Most of players describe playing discomfort as tension. They associate the tension within motional blocks, hardly coordinated hands, pains, stress, frustration, expressional limit and lack of joy. Players even feel demotivation or even disgust to practice, because they are already in tension before real work starts. They are more or less afraid of their performances, because they lack of self-control within their own body-mind system. This tension is of course not only of physiological basis, but also psychical. These outcomes usually have more roots and the origin may vary for particular players, but in the end, they influence each other and tend to regression. We need to consider them always as psychosomatic.

How does our playing become over-tense? 

We will focus on perspectives within playing itself:

  1. Lack of awareness to the body motion. Lack of aware work with own body and motional energy that causes integrating over-tense motion yet during practice. Non functional motional patterns that lead to pushing motion over the muscles.
  2. Habitual patterns – the body already reacts and moves in extra tension because it was trained that way
  3. Stress reaction on a mistake, bad expectations. Stress at lessons, bad experience at the public performance. Instrument as a stressor itself.
  4. Expression that we cannot lighten
  5. Concentration – as you will see later, our body reacts on narrowed focus by narrowing the structures.
  6. Sympathetic dominance in culture and consensus
  7. Concentration
  8. Lack of compensation and relaxation of body mind system after practice and playing that causes increasing tension and stress on a long term level
  9. Ineffective practice lacking awareness to motional principles

Possible outcomes of longterm over-tense playing: 

  • playing discomfort, harder technique learning
  • Loss of control among the body motion
  • Increase of Stress
  • Blocks and Pains 
  • Frustration, loss of motivation 
  • Fear of mistakes, public performances
  • Burnout 
  • Depression
  • Anxiety caused mainly from lack of breath and fear of each tone

How to understand tension? Playing tension, motional energy. 

We usually say that tension is bad and release good. It is either this or that. 

That is very black-white understanding. 

Release may be understood as relaxation of your muscles, compensation after practice, but also look at that as to recovery – exertion, adequate effort, that is to invest enough energy to do what you need do or play but not more. Release may be understood as good functioning. A body, that you can rely on, brings release to your mind. Such a body is connected body without unnecessary blocks and tensions in your joints for example. 

Tension can be understood as muscle work, muscle tone, hypertonia1, hard work, stress, rigidity, but also expressive tension and dynamics or even concentration (while you are concentrating, your muscles really “concentrate” the body into the focal point). Tension is condition of every motion and action.

Only a certain kind of a tension is a troublemaker. It is inadequate, long-lasting, not coordinated-unconscious, not compensated tension. Tension as a stress reaction that is not eliminated is also a problem. Over-tense motional code as a basis of our playing is a huge problem. It may lead to increase stress or even support the start of stress reaction. Integrated over-tense reactions act like reflex, which then is switching even without any adequate reason, in a state of safety. We basically learn ourselves those patterns of tension and stress yet during our practice time. 

Of course, the reason of over-tense playing and stress come out from other reasons also, such as the whole motional background and growth in early age, family background… Despite any negative background we may influence the outcome consciously.

Exertion and recuperation.

Tension and release never exist without each other. They work complementary.

In LBMS system, we use the topic exertion and recuperation2. This helps us understand and redistribute our motional energy  and tension within our bodies better. If we are working, we need a break. We cannot play in the same tense dynamics all the time. 

We can look on that from mikro and makro perspective. Not all the body parts have to work with same intensity. If we try to release at playing, we shall map the body and target the spots that may support us not by tension, but by release! We also have to understand, that exertion and recuperation is not one and other degree, but the whole three dimensional scale with very wide range of intensities. So at some composition spot, exertion of right hand will be different from the one in two bars later. Your hand will work hard, but your spine can stay more in the recuperation modus. 

This is one of the key abilities we need to cultivate – how much motional energy and in which body parts do I need to use in my motions within playing? Which tension is adequate for some motion? Which is not? Do I need to work hard with other body parts? Which body parts may release more? We learn to work with balance and plasticity of our energy. This approach itself is also a compensation that happens yet during playing!

You should work on this balance within: 

  • your playing style
  • your body and motion
  • composition (redistribute your energy)
  • Your practice
  • Your day

Try following exercise: 

  1. if you sit on a chair or elsewhere right now, try to focus on how you sit, which parts of your body touch the surface, which give you support, which body parts are in more tension that it is necessary for sitting? Check your jaws, belly, spice, neck, face… 
  2. Lift your hand up, check what changed in your relaxed state. Release again the body parts that do not need be in tension. Now write your name to the air space. Then check your body again with the hand still up. Did anything change during writing? 
  3. Put your hand down. release. Now lift the hand and try the same exercise again, just now stop during writing anytime you find out extra tension within yourself, release and continue writing. You ma stop more times. 

