brain sit down and shut up so I could practice guitar.

I meditated for thirty minutes right before practicing, to connect with the quiet, peaceful, timeless, wordless place inside of me. I know that place well from meditation, from long-distance running, and from making art. It would be great if I could stay there after I picked up the guitar. When I felt especially wound up, I observed the anxiety in my body and visualized it as air that I could release as I exhaled.

I practiced tiny chunks of music -- just four note patterns -- so I couldn't "fail." Nobody likes to fail, so why not give yourself an assignment you can't fail? I made sure I didn't bite off more than I could chew. When I was really confident with that tiny bit of music, I added a tiny bit more.

I increased the metronome just a tick at a time. If I could handle a passage at 60 beats per minute, I'd increase the pace to 61. You know the story about the farmer who could lift his full-grown bull, because he started when the calf was born and just kept lifting him every day? That was me. When I chuck my expectations of how fast I am "supposed" to improve, working deliberately can be pleasantly hypnotic, like knitting.

I refused to label my practice as “good” or “bad.” Like the Karate Kid, I spent my time doing “wax on, wax off,” over and over again. This little bit of Zen wisdom might seem counterintuitive, because we usually think, how can I get improve if I don't evaluate what I'm doing? It works because you learn by doing, and even more so, by paying attention to what you are doing. Paying attention to how you are doing is just a distraction.

I "witnessed" my hands as I played, as if I were watching a documentary about a couple of hands practicing. This was so successful I started to feel a choked-up pride for those brave, hardworking fingers. I found myself cheering those fingers on, not just when they did something well but even when they just tried. You don't berate a little kid just learning to kick a soccer ball, right? You show her what to do, and praise her when she tries.

I videotaped myself playing so I could get a grip on reality. I didn't like what I heard on playback, but at least I could see that my problems were the opposite of what I feared. The musician I saw on camera wasn't clumsy, like a bull in a china shop. No, that woman played like a nervous mouse doing needlepoint. That reality-check helped me feel okay about playing with more oomph.

I asked my guitar teacher to stand in the hallway while I played at my lesson. (I still do this now... Progress is slow, like a tortoise.)

I love music, but music doesn't love me

I wasn't just practicing guitar. I knew I had to dig deeper and grapple with my anxiety when I didn't have a guitar in my hands.

I listened to self hypnosis tapes to reduce anxiety. I was concerned about the quality of the ones available online for free, so I ended up spending 15 dollars per download to buy them from a professional outfit in the UK. I don't know whether these tapes helped me at all, but I can tell you that when I hear a British accent now, I feel relaxed.... Deeply relaxed... Even more deeply and fully relaxed.

I practiced a technique called EMDR that is used to break free from the repetitive loop of painful memories. EMDR has gotten a lot of press recently because it can help veterans with PTSD. I learned the technique from a therapist years ago. I don't recommend that you dive into it on your own, but it's worth looking into.

I kept up my regular meditation practice and went on a weekend retreat. At the retreat I looked at my relationship to music, how I've always felt it was an unrequited love affair. I love music, but music doesn't love me. Having the time and space to reflect on that frustrated desire was golden.

Here comes the wrecking ball

So how well did all this work? Depends on what you mean by "work." My guitar skill were getting better, incrementally. But at the same time, anxiety came at me like a wrecking ball.

First I my left shoulder hurt when I played, and soon I had pain all day long. Migraines laid me low. My left fingers went numb. And my lessons... Have you ever nearly collided with a tractor-trailer on the highway? You know how adrenalin shoots through you like a torpedo? That's how I felt at my music lessons.

For a short-term solution to the physical pain, I started taking small amounts of Valium, to relax my muscles and ease my mind.

I knew then I was going to have to get some therapy. Quitting guitar wasn't an option-- as I've said from the beginning, this isn't really about the guitar. It's about transformation. I wanted real transformation, from the inside. Relying on Valium is not an acceptable solution to me, though it was a life-saver when my physical pain was particularly bad.

The best part of the music clip I posted, for me, is not that I hardly made any mistakes as I played. It's that I was able to record that video in a calm frame of mind without Valium. That was genuine progress.

Six weeks ago, I started meeting with two different therapists. Monday is social worker counselor day, Friday is psychologist day. I know most people don't double-up on therapists, but I wanted results, darn it. I was fed up with making myself miserable. I'll pick up that story in my next post.

