If you are interested in listening to the podcast version of this blog, go to https://anchor.fm/tamara-tanner/episodes/Day-4-Repetition-Allows-You-to-Go-Deeper-e14qrp4
I have memorized both pages of my music! I thought that memorizing music would be the awareness activity for one day, then I would move on to something different. But guess what? This has been consuming for me, and I want to go deeper. I am obsessed with accomplishing this goal I have set for myself of performing this Bach piece by heart, it has taken longer than I thought it would, and I am loving the immersion into the process. There are still a few lines that I’m not yet solid on memory wise, so I go back and look for more details I hadn’t noticed yet. It is absolutely amazing what I uncover that I hadn’t noticed before. I am feeling like this piece and I are becoming good friends. I have not even counted how many times I have played this piece in the past few days. I work on it for a little while, then I put my violin down. I come back to it several times during the day. Repetition is a learning tool I was taught as a young child, and I have been using it ever since. But when I tell my students that they need to do something a hundred or a thousand times to learn it, I think that sounds like drudgery to them. Boring. But I have to say, not at any moment in my practice working to memorize this piece has it been boring or miserable doing the same thing over and over again. On the contrary, it has been a delight. It has kept me alert and I have used my brain in so many different ways. I loved this music before I started working on it, but I love it even more now. The sequence of notes edify me as I discover details I hadn’t noticed before or that I notice again after my new discovery of them yesterday.
Essentially, what I have learned today is that awareness itself can take us deeper. Today’s world seems to be designed to take our awareness quickly from one thing to another supposedly to keep our interest and not get bored. But what if the key to keeping our interest is to stay with one tiny thing, go deeper with it, then to let that little thing teach us and lead us to the next thing? What would it be like instead of having outside sources direct our attention from one thing to the next, we chose one thing to focus our attention on and went deeper with that one thing so it could teach us where to go next? In my case today, it was focusing on a group of musical notes, noticing their sequence, duration, sound, and every detail about them. As I write about this group of notes that I am getting to know intimately, I feel an excitement to stop writing and play them again on my violin. I feel alive and a love for this music that I hadn’t felt before. I am noticing that I am getting more done, the activities of my day are more purposeful, and I have all kinds of ideas that are coming to me that are unrelated to the music.
What thing can you fully put your awareness on today? How can you go deeper with it? Is it something that makes you feel full of life? If it is, I invite you to spend time with that one thing. Become intimate with it. Be aware of all the details that make up that thing that you are putting your attention to. Notice how that activity changes you. Notice what next step it invites you to take.
Explorations in Healing 