We will then integrate release into our playing style very similar way, which I share a bit later. 

If you are not able to detect tension within your body, you need to train simple exercises and body awareness on body mapping like body scanning, progressive muscle relaxation, exercises from Feldenkrais Method or Alexander Technique, on bodily awareness. 

You should be aware of balance between exertion and recuperation within your practice schedule and compensation. Exertion and recuperation is also a topic of compensation. 

My suggestion is that you write your practice or work plan and schedule also your break for compensation – plan also how you will compensate your work to make your recuperation most effective. Try to write down also your “free” time on digital device. At the end of the day, look at the structure you made for your well being and effectiveness. Be aware how you feel after this day and look at your schedule, what could you do better to recuperate in the next days.  

Over tense motional basis and influence to psyche.

What causes the tension? It is an impulse. Then your muscle react. We call this muscle response. Basically, you answer to some question by your tension. This impulse may come from the inside, although the inner impulse is often already a reaction on some outer impulse. You remember having a piece of delicious cake in your fridge, which causes your muscles to reply the way you can stand up and go to the kitchen to reach it. But your muscles can also reply on an impulse of stress and fear. You are waiting for the lesson at the school corridor and your body becomes tense. Your muscles responded on your inner impulse. Even the piece of cake lead to inner impulse – your experience with delicious taste that does not let you sit calmly and pushes you to get it. 

“Muscle responses are of two kinds; those accompanied by changes in tone, and those accompanied by movement.”3 

The muscle response may cause tension only or lead to motion. Our task to get this aspect of your body into your awareness is being focused more on impulses that lead to certain kind of tension or motion and be able to influence release and balance.

Briefly about stress mechanism.

The stress reaction is communicated within our bodies by autonomous nervous system, largely self-regulating division of the nervous system of vertebrates, controlling the involuntary and vegetative cardiovascular, digestive, reproductive and respiratory functions.4 It operates within two subdivisions – parasympathetic nervous system, whose general function is to conserve metabolic energy5, and sympathetic, consisting of nerves originating from the cervical, thoracic and lumbar regions of the spinal chord, supplying muscles and glands, concerned with general activation and mobilizing the body’s fight or flight reaction to stress or perceived danger.6 

These divisions are sometimes called according to their functions “relax and digest” and “fight or flight” and you can basically imagine parasympathetic as the relaxing branch and sympathetic as stress branch. This is of course very simple picture of much more complicated mechanism. The ANS works complementary, as well as the topic of exertion and recuperation. The divisions are in ongoing process of reaching balance within your body, called homeostasis. So it is again a proportion of them within your activity, not just one or another. What is then our issue is to be able to keep yourself away from proceeding to stress levels too much and too often. 

Stress reaction starts, when your mind recognizes something as danger, which does not necessarily mean that the situation is really dangerous to you! Stage fright is typical example of this phenomenon. The audience won’t probably eat you, but your system reacts as it could happen anyway. 

This reaction prepares your body to fight this danger or either run away, or, if the danger is too close to run, you freeze. The bodily symptoms are known to each player who went through stage fright – your heart beats fast, your hands may sweat, your hands or even knees shake, your racionality does not work, because there is no time to think when facing danger, not your digesting or immunity, creativity. So even the enemy is very small and very often not relevant, this reflex prepares strong tools for strong fight. It is because this mechanism is as old as there were such predators endangering our lives. Also the same stress response mechanism is present at many other animals on lower evolutional stages. The reaction is led by older brain structures, so called “lizard brain”, amygdala. 

This is a simplified picture of a stress mechanism, but it goes through more body systems of course. The reaction itself is led by a cocktail of hormones and so called “information liquids” of stress response circulating within your body. The problem is, that even the reaction “stops”, some of these liquids, such as cortisol, decrease yet after several hours! So even in relatively peaceful conditions – like evening home after stressful day, does not really mean the stress is over of your inner system. Additionally, if you live in constant stress, your body may be “flooded” by these liquids all the time.

To understand the layered problem of tension and its problems, we briefly introduce also one more term sympathetic dominance.

Sympathetic dominance means, that we live our live mostly sympathetic way – in modus of struggle, much outer action and stress. The instrumental playing in over tension, without compensation and with stress is an equivalent to sympathetic dominance. 

The body-mind system is not compensated and looses its inner balance. The body action of fighter is not fully switched off. This long term way of life may lead to chronic psychosomatic problems and also makes our our instrumental studies very ineffective and hard. 

The stress reaction serves to safe our lives. But imagine that you are within this modus for a long time or even every day with your instrument! Your body becomes in permanent state of danger! Many people then ask, why not to play from the basis of parasympathicus? 