Sunny Side Up

2014-11-24T20:24:00.005-08:00

I wrote a post I didn't publish last week. In it, I outlined everything I have done in the last three months to combat the panic I feel when I play guitar in front of people. Ev-er-y-thing.

There were some sensible ideas on the list, some silly ones, and (occasional) prescription drugs. The post wasn't badly written, or embarrassing; it was just boring.

The list might have been more lively if I had envisioned it as a board game.

Roll the dice and meditate for the number of minutes shown on the die. Practice the first exercise on the guitar game board. If your heart rate speeds up, divide the beats per minute by 10, then open the book "The Inner Game of Tennis" to that page number and read it aloud. If your heart beat remains steady, roll the dice again. If at any point during the game a player goes to bed with a migraine, he or she must forfeit the game. However, if a player starts to cry, that player gets a hug and another turn.

Fun though that might have been... now Thanksgiving is coming up, and I have a big project to finish before the end of the month: make advent calendars for my friends and family.

So I will be taking a short hiatus from writing about Tortoise Guitar. I'm not taking a break from practicing, or playing, or taking lessons; just a break from keeping a journal about the process.

I'll leave you with something I did not expect I would be posting so soon: a video of myself playing. This is the first minute of the piece by John Fahey I've been learning, "The Sunny Side of the Ocean."

I realized that while I am not ready to FILM myself playing, I didn't mind recording the sound if the camera was focused on something else.

So the star of this video is a sculpture I made a few years ago. I made her face and hands from polymer clay, her hair is wool. I made her clothes myself on a sewing machine, and the ring on her finger is a broken earring of mine. Her hedgehog is his own creature, though. He comes and goes as he pleases.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaVPfTDXxxM

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving and do what you love most in your free time.

Postscript: I know some of you are interested in the nitty gritty details of how I have dealt with anxiety. Me too. Hey, that's been my life for the past few months. I promise I will write about dealing with anxiety when I figure out how to make it not boring.Truthful, clear, and not boring, that's my goal as a writer.

Brass tacks and brimstone

2014-11-05T09:26:00.000-08:00

Every week I say to myself, "I've got to write more about the nuts and bolts of learning guitar." Then I get sidetracked and write instead about The Big Picture And My Soul in the Cosmos.

These are brass bridge
pins on a guitar. You
might find brass tacks
on a banjo, though.

Today I am going to write about playing guitar. Brass tacks.
A progress report.

To put this in context, I was not truly a beginner when I started lessons three months ago -- I had picked up some basic guitar skills as a teenager and never moved forward. Shawn says many of the adults who come to him for lessons are in the same boat.

I could do some basic folk-style picking (think: "Landslide") but only in a repetitive loop; I couldn't switch up the patterns to vary the sound. I knew basic chords but my barre chords never sounded good. I did some basic strums, but I didn't like to strum the guitar because that usually means you're singing along. I did not sing. No way, nohow. On the plus side, it's probably relevant that I could read music and could sound out melodies and chords on the piano.

When I came to Shawn, my guitar skills were weak, mostly because I lacked oomph, verve, and confidence. You can get better at guitar by playing music with people, learning from other players, and going forward with something that sounds gawd-awful until it doesn't sound gawd-awful anymore. I hadn't done any of those things.

Down to brass tacks. What skills have I picked up since August? Shawn has me doing slightly more complicated finger-picking for a simple classical piece and a nifty John Fahey piece. I just started on "Blackbird," the ever-charming Beatles song. We're not working on strumming yet, but Shawn taught me a 12-bar blues progression I can use to strum along with a whole bunch of classic blues records, when I feel devil-may-care.

At the same time, I'm learning to read tab (the written form of guitar sheet music), so that's another skill that's gaining ground. And I've accepted that playing something fifty times slowly is actually an okay way to learn, not a sign that I should move back to Loserville where I thought I came from.

It's pretty cool to see how "practicing" works. I feel like a parent watching her kid learn to ride a bike. These are the stages of learning for me.

Wary confusion: my fingers fumble and hardly find the right notes.
Tentative progress: my fingers hesitate a smidge, but land in the right place.
Success that takes me by surprise: hey, look at that, I'm playing this thing! My hammer-on sounded awesome!
Unconscious skill: my fingers play the measure the way I button a shirt, without having to pay close attention.
Time to go a tiny bit faster! Bump up the metronome a notch and it's back to stage 1 or 2 at the new tempo.

