Play Tension Free: How to Calm Your Body, Mind and Music - PHH 118

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Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Ann Sullivan, a harpist on a mission to empower every harpist to experience more harp happiness. Over my decades long harp journey, I've had lots of successes and more than a few failures. And I know firsthand what it's like to feel that playing the harp the way you want may not be possible for you. Now, I play and teach all over the world, and I know what most harpists are never taught. The secrets to gaining the skills and confidence you need to play the harp with beauty, freedom and joy. That's what the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast is all about. Showing you simple steps to help you play the music you want the way you want. If you're an experienced harpist looking for that next level, or a harp newbie anxious to avoid the pitfalls, or a harpist who just wants more fulfillment and a little encouragement, you're in the right place, my friend. So let's get started. Welcome to the show. Wouldn't it feel great to relax? Well, of course. Since this is the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast, I'm not just talking about a cool drink, a good book, and a bubble bath. I'm talking about being relaxed. When you play the harp, you know why it's important to be relaxed when you play. When your hands, arms, shoulders and the rest of your body feel relaxed, you can practice and play without strain and with freedom, flexibility and flow. When your mind is relaxed, you can concentrate and focus without fear or distraction. When your mind and body are relaxed, your music can also relax so that it can communicate its mood or story in a clear and relatable way. Does that sound too good to be true? Like an impossible dream to you? Well, let me tell you that it isn't impossible to achieve. More importantly, this kind of relaxation shouldn't be just a happy accident for you. We teachers are experts at telling our students to relax, but not so expert at showing them the tools they need to practice to make relaxation a habit. But I hope to make up for that today. Together, we will explore the five most common tension traps. Things we all do every day in our practice that cause our tension to build. And for each one of those, I will give you a one step action to help you learn to instantly release that tension. We'll also talk about when tension is helpful, you already know when it isn't, and how to harness its power and and then to let it go. But if there's one thing I want you to get from this podcast episode, it's this. Releasing tension is a Technique you will need to practice. Like every other technical skill, the more you practice it, the more easily you will be able to create relaxation when you need it. For instance, coming up to a tricky spot, playing a fast passage, or playing in a lesson or performance. And at the risk of stating the obvious, the one thing that doesn't work is to just keep telling yourself to relax, relax, relax.

Okay, well, calm down just a moment. I know I was screaming relax at you. So it's time to calm down. And I'm going to just cover a couple quick things that I want to mention before we get onto our relaxing topic. One of them, and the most important, is that our fall trimester of coaching is coming up, and registration for that trimester opens today. Now, registration is only open for 10 days. It's open from today, August 21, and we will close it on September 1 or when the coaching slots fill up, whichever happens first. So you want to get in there and register. Now, we have five coaches, but they only have so many spots. And if you haven't registered yet, here's the thing. Our coaching students who were in the trimester over the summer had first opportunity to register, and then the first to know list had an opportunity to register. So some of those spots are already gone. In fact, a good number of them are. So we do have spots, and I'd love for you to jump on board. Our coaching program is so.

It's a great program. I can't say enough about it. And I don't teach in the coaching program. So I'm not just bragging on me here. I'm bragging on our coaches and the system that we use that we've developed here at Heart Mastery to help our coaching harpists work through.

Whatever obstacles they have to achieve their goals. The whole point of this program is that we set goals together based on what you want your goals to be and then create a plan to achieve them. So that's certainly a relaxing thing, right? I mean, imagine having a plan and having somebody work with you to make that plan happen so you can just relax right into that system, Right? But you'll find the link to register for the coaching program in our show notes. Or you can go to heartmastery.com, and you'll see our programs up there. You can look for our coaching program. There are the links there to get signed up and get started. I cannot recommend this program too highly. It is so successful. And the students who, who take this, take this course and do the coaching, they're just, you know, they're great students to start with, but they have so much success. And so thank you. You know, they're better harpists every day just because of it. So I'm excited for them and I'm excited for you. So you take advantage of this opportunity and go ahead and register.

