Pianodao Wellbeing – Page 3

Wisdom and Expertise

Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Reflection by Andrew Eales

How do you feel when so-called “experts” say things that just don’t match your experience? Is their academic learning superior to your practical experience? Does their input leave you feeling more, or less confident than before?

Practical experience and academic learning ideally go hand in hand, the one neither replacing nor outbalancing the other. But it’s helpful to consider how the right balance between the two is best achieved.

Wisdom for the Winter

Fermata • Pause and Reflect

Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Reflection by Andrew Eales

As Autumn turns to winter, dead leaves wither on our pathways, migrating birds have headed off in search of warmer climes, insects are crawling into holes, and many animals are settling down to hibernate until the spring thaw.

In Chinese medicine and Qigong practice, the human metabolism also slows down in the Winter, and our energy can become dormant. And yet we seem to largely ignore the challenges of the season. Instead, we work and play even more frenetically than usual as we head towards the Christmas season at breakneck speed.

There is a real danger that our over-exertion in the early winter leaves us physically depleted, mentally and emotionally exhausted, and more susceptible to infection, illness and a general sense of feeling “run down”. We need to take stock…

Avoiding Excess, Cultivating Balance

Fermata • Pause and Reflect

Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Reflection by Andrew Eales

In this short post, I want to address our need for a balanced approach to our piano practice and playing. But first, let’s take a step back and consider some more universal principles.

It seems to be our Western way of thinking to categorise and put everything in separate boxes. We are not always so adept at making connections. We explain our world using artificial constructs that polarise, and that fixate on opposites. We speak of good and evil, black and white, hard and soft, male and female, hot and cold, fortissimo and pianissimo, night and day.

We may think that these opposites are mutually exclusive, but our experience of the world around us teaches a different lesson. Just as positive and negative ions charge the air we breathe, so too energy, movement and a living narrative are all impossible without the interaction of opposing forces.

The Supreme Good

Fermata • Pause and Reflect

Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Reflection by Andrew Eales

What are we to say, and how are we to live, in times of trauma, escalating suffering and conflict? On this site I often quietly apply the wisdom of Daoism to our piano playing journey, but what of its broader relevance? Faced with misery on multiple fronts, can Daoism offer any hope?

The great Daoist sage Lao Tzu lived in tumultuous times, too. The details of his life may have been obscured by the mists of time, but the conflicts of that era are well known, and they were brutal. Reading his classic Tao Te Ching, no wonder his deeply-considered response to the world as he found it continues to resonate with so many to this day.

An Empty Vessel

Fermata • Pause and Reflect

Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Reflection by Andrew Eales

The image of an empty vessel is a common one found in many cultural and spiritual traditions. It is a concept which is marvellously introduced in these words from the Tao Te Ching, written by the Daoist sage Lao Tzu:

“Clay is folded into a vessel,
Yet it is the hollowness that makes the vessel useful;
Windows and doors are cut out,
Yet it is their empty space that makes the room useable.”

Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching (chapter 11, excerpt)
translation, Edward Brennan and Tao Huang

Here’s a wonderfully pithy rendition of the first part, this time as translated by that great author Ursula K. Le Guin:

“Hollowed out, clay makes a pot.
Where the pot’s not is where it’s useful.“

Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching (chapter 11, excerpt)
translation: Ursula K. Le Guin

In her ever-thoughtful commentary, she notes,

“One of the things I love about Lao Tzu is he is so funny. He’s explaining a profound and difficult truth here, one of those counterintuitive truths that, when the mind can accept them, suddenly double the size of the universe. He goes about it with this deadpan simplicity, talking about pots.”