That's how my technical skills are moving forward. Really, really slowly. But that's why I call this Tortoise Guitar.

You might have noticed that none of those five stages of practicing include "set free the music inside the notes." That's the lesson that is so big I can hardly see it, the way you can't see the immensity of the mountain you're scaling.

What I've grasped so far I've is this: the difference between playing music, or just exercising my fingers, arises as much in my intentions as it does in my muscles. Shawn says, "What Keith Richards plays on guitar is not always that difficult to do, but my goodness, his intention makes it sound like fire and brimstone!"

I've mentioned before that I've made videos as I practice. What I saw and heard in those videos was an tense, timid person playing like a mouse. An introverted mouse. So I've turned up the volume-- literally and figuratively. Now when I play, I exaggerate my musical intentions. It turns out that when I wildly exaggerate what I want to express on the guitar, my intentions reach a level that are slightly noticeable to another human being. It's a start.

So how am I doing on verve and confidence? I'm know I'm playing with more verve and confidence at home alone. I still freeze up around other people, even if it's "just for fun." Letting go in front of other people is... like walking down the stairs into a dark and dusty basement. Of an abandoned house. Alone. Without a flashlight.

I realize I haven't talked much about the mental strategies that have helped me keep the anxiety at bay for these three months. I'll save those for another post.

And I'll leave you with an amazing quote from John Fahey.

"You must play until you are no longer afraid of the guitar. Many players are afraid to touch the guitar, and they act like it. You must create an intimate relationship with your guitar. Getting over your fear of it is much like a romantic-sexual conquest... No guitar can withstand the creative spirit that is in every human being."

Tortoise assumes the lotus position

2014-10-24T17:22:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when I tell people I go on meditation retreats that last two to five days, they look at me all squinty. As if I had said that I floss my teeth for fun two to five times a day.

Other people sigh with pleasure and say "I'd looooove to do that," as if they imagine an all-you-can-eat buffet of Parisian pastries and malted milk.

This past weekend I went to a meditation retreat at the Kripalu Institute in Lenox, MA, with my long-time meditation teacher, David Harshada Wagner. I try to go to every retreat that David offers in my area, but for this one I had in mind that working on my music anxiety would be front and center. The Tortoise assumes the lotus position.

(Honestly, you don't have to sit in the lotus position to meditate. I don't.)

For me a retreat is like "a room of one's own," where I can get down to work on what matters most A retreat allows me to feel my feelings, breathe my breath, sleep and wake up on my own schedule. Great vegetarian food, quiet dining rooms to savor peace along with your meal, beautiful woods to walk in. Of course, the main attraction is meditation sessions and talks with David Wagner. It's not always a day at the beach. Sometimes it's more like going deep into your own dark and gnarly cave for some adventurous spelunking.

So after a weekend away from the guitar, I'm home, picking it up again.

I want to offer a handful of tiny lightbulbs that clicked on for me during my retreat weekend. I hope they shine a little for you.

One: David Wagner teaches that meditation is not about getting calm, or letting go of energy. Energy is power. Meditation helps you redirect your energy towards your true purpose. My shoulder muscles have hurt like bejeezus since I started playing guitar this summer. That same energy that is fighting against me now could propel me forward in whatever way I want.

Two: Hey, you know what? The reason to play music could be because I enjoy it myself, not to please other people. I'm sure this is a big "Duh" to many of you, but somehow I did not get that memo. To me, playing music has meant "making other people happy or unhappy." Well, phooey.

Tres: I remembered that when I used to give public talks as a librarian about collecting antiquarian books, I wasn't anxious at all. I loved that topic and I wanted to share it. I felt as if I were the sun, beaming my sunshiny rays in all directions, landing on flowers and rocks alike. I had something to share, and it wasn't going to please everyone. So what!
Moral: this would be a wonderful attitude to bring over into playing music.

Cuatro: A very simplified version of Hindu cosmology says that every planet, every starfish, and every guitar player who has ever lived are all temporary aspects of the timeless, formless, infinite Reality. I'm made of cosmic Play-Doh smooshed into the shape called "Anne" for a little while. The vibrations of the music I'm playing are cosmic Play-Doh. The doorbell at my guitar teacher's house is cosmic Play-Doh. And eventually, everything will all go back to the formless and timeless.

