Now I have done the workshop, unleash me on the world.

Over the years of teaching and being involved in NLP I now see that I might be part of the problem, that of the weekend workshop. My fascination with the mind and consciousness has let me to explore many things, music, hypnosis, meditation and those things were fed into my work. However I have seen in my time the rise of the workshop seminar course on a level that certainly did not exist even a few years ago in this country. There are workshops for everything, hot yoga, raw food, Tantric techniques and all of this is driven by somebody selling something. 

Now as part of this problem I can see that the unintended consequence of this is someone goes to the weekend workshop and becomes a practitioner of it. Now I do not think that the university courses for things alternative are any better with herbalism courses that do not involve going out and finding the plants in the wild, and massage courses that don’t involve any physical contact, (I joke not) and music courses that do not teach how to make money, that has to be learnt by chance it seems. Obviously in the past if you wanted to use herbs you learnt literally in the field, the herbalist of old never learnt in a formal setting and therefore they never got caught into the intellectual way of exploring something: the way that involves the use of statistics and is data driven. Much of the data and statistics are at best misinterpretations and at worst are things that are pulled literally out of the air, I have seen data that supports something that later is refuted by other data, the thing that seems to be missing is personal experience.

So how does the teaching of music fit into this? Music once was the domain of the unprofessional, one would have learnt by watching and maybe being apprenticed to another musician. Once the church was involved then things got into a pattern so that musicians learnt to play to the script not only the written music but the essence of it and no funny stuff, (this is why improvisation fell out of favour). Contempory music in this country was until recently like the former description of learning on the job but now it is learning in a college setting and it has the hallmarks of what I was saying earlier something disjointed and removed from the root of the music. 

So what to do? Attending the workshop is okay however that is only the beginning of a long journey with the beginning point of ‘evangelising your enlightenment’ needs to be repressed and for the years to develop and mellow the fruit. That will eventually come along after the flowering of the seminar and college buds have fallen away and the developing fruit has withstood the rain, the pests, wind and all the interested birds of life looking to damage your ideas.

The resulting misshapen and damaged fruits no longer look like the pictures that the advertising gave you with their brilliance shown in the workshop but they will be nourishing and better than anything that a workshop picture will afford you. And how long does it take for the fruition?

10,000 hours………..

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

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

Wayfinding

According to Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, “Wayfinding is the ancient art of figuring out where you are going when you don’t know your destination. For wayfinding you need a compass and a direction. Not a map – a direction”. I have found this concept to be quite helpful ever since I more or less rejected the concept of final destinations materially or spiritually.

This is a useful concept when it comes to music as well because the song knows its own destination it comes without a map with its own directionality in form of feeling about what the song expresses. The map of the components of the song chords, melodies, words et cetera these are always unclear at least the beginning. It is very rare the song leaps fully formed from the mind. For me in the years that I have written songs it  has probably only happened about three or four times.

Much of this concept of wayfinding is being brave enough to wander off into the wilderness without a map and this is something that people who attend song writing classes find the most difficult. They are always trying to rationalise or make things rhyme or they try to edit when all that is required is for the raw data to erupt out of nothingness.

The concept of nothingness is difficult enough for the Western person to understand anyway so to allow that to knock down the house of cards which is our intellectual reasoning and the belief that we are rational is challenging.

Over the last few blogs I have spoken about in creating songs or inspiriting the work that you do in order to reduce the banality that the intellectual mind has when you’re trying to create. The intellect is great as an editor but crap as an artist, so rationality is a good servant but a terrible master and this is  what we have arrived at with three hundred years of The Enlightenment, which from a trades description point of view is the most misleading term which could have only come from colonial thinking. That idea infects most of what we do in the West; that we have the right idea that the planet needs saving by us when we are the ones that got us into this mess in the first place, it is like getting Goebbels to set up the state of Israel.