I also wanted to mention that if you are not in the habit of checking out the show notes for these podcast episodes, you might want to start doing that every podcast episode in the show Notes. In addition to links for whatever I mention on the podcast, I also put a related resource that is a blog post from the archives of our blog. Now, I stopped blogging when I started the podcast a couple years ago, so the blog is not being updated. But there are 10 years worth of blog posts, and rather than just, you know, let them live in some Internet archive and gather dust, we left them accessible from the Heart Mastery website so that you can get in there and look for articles that I've written on just about any kind of harp topic. And so what I like to do is when I'm speaking on the podcast about a particular topic, I like to find a blog post that I've written that explores that same topic in a different way, or maybe a related topic topic. So if you look at the show notes, you'll find a link right to that. Now, you can find the show notes in most podcast apps, whatever it is you're using, but if you can't find them on your app, then just hop on over to the podcast page on the heart mastery website, heartmastery.com, click on podcast and you'll see the latest episode. Click on that. And of course, you can listen to the episode there, but you will see the show notes and all those links. So, for instance, in today's episode, we're talking about taming tension, but I have linked to a blog post called Floppy Develop Strong Fingers the Smart Way. This will talk a little bit about how to train your fingers to be strong without making them tense and tight or without injuring them. Also important, every podcast, you'll find a link there, as well as some other, you know, helpful resource links there related to what I've talked about in the podcast episode. So I wanted to be sure that you knew that so that you weren't missing out on something that might be helpful to you. So having said that, take a deep breath. Breathe in. Let it out. Do you feel relaxed? Okay, well, let's start relaxing. Now that you're nice and calm, think about what it would feel like to practice with this kind of relaxation, you would be able to focus longer, to practice more mindfully, you wouldn't be as distracted. Your hands and body would be relaxed. So you would be avoiding any kind of potential for injury.

Your mind would be relaxed, you'd be more expressive, be more musical, thinking about the things that you were doing without judging yourself, without being critical. You could actually enjoy your practice. Now granted, none of us are able to be that relaxed all the time, but you can develop the habit of being relaxed. You can find ways to release the tension. Well, you don't have to look very hard. I'm going to tell you some of those ways today. But you can learn to release the tension and have that be part of your routine. So you can obviously incorporate this in a pre practice routine or a warm up and do some breathing techniques or just some stretching techniques that can help you relax. But that's really not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the kind of tension that you need to relax that comes when you're playing.

So that's really what we're talking about today. And granted, all those pre practice routines that help you relax are going to be valuable because it will help get you in that frame of mind to start with.

But what happens when you're starting just fine and you play along and you end up accumulating tension?

That's when your hands get tight and your sound gets brittle and your mind starts swirling, or you grit your teeth or you find that you're clenching your toes, or maybe you are even gripping your thighs. There's all kinds of muscular tension. Your shoulders might be hunching, your neck might be all twisted. There are all kinds of things that we do to sabotage our very best posture and our best relaxed playing. And that's what we want to get rid of. So I'm going to start by just thinking a little bit and exploring how you might calm your body.

It's so important to think about your posture. The harp. So start by just sitting, checking your posture. Are you sitting at the sit bones? Are you relaxed? Do you feel straight? Do your shoulders feel open? You're not hunched over.

So let's just sort of do a quick check. Just start by relaxing your face, your head, your neck. Think about being relaxed and see what tension you can release there. You might find you've been holding tension in your jaw or maybe wrinkling your brow or maybe squinting. These are things to be aware of. So release the tension there, then release your shoulders. Think about your shoulders being down and just you Know your head and neck just suspended right out of your shoulders, shoulders down, your head up. Think about your core muscles and how they support where you're sitting.

Relax your legs, wiggle your toes a little bit and see if there's tension that you're holding there. Doing this kind of a check and thinking about where you particularly seem to hold tension. Where are those trouble spots for you? That's an important thing to notice because when you know where you hold tension, you know where to go to release it first.

