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ORIGINAL: payaso

That sounds good advice, but there may be another way of looking at this. Sometimes anxiety – apprehension, tension or panic – can be a warning of real imminent danger that needs to be taken seriously and not always dismissed as inappropriate. The desire to achieve a super-fast picado seems to be a major stumbling block for many would-be flamenco guitarists, and a potential source of injury and despair. Yet this most unmusical of techniques, now so dominant in flamenco guitar today, is not an essential part of the essence of flamenco and of ‘flamencura’ and may even detract from it. Maybe one should heed the warning and turn instead to trying to express the emotional power of flamenco, not just the pyrotechnics impressive to some other guitarists but not so much to other listeners.

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That sounds good advice, but there may be another way of looking at this. Sometimes anxiety – apprehension, tension or panic – can be a warning of real imminent danger that needs to be taken seriously and not always dismissed as inappropriate. The desire to achieve a super-fast picado seems to be a major stumbling block for many would-be flamenco guitarists, and a potential source of injury and despair. Yet this most unmusical of techniques, now so dominant in flamenco guitar today, is not an essential part of the essence of flamenco and of ‘flamencura’ and may even detract from it. Maybe one should heed the warning and turn instead to trying to express the emotional power of flamenco, not just the pyrotechnics impressive to some other guitarists but not so much to other listeners.

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Breathe!

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ORIGINAL: mark indigo

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Breathe!

or else!

my dad had just got his dog used to not eating anything when it went and died

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Lenador wins the prize for the best pun

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Estabana - I tried your crucifix stretch on a gym ball and it's the dog's bollox

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Mark, you imagining approach sounds promising.

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Where it gets really interesting though is how those muscle contractions occur.
There has to be a desire to make the movement in question, there has to be a mental conception of how that movement is to occur, and the "orders" have to be formulated in the brain and sent via the nerves to the muscle to tell it to contract.
If you can improve the mental processes that create the movement in the first place, and remove extraneous instructions from the program (like contracting unnecessary muscles in the neck, or torso) through mental practise then you will be stopping off at source the unnecessary muscle tension.

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the mind has a hard time to settle into it because it is a control freak, and it's running itself ten times faster that it needs to go.

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The thing you have to ask the mind do, is to just let you breathe and open up. The mind hates this and will fight back because it's in the skull on top of the body and it thinks it knows more than you do or the body. When you talk about tendons and muscle connections and kinesthetics of playing the guitar this is all correct. But try that without a guitar with nothing, but breathing.

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I know. That's why I signed up for a Vipassana silent meditation retreat. 8 hours a day meditation, over 10 days. No talking. No books or pens, no reading or writing. No radio or tv or cd or mp3. No singing or musical instruments.
Just me and my crazy monkey mind.... And then a year later I went back and did it all again.
But you know what? As soon as I picked up the guitar again all of the old habits came back because I was using the same protocols, the same set of "instructions" as before.
I had already practised yoga too before this, so plenty of corpse pose etc.
But you know what? My internal/subconscious concept of standing involved such a lot of tension in my neck and torso that as soon as I stood up from the floor I just cranked it all back up without, of course, realising I was doing it.
As I said, for some people relaxation or stretching exercises might be enough to initiate changing the way they play, but it sure wasn't for me.
It is often said that it is better to learn technique right in the first place because bad habits are hard to change. I think what I am talking about here is why they are so hard to change.
One of the reasons I went straight back to playing in my bad old way after yoga or meditation or stretching or whatever was that I had PRACTISED playing in that bad old way for so long!

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First I respect and acknowledge your work at a Buddhist and meditation practice. I also respect your sense of how to move though it in whichever way you see best for yourself. I'm going to say a few critical things about Vipassanna based on my observation of practitioners I've spent time with and listened to about how they practice. I'm not directing this at you personally. I began meditation a long time ago and I drifted through various kinds of practice the first three years until I found one that made sense to me that was not too esoteric or culty. The schools of practice I checked out were a few Indian kinds of practice, Tibetan, Ningma sect stuff in particular, a few others. After some time I ran into these very well trained Soto Zen monks in Berkeley, and I stuck with them because they were the most normal, least pushy and never asked for or pressed for money. I did not ever work with any of the chanting cults kinds of Japanese Buddhism that some of my friends were into, now I see on TV in Japan the lady who invented it. She's not even a real monk.

I have to admit I'm not really a very good buddhist either, I'm pretty sloppy and out of trim. But there were some years when I was involved everyday and around very well trained monks. I learned a lot of common sense things about Buddhism from them.

We both have experience at meditation, but many others here don't, so when you or I say general things like "breathe, breathe", for them it might be a new idea. So I think any kind of talk about this is good, but I've been in an our of Meditation practice for 30 years and in that time I've seen patterns, sometimes meditation, breath watching, yoga works and some time sit does not. For the same person, these kids of practices may not work for few years and then the situation changes and they become beneficial and helpful. For you obviously you are not into it.

On the subject of Vipassana practice, I've got my doubts about it, as you have yours about the yoga stuff. The stories I hear from Vipasanna goers are often times like your story. I've heard that over and over through the years.

The thing about a practice is that once a year for an intense ten days is fine, but that kind of intensity needs to be supported by a lot of build up to it. I have talked to full time transmitted monks in other sects of Buddhism who have really careful things to say about Vipassanna. One of the observations is that they say is look we do this every day beginning at 5 am and then a few more times during the day, and we work very consistently everyday this practice. They will go to retreats in the monastery when they close the monastery to lay persons and do a practice that lasts several days and it's not meant to cure them of anything, but to deepen the practice they have everyday.

I've never gone to a long ten day retreat where you can speak, for me I see no reason to do that. And the monks I have been around have also said you know for a lay person ten days is too much once a year. It's like grabbing your guitar and practicing for a hundred hours in one week and then expecting the rest of the year to be workable with no more practice the rest of the year. The monks I have been around in the Soto school say if you can manage 10- 15 minutes a day of sitting practice you'll be better off than going whole hog once a year and wrecking your knees and your back.

The other reason I won't do vipassnna is because they encourage sitting through body pain. I heard Vipass people come back from retreats and say, "Oh I was getting leg cramps and numbness, etc, but I just sat through it. " I think that is really stupid, for one when you get older you simply can sustain a kind of practice where you have to tough it through body difficulties, there are enough complications without needing to have pain to overcome. The idea by contrast in Soto training is that the practice is not aimed at dealing with pain while you sit, it is maintained by sitting everyday with good spine shape and a bright mind. At a Soto retreat maybe an older person would sit in chair and not try to sit through physical pain that younger vipass people seem think they have to endure.

Anyway, someone just pulled up to my shop with a bee hive in the back of a truck and they are trying to give it to me. So I have to go figure out what to do with a bee hive now.

But again, I'm not being critical of you personally or any ones practice, just relating some things I have observed about different kinds of practice. Probably the best outcome of this conversation is that is reminds me to go sit myself down a bit.