I like this picture a lot. It tells me that when I write, or play guitar, or stand in line at the post office, I am part of the Universe having a conversation with itself. You could say I'm riding a surfboard, on a wave, on an ocean, on something bigger than anyone can imagine.

It's not about me. It's a ride. Cowabunga!

Light bulbs are light bulbs; they're not the engine that makes the steam train run. Insights from a two day retreat aren't going to "fix" my anxiety. But insights are a way in, a way in to see the work that needs to be done. I'll take them.

Postscript: David Harshada Wagner is an awesome meditation teacher I recommend to everyone. His message is Love Hard, Live True. And if you can't get to one of his classes or retreats right away, you can follow along with his surprisingly powerful video classes on YogaGlo.

The view from inside the tortoise shell

2014-10-10T13:17:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in my last post, I am now playing music on my guitar, not just exercises. Shawn gave me bite-sized bits of music -- just a few lines of classical, blues, John Fahey -- but at last, I am playing something with color and flavor, feeling okay about the sounds I'm making.

All those weeks of doing nothing but exercises were my idea, I want to be clear. Since I’ve always felt that ‘playing music’ makes me anxious, I thought that focusing on exercises would give me less to be anxious about. And that was true, but it was like doing topiary with tweezers. I obsessed over details without getting anywhere in the bigger picture.

Shawn went along with that for a while but he finally steered me away from my super-careful tweezerly attitude and assigned me some music to play, really play.

So things were looking and sounding fine, I thought. Well, there was that migraine that kept me in bed for a couple days. And the pain in my shoulder that I had to put ice on. But I told myself things were going well because I was playing the guitar every day... when I wasn't under the covers with a migraine or icing my shoulder.

By Wednesday, the day of my lesson, my left shoulder was so tense that my fingers were numb. I drove to Shawn's studio but I left my guitar in the car. Inside, I sat like a little kid hugging my knees, and made mewling noises about feeling unhinged.

I really, really, really did not want to play guitar or talk about playing guitar.

If Shawn was thrown for a loop, he didn't show it. He talked to me with great patience about how rotten I felt. Then he suggested we listen to some songs and talk about that instead.

Listening to records and talking about them is one of my favorite things to do. So while that hour might not have been a practical guitar lesson, Shawn was right to get me doing something positive.

I think Shawn thought I was going to give this up. I mean, when a person comes to her guitar lesson without a guitar and huddles in the corner like a tortoise who can't face the world... Things aren't looking good.

But this project never was about the guitar. Really. It’s about the cage I’ve lived in for years when all the time the door has been wide open. It’s about me tackling something that seems impossibly scary. I’m pretty sure that if I can uproot this fear, I’m going to feel a whole lot better about a whole lot of things.

So I’m not giving up.

Last night, I dreamed that I could fly, but I still couldn’t escape the monsters chasing after me. Then God showed up and told me, “You need to wake up!” Yup. Always good advice.

I started calling some therapists because I think maybe I need some extra help here.

I asked Shawn for the next page of the John Fahey piece that I love. I'm playing it very slowly and it's beautiful.

More news as it develops.

Blues, tattoos, musical news

2014-09-29T21:29:00.000-07:00

Last week, Shawn instructed me to stop micro-obsessing over exercises and start playing music. He gave me 26 measures of music to practice and play. A twelve-bar blues progression (twelve measures); a simple Italian classical andantino (eight); and the opening phrase of a John Fahey piece in open-G tuning (six).

I think this was sort of brilliant of Shawn.

One bite of the blues, one bite of classical, one bite of Fahey. Nothing overwhelming.

How's it going? Pretty good. I don't want to say "hey, NOW I'm on the right track," because, you know, chickens gotta hatch before you count them. But I feel good about what I'm doing this week for a couple of reasons.

First of all, before I started to practice these pieces, I found videos on YouTube of people playing them well-- playing with soul and guts and good taste. It would be weird to try to make a lasagne if you'd never eaten lasagne before, right? So the first thing I did with these pieces of music was to meet them on their own terms, as music. Music that says something, music that goes somewhere.

Second, the three styles were little Petri dish to let me see what different kinds of music stir up inside me. Here's what came up for me when I practiced these three pieces.