So when you know where you hold tension, then we're going to practice not just releasing it, but we're going to practice creating the tension there as well. So think about this as you know as like if you closed your hand and made a fist and then you opened it, you'd be making that tense, tight fist and then releasing your hand, right? So I want you to think about that place where you hold tension. Is it your shoulders? Let's pretend it's your shoulders for a second. So we're going to tense up your shoulders, hunch them up, hunch them all the way to your ears and then release them. Do that just a few times, make it tense and then let it relax. What you were learning in this process and is what it feels like to be tense and what it feels like to not just be relaxed, but to release the tension. Because that's the feeling we want to come back to.

Now. It would be a good idea, now that you've sort of checked in with your entire body here, it would be a good idea to do that regularly, to just do a quick, you know, head to toe tension check. Am I relaxed everywhere I need to be. In fact, if you set a timer to, to go off, maybe, I don't know, every 15 minutes, 20 minutes, several times during your practice, just to remind you to do a little body check and maybe a tension, you know, tense and release kind of exercise. And one of those real trouble spots.

The tense and release exercise, I can't emphasize this enough, is so important because when you can, when you practice it, it's going to give you the experience you need at releasing the tension. Create it and let it go. Because creating tension is what we do when we play. We don't need to most of the time, we don't mean to most of the time, but we create that tension. And so we need to know how to let it go. So I would start with those kind of calming your body exercises, see how those feel to you. And now let's talk about just calming your Mind.

The most important thing is to remember that you only need to think about one thing at a time. In fact, it's only going to be a problem if you try to concentrate on too many things. So this could show up in your practice as well. I'm practicing, but I'm also thinking about this other thing. Whether it's the. The list you have to make for the grocery store or the cookies you have to bake for the meeting or whatever it is, you can only think of one thing at a time. And learning to put those other thoughts aside and to think about what's on that music stand in front of you right then is a beautiful skill. Think about all the applications of this kind of skill. Right. How wonderful to be able to teach yourself to focus when you're in a stressful situation or when you're coming up to that trouble spot. So here are some habits that you can start doing. One of these might be exactly the one that you say, oh, yes, this is the one that I needed, and I'm going to try this one. So perhaps you get distracted by all the things, all the music that you have to play. Not just things you have to do, but music you have to play. I suggest that you clear everything off of your music stand except for the one thing that you're going to practice right now.

So we're going to start and just play one thing, and then you have some other decisions to make, right? Decide how long you're going to work on it right now. Are you going to work on it for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes? As long as it takes. Well, make a choice. Set your timer, and then when your timer goes off, stop. That's enough practice on that piece. And you can give yourself a few minutes to stand up, take a drink of water, clear your mind, maybe walk around the room once, then reset your music stand with the next thing you want to practice and go through those same steps. But you can't practice all your music all at once. So let yourself concentrate on one thing at a time. Now, one thing at a time also might be.

Clearing your practice space so that it's not distracting you. It could be a very powerful distraction when you see piles of clutter, piles of music, and the back of your mind is always thinking, gosh, I have to clean this up. Well, you know what? Take a day, clean it up, or put it all in a box and put it in the closet just so that you can't see it. But don't let your environment distract you. You have some Control over that. And those distractions are going to just create that little buzz in the back of your brain that will keep you from bringing your full focus to your practice.

One more suggestion here.