ANS is somehow complementary to keep homeostasis within our body system.

In relaxation, we optimally enter the parasympathetic state, which makes us relaxed and compensated after hard work and that is the major aim of compensation.  

However, it is a bit harder within playing itself. The idea of playing from the parasympathetic basis is very idealistic and narrowed. First, the system does not work solely through only one or the other division. Second, playing the instrument IS an outer action, very much sympathetic, and music is of many expressional levels. Our aim will therefore be, to understand this issue exactly from the point of exertion and recuperation mentioned above – we combine certain amount of those in each moment of playing a bit different way according to what our body, mind, but also music needs. Some part of music will be highly active, some very calm. So the goal is to reach an ability of flow between those two poles in the whole intensity range of possibilities they offer though motional energy. 

Tension and emotions. 

Also, because we play through our emotions, it is activated much to interfere. Emotions are very strong impulze actor within our motion and playing! 

“The most conspicuous of all bodily responses to emotion, and the stresses which evoke it, are those in the motor system. In everyday life, facial expression is probably the most sensitive indicator of another’s emotions; posture similarly reveals the state of a person’s feelings. Emotional changes are therefore made evident by such alterations in tone of the voluntary muscles”7

Our emotionality is highly mirrored by motor reactions. The origin of the word comes from the latin word – e-movere, which means move away8. We also say that emotions move us, we are moved by emotions. This also means your emotions will constantly be influencing your bodily postures, but also our awareness, memory.

Our anger will make your veins tighter and muscles tense. We feel pressure from our teacher and “magically” start to press on our bow and left fingers on strings. But it is even more complicated than these clear moments.  Our emotions are very complex and it is very hard to bring them to light from certain motions clearly. 

We hardly understand our emotionality to coordinate it, but we may coordinate our emotions within playing through awareness to our certain motional actions, because their influence is bilateral and in a way even psychosomatic.  

Much of motor actions is done by need of certain motion, though much of tension and motions derive from certain emotions. Violinists for example very often condensate in their thorax not because of the functional need, but when they feel fear, or they also raise shoulders and tension within hands when facing difficult spots to “fight” this spot, not because it is required from technical stance. By dealing with the motion, we also influence our psyche and its issues bound with playing.

In Laban Analysis, we recognize function and expression9 of movement. 

Although it is not really precise definition, you may imagine the difference as technical and emotional aspect of your playing. Technique is meant to be an aware control over the bodily actions within playing, not the automated drill of your fingers. 

It never means that once we focus on function, expression is simply gone. Our motion is never an empty form, expressive moment is always present and deeply influences the function, even though we do not focus on it, same way as in your everyday life, when you are focused on something rationally, your emotions and feelings circulate within your body-mind system, no matter that you are not aware of it at that moment. It says that awareness function gives stable framework for your expression and your well being during playing. 

Aware work with function and expression polarity enables us to control our over-tense playing and stress reactions always through awareness to the body motion – the function. That is the controller of emotional flood. They again work complementary, so it is up to our learning process to reach balance within them, in different proportion in each spot.

Fighter modus. 

In LBMS, we define the category effort10. It tells us about the way we use our motional energy in motion. We recognize it through various sub-categories, including weight, time, focus and flow. In our journey to released playing, we need acknowledge, that release is not only about releasing the muscle unit, but much more about active and aware using of our motional energy – on particular effort we put in the playing in each moment. Our aim should be to learn find adequate effort in each motion within our bodies – no more or less energy or strength that our playing needs within the moment. 

The motional modus of the fighter is highly sympathetic. The typical motional aspects are strong weight – motional energy in which you use your “body mass”(active weight) – muscles and body, increasing tempo, direct focus, the action called punch. This motional code is as such as the stress modus for fight or flight reaction. 

If you are not able to switch the fighter off, your body stays in this highly stressful mode. 

Alas, this modus raises not only from the reasons mentioned at the beginning of this article. You may look at them from following perspectives too:

  • cultural – our society is very high performance and result focused, there is much of support in concurrence struggle in our education and work background. Being overloaded is also some way “normal” or popular, while relaxing is still some kind of activity to be ashamed. Hardworking and high results are something of high respect and even virtue
  • ontogenetic – a player went through unique motional and psychological growth within its family and life, that counts in the body playing on instrument. There can be much of relaxed mind, but also much stress, trauma and even trans generation modus of body-mind setting 
  • Consensual – the consensus of interpretation is still highly tense in energy and muscle use. Also, so popular solo concertos were even written with the meaning of struggle of a single person with the whole orchestra! 