Playing the classical piece
I feel well-behaved when I play the lyrical andantino, above reproach. My mean-spirited inner critic thinks it's charming but a little boring. No-one is going to criticize me for playing this, but no-one is going to carry me off into the sunset, either.

Playing the blues chord progression
This set off my alarm bells. The teacher is going to catch me smoking in the bathroom and I'll be in big trouble. Or worse, an older kid will find me smoking and laugh at my clumsy stab at rebellion. Maybe I should get a tattoo first, and then the blues won't seem like such a big deal. Just kidding, Mom!

Playing the John Fahey song, "On the Sunny Side of the Ocean"
This little scrap of music is more about vibrations and color than about a directional melody. It's a little dissonant, very understated. I love it. It feels like an intuitive conversation with a good friend.

Believe me, I am not saying that my reactions are justified or helpful. But I can't help thinking that almost everyone must have their own version of these feelings lurking inside. It must be better to look at them head-on, right?

I had a fantastic dream a few nights ago: I underwent hypnosis so that I could hear music more deeply, and it worked. In my dream, musical phrases had color, and texture, and flavor. The vibrations went through me like a great massage. The down side of this, in the dream, was that I was so overwhelmed by the beauty that I couldn't move. I lay on the sidewalk outside the hypnosis center, blissed out and waiting for a taxi to come take me home.

Hmmm. If I enjoy music too much... I'll end up like a junkie on the sidewalk? Where did I get that message?

Waltz of the Nervous Spider, Parts 1 and 2

2014-09-21T05:58:00.000-07:00

When I started this blog, I said I would report on my missteps as well as my progress. I wasn't going to wait until all the dust settled and then tell you who won.

Well, this is the story of a misstep.

On Thursday, Shawn told me that he thought I had painted myself into a corner with my practice methods.
He said, "You've been practicing the same thing too much. You need to let yourself play badly."

I was pretty defensive about that. Based on the method that Kenny Werner describes in Effortless Mastery, my number on priority has been learning to practice in a meditative state. In my last post, I wrote about tricking my mind into loosening its sweaty grip on the steering wheel so auto-pilot could click in.

I still think that is the right goal: to master musical skills so they feel as automatic as zipping up a jacket. But Shawn was right. I had turned that good idea into a hurdle so high I could never clear it.

It's as though I announced I wanted to learn to cook, started with cake decorating, and then narrowed my focus to making leaves out of green frosting. I wouldn't let myself move on until I could make a single frosting leaf perfectly and effortlessly, in the meditative state of mind.

On the guitar, that means that I labored to make each finger-picked note sound clear and perfectly formed. In the first week, Shawn had given me an exercise that used four chords and four fingers. In the guise of practicing a little bit at a time, I had narrowed my practice to polishing just the transition between G and D chords.

As I narrowed my focus, I found fault with almost every note. That would lead me to chop up the exercise into even shorter sections. I thought I was on the right track, following Kenny Werner's advice to go "as slow as needed to play it effortlessly and perfectly." I got to the point where I was spending quite a lot of time on what two fingers were doing with two notes.

Then I made a video of myself practicing. I was pretty happy with how I sounded when the camera was rolling. What I heard as I played was notes that were accurate, clear, nothing to object to. So it seemed to me.

But when I watched the video a few minutes later I was shocked. There was no doubt Shawn was right; I had gone a long way in the wrong direction.The person in the video acted like making a mistake would lead to a painful electric shock. Her left hand crawled along the neck like a nervous spider, one tentative step at a time. The sound coming out of the guitar was a waltz for that nervous spider hummed by a doubtful mouse.

I was trying so hard to avoid mistakes, I sounded all wrong. I had worked so hard not to sound "bad" that nothing sounded good.

At this week's lesson, Shawn firmly directed me to start practicing guitar skills in the context of making music. The tiny elements aren't as important as the feel of the bigger picture. He gave me a beautiful, simple little classical piece for beginners; a chart of the basic twelve-bar blues changes; and the first page of a piece by John Fahey that's technically easy but contains oceans of music when played well.

I honestly don't know how this is going to shake out, but I don't want to stay on the track I've been on, the track of the nervous spider. I'll report later in the week how it's going.

Effortless: what the heck?

2014-09-19T08:58:00.003-07:00

Note: when I wrote this piece on Wednesday, I had full confidence that I was going in the right direction with my practice methods. Then, at my lesson on Thursday, Shawn pointed out I might have confidently marched down a dead-end street. I still think what I wrote about here -- aiming for effortlessness-- is important.