We harpists have so much we're trying to do when we play. We're trying to make music. We're trying to play the right notes, the right rhythm, the right fingers. We're trying to watch our technique, make sure our fingers are closing and our thumbs are up and all those important things. There are so many details to watch, things to think about as you're practicing. Think about one of them. You can't think about all of them at once. You can't pay attention to your thumbs and to the dynamics and. And to your elbows and the rhythm and think about one thing at a time. I work with students often who try to, you know, they're overachievers. We all are, right in the harp world. So they're trying to make sure that everything they play, their technique is perfect. The notes are right, the fingering's right, everything's good. But you know what? That makes progress. Really slow, and it makes practice very frustrating. So this is what I tell them. Do your technique practice and pay every single ounce of attention that you can to your technique while you're doing your technique practice, and then set it aside. I mean, if you're doing the rest of your practice and you notice that, oh, you know what, my thumb is not doing what it's supposed to do, or my fingers aren't closing, then just fix that. You know, you can say, okay, all right, I'm going to, you know, think about that once. But when you're practicing your music, let it be about that music. Your technical work and your music need to come together. But if you're doing your technique work, that's going to come over to the music. So let yourself do a repetition or two of whatever it is you're working on, where you are paying attention more to your technique than to anything else. But don't try to make everything important all the time. That's a way to drive yourself crazy. There's another hidden sort of spot that might be causing you some mental tension, and that's around your practice plan. If you don't like to plan your practice, that's fine. If that keeps you nice and calm, terrific. That's okay. If you're the type that likes to plan, then go ahead and create that detailed practice agenda and play through it. But you don't have to create a plan if that doesn't work for you. You can do the old just play the next piece on the pile thing. You can alternate pieces that you love to play with, pieces that you're learning. Your practice plan needs to suit you. It can be as detailed or as freeform as you like. But don't think that you have to create a practice plan or that your practice plan has to be the same for every day, because it doesn't. So please don't create more tension and frustration or potential frustration than you need. So make sure your practice plan suits you.

And then I like to think that before you practice, not only are you doing the stretching and the breathing or whatever you like to do there, but you can have focus cues that help you calm yourself before you start to practice. And I think these are really helpful because if they become habit for you, they will help you before you perform as well. So whether that's playing in a lesson or playing for church or playing anywhere, right? So just think how nice it would be to have a couple things that just helped you calm down.

Now at home, at practice, you could even use tuning as part of your focusing when you tune. That's helping to bring your mind to the task. And starting with a slow technical warm up is certainly part of that. But you can also take that moment when you first sit on the heart bench. You don't have to dive into your practice as you sit there. Before you start.

Picture a beautiful scene to yourself or here in your head, the piece that you're about to play.

And let yourself enjoy it. Not think about what you have to do, but just to think about what that scene looks like, what that piece that you're about to play sounds like, what you love about it. Let it get into your soul just a little bit before you start. And when you do something like that before you practice, you'll find that you can do it before you play for anyone. You can take that moment to sit there, breathe and think about that happy place, or hear that beautiful music in your head and know that that's what you're about to do. Those kinds of cues are so, so helpful and a wonderful part of a pre practice or pre performance routine.

Now, I want to talk specifically about the tension that happens in our fingers, our hands, our arms as we're playing.

And tension. A little bit of tension is necessary when we play. I mean, if your finger was totally floppy when it went to play the string, it would just brush over the string and it wouldn't make a sound. You've seen people do that, right? Maybe you even did it the first time you came up to the harp. I know that when someone who's never seen a harp before comes up and they want to play the string, they're always surprised at how much strength it takes to pull the string. And so they start to try really hard. If you've seen a little kid play it, they actually like, grip the strings and kind of really sort of tear at them. And what's interesting is that kids usually don't tense up for things like that, but they've decided it's just sort of instinctive that, wow, that string's hard to play. I'm going to really grab it and really pull it.

So when we're just using our one little finger to play that string, there is going to be some tension. We can't flop it over the string. So I call this point of impact tension. And it might be better to think of it not so much as tension, but in terms of energy. You have to have enough energy to play the string with the tone, with the volume, with the sound, the accent, whatever it is that you want. So if this is point of impact tension, what has to happen right after it is you need to release it. And that's what closing your fingers is about. That closing your fingers that follow through is the way you release that tension. So when you're working in your technical exercises and playing slowly, every finger that you play, think about releasing that tension. As that finger closes, there's that little bit of. Of energy that you sometimes a lot that you have to put into playing that string. But as soon as your finger leaves the string and moves to your hand, the tension is released. We release tension also by movements of our wrist and our forearm. The salzado technique calls those raising or aesthetic gestures. Other people have other names for them. But that movement of your wrist and the movement of your arm is a physical way of releasing the tension. So that as you practice those gestures, as you use them in your playing, remember that that's their purpose. They're not just there to look pretty. They're there to give you a way to release tension that builds up while we play.

