You know, people come to therapy really for blessing

You know, people come to therapy really for blessing. Not so much to fix what’s broken but to get what’s broken blessed. James Hillman

What is needed to effect change maybe a level of the uncomfortable or the disorientation that we try to avoid? The weekend workshop approach to learning means that change is unlikely.

Yes discomfort we do not like it whether is the fear of the dark or pain at any level but what have we done by avoiding discomfort but kicked a can down the road? Maybe we do not want to be fixed physically or in our head because change may be the most uncomfortable of things.

Something my wife noticed as a massage therapist was that people would go so far in their healing but then seemed unwilling to go that final bit that would have either finished the job or made the change. That was also something that I found was evident in NLP as well that you had to almost burn the bridges to stop people going back into old patterns. One way of making lasting change was to make the past and present so painful that the only way to relieve it was to change.

Could this be why the great success stories often involve 'rock bottom' or bankruptcy before the riches as if the reset button needs the pain, maybe as we are so resistant to that discomfort means we are also resistant to change.  So instead we want  in James Hillman's words  what is broken to be blessed like a badge of honour.

Think of what this means for your guitar teaching? Have you noticed that many pupils will get to a certain point and then plateau out? Maybe is when things get a little bit tough, the development of the technique stops, why is that? Maybe it’s because people then carry on playing the thing that they can already do, it is easier you see. Why struggle with things that are painful when you can just do something that you can chill out and repeat? That is okay if you just want play but if you truly want to develop one needs to do things that are going to hurt.

A number of guitar teachers have commented in the past about pupils who turn up doing very little practice. Now this is a complex problem because they may just want to come and give you money and spend some time twiddling around on the guitar and that may be okay but if they really want to learn which means they really want to change then you have to enable them to confront themselves and by extension suffer for their art.

I am not saying that this is what is required for everyone it may only be required for a few and those few will go on to become very good musicians, what I flagging up here is something about human consciousness and how the avoidance of discomfort stops us developing a skill.

So for those who want to continue doing the same broken recording you can bless them as they give you the money, and for the ones who want to change and develop and become artists allow them the opportunity and the space and your knowledge to suffer for their art.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of playing in a rock band, the transformative summer school

Keep it simple

It has become clear that choice is not what it is cracked up to be. Choice was always the flagship of marketing whether it is a number of TV channels, the treatment options for health or what we can buy in a supermarket, but in reality it has become a curse. We are drowning in choice and it leads to confusion and lack of decision and certainly contributes directly to a lack of staying power required to learn.

With regard to learning musical instruments such as the guitar there are so many lessons and technical videos out there anybody wanting to learn will literally drown in them. I am not sure that it works at all particularly if you are starting out. In the past there was a lack of information so if you got a scale, some chords or small solo from a recording you spent a lot of time on that small amount of information and really got into your fingers before moving on and that is what scarcity did, it made you a better player.

The people that are supplying this information free have contributed to its devaluation so unless one puts a value to something it is not taken seriously. This is a problem for people teaching where the value of information has been devalued by oversupply. The fact that there is more out there does not necessarily make it better, often information is directly related to the need someone has for it. Sometimes people just aren’t ready for certain things.

Before we can have complexity we must have the basics, something that we can build upon and make sense of. The information that follows builds on the basics which if learnt act as good foundations because without them whatever follows will not hold.

What is it that you need to know to play an instrument? It is now quite common to find somebody playing the electric guitar who have some complex technical skills but they don’t know the basic chords or the basic scales that are required to map out the fretboard. Joe Satriani tells the story of somebody who came for lessons who could play guitar solos by the band Anthrax but did not know any chords. I have experienced this as well with a new pupil playing fragments of Metallica solos and part of Eddie Van Halen’s Eruption solo but knowing no major or minor chords unless they are in a song that he was playing by rote.

How good were the old rock and roll and blues players and how much did they know? Probably the answer to this is that the old players didn’t know very much technically, probably not very much in terms of scales and chords and techniques but what they had they used well, and that is the point, we know too much and what we have is of little use or benefit.

So less is definitely more.

Vic www.bluescampuk.co.uk learn to play in a band in 3 days