Important, but not the whole enchilada.

Jazz pianist Kenny Werner (Effortless Mastery) says that when you practice a new piece, you should take it "as slow as needed to play it effortlessly and perfectly." He practices each section until his hands can play each line of music "as mindlessly as using a fork."

This piece of advice sounds really do-able -- if you're messing up, slow down until you don't mess up. But it hasn't been working for me. I do my exercises calmly, slowly, meditatively. But when it comes down to it, my hands aren't getting more proficient. By the end of practice, I often have the metronome going slower than the day before. There are times I feel I can't play even a single note "effortlessly."

Honestly, "effortless" seems like a kind of crazy word to use about music, doesn't it? You have to burn calories. You have to hold up your guitar and not drop it.

Going back to Werner's book, he says what he means by "effortless" is action that arises from "a place of relaxed focus," a state of mind similar to meditation. This "effortlessness" often descends on a person who studies martial arts, or an athlete completely absorbed in a competitive game.

I've never spent much time on sports, but I thought I'd recognize that "place of relaxed focus" because I love to meditate. Werner's advice wasn't working for me as promised, though. I was taking my time, going slower and slower, recognizing when I lost focus and returning to the meditative state... but my hands didn't absorb the new skills.

Maybe I had misinterpreted what Werner means by "effortless." He drops another clue when he says playing music can be as "mindless as using a fork." Well, I know what it's like to use a fork... wash my face... write with a ballpoint pen. These are routine things that get done almost as a reflex.

When I use a pen to write a few words, my hand guides the pen through the steps almost unconsciously. I may have my goal in mind ("sign back of check") but the mechanics are done on auto-pilot.

Of course, when I was first learning to write with a pen in grade school, I had to put a lot of effort into it. But now, my brain doesn't need to remind my body what to do. When I pick up a pen, there's no inner voice giving instructions. I'm on auto-pilot, and the only thing on my mind is the words I want to write.

So is writing with a pen "effortless"? It isn't work-free. It burns calories and uses a few muscles. But my mind doesn't supervise the process, and that's what makes it feel effortless. I think that is what Werner is getting at.

I need to trick my brain into loosening its sweaty grip on the steering wheel so the auto-pilot can click in.

Today as I practiced, I let go of the guitar every few moments and picked up a pen on my desk, as if I were about to write my name. As I grabbed the pen, I could feel a distinct shift in my mind as auto-pilot took over. When I put it down and went back to the guitar, that sense of auto-pilot lasted about a millisecond before my brain went back to kibitzing and barking instructions.

But briefly, I felt the difference between an effortless mind, open like a clear blue sky, and a supervising mind, as busy as a noisy flock of crows.

Howl and move

2014-09-11T15:34:00.000-07:00

"I'm not very good technically (on guitar), but I can make it howl and move” – John Lennon, to Rolling Stone.

So far, my blog about learning guitar has barely mentioned fingers, or strings, or chords. It's time to write about literally practicing guitar.

At my request, Shawn has designed exercises for me that many people would call boring. Mind-numbingly boring. But that’s the point! A lot of musicians find that their critical mind is their own worst enemy. I sure do. My mind calls me names and brings me down. It tells my body to tense up every muscle in self-defense. If boring exercises will numb my mind and let my fingers go about their business in peace, that's golden.

Shawn offered to make my exercises more interesting, but I said, boring is good for now. Let my mind check out, peace out, and get out of the way.

Three weeks into the Tortoise Guitar project, my exercises include:

Five basic chords: G, D, C, A, E, and the easier minors and sevens: Am, Em, A7, E7. No barre chords yet.
Finger picking patterns that use each finger once: PIMA and PAMI. P-I-M-A are the traditional labels for the thumb, index, middle and ring fingers, from the Spanish words pulgar, indice, medio, and anular.
I'm working on changing chords cleanly.
I'm working on changing chords more fluidly, gradually, using the metronome.

At the same time, part of my practice is learning to manage my mental state. I’ve tried different ways to relax my mind while my fingers buckle down to learn their jobs. This is what has worked best for me, so far.

