And what is the distinction between Holistic Music and other music education?

For anyone who's been through music lessons before in some form or another, most of the time in our general society, there is a really clear focus on two particular dimensions of the human experience, and that's the physical and the mental. 

In lessons we learn the physical movements of how to navigate the instruments. We learn the practical skills that we need to play the instruments. We also develop the knowledge in the mental realm of, of how music works, all of the music theory, how to read music. And this is generally considered the main scope of learning music.

Through my personal experience, learning, practicing, creating, writing, teaching, performing music over more than 35 years, I found there to be massive gaps in this model and that it's been really lacking in a lot of important ways, actually, some of the ways that are most intrinsic to music itself.

In this video and blog post, I will unpack what I mean by Holistic Music, and what it means to learn and practice music in this way.

Check out the video below to watch and listen.

Scroll down to read the transcribed blog post.

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So then if we think about when we get inspired to learn music, what is it that inspires us? 

Usually it's a feeling, right? 

We get a certain feeling, we get an inspiration, we get some kind of calling from music, and ultimately we want to express our feelings through it, and we want to connect with people through the music as well.

So primarily our drive and our motivation and our inspiration to learn music is an emotional one, and it can also be a spiritual one where we get to experience something beyond our personal selves. We start to realise that we're actually bigger than we think we are. 

But then when we go into our music lessons, the focus is so heavily on the physical and the mental. There does have to be a strong focus on those things because our body and our mind needs to learn how to do it all, we need to build up the skills and the knowledge. 

But if our music learning paradigm isn't imbued with that initial inspiration, that initial drive and impulse to want to learn music, which is the emotional and spiritual dimensions, then pretty quickly our motivation is going to fall short.

We're going to start to run into roadblocks. The natural challenges of the learning journey become more than a lot of people are willing to overcome because there isn't a strong anchoring in that inspiration and that deep calling that we have to music gets lost. It gets lost in all of the learning and all the drills and the scales and the exercises and all of that.

The traditional mode of learning music also misses out a really, really important aspect of the power that music can have in our lives. That is, the power to come to know ourselves more deeply, to come to feel and experience ourselves more deeply, to understand ourselves more deeply, and to grow and transform and expand as human beings, not just in music, but in all dimensions of our experience.

When approached with this in mind, music practice has the power to be truly transformational. 

And I believe that it's actually this that we are looking for in our music practice. We're looking to expand beyond our limits. We're looking to experience ourselves as more, as bigger as, as more fully expressed than we are currently in our lives.

And music we know is the vehicle - or a very powerful vehicle for us to be able to do that. 

These are many of the reasons why I created the Holistic Music Method. 

Here I'll explain the different dimensions of the Holistic Music approach and what that means for your music practice. 

For something to be Holistic, it's really embracing all dimensions of something. 

And in the case of Holistic Music, the way that I describe this is the four primary dimensions of being human, which are the physical, the mental, the emotional, and the spiritual dimensions. 

As I mentioned, we already get a great opportunity to work through the physical and the mental dimensions of music, but there is actually more to them than we normally get taught in music anyway.

So in the Holistic Music Method, we get to expand what they actually are and look at more of these dimensions than we currently experience in the learning of music. 

And, we spend a lot more time on the emotional and the spiritual dimensions, making sure that our music practice is imbued with these, because this is where the inspiration lies. The physical and the mental dimensions are there to serve that emotional expression and that spiritual expansion. 

The Physical Dimension 

This is obviously all about the body. It's about movement, It's about the contact with the instrument. It's also about embodiment, feeling, the physical sensations of sound within the body.

It's our kinaesthetic sense, our spatial awareness, and it's connecting in with the ways that movement helps to learn music and learn musical patterns. It can be a lot like a dance. 

In the physical dimension, there's an opportunity to understand the body and that the body moves more slowly than the mind or the, the heart or the spirit.

The Physical dimension is on a gross, dense level. And so, it gives us the opportunity to learn how to be compassionate with the body, compassionate with that dimension of ourselves, to be patient, and it gives us an amazing opportunity to practice mindfulness. 

It’s also a portal into flow states, which I maintain is really one of the most primary reasons why we are attracted to doing music in the first place, because it has the potential to bring us into these states.

And of course it's about skill building. Anything on a physical skill level is obviously the physical dimension of learning music. 

The Mental Dimension

The mental dimension clearly has to do with the mind, and all of the ways that we use and, interact with the mental dimension of ourselves through the learning of, and practicing and playing of music.

In this dimension, there is knowledge. The mental structures, the patterns, the cerebral structures of music that we comprehend with our mind and the way that we use our mind to navigate a musical scenario. It's obviously a very important aspect of ourselves to be able to use within music and properly integrated into the musical experience. It's there to assist us. 