This motional energy or strength must be understood the same way as the exertion-recuperation polarity was presented here. There are many levels of energy from the very strength to total lightness. Even lightness is still use of energy! The difference is that you use your energy actively and aware way to its extent. Adequate effort is about intensity of our motional strength used. 

Imagine the motional energy as a flow of water, which may be very different in each part of a stream corridor, but it is still water mass with its strength. You need use your motional energy same way, in oscillation through various extent of strength and lightness. Everytime during playing, practice, composition, we need to ask ourselves if this strength we use is adequate or not. If we control our intensity of motion, we suffer by less stress, control, blocks and pains. We can build our expression better. 

Discovering motional energy and adequate effort: 

Raise awareness to motional energy in everyday situations: 

How much energy do you use for cutting vegetables? Brushing your teeth? Walking to the bus, rushing to the train? What do you do while long waiting at the nice place or before stressful situation? Which parts of the body need work hard, but which can release more?

Try following exercises:

1. intensity in strength

Stand up at the wall with your palms on. Release to the wall as much as you can. Yield in the wall and relax first. Now only touch the wall with your palms lightly – that is intensity one. Now try to push against just a little bit – that will be your intensity “two”. Now try to higher the intensity to three. Continue to five, in which you imagine, you really want to move the wall away with your hands. Learn to go through various levels of intensity back and forth. 

2. ideokinesis., discovering the motion through imagination

You may sit or stand. Play with your hands. First imagine that you play with tiny feather. Then try to imagine you take the salt in your hands and put it in your meal. Then imagine you hit with the hammer. Squeeze the lemon in your tea. You knock on the door – try lighter and then increase intensity. Then imagine you clean the shelf by your palm from the dust. 

These are various images of different motional strength. PLay with your own images. 

3. score

Work with your score material. Try to think which intensity or an effort action would parts of composition need? You can create colors for each intensity you are aware of and mark it in the score. 

Learn “the bridges” – how do I flow from one intensity to another? 

Impact of the stress response on playing

“This reaction is natural and self-protective, but if becomes somatic pattern – normal for our action, then we are in a state of permanent tension, in which we expect danger, although it is not present.”11

In the most cases, stress response is one of basic and most frequent somatic patterns of playing. This reaction is connected with situations of danger or unexpected situation. Why is it so bound with such a “safe” activity as instrumental playing is? 

As we already learned, stress within playing is highly supported by over-tense playing, lack of recuperation and ability to work with motional energy. Anyway, the instrumental playing is organic action, which means that even when we learn something well, there are many other circumstances like our own present setting, outer atmosphere and setting, that bring the major question: What will come out from the instrument? What will my body do next? We may suffer from immediate stress responses while playing and proceeding difficult spot. I believe you all know the situation, when you proceed right before such spot and your thorax, pectoral, cervical and other muscles get tense together immediately. Some players even suffer from such stress, that the instrument itself becomes a stressor and causes such reaction when they get to it only and do not even start playing. 

Next to the ones already mentioned above, there are unexpected situations and stress supporters that happen during playing:

  • your body does something unexpected – you slide different way, get in different posture that is unusual for the spot you play. The unexpected bodily actions raise from the lack of body awareness during learning process on your instrument, but also the basal awareness to proprioception itself. The less we are aware of our bodily actions and the less we integrate them consciously into our playing somatic patterns, the more unexpected and stressful situations  we may expect from our body
  • mistake, something sounds or happens differently – it tears us away from musical flow in a way of a little shock and creates stress reaction. If we have no tool to stop or eliminate this reaction, it is kept within the body for the rest of playing. We play with higher extent of danger alertness permanently then. 
  • expectations – we create premise of how things should happen and then if reality does not meet our expectations, we suffer from stress
  • concentration – body react on concentration and narrowed focus by narrowing the structures
  • negative experience in public – each experience counts and influences our further reactions on our own playing, increases or lowers the stress reactions
  • perfectionism – once we are not able to accept any difference or a mistake, our playing will be always very stressful. This is also supported by idealization – elsewhere open YouTube and listening “the best of the best” create an image, that anything else below is bad – our playing can then never be good enough
  • too much long-term tension, fighter modus – it raises stress itself
  • reflection of “the bad” only – if we never reflect what is good on our playing, what works, we may get an idea, that everything is always wrong and get to stress. We always expect the bad – we are already in stres modus to expect only the wrong – the danger
  • stress at the lessons, way of communication of the teacher, background of the school, unfair or non-transparent making of exams and concerts 
  • Instrument becomes a stressor – even when you proceed to instrument or an instrument proceeds to you, your body responses with stress already

How does stress reaction act in our posture? 