I meditate before practicing.
I make believe I’m watching a film of someone else’s hands playing guitar. This idea comes from Kenny Werner’s Effortless Mastery.
I observe what my hands are doing in a nonjudgmental way. This is an important point from The Inner Game of Tennis. I say to myself, “The F# in that chord was buzzy,” instead of “That was terrible! You can’t even play a simple D chord!”
I lay my head down on the guitar to make the sound vibrate through more parts of my body.
I focus on using just the muscles that are required to change chords. My shoulders don’t need to tense up to make a chord change, but they want to. I’m consciously practicing keeping the shoulder muscles uninvolved.

Shawn suggested one more exercise for peace of mind: I take one Beatles song a day and play it straight through, no matter how difficult. I soldier on through the awkwardness and horror of making lousy sounds. That is just to prove to my poor anxious mind that the sky won't fall on my head if I play something "badly."

Full circle back to John Lennon. There's a guy who found a way to make music even though he wasn't so keen on polishing his technical skills. In the video below, you can hear his frustration in a demo tape he made as he wrote "Strawberry Fields Forever." "Canna do it, I canna do it," he says, as he flubs a guitar move. What does he do then? He slows down and practices that move. He may have told a reporter he never had great technical skills, but I would say he developed his technical skills to serve the song he heard in his mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jD2h0WuQ9kE

At 55 seconds, Lennon exclaims: "Canna do it, I canna do it." Well, he kept at it.

Just being honest

2014-09-05T07:42:00.000-07:00

These first two weeks of Tortoise Guitar have gone well for me and my guitar. Every day, for 30 to 60 minutes, I’ve practiced the first exercise Shawn designed for me. No tears. It felt a lot like practicing guitar as a form of meditation, just as I hoped.

I had a lot of beautiful moments in those practice sessions, the ones that only happen when you are “in the moment.” I felt my thoughts dissolve. I felt the music unfolding outside of me. I felt the metronome slowed down, Matrix-style, so I had all the time in the world to make the notes happen. I was looking forward to writing my first practical entry for this blog, so I could reveal that I am evolving into a relaxed and focused superstar of yoga guitar.

But no! This afternoon was my first “real” lesson at Shawn’s house since I began, and it was a hellstorm of anxiety!
All my old enemies showed up: shaking hands, clumsy fingers, pounding heart. I had difficulty speaking, my head swam, and my left shoulder felt like a squirrel in a panini press. Even though I know Shawn is super-supportive… even though nothing was at stake… anxiety possessed me like a demon.

I had to ask Shawn to stand out in the hall while I went through my exercises. If I closed my eyes and pretended I was alone, I was able to snatch a few ragged seconds here and there when my fingers seemed to work. Mostly, I was along for the ride with panic at the wheel, speeding down the wrong side of the highway. It was as though the last two weeks of meditative practice had never happened.

So back at home, as I picked up my guitar again tonight -- still reeling from the flood of adrenalin my brain dispatched to help me escape death by guitar – I came up with a new strategy. I asked my clenched-up shoulder what was going on.

Me: Hey, Shoulder, why so tense, buddy? What are you afraid of?

Shoulder muscle: You sound like a loser! If people could hear you, they would laugh at you and wonder why you even bother to try. They'd say you'll never play guitar because you are not a cool person. And no matter how much you try to get tan, your legs stay milky white all summer. Brace yourself! Ridicule is coming!

Me: Okay, so… worst case scenario… let’s say that happened. Let’s say the meanest girls from junior high flew here from Los Angeles just to make fun of me in my bedroom. They tell me I'm uncool, they laugh at me, blah blah. Honestly, how would I react to that? Would I be crushed? No. I’d be puzzled. And I would have to ask the mean girls:

Me: Wow, Jennifer, Leslie, that’s a boatload of mean stuff you’ve serving up. What’s that all about? Are you unhappy with your lives? Are you angry at somebody else? Do you get some kind of sick pleasure from torturing other people.

Mean girls: We’re not mean, we’re just being honest. You suck at volleyball, your hair is stupid, and you really suck at guitar. In case you hadn’t noticed.

Me: Well, yeah, I’m a beginner. Big deal. That’s what happens when you learn a new skill. I’m okay with my progress. Honestly, it seems kind of weird that you’re even paying attention.

Mean girls: Yes, admittedly, this is a weird conversation, but that’s because we are not really Jennifer and Leslie from junior high but projections of your worst fears about yourself. We’re not so bad in real life. Except we would probably be jealous of how you look ten years younger than we do now, because we tanned and smoke and drank too much way back when. What moisturizer do you use? But hey, we can talk about that at the next high school reunion.

