About our Programs for Musicians
Our Mindfulness for Musicians Program is for musicians of all ages and levels. This program is all about helping you to reach and maintain your very best whenever you walk out on stage.
Our Mindful Ensemble Programs support teachers and conductors working with young musicians.
Why Mindfulness AND Music
Great musicians share some extraordinary abilities.
In front of hundreds or thousands of watchful eyes and ears they sustain high levels of concentration while also managing stress and self-doubt. Their individual instrumental or vocal skills are highly developed. They’re also extremely attuned to what is happening around them. They react to what they see, hear and feel in the real time, alive process of making music.
These skills are available to anyone.
Every musician knows that practice and concentration are important.
Have you every had a teacher say something like…
“You just need to concentrate.”
That’s easy to say.
How many of us have specifically practiced and developed the attention skills to really concentrate or those behind managing stress and intense pressure.
Usually when we practice we’re hard at work on the physical aspects of playing our instrument or bringing a piece to life.
That’s important but we struggle when those moments arrive when what is happening in our heads (and bodies) becomes even more important than our skill and preparation.
Situations like…
- You’re in rehearsal with that conductor who looks at you like they’ve just eaten a lemon. You feel yourself tense up before you play and….
- The final round of that audition you’ve spent months preparing for and you need to keep your composure and nail every note.
- You are a conductor. You are well prepared but then you stand in front of the orchestra and 60 pairs of eyes staring at you has an impact..
- Another day in your high pressure orchestral job with the constant expectation of the highest level of playing.
- You’ve just had a fight with your partner and you are heading in to play a concert with one of the biggest solos in the repertoire.
- You’re a music educator working with young musicians whose individual skills are high but whose ensemble awareness is still developing.
- You are finding the constant need to be at a high level is fatiguing and stressful and you need tools to deal with that.
It’s moments like these we recognise it is just as important to train the skills to deal with these things as it is to train your instrumental or vocal skills.
What you really need is something that helps when you’re mid-performance, audition, rehearsal or even practice session.
Introducing the…
Mindfulness for Musicians Program
- A One Day In-Person or Online Workshop for multiple participants
- An 8 Week Online Course (each session runs for 1 hour)
Mindfulness for Musicians Overview
This Program covers:
- The Skills of Mindfulness – an introduction for Musicians
- Accessing Rest – relax and recharge even when things are intense
- Nurturing an ideal performance with Mindfulness
- Turning any situation into a way to increase your performance skills
- Improving your focus and making positive habit changes with Mindfulness
- Accessing change and movement (flow) in yourself and heightening your awareness of flow in rehearsal and performance
- Getting ready for a big performance or audition
- Taking the skills into your life
This comprehensive and step-by-step program supports your mental game helping you perform at your highest level each time you step on a stage.
The Mindful Ensemble Programs
Program 1 – 3 Hours
This program is for teachers and conductors working with young musicians. It is designed to support the development of ensemble skills by applying the attentional skills of Mindfulness. These skills fast track a young musicians ability to see, hear and react to what is happening around them. This program is open to one or more participants and equips you with training that includes:
- Understanding the skills of Mindfulness
- Embodying the skills of mindfulness in rehearsal to create a mindful rehearsal environment for optimum learning and enjoyment
- A technique for conductors to support mindful awareness in rehearsal and performance
- Activities that have been shown to expedite the learning of ensemble awareness producing extraordinary results in a fraction of the usual time
- Working skillfully with thoughts and emotions
- Strategies to manage your stress and anxiety
- How to embody the skills of mindfulness in rehearsal to create a mindful rehearsal environment for optimum learning and enjoyment
Program 2 – 2 Hour Rehearsal
In Program 2 we come and work with your ensemble.
In this session we’ll:
- introduce the skills of mindfulness and how they can support musical skills
- work through a range of mindfulness activities designed to heighten ensemble awareness
- discuss attention skills, improving concentration and effective practice
- learn a technique to use when warming up to focus attention and improve concentration
- learn a technique to access rest and recharge
The techniques and skills that students learn in this program will have positive impacts across their lives.
Interested in learning more about Mindfulness for Musicians?
Our Mindfulness for Musician Programs are designed to support any musician from student through amateur to world class performer to reach and sustain their peak level of performance.
FAQs
Mindfulness Meditation allows you to work with thought in ways that can be profoundly helpful in situations like these.
Under performance conditions our thoughts can trigger stress and other emotional reactions that impact our ability to play at our best. Being able to work with thoughts and emotions in real time and under challenging circumstances gives you the capacity to access your best when you need to. The same skill set also helps you with the compulsive kind of thinking that keeps you awake after a concert. The thoughts themselves are not the problem – i’ts how we relate to them that makes the difference. That’s where Mindfulness comes in. You’ll be able relax after a show, not be derailed by negative thoughts prior to a performance and actually learn to nurture positivity that further supports your confidence and ability when you enter the stage.
That’s a good question. As Musicians we are familiar with practice! We’re used to the idea of developing a set of skills over time with practice.
Mindfulness is a skill set too. Mindfulness skills are attentional skills which can be trained and developed over time with practice too.
Both skill sets benefit from a clear framework. In other words – what and how to practice. The outcome of practice is relatively predictable in both cases. Our skills grow and deepen.
When we stand in front of a group chances are we are well equipped musically. However there’s also a good change that we have given zero thought/energy/preparation to knowing how to deal with the impact that 60 pairs of eyes has on us.
It can be a shock. Our minds might race and so might our pulses.
Mindfulness is all about working with our experience so that we can relate to it in ways that empower us. We can learn to deal with these reactions when they occur. We can also learn to use Mindfulness to develop the calm and clarity that allows us to do our best work under these conditions. Best of all we can help every person behind those 60 pairs of eyes by creating the conditions for Mindful Awareness in rehearsal and performance – enhancing ensemble awareness, interaction and unity.