Play Piano

20 November 202012 July 2024Achievement, Kids, Learning music, Lifestyle, Parents, Self-care, Self-expression, Soulful Life, Wellbeing

My students learn how to play the piano in a way where they use it to express themselves and improve the quality of their life, as well as to play with accurate technique.

Playing the piano is a great medium for expressing feelings and over time this can become a worthy part of your personal support system.

Music reaches where no words can!

Given that the majority of people learning the piano don’t want to become a highbrow pianist or soloist, and that doesn’t really interest me anyway, my approach is to encourage a practical heartfelt soulful method of self-expression.

The piano can be the means of an improved social life, retreat from the world (including corporate life),Â coming home to your senses, a personal meditative spiritual practice, or even a way to bring listening pleasure to loved ones.

It is a truly special gift to be able to reach deeply inside someone’s heart and give the joy of music – your music!

Gentle Discipline

12 November 202019 November 2020Achievement, Learning music, Parents

Gentle Discipline

This morning I am curious about gentle discipline.

I know that usually when we think about discipline, it comes with ideas of being rigid in the pursuit of something. Being unbending. Unyielding. Tough on ourselves to serve an outcome.

What if, in the pursuit of the desired outcome, we could be gentle in our discipline?
What if, we could stay with the vision of what we want, and, be gentle?

I have noticed that when I am harsh with myself, the product of that harshness has an edge to it.
This is not something I prefer.

When I am gentle and coax myself, nurture myself through to achieve what needs to happen, it gets done.
It also comes with love and pride and the product of it has joy and satisfaction surrounding it.

Recently I bought a beautiful pottery bowl – handmade by an Australian. www.ClaybyTina.com
It is a thing of beauty.
Every time I see it, I smile – yes I believe beauty is important – for our spirit and for our soul to elevate our existence out of the merely mundane.
I am certain that she absolutely loves throwing pots on a wheel.
It emanates from that bowl.
Side by side, her bowl next to the mass-produced one I bought in a supermarket, it is patently clear she was feeling love and care and her spirit was engaged when she made her bowl.
It also feels very good to be supporting a local person producing beautiful things.

In our music practise, it is inevitable that there will be times that we simply don’t feel like it.
It is a given.
In the early stages of becoming a musician, practise needs to be consistent and frequent to build the skill – muscle memory and brain connections and the multiple new skills involved.

How can we be gentle with ourselves in the pursuit of our new skill?
How can we produce our thing of beauty and it be embued with love and care and spirit?
How can it be a routine that not only builds our skill but sustains and nourishes and nurtures us?
This is the feeling I have from Tina’s beautiful bowl.

Pamela Jordan is a Professional Piano Teacher Mentor in Seaforth, Northern Beaches, Sydney, Australia.
#northernbeaches #pianolessons

Email Pamela CLICK HERE

Discipline and Creativity

15 July 201912 July 2024Learning music, Soulful Life, Wellbeing

Discipline is the fuel of achievement.

Creativity sparks the flame

Passion fans the fire

Discipline keeps it going for as long as it takes.

Disciplining yourself can be tedious,

annoying, inconvenient

and even agonising.

And yet, the results brought about by self-discipline

cannot be reached in any other way.

Discipline puts your most incredible dreams within reach.

With self-discipline, you can make the best of your possibilities come to life.

How do you bring yourself to that level of discipline?

You get there by knowing what you absolutely must do,

knowing that through self-discipline

you can make it happen.

What do you know in your heart,

you are truly meant to accomplish?

When you experience life as a mission,

the discipline you need will be there.

Discipline and focus applied consistently over time,

can take you to truly amazing places.

Where is it you are uniquely suited to go?

Author Unknown

Music: Receiving Praise V Rejection

15 July 201919 November 2020Learning music

Receiving Praise v Rejection
So you would love to play the piano, and you are aware that being ridiculed or criticised in some way is stopping you?
Perhaps you were playing, at any level, and somehow the comments of other people, rattled you and you now don’t play?

This whole thing about expressing ourselves, the truth of who we are, and playing a musical instrument potentially brings comments from other people.

Do you feel that it’s alright only if people make positive comments? Is it bad if people ridicule you, or criticise you, or reject you?

What if I said that the way to move forward with strength, is to learn to be neutral about other people’s comments?

That is, learn to not react to other people’s opinions of your self-expression. It would be understandable to seek praise and feel warm and fussy from adulation or appreciation.
Where I have come to in my journey of navigating these things, is to stay neutral. Why?

At the end of the day, in the privacy of my own mind and heart, I know where I am at in my expression. I know the truth. I know what kind of performance I gave. I know what my inner ‘set point’ is.

If I allow praise or rejection or expectations of other people to shift that set point, I am lost to myself.
The path I am on becomes no longer my own.

Therefore, the healthy response to praise or rejection is…. “thank you”.
Simple as that.
And then we return to our own path.

Come back to your senses

19 February 201912 July 2024Learning music, Lifestyle, Self-care, Soulful Life, Wellbeing

Coming back to my senses has for many years now been an important part of my self-care. There is a certain feeling I experience that tells me it’s time to be in nature or just resting at home. It’s time to come back to me, to my feelings – to align myself again. Switch the world off for a while.

There was a time when Sunday was considered the day of rest. This makes perfect sense to me. One day a week to be still and catch up with myself, get off the conveyor belt of life, feel what I am feeling, check in with myself, nurture myself.

It seems that good self-care is very much about being honest with myself about what I am feeling, and accepting myself in that moment. Then, lovingly navigating my way through it.

Feelings, self-care and self-love go together.

Of course, it’s often painful, and sometimes excruciating in all of our human messy fallibility.
Sometimes though, feelings are such a warm glorious companion, I wouldn’t want to be without them.
Would you?

We dehumanise ourselves when we choose to live in our head instead of our heart.
We say no to the rich tapestry of feelings available to us and then experience meaninglessness and emptiness.

In his book ‘Care of the Soul – a guide for cultivating depth and sacredness in everyday life’ Thomas Moore writes that when soul is neglected, it appears as symptoms. Obsessions. Addictions. Violence. Loss of meaning.Â When we care for our soul we more and more experience deep satisfaction and pleasure. Our life becomes more and more meaningful and fulfilling life. This bookÂ irrevocably changed my life for the better.

Wishing you a more soulful life,
Pamela