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The Essence of the Practice

Writer's picture: Cliff DansaCliff Dansa

In 1993, the improv group was meeting every other week, I was deciding to go back to school to become a high school mathematics teacher, and I was deciding to get married. As my life was changing, I realized that my music practice would have to change as well. I was approaching forty years old and I had to firmly face the fact that whatever dreams I had of “success” in music—as defined by mainstream culture—were probably not going to happen. As I was rearranging my life, I found myself examining the role that music practice had in my life and asking whether it was something I wanted to continue and if so, how. What would it look like?


I never seriously thought about quitting—music was obviously feeding deep parts of my soul—but I did start examining how music was feeding my soul, examining the role that music played in my experience of life and my sense of well-being. Since I was both working and going to school, I realized that my time to devote to music practice would be very limited and I started asking myself how I could use the time that I did have most efficiently. I started wondering what would happen if I completely let go of striving to be “good” or “successful” and instead structured my music practice to maximize the experiences that made me feel that music “feeding my soul.”


My first question was, “What are these experiences I am trying to maximize?” This was, and continues to be, a very interesting question; I don’t think that even now I could give a concise answer. I started paying attention and asking myself, at the end of every practice session, “How was that? Did that feed me?” Sometimes the answer was “yes,” sometimes the answer was “no,” often it was a little of both. When I felt that the answer was “yes,” I tried to pay attention to what it was that I had experienced. I paid attention to what I had done while I was practicing, what intentions and structure I had been working with, trying to understand what worked and what didn’t work. I had been disciplining myself for years to keep practicing music because that’s what I needed to do in order to become “a good musician.” Now the goal of becoming “good” was gone. If that’s not the goal then what is the goal? It took me many years to begin to sort things out.


Out of this exploration and the work I was doing in the improvisation group, an approach to practice evolved that I have continued ever since. My practice is simply to step into the studio without any intentions or preconceptions, and to notice what calls to me. Am I drawn to a particular instrument, a particular song, a particular way of working with a song? I give absolute free reign to my curiosity and my intuition. I give myself over, fully and completely, to whatever activity calls to me—which may change as I play—until the time is over. Then I walk out of the studio and let it go. The next opportunity I have to go back to the studio, I again walk in empty, open to a completely new experience.


Many years earlier, back in my tree planting days, I had noticed a certain rhythm in my practicing. Every couple of months, I would go through a phase where practicing would not be much fun. It felt like work, maybe even drudgery. So I would quit practicing for a few weeks until I started noticing that I was missing playing music. I would pick the guitar up again and hear it with new ears, experience it with new fingers. I would have a little musical breakthrough and be able to do things and play things that I hadn’t been able to do before. I would get excited and play a lot, working on these new ways to play, trying to get them right, trying to master them. As I worked on these things—day after day, week after week—practice would start to feel like work, like drudgery. I would start to lose interest and quit playing for a while. Then the whole cycle would start all over again.


For a long time I got down on myself for this cycle, feeling that I should be able to maintain a constant disciplined practice routine, but eventually, I started to realize that it was a natural rhythm that is just part of the process. Then, as I started playing more instruments, I started out-maneuvering the process by changing instruments. When one instrument started feeling like work, I would simply pick up another instrument. Joni Mitchell describes this as, “the old farmer’s crop rotation trick,” saying that when she feels stuck as a writer or musician, she paints. I learned that sometimes I could accomplish the same thing by playing the same instrument but playing a different type of music or a using a different approach.


As I started to shift the focus of my practice toward feeding my soul, I started experimenting with when to make the change, when to let go of a breakthrough and move on to something else. Did I have to wait days or weeks until things started to feel like drudgery, or could I make the change sooner and avoid the feeling of drudgery? Eventually, I realized that—in terms of cultivating an intimate relationship with the music—the time to drop the breakthrough is almost immediately. I let the breakthrough happen, I work with it, explore it, allow myself to get lost in it, but I don’t come back the next day and try to revisit it. When I come back to the studio tomorrow, I will forget about today’s breakthrough and go with what calls me in that moment. I have learned, over and over again—I’m a slow learner—not to go back to try to repeat what I did yesterday. In terms of having a rich experience, it never works.


There is a noticeable qualitative difference in the experience of exploring something new and the experience of repeating something that we’ve done before. I was aware of this difference for years before I encountered constructivist learning theory, but when seen through the constructivist lens, this difference makes sense. When we repeat something that we’ve done before, the brain classifies it as another instance of something it has encountered before and when it does this, the brain filters out stimuli that do not fit into our remembered mental constructs. This causes our experience to be less vivid, less alive. We lose the sense of “beginner’s mind,” the sense of aliveness that it the reason that I do this practice.


There is an old joke in which a guy walks up to another guy on the streets in New York and asks, “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” The other guy replies, “Practice.” This attitude about practice is ubiquitous in our culture. Practice is something that you have to do in order to get somewhere, in order to be good. How much time do I spend practicing like this? Zero. Nada. I never do it. Life is too short to spend in drudgery trying to achieve some mystical distant goal. During my artistic practice time, if it’s not delightfully fun, I don’t do it.


Rather than practicing to achieve something or to become “good,” I am letting go of any notions of achievement, committing myself to going into the studio everyday and allowing myself to be guided. Wherever that leads me, I am willing to be there. And, interestingly, as I fully committed myself to practicing like this, I didn’t quit getting better. There’s no real way to compare, but it feels like I started getting better even faster than I was when I was trying to get better. There is a paradoxical koan-like sense to this.


It took many years for me to fully make this change; the old patterns were deeply engrained. At first I struggled with motivation. For years I had been carrying around a nagging voice in the back of my head saying, “You should be practicing more. You’ll never be any good if you don’t practice.” It was annoying, but it would motivate me to practice. Now, with the voice gone, what was there to motivate me to practice? Even though I was learning to structure my practice time so that it was more of a delightful exploration, I had to make a conscious discipline of stopping at the end of every session to notice, “I really enjoyed that. I feel clean and nourished inside and I want to do this as much as I can.” I had to consciously make myself notice this for months until it became engrained in my subconscious. Then I had no problem at all getting myself to practice. Instead, I struggled with the discipline of getting myself to stop practicing in order to deal with the rest of my life. I’m still working on that one.


It may seem that this practice is just doing whatever you want to do and having a good time, but it’s not. It’s actually a very exacting discipline, much like the improvisation group. There is a subtle but important difference between just doing what you want and listening for what you are drawn to, what you are being called to do. “Doing what you want,” is based on a self that wants something, even if that something is only an experience that can be labelled as “fun.” This is different from walking into the studio empty and listening for what needs to happen. It’s a different voice. Learning to tell the difference between these two voices is one of the important lessons of this practice.


Listening to this voice allows us to connect with, to sink into, something deeper, something bigger, than our small sense of self. Call in the collective unconscious, call it the divine, I don’t really care. Maybe it doesn’t exist at all and we are all just making this up. I don’t care. What I know and care about is that I can sink into this experience of something that is larger than me but includes me, something mysterious but very alive. In that moment, I feel energized and I feel—in a non-conceptual way—that my life makes sense. This is why I do this practice. This is why I call it a spiritual practice.

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1 Comment


Libby
Libby
Jan 05, 2022

I feel drawn to the kind of practice you describe. Thank you for describing it so well.

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