Shoulder muscle: Do you still need me here? I’ve forgotten what I was tensed up for.

Me: No, that’s fine. Thanks, Shoulder. I appreciate how you try to protect me by turning into a rigid shield of armor, but you can take a break now. I have other ways of taking care of myself now.

In my next post, I may get around to talking about playing guitar. For now, though, I feel like we're trying to build a railway line through a mountain tunnel. Shawn is the engineering expert, with all kinds of tools and plans for laying the track, and he has great ideas about what’s up ahead. But I'm still trying to blast the tunnel open. It may be a while before things are clear enough to make visible progress.

Making friends with a guitar, making friends with myself

2014-09-01T16:24:00.002-07:00

Why should I play guitar? I'm not itching to start a band. I don't want to strum ballads in a coffee shop. I've never needed a guitar to get the party started. I have several friends who are wonderful guitarists, so I might as well stick with my strengths: cracking jokes and making pies.

But here I go again, picking up the guitar and trying to make music, just like I have a dozen times before. Why do I keep banging my head against this wall?

The obvious answer is that I love guitar. When I was a kid, we had LPs by Odetta and Joan Baez in our house. Their voices seemed awfully earnest to me, but in the sounds of their unruly folk guitars I heard the thrill of talking back, of hitchhiking, of reckless freedom. From the public library I borrowed records by Simon and Garfunkel, Donovan, Dylan, and eventually I made my way to the powerhouse guitar mavericks Leo Kottke and John Fahey.

The more I heard, the more I loved the sounds people can make with guitars. Paul Simon’s guitar makes me think of a lemon Lifesaver: sweet, a tiny bit tangy, but ultimately so smooth I’m ready for another song as the first melts away. John Fahey is more of an acquired, "not for everyday," taste. Fahey's way-out-there guitar is like sinking my teeth into a real lemon, shuddering and laughing at the sourness.

It's a big world, acoustic guitar. I love the range of tones from silk to sandpaper, from ice cream to firewater.

So maybe ... since I love to listen to guitar... I might enjoy playing guitar. At least, that's what I hoped the last dozen times I picked up the guitar and made a dogged effort to get somewhere. But enjoyment rarely happens for me and my guitar. I feel bad for the guitar, and bad about myself.

For a long time, trying to play music has made me feel so tense, so self-critical, and so fearful that there is not a split-pea's worth of pleasure in it for me. Honestly, this might be the reason I've been pretty skinny my whole life. I've burned a lot of calories trying to play music, with my pounding heart and my shaking hands.

What I want to do now is something brand new: I don't want to try one more time to learn to play guitar. I want to to learn without tears.

That's the less obvious reason for this project. I want to learn how to learn. It's not just about the guitar. It's about learning how to grow and thrive.

I believe I have to start with two fundamentals:

To go back to the beginning on guitar, to master the basic skills that have never been solid for me.
To turn off the scolding, belittling, disparaging, just plan MEAN inner voices that overwhelm me when I pick up a musical instrument.

In this blog I will keep track of my progress on both of those fronts, writing about what seems to work to stretch my musical skills and to quiet my self-critical mind. I'm not writing about this after the fact, after I've learned what there is to learn -- I'm writing at the very beginning of the process, in the midst of uncertainty and trial and error. I hope to conquer "music anxiety" by using myself as a guinea pig. If what I say about playing music sounds familiar to you, I'd love to hear about how you have wrestled with the same demons.

I'll be drawing on what I've learned as a meditation student. I've got several books that address the problem I've described: The Inner Game of Tennis, Effortless Mastery: Liberating the Master Musician Within, The Natural Classical Guitar. My guitar teacher Shawn Persinger is working to develop exercises and approaches that will let me move forward in guitar without wrecking my peace of mind.

Some of my posts will be about actual guitar exercises. Some of my posts will be about philosophy and emotions. I'm keeping the journal of one woman making friends with a guitar, and making friends with herself.

Fun stuff! Yay, Youtube!

Paul Simon and his spookily lookalike brother Ed play "Anji" on two guitars in 1968.

http://youtu.be/jN2sWrr6l80

John Fahey, Thus Khrishna On The Battlefield, 1973.

http://youtu.be/Ey04dUTM_gQ