My 2022 Harp Happiness List - PHH 032

Welcome to Practicing Harp Happiness, the Harp Mastery Podcast. My name is Ann Sullivan and I'm a harpist, teacher and founder of Harp Mastery. I'm all about creating more harp happiness in the world by helping harp players like you play the music they want the way they want. But as a harpist who nearly flunked out of one of the most prestigious music schools in the world, I although later not only graduated, but I went on to teach there. I know from personal experience that learning the harp is way harder than it looks. Here, each week on the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast, I show you how to solve the challenges of practicing and playing the harp. Whether it's about making your fingers behave or learning music faster, or getting your piece's performance ready, or just learning to enjoy your playing every day. Sounds great, doesn't it? Let's get started.

Welcome to the show. I hope your holiday season has so far been joyful and happy. Christmas is just past and we're getting ready to welcome a new year. Now, there are all kinds of reasons to hope that this year will be better than last year. As a global community, we hope for a stop to the spread of the pandemic and a return to a calmer life, less fearful life. As musicians and harpists, we look ahead to more playing and learning opportunities, even as some of our attempts at reopening performance venues seem premature and things threaten to shut down again. Personally, so many of us have had challenges.

It's been a year of big changes for me. Just 12 months ago, at the end of 2020, my husband and I sold our business in central Pennsylvania, relocated closer to Philadelphia to be nearer our families. It turned out to be a fortuitous move because this year we lost both of my husband's parents and we were able to care for them in their last months.

My son, who used to live in this area as well, is now studying and living abroad, and while he's pursuing what I believe is exactly the right path for him, I miss having him close by.

So many of us have struggled with illness and with loss and we'll be ready to get rid of 2021 and welcome the possibilities of 2022. But before I let go of 2021, I want to remember the good stuff. There were plenty of highlights, personal and harp related this year, and I wanted to share some of those with you. Now, some of you listening I know were there and were part of some of those moments as they happened, and I hope they meant as much to you as they did to me. So I'd like To review some of those favorite moments of 2021 with you now and also share just a little bit about my own harp goals for 2022. It's good to look ahead, but it's also good to let. To look back. So let's just start with that quick look back at some of what I loved about 2021. One of the things we did this summer at Harp Mastery was to include adult students in our summer harp camp. Now, we've always done live retreats at Harp Mastery, and we've done a couple of virtual retreats as well. But I've been so looking forward to getting back to teaching in person. And I love the intimacy and the just continual contact that we have at in person retreats. Just the chance to get to know students on that kind of deeper level is so wonderful. And we were able to do that at harp camp this summer. And that was so much fun for me. Such a highlight. And so if you were one of those adult students there at harp camp, please know how much I appreciate your presence and your enthusiasm and your willingness to get in there and work and just be part of the camp atmosphere. So we had a great time with that this summer, and that felt really, really good to me. Definitely a highlight. We had a couple others that were smaller highlights. Like, I really enjoyed our cadenza play in at the end of November. The. The day after Thanksgiving, we had people from all over the world join us to just play the Waltz of the Flowers cadenza. And we put little dots on the map and we were just together for an hour as a. As a sort of webinar thing. And everybody, you know, played the cadenza on their own and we popped our little markers on the map and it was just a fun thing to do, something we hadn't tried before, but just another way to get together. And I really enjoyed that.

This also was a year when I was finally able to get back to playing chamber music live. Chamber music didn't happen at all for me in 2020. Well, at least not after the pandemic shut everything down.

So this year, 2021 had some more opportunities in it where we were able to, you know, okay, we're masked and we're, you know, staying as safe as we can. And playing chamber music once again was just a wonderful opportunity for me. It. I didn't. I wouldn't have guessed how much I would have missed it, but it turns out maybe it's not really. Shouldn't have been a surprise, but it turns out that that's really important. To me, not just sitting in my own room and playing music for myself or by myself, and not even just teaching, but playing music with my friends and colleagues is part of why I do this. And it was not only wonderful to get back to it, but it was a pleasure to realize that that was so important to me as well. Because, you know, sometimes we're so busy in the thick of things that we don't stop to think about what's important to us. And the fact that being able to do that again brought me so much joy was a wonderful moment of affirmation and reaffirmation, thinking that, yeah, this is why I do this, this is important to me, and this is what I do.

Now, on the other hand.

One of the other things that I do that is so important to me is my teaching. And. And one of the things we've never stopped doing through the entire pandemic is teaching and coaching online. And it is a continual source of pleasure and gratification and excitement for me to hear the progress that our coaching students make, to be part of the progress that my Gold Circle students make, to work with the My Heart Mastery members every week, and to watch those light bulbs go off as we dig into different topics, those breakthroughs, whether they're big or little ones, those aha moments, those questions that lead to inspiration and to learning and growth in a new way, are also very important to me. And those moments were definitely highlights. My year would have been much less rich if I had not had those as part of it.

And I think one of my other favorite moments of 2021 was just recently, at the beginning of this month, my own father died just before the pandemic hit, and we had postponed his memorial service so that it would be at a convenient time for everyone. But by the time we were ready to hold it, he died. That February, and in March, everything was shut down. The pandemic had closed everything down, and we were not able to have his memorial service. It had been planned several times and put off several times. And this December, we were finally able to hold it and to have our family there and some of his friends, and to be able to.

