I want to share a story about one of my students from last year, Jill, an accomplished string player who teaches and conducts in the schools. ✨

When she came to work with me, she had noticed something was off in her practice. She’d moved from hour-long sessions to working in 30-minute blocks. “I hyper-focus,” she said, “and then I don’t finish everything I need to do.”

But beneath that was something deeper.

There was one piece, a Bach Sarabande, that she had learned years earlier in a state of real tension and stress. She discovered that she was playing it on a single bow hair without noticing, until she listened back to recordings and heard just how tight she had become. “This piece is associated with a LOT more tension,” she shared.

So we worked with it.

When she approached the piece trying to sound good, the change was immediate and visible. Her body locked up. The music became forced, the tone tense and unreliable. But when we shifted something in her intention, when she moved from trying to achieve a result to genuine curiosity about what might happen – free of expectation and judgment – everything changed. 🎻

Her shoulders released. Her breathing deepened. The passage she had been struggling with began to move again, easily.

By the end of the session she was playing faster, freer, and more in tune than she had in months, not because she practiced harder or forced anything, but because she stopped interfering with what her body already knew how to do.

A few months later, she told me she no longer carries that same tension with the piece. She learned something through it, about her instrument and about herself, that went way beyond technique. 🎵

Playing had now become a way to settle her nervous system rather than wind it up…. and when she told me about it, she lit up with joy.

It was clear that this kind of shift was healing, reaching far beyond the music. 🧘