The body becomes tense, tends to pull up, dissociate the upper and lower body part through the diaphragm area.12 

Postural phases of stress reaction13: 

  1. focus – the spine gets tense, body pulls up to upper body part. A little amount of adrenalin gets into body. This phase is not a fight, just swathing to more focused setting. “The skeletal muscles pull us up to gain higher level of focus.” 14

This level may serve well to our performance and focus, if we do not let it proceed to further phases. 

  1. Self-assertion – the process of tension raise continues, the pulsation as well. The peripheries are getting ready for fight or flight, for a reaction. In this state, we still are able to face and confront the stressor. 
  2. Fight or flight, rejection. On this level, we sink in the stress. There is a contradiction within the body, to run away or either freeze. Upper body part is open with rich blood flow, while the lower balances the pressure by contraction. We are loosing control, and process of dissociation – loosing the body mind connection, may start here, because we cannot act according to the inner energy, which stays conserved within our body. We are captured by situation, which we cannot  naturally react on by just leaving it. 
  3. Freezing. When we cannot fight the situation or leave – use our cumulated energy, we freeze. The thorax stays in the inhale possition(while diaphragm in exhale possition!). We lack stabilit and vitality. We lost the chance to react. On this level, cry or panic may follow. 
  4. Collapse, resignation, defeat. Breakdown of organism, debilitated. The body comes back to normal state, but collapsed, with lack of vitality. We may feel despair, apathy, no motivation or hope, lack of energy. 

In instrumental playing, we can register tendency to pull ourselves from the lower body to upper one. Our spine is usually more tense and being felt longer with lots of tension in cervical part, our hands are being felt more out of control, we cut from lower body and diaphragm breathing. In this state, we cannot really control our bodies and stress levels. Typically, over tense or stressed players suffer from lack of motivation and vitality – because they go through the phases to the level of resignation and collapse permanently. 

“If our first reaction causes alleviation of stressor or stressful situation, then our organism returns to balance. In not, then stress reaction proceeds.”15

If we learn to consciously keep the first level by complementary-bodily actions to calm down the system, we do not have to go through the whole stress cycle within playing and we will be able to constantly be returning to balance during our playing. The reason why to learn the release brakes is to be able to hold ourselves on the first level of focus, but not let the body proceed to further stress phases. 

Integration of release and brakes into our playing to eliminate fighter and stress response. 

Stress response is somatic pattern, which switches on autonomous level. We will learn new somatic patterns by which we may react on situations and over-tension different way and gain a tool to keep ourselves more calm and released. 

Changing somatic pattern is not release or relaxation, as we might understand it. It is more a change of our bodily behavior and reaction on certain situations. 

We build new somatic patterns on more parasympathetic aspects and bodily actions connected with release and anti-stress mode to raise our release and calm state. 

Re-patterning is run through levels:

  1. learning new somatic patterns though bodily exercises without instrument – our body needs to experience the modus we wish the body adopts later during playing
  2. Integration into playing
  3. Integration into compositions
  4. Work with mistakes during playing
  5. Effective structure of practice time and day with integrated compensation and psychohygiene techniques

In this article, I offer only few tips of new patterns and related exercises, that can be integrated easily and effectively. 

Remember, how does the stress reaction and fighter modus embody? We will build our new somatic patterns through these aspects and changing their intensity (not building the opposite modes – be careful of not building the opposite modes! Think to increase or dicrease through steps from the level you are, do not think to go to opposite extreme)  

Components of new somatic patterns based on Bartenieff Fundamentals:

Bartenieff was a student and close assistant of R. Laban, their work create the whole LBMS system. She defined concepts of support for human movement called Bartenieff Fundamentals16. There are about 11 of such concepts. We will now take inspiration from some of them, presented simple way as examples, and focus on related qualities, which may help us eliminate stress response in the body and over-tense playing arising form it and show very simple exercises to integrate in playing easily. These are: 

1. Breathe support:

Breathe is essential quality to our beings. It is also a movement, first movement developmental (neuromuscular) pattern. It is an essence of our lives, and also our motion!  

Awareness to diaphragm

There are many exercises and techniques offering learning to be aware of diaphragm and breath through it. 

Lie down on your back with bend legs. Relax your face, jaws. Put your hands on your belly, half on the last ribs, half on the belly. Stay calm, do not push your breathe and just give awareness to the feeling of moving this area through process of breathing. Constantly relax the rest of your body, face, jaws. You may also help yourself release through feeling of increasing weight to the floor through exhale. 