Memorialize him and just talk about how special he was was very helpful. But it was a harp moment as well, because.

I played the harp, played two pieces accompanying my sister who sang, and it was the first time that she and I have ever made music together, just the two of us. And that was a very special moment to be able to do these two selections as part of Dad's Service was definitely a highlight for me. Just a moment of connection and of continuation, the sense of the continuity of life and the gift that we have been given and were able to share. So it was a wonderful moment.

So those are some of my favorite moments from 2021.

But looking ahead to 2022, there is so much that I want to do. I have chosen a word for the year. I've done this the past number of years for quite a while. And I have a word that I use sort of as a theme. And it's not only perhaps a theme, but it's a touch point. It's a reminder as I go through the year of where I want my thoughts and my actions to be what I want to use as a central force or idea or motivator for my year. And they're not usually very profound things, but they remind me what my year is. And I write my word on different pieces of paper, leave it lying about different places, put it on my whiteboard or write it in my journal, but it's there to remind me. And my word for 2022 is nourish.

I feel like.

So much has been drained from me over the past couple of years. I mean, it's been stressful, right, with the move and the family losses and all that. So I'm ready to nourish, to nourish myself, to continue to nourish the people that I work with, to nourish the environment where I am in different ways, to nourish my friends and family.

So this is my word for the year. And the musical aspects of this are ones that I wanted to consider as well.

And I identified for myself three areas that I particularly want to focus on as I go into 2022.

Playing. Playing is so important for me now in my heart Mastery. When we play for others, we talk about it as sharing. That's the word we use.

With our Scale of Success students and the My Heart Mastery members. We talk about it as sharing, and we're mindful to call it that and not use the word performing all the time. Performing sounds like.

It'S a one person activity, but music isn't like that. Music is about communication and it's really about sharing. It's about sharing beauty, sharing ideas, sharing passion. It's not just about doing something. So this is why we usually use the word sharing when we can. Now, I love sharing. I love performing because for me, it is supremely about that act of communication. It's not about me, it's not about what I can do. But it's about the music. It's about the story of the music. It's about the feeling behind it. And lately there has just been too much time in between performances for me.

I need to keep sharing my music with people. And so my idea for 2022 is to establish for myself a weekly rhythm of sharing my music in a variety of ways to keep the music nourishing not only those I play for, but nourishing me as well.

So while that's not something that you might exactly call a goal, it's not very hard and fast. It's very fluid, very plastic. But I want that weekly rhythm. I want that continual idea of being able to share my music. And so that's going to be one of my focuses for this year.

But of course, I also want to continue to nourish other harpists through my teaching. That is how I nourish other harpists, primarily. My own teachers were so important in my life, both musically and personally. The knowledge that they shared so freely and the examples that they set inspire me every day in my own teaching.

Because it's not just about teaching the harp. It's about teaching people. And it's vitally important to me. Now 2022 presents me with some new opportunities to help nourish and encourage students. And I intend to pursue every single opportunity I can for my students sakes and for my own in my efforts to continue the legacy and the generosity of the teachers who taught me.

But a big part of my musical life in 2022, I hope to be about growth. Now I. I realized that like everyone else on this planet, I am definitely a work in progress. Now, I myself work with two different coaches. They're not harp coaches, but they're coaches who help me lead and teach and live at the highest level I can. And they help me keep looking for that next highest level where I can look for more growth and explore more opportunities. And when it comes to my harp playing, I have some really fun ideas for my personal harp growth that I would like to implement this year. Now, they're still in the idea stage, so I'm not quite ready to share them in detail, but my thought is that these ideas will help me stretch myself in my playing, in my own personal harp journey. And that is going to be necessary to nourish my soul.

So I don't mean to get too deep with this, but I hope that my own thinking will inspire you just a little bit to think about what your harp happiness could look like in 2022 and give it some thought you don't have to share anything, but if you're so inclined, go ahead and share your Harp Happiness goals for the year in our private Facebook group. If that's if you're a member there, or if you want to become a member there. It's a harphappiness hq. I will put a link to it in the show notes, and if you'd like to join us there, you certainly can. It's a very encouraging community.

So if you feel like sharing your goals there, we'd be happy to support you in that however we can. Or you can share them in the My Heart Mastery Member forum if you're a mass. If you're a member there, or just shoot an email to us here at the podcast@podcastarpmastery.com and we'll, you know, we'll do what we can to support you there too. Even if it's just giving you a shout out for having acknowledged your own goals for this year, I do encourage you to give it just a little bit of thought. Don't make them big, lofty goals, don't make them so burdensome that achieving them, it just feels impossible.

But do give yourself an idea of what Harp Happiness could look like for you this year.

It's an interesting process, fun thing to think about, and I hope that this show today has inspired you a little bit along those lines. Now, next week on the show, our first show of 2022, we're going to be talking about how not to overburden yourself this year. We're going to be talking about tackling big projects, perhaps, but really working on things one step at a time, organizing yourself so that you don't overwhelm yourself in 2022. But you take that steady path to progress and growth that leads, frankly, to Harp Happiness. So I wish you all a very happy new year, a wonderful rest of your holiday season, and I know that we're all looking forward to just the happiest, harpiest new year that we could possibly imagine, and I will look forward to talking to you then. Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you soon. Thanks for tuning into another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your Harp Happiness every day. See you next time.