The buildup of tension itself is sort of natural. We want to avoid it, but it happens. So you need those ways to release it. Closing and raising are some of them. Remember, the tension comes in in other ways, too. I mean, there's dynamic tension, and that's not so much a physical thing as something that's built into the music. When the music creates energy because it creates excitement, the dynamic Gets louder, maybe the tempo gets faster. When we create that kind of tension, we don't have to make that physical tension. We often do because we're responding to the energy of the piece. But remember that just because the dynamics get louder doesn't mean we have to get tenser, right? So the dynamic tension, while it's part of what drives the piece, doesn't necessarily have to create tension in. In our fingers, hands, wrists, forearms, and the closing, the raising, are ways to release that tension another time. We often accumulate tension in our hands and our wrists and fingers and forearms is when we're trying to control our fingers in a very fast sort of a passage, right? There's a lot of finger motion, a lot of dexterity involved, and we tend to. To stiffen up and to tighten up as a means of controlling our fingers. This also isn't ideal, but to a certain extent it's only natural and it's nearly inevitable. When you practice that kind of a passage, what you want to do is make sure that you're letting yourself play that passage that sometimes at a very soft, very light dynamic, so that you can develop some full finger motion, but very loose and very relaxed.

That will help you when you actually play that passage to remind yourself not to increase the tension physically. And then, of course, you need to look for when and how are you going to release that tension. You may be surprised to find that you can actually release that tension while you're playing as soon as you think relax your hands will do it. But of course, this only really happens if you've practiced that at home first. And you can try gathering tension as you're playing and then releasing it while you're still playing, much in the same way we started with that sort of tense and release exercise. Do that while you're playing and see how it works. It may surprise you how easy it is. I promised to talk about five very common everyday tension traps. I actually just talked about a few, but I have a few more for you. So here's the first one, and I think this one is one that we all experience from time to time. We end up creating tension because we're trying too hard.

We're trying so hard to get something right, to do it again and again and again. We're concentrating and we don't even know how tense we're getting. This kind of tension doesn't just show up in your hands, it's everywhere in your body. It's across your forehead, it's in your neck, it's in your shoulders, it's everywhere. So be very alert to this. You'll know when it's happening if you remember that it might happen, right? So just be alert and aware. And when you feel that coming on, take a break. Take a break, Walk around the room, stretch. Just do something else for a few minutes. And then when you come back, don't immediately resume that thing that you were working on that made you so tense. Instead, take that same thing and just play it through in a relaxed way. So this might mean playing it through very slowly or very softly or very carefully, but whatever it is, just play it through and then put it aside and come back and work on it later. But once again, it's all about being alert and aware and making sure that you stop when this is happening to you. It's that point of diminishing returns. You'll know when you get there. I'm pretty sure.

Tension trap number two is going too fast. Yes, we want to increase the tempo. Yes, we want to play fast, but that can make us tense. And then, guess what? Our fingers aren't free and nimble enough to play fast because they're tense and tight. So quick rule of thumb here. If you're trying to get one of those really tricky passages to go faster, for every three times that you practice it fast, play it once at half tempo at a nice medium, medium dynamic. You're not going to work hard at anything. So for every three times that you practice it fast, once at half tempo, and let yourself just relax into it.

