When you unpack your instrument, you might already be feeling sore. Maybe you feel it in your shoulders, your neck, or your hands.

You’ve been playing long rehearsals lately, and you’ve been aware of this tension for some time now. It gets louder the moment you lift your instrument.

But you try not to think about it too much and hope it will just go away on its own. You have repertoire to learn.

So you get to work and focus, concentrating hard to be efficient and get a lot done quickly, since you don’t have much time to master those tricky spots before your next rehearsal.

As you “get into” what you’re doing and intensify your concentration, your attention narrows and effort increases. Your intention is good, but the discomfort is still there in the background, gradually becoming more insistent.

It’s both annoying and worrisome because it’s starting to turn into pain.

When will this discomfort go away?

⚠️ The Hidden Cost of Intense Concentration

Under these circumstances, the pain isn’t increasing because you’re paying too much attention to it. Most of the time, you're doing just the opposite – working hard to ignore it, override it, or push past it.

But avoiding your body’s discomfort signals while intensifying concentration has a way of tightening your whole system around the very area you're trying not to feel. The body responds by holding on in subtle ways that aren't immediately obvious.

What I've noticed, both personally and in the musicians I work with, is that discomfort rarely disappears when it's treated as something “bad” or “wrong,” something you need to manage or eliminate.

When a sensation is already present, trying to “out-concentrate” it often creates more stiffness, bracing, and effort. When you approach your instrument this way, you’re adding a layer of tension that amplifies the experience instead of resolving it.

The problem is, you probably aren’t aware that this is happening in the moment. It’s only later that the pain catches up with you. And you’re unlikely to connect the way you were concentrating, thinking, and working with how your body responded.

It’s a familiar pattern for accomplished musicians. You’ve been trained to use focus as a tool, and intense concentration in practice feels like the right thing to do. After all, hard work and discipline have brought you this far. But when discomfort becomes chronic, those same strategies can begin to work against you, subtly undermining the very progress they once supported.

In the worst cases, people develop injuries that force them to stop playing, either temporarily or permanently. You can probably think of at least one musician who plays your instrument who has had to cancel performances due to pain. As a violinist myself, I think of Hilary Hahn, who has had to cancel multiple performances in recent years due to pain and eventual surgery.

🌿 There’s Another Way

There is another possibility, one that allows things to unfold more gently and may prevent unfortunate scenarios like that from playing out.

The sensation can be acknowledged briefly, without turning it into a problem to solve. It can be allowed to exist as part of the moment, while attention widens again – to the rest of the body, the breath, the sound moving through the room, the parts of the system that are still functioning with ease.

The discomfort doesn’t have to disappear for this to matter. It simply stops dominating the field of awareness, and the body no longer needs to organize itself around a single point of concern.

When that happens, playing often feels less constrained and more responsive – not because anything was “fixed,” but because the nervous system has room to settle and the whole self can adapt. The music begins to flow from a place that is more spacious and free. ✨

If you’ve ever sensed that trying harder only makes things worse, there may be something important within you asking for attention. When you give yourself the space to become curious and to listen more deeply to what your system is communicating, things begin to soften and release rather than tighten and narrow.

If this resonates, I would love to hear about your experience. Reach out. I’m always interested in what musicians discover when they stop fighting and start allowing!

Love & Light,
Jennifer ❤