Breathing is essential for our being. Additional connections to our issue are:

  • reconnecting body parts through diaphragm
  • Release of related muscles through the same connecting vertebrae (T12, L1)
  • Expanding inner space through breathe – contradictory to anxiety and tension
  • Stimulating parasympathetic paths
  • Release through re -patterning motional paths – breathe is the first neuromuscular pattern17 , every motion starts with this layer
  • safety 

2. Axis of Length, sensing one’s alignment:

Awareness and relaxing the spine

First, put one palm on your coccyx, the other on your first two cervical vertebrae and walk. Try to feel your spine between your palms from upside down. Now stop, relax your hands for a while. 

Putting your palms exactly on these places has more reasons :

  • Support – an axis from the ground to heaven, support of your verticality
  • As the third motional – neuromuscular pattern, you support the bodily connectivity by work with spine ends. Within this pattern, our self is settled, so awareness to your spine is connected with awareness to your self
  • Feeling the spine not as skeletal structure, but very organic structure, within the ends create motional interaction between each other
  • parasympathetic nerves run from cranial and sacral area, with aware work with the ends, you basically support the parasympathetic branch on charge

Continue with exercise by experiencing pulled up and related spine. Stand up and try to pull your body from lower spine to your head, then relax the pull up back down and perceive the difference. (Do not forget to release your neck!) This is the difference between narrowed tense pulling-up stressed body and relaxed structures, but active and under our awareness. Learning the feeling of more relaxed muscles around your spine that do not tend to pull up unconsciously helps you keep more released and anti-stress playing mode. 

3.  Grounding 

Feeling the support of ground or a chair. Interplay of your weight and gravity. Perceive the connection with ground or chair support. This is how we can understand the grounding better. Not growing in the surface to create rigidity or “collapse” with all our weight to the surface, but really feel lively support of the ground and interplay of my weight with gravity. In LBMS, we call the connection with the surface also yielding. “Yield brings the aspect of bonding with the support before separating with the push.”18 The support of the surface enables us create motional impulse. 

Standing.

Stand barefoot and close your eyes. Unlock your joints and stay flexible. Start moving your weight through the whole feet, from inner site and tips, to outer site and heels. Do not push yourself to keep straightforward, you may dislocate yourself from the center axis, but always use unlocked joints for it to keep flexibility. Keep your jaws relaxed. Then stop at some point and simply try to feel the ground underneath. Imagine that your weight goes with exhaling from the upper body down to the lower part and to the ground. Your upper body and skul of your neck feels light.

Sitting.

Put your hands under your buttocks and move your pelvis to find sitting bones. You will feel them clearly pointing in your hands. Once you find them, put your palms away. Breathe out with imagining your weight from upper body freely through the lower body down, relax pelvis, hips and your jaws. Breathe freely and move freely on your sitting bones with eyes closed. Then stop and only perceive the relaxed connection with the surface of the chair. To reach true grounding through sitting bones, you need have your hips, pelvis and jaws relaxed. 

What is grounding and yelling good for additionally? 

  • Stability and support
  • Helps redistribute motional tension better, release over-tense upper part
  • Redistribution of weight 

4. Core support

Core support is not about pressing abdominals, as many people believe. Core is much more. 

“Core is synonymous with what is most vital to the whole.”19 It is not only a skeletal muscles, but the skeletal structure and also organs and basically, what creates our emotional and intuitive center too. It includes skeletal and muscle structures, organs and tissues. Its functions are support, weight center, connector of upper and lower body, home for vital organs, origin of gut response, home for our expressive self.

The core includes thoracic and pelvic part. Even breathing and awareness to your spine already creates the support of the core. Anyway, we very often forget to consider pelvic part. If that becomes rigid, our motion looses stability and freedom.

Moving pelvic part.

Imagine your pelvis as a bowl. The skeletal structure literally is designed like that. Now imagine it is full of water. Bent your knees comfortably to release. Now move your pelvis freely to sides, front, back, in circles and imagine you are pouring out. 20

Easy way of re-connecting upper and lower body part:

Releasing the lower limbs through simple kicking the limb out. You may apply this simple step into your playing – integrate it in the rhythm at the spot you have stress from. After time, you may only shadow this movement without actually doing it all the time. 

Why doing so? 

  • the only muscle connecting our limbs with the upper body and torso, is illiopsoas
  • illiopsoas is the deepest muscle, constantly in hard charge
  • It is a so called muscle of the soul – connected straight with the limbic system, so it has a great influence in our emotions and opposite and it also detects stressor and danger, there are also many our feelings and fears suppressed 
  • We need to relax it all the time
  • Illiopsoas starts at the same vertebra as the diaphragm and some other muscles, like trapezius, so we need relax it if we want to have others relaxed and also we may release it through diaphragm breathing
  • Upper and lower motional connectivity is also a neuromuscular pattern, supporting the total body connectivity21

Releasing the psoas, one simple example:

Use fully deflated small overball. Lie down on the floor with knees bent. Relax your jaws, body, breathe freely to diaphragm. When you are relaxed enough, put the overball under the area of your heart/stomach. Lie down freely, constantly relax your jaws, breathe to diaphragm and you may find a little pleasant motion on the ball. After some time, move the ball under your pelvis and do the same. Then put the ball away and relax some more time. 