It can be so easy though, to get caught up in the mind and the intellectualism of music and actually forget the emotional source of why it is that we feel with music in the first place. 

Sometimes people have a little bit of a resistance to the mental dimension of music because they don't want to get stuck in that or trapped in that. Sometimes it starts feeling a bit heavy or not fun anymore.

However, I maintain that in its correct place it's absolutely necessary and, a really beautiful support to that emotional and spiritual expression in the mental dimension. 

We also have our thoughts. We have the way that we think about the musical process, the judgments, expectations, the narratives or the stories that we create around music and around ourselves in the music.

In the mental dimension we not only have the mental dimension of music, but we have the mental dimension of how we relate to our own process of learning music. That can be in our self dialogue, in our expectations of ourselves, in our internal narrative that we have around the process.

As is usually the case in our culture, the mind is very strong and very dominant. So it can tend to come in and take things over. In the Holistic Music Method, we really make an effort to have it serving the process in its right place without taking over the other dimensions, which are equally, if not more important.

The Emotional Dimension

This is really where music shines. It's a language that we use to express our emotions. The connection between sound and feeling is a very profound one, and one that we can spend a lifetime journeying through an understanding of. 

The beautiful thing is that we can experience that emotional connection to sound without really having to do anything. All we need to do is make a sound and we can make an emotional connection with that. It's truly one of the most satisfying and enjoyable aspects of music practice is to deepen and cultivate this sound-feeling connection. 

There's the emotional dimension of music and how musical sounds and structures make us feel, and how we can use those to express ourselves. And then there's also the emotional dimension of how we relate to ourselves, again, in the process of learning. 

On this level, as opposed to the thoughts that we have about this, which are more of a mental thing, it's the emotions that we have in relation to ourself, the feelings of frustration or self doubt or self-worth, that might come up for us.

But it's also the feelings of joy, of beauty, of those intangible experiences that come through the music - and this really is a truly rich world of possibility and discovery that's there waiting for us. 

One of the ways that music has a capacity to be transformational is in the way that it helps us to understand more about who we are as human beings on an emotional level. It's truly powerful because of that sound-feeling connection, and because of the understanding we can gain about our own emotional world and, and how we relate to ourselves in music and in life. 

Through music, we have an opportunity to learn to trust our feelings, to follow our feelings, to allow them to be seen and expressed in the world, to develop a trusting and positive relationship with our emotions internally and in our relationships with other people.

Anyone who's on a journey of personal growth knows that this is probably one of the linchpins or the keystones to personal growth and transformation in any area of life. 

The Spiritual Dimension

The spiritual dimension of learning and practicing music is really the place where we integrate all of these parts. 

When I say spiritual, I don't mean religious, I just mean any way that we experience some kind of expansion beyond the personal. 

This can often happen through the flow state, especially in music practice because one of the hallmarks of this state is the sensation that you're being acted through - that it's not really you doing the playing, it's something greater. 

However you want to understand that, label that or explain that, the subjective experience within the human being is that there is something bigger going on here than ‘just me’. 

That experience can be really profound, and it's through that deep concentration that we can cultivate when we are bringing our attention into the act of playing music into the physical, into the mental, and into the emotional dimensions that give us the intense focus that is required to enter these states of flow.

There are just amazing insights that can come from that. What's really exciting is when people have their first experience of tapping into that and they realise - wow, this is what it's really all about! 

It's not about the physical. It's not about knowledge. Even though those things do facilitate, and be really wonderful portals into this experience. They're there to serve the expansion of that experience. 

But ultimately what we are really looking for is that emotional, creative, expressive flow that helps us to feel ourselves, know ourselves, and express ourselves more deeply. 

So if you are on a journey of personal growth and you also feel called to learn music, I'd like to suggest just exploring what are some of the ways that you can actually bring all of these dimensions into your learning of music?

In whatever pathway that you find, whether you decide you want to investigate working with me, which you're more than welcome to, or if you find that elsewhere, consider those moments where you come up against a challenge or a roadblock and what happens in these times. 

Often people tend to put it aside for a while or, or get discouraged. But what you might really need in those moments is an opportunity to connect more deeply to the emotional and the spiritual dimensions of what music is to you, and why you feel called to it. 

If you can connect to those things in the midst of the training of the skills and the knowledge to be able to, to play the instruments and learn the music that you love, that's going to sustain you through the challenge of that learning.

So I encourage you to just consider the ways that you can do that. 

I will be making more videos (and blog posts) about this as well. 

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Practice the beauty of sound, love the sounds you make!