Tension trap number three, forcing the sound. Okay, we want a louder dynamic. We need it louder, or we want to make that crescendo more exciting. Or we just find that we're trying hard enough that we're playing louder and louder and louder without even noticing it, and we force the sound. Your ears may tell you this if you're really alert to the way you're playing sounds, you may notice this first, not from the way it feels, but from the way it sounds. So if you're noticing that, then take that passage, that piece, whatever it is you're doing, and play it three more times. But each time you play it, play it softer, play it a little slower. You want it to be very buttery, to make it just like walking through molasses. So slow it down, make it softer and enjoy that sound. I actually call this the diva soprano method. Because, you know, those sopranos, they've got those wonderful high notes, and they just hold them and hold them because they can. And the notes sound so beautiful, and they'll just be there on that high note, and they'll be holding it, and the orchestra might be holding the chord underneath them. And you're thinking, okay, already, we're ready to go. You're still holding this note. We know you can. That's what we're looking for. We want you to just be as slow and as diva like. It's like, okay, listen to me. Listen to my beautiful sound. That's what we want. So that's how to get out of that trap right there. Trap number four I actually already referred to a little bit, but I'm going to take a slightly different approach to it here. Trap number four is not having a plan.

Sometimes not having any plan before you practice can add to the distraction, add to the confusion. The noise in your head can make you just a little bit flustered. Well, what do I do? What do I do? So the easiest way to get around this is just when you stop practicing today, put that first thing you're going to do tomorrow on your stand by itself. Just that one thing on your stand. Put that there so that when you come to the harp tomorrow and you sit down, you know where you're going to start. You don't have to have a big, elaborate plan, but just having some sort of plan. This is what I'm going to start with. Can be so reassuring, can get you right into practice. The easiest way you're totally ready to go. Can make you much calmer. Trust me. And the last one, this is definitely a mental one.

This is what I call getting stuck in the shoulds. I should be doing this. I should be able to play this better. I should be spending more practice time. I should have learned this piece by now. I should have practiced my technique yesterday. I should. Should.

There's nothing like the shoulds to create mental tension that is going to SAP your playing. It's going to take you away from the music that you really want to make. Don't get stuck in the shoulds. Instead, try a could. Well, I could do this today. I could do this tomorrow. I could try this. I could try this instead. There are so many things that you could could do. There's no point in wasting time on the things that you should have done but didn't. So don't get stuck in the shoulds. Try a could instead, and that will help you stay relaxed, I guarantee.

So now, how relaxed do you feel? Does it feel possible for you to create that kind of relaxation? Create the ability to release tension while you're practicing and while you're playing. I hope it does. One of the things I really want you to try are those pre practice or pre playing focus cues where you sit and you hear the music or you look at that beautiful scene in your mind and just sitting there on the heart bench, letting yourself focus right before you start, that's going to be such a powerful habit that once you develop it, you're never going to want to be without it. And you won't be without it because it will be that habit for you. And you'll have a way to help yourself calm down and relax anytime before you play or practice.

An even bigger takeaway that I want to just sort of draw your attention to right now is that this is about awareness. You need to be aware of where in your body you're holding tension in if tension is building up and how it's impacting your playing. When you can be that aware, you are halfway or more toward curing yourself of the tension problem. Because once you know where it is, once you know that it's there, then you're able to release it. So learning to be aware is the first step in being able to respond to it. So that's our relaxing episode for today. Next week on the podcast we're going to be talking about mental practice. How to practice when you don't have your harp with you. Maybe you're on vacation, maybe you're waiting backstage to play and your harp's on stage. Any number of situations. What can you do when you don't have your harp? Well, mental practice sounds like a really good idea and it is. But that doesn't mean we all know exactly what it means or how to do it. So that's the subject of our podcast. Next week I'd like to remind you that coaching registration registration for our fall coaching session opens today and you have from now until September 1st or whenever we close the registration to get in there and reserve your spot, reserve your opportunity to work with one of our very talented and lovely.

Certified coaches. These are just the most generous people, expert harpists, terrific teachers and their students all love them and I know you will too. So this is the opportunity all only comes up three times a year to work with our certified coaches. So don't miss this. You will find the link in your show notes or@heartmastery.com look under our programs you'll find the coaching program and you can read more about it and register right there. So until next week, I would like to remind you that every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening to the podcast and I will see you next time. Thanks for tuning in to 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.