To have a better idea of how this muscle look like, take your time to look at the picture. You may be surprised how up the muscle attach! You then discover that through motion. Put your hand on the spine at the place where your thorax end and walk a bit. You will feel the muscle units working. 

5. Body connectivity, releasing the parts

Try to discover and release by unlocking and moving all the joints. Do not forget your jaws! 

We usually feel that our upper part is tense – shoulders, neck… Not a fortune, that the muscles are usually connected to the big joints of our body. Many muscles, from front and back, that we perceive as in overtone modus, are attached to the shoulder socket. 

Focus on releasing the skeletal structure of the upper limb, will help our aim to release the whole area and affect all the muscles included.

Do not forget, there is not only so called shoulder, but there is scapula and clavicle, moving your arm! Put your hand on your shoulder and move the arm to feel how this whole system interacts. Try to be aware of how much you use rotation in your playing, how much you let your scapulas interfere through your back with tense neck muscles  anytime you want to move your arms. 

Same with the lower part – pelvis, hip joints, knees, need to be unlocked to allow flexibility and re-integration of the lower part. Tension within hip area and pelvis affect illiopsoas, which we already know from above – affect the whole torso, influences release in upper part and affects our limbic system. 

6. Effort intent

Remember yourself the exercises with the effort and motional strength, mentioned in the article above. Cultivate awareness to the levels you use at particular moment. Each time you get too tense, stop or prolong note to decrease this energy and continue lighter. 

Anytime you know you are proceeding the spot where you tend to get more tense as a “fighter”, make a break or prolong note BEFORE it happens and try to set your energy level before the spot – this way you integrate different pattern, you will play aware to your effort intent. Do not let yourself run into the spot with other effort setting than you wish for yourself. 

Integration of somatic patterns into playing – stops and prolonged notes

Any of the concepts above may be used as new somatic pattern to be integrated to your playing. 

Start with the one that you feel most related to and you have a capacity to be aware of that. 

First you need to work with somatic concepts or so called exercises without your instrument to give the body and mind the chance to understand what are you searching for. 

Then there is time to integrate it in your playing. 

First you will do, decide, what are you going to integrate. It may be breathe only. Or you can decide to be more complex and build more complex somatic pattern. Let yourself be inspired by following way of building new patterns: 

Simple pattern – you give your awareness to one thing, for example:

  • One phase including aware diaphragm inhale and exhale
  • Releasing the spine
  • Awareness to your feet

Complex pattern – you give your awareness to more issues at once:

  • more phases of breath 
  • Include awareness to other bodily issue while aware breathing, for example: 

During first inhale, focus is on diaphragm + spine, with exhale, the spine is released. 

Prolonged: during second inhale, focus on additional issue that is needed – grounding/some crucial part of the body to release, during second exhale, release them/give them awareness. 

“Motional home” – imagine some comfortable organic state, that you may return anytime while you are playing. I call this concept Motional Home, since we usually feel home as safe place where we can release more, express who we are, recuperate, having no stress. 

Analogically, we can build motional home – a pattern to return to playing comfort. Within this pattern, we should learn all that we need to set to feel comfortable and move freely – go from the simple concepts you learned within this article. Put awareness to your breathe, spine, grounding and anything else you manage, to your motional home and integrate it same way as the simple or complex pattern to your playing. 

Create a sign, that you can mark in the score and practice the compositions with this. 

We can integrate new somatic patterns into our playing through stops and prolonged notes. 

How does it work? 

Once we detect over-tension or stress within our body:

  • we stop exactly at the possition we are
  • We scan our body and release body parts that are unnecessarily over-tense OR we apply new release/antistress somatic pattern/motional home as a release tool
  • We continue playing
  • Once we are able to apply new somatic pattern during stop, we try only to prolong some note for this purpose to void breaking the music continuity

Do not stop at the same place all the time.

We should come up with building our more complex somatic pattern through our experience with bad habits – which part of the body tends to tension the most? Which block our release the most? This one should be included in your somatic pattern of motional home. 

You may change somatic patterns according to your particular needs, just thoracic breathing, grounding and reconnecting body parts should stay the basal aspects of it. 

Integration to the composition

Try to find out, where do you start be over-tense and put your somatic pattern before the place to avoid the raise of stress reaction and fighter. Create a mark of your motional holm-somatic pattern and put it consciously to places in the composition, where you manage to do it. Use breaks, long notes in real rhythm, … This way, you may keep yourself under control during the whole composition. 

Somatic patterns in work with mistakes 

Mistakes and sound or motional differences are huge stressors for many players. Learn to eliminate stress reaction on them during playing. 

Once some mistake happens to you, try to stop or prolong the note after and apply your anti stress somatic pattern, then continue playing. After that, look back in your score and try to consider where can you calm down before this crucial spot. Apply the motional home integration technique before this place to decrease the stress. 

Additionally, analyze, why the mistake happened and create more precise command from your mind to avoid the mistake again. Now you will have to steps in your prolonged note – somatic pattern + so called gps – mind navigation for the spot. 

Releasing stress from mistakes is also about particular way reflection made. If we tend to point only the mistake out, the player soon feels not being capable of playing, because every time something is wrong. In our reflection, counting the good and stable factor of our playing and material learned is a must. The proportion is always to the good site and the result is that a mistake is only a reflex, that did not work or it is not yet completed the way to work well. Mistake is a process of learning only – the process of building proper functional complex reflex. 

As it was already pointed out above, complex reflex should include not only “musical” information, but also bodily motion guide – from where do we lead the motion, what about of energy do we use, which muscles relax, which work and to what extent, how is our posture during playing that spot? If there is a mistake, it usually means there is some information for the body missing, which I called GPS – we do not give the body a direction, from where to go, where to lead, what speed to go… Conscious work with “gps” may be integrated also via stops and prolonged notes. 

Additional problems of over-tense and stressed players:

  • extension troubles, because muscles are in long-term tense – compensation through opening
  • In long-term stress, human mind operates though emergency emotions22, such as anger, fear, panic, powerlessness, apathy, displeasure
  • May cause rigidity, collapse or burnout
  • May cause pains, also psychosomatic ones – stress is suppressed to the body
  • influence to our playing motivation and goal focus, we may feel disgust and fear of goals, lack of vitality to proceed to our goals
  • Dissociation, which may happen during the stress phases so that the body parts can react on stress solely according to the emergency needs. We then may feel some parts of the body as not related to us, coordination and proprioception is worse
  • Using and feeling extreme poles of motional energy only

Recapitulation and additional necessary work with decreasing stress and tension

  • cultivating somatic inteligence 
  • Re-patterning somatic patterns on situations and playing issues
  • Integration to playing style 
  • Integration to compositions
  • Compensation and psychohygiene as daily routines and practice time routines
  • Considerations over balance in repertoire in its difficulty and motional energy levels required by each composition
  • Work with mistakes and stressful situation with in-building anti stress somatic patterns
  • Work with expectation
  • Self-reflection of inner feelings and needs
  • Effective practice including balance consideration, breaks with compensation and awareness to bodily actions within playing as an indivisible part of building playing reflexes.

More complex work with tension and stress release will be offered in the next articles and the book.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: 

  1. “abnormally high muscle tone or tension”, A.M. Colman, Oxford Dictionary of Psychology, 354., Oxford university Press, 4th edition, 2015 ↩︎
  2.  K. Studd, L. Cox, Everybody is a Body. (2020), USA, Outskirts Press:  ↩︎
  3.  P. Sainsbury, Muscle responses: Muscle tension and expressive movement, Journal of Psychosomatic Research, Volume 8, Issue 3,1964, 179-185 ↩︎
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  5. Colman, A. M., Oxford Dictionary of Psychology, 550 ↩︎
  6. Colman, A. M., Oxford Dictionary of Psychology, 747 ↩︎
  7.  P. Sainsbury, Muscle responses: Muscle tension and expressive movement, Journal of Psychosomatic Research, Volume 8, Issue 3, 1964, Pages 179-185 ↩︎
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  14. Keleman, S., Emotional Anatomy. 2013: 91-109 ↩︎
  15. Keleman, S., Emotional Anatomy. 2013: 91-109 ↩︎
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  17. Hackney, P., Making Connections. 1998, OPA: 41-42 ↩︎
  18. Hackney, P., Making Connections. 1998, OPA: 96 ↩︎
  19.  Studd, K., Cox, L. Everybody is a Body. (2020), USA, Outskirts Press: 43 ↩︎
  20. Studd, K., Cox, L. Everybody is a Body. (2020), USA, Outskirts Press: 48 ↩︎
  21.  Hackney, P. Making Connections. 1998, OPA: 41-42 ↩︎
  22. Keleman, S., Emotional Anatomy. 2013: ↩︎