So let the music flow and the ideas develop when you feel you’ve arrived at the destination then it is time to do a little bit of mapmaking so that you can discover where you have arrived and then find out more about the final destination. In other words the editor needs to come in and tidy everything up if you want to present it to polite society. If you don’t want present it to polite society then leave it as it is so that people can make of it what they want.

So try this as an idea, start off with some random lyrics and some chords from somewhere, change them around and allow the song to be undirectional before you start to structure the ideas. If the song just wants to stay with a set of four chords than let it, if it wants to become more complicated, let it do that, in other words let the song do what ever it feels it wants to do. See how it changes your concept about writing. 
This is a great technique for teaching children as well as it demystifies the artistic process and makes it accessible to everybody.

Vic www.bluescampuk.co.uk play in a rock band …………….

All of humanity is in peril of extinction

It is my driving conviction that all of humanity is in peril of extinction if each one of us does not dare now and henceforth always to tell only the truth and all the truth and do so promptly right now - Buckminster Fuller

This is a quote that is probably fifty years old but has more gravity today with the fake news banner.

There has always been fake news it was called history, which is written by the winners and only by digging into the archaeology and the looking at the losers story do we start to get the picture that may be nearer to the truth if there is such a thing.

For me the absence of features in British History that we never hear about but are very important in the history of other nations and peoples would paint a clearer and more uncomfortable picture of our history. So when I sit in a classroom listening to the latest document to protect the government and institutions from litigation (which is called Child Protection) and the term British values is slipped in I wonder what British values they mean.

The nature of the artist much like the job of the court Jester or fool is to talk truth to power otherwise what is the point of it all just to look pretty and have your voice be processed through a computer so it is pleasing to the ears or should it rattle cages and maybe unlock a few to let the skeletons fall out? Political sexual indiscretions anyone?

But here is the question that we need to ask, what is truth? There have been lots of experiments where people have been questioned directly after witnessing a scene and then the comparisons are made in the descriptions, and they often vary. When asked at a later date to recount the incident those descriptions become more diverse and therefore if all those people are thinking that they are telling the truth there  is something wrong with our understanding of it.

This postmodern aspect of the truth being unreal has led us to Trump and Brexit where the statistics that we used to back the campaigns were obviously open to interpretation as to their truthfulness.

So maybe truth lies within ourselves and what we see as the truth. What we remember of an event may  differ as much as our interpretation of the meanings. Maybe the times were simpler when Buckminster Fuller made his statement or maybe the narrative the governments were using were not being undermined as much. We know that many of these narratives in the 20^th century led to terrible things. Perhaps putting ourselves in the shoes of the people who are suffering may be still be the simplest way to find some sort of truth for ourselves otherwise we could all just end up being like the concentration camp guard who was just following orders.

I sometimes feel like that when I’m sitting listening to the latest pronouncements of the politicians about child protection. Much of child protection is common sense but I’m not sure what we are teaching our children by putting them into schools that resemble prisons in lock down, unconsciously we are telling that the world is a very dangerous place and the only people you can really trust are the ones that have been vetted by the government and that does not include your parents or anyone else’s. Let us wait and see what the next fifty years will bring I will not be here but some of you may be and let’s see how true all this stuff was.

I think it’s time for protest song about school and hospitals that resemble prisons and the creeping necessity for showing some form of ID for whatever you are going to do because they don’t trust you either and that’s the truth.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  play rock in a band

We learn the chords are living things- Jimmy Webb

Any good songwriter will tell you the chords have a natural gravity to them, some will say that they seem to hold a dialogue with you through the music. They tell you what is coming next and they also tell you what is not coming next, when we play a chord that is incorrect in the sequence it screams at us, in fact all music does this, melodies, voicings of chords, and harmonies if they are wrong. I have found it  easy to understand this in music by adopting a sort of pseudo-animist perspective believing the song lives, or for me to breathe some life into the song in order to animate it and therefore to give it some form agency in the world.

Think about the impact the great songs have had some of them have spanned generations, others burn brightly for a short period of time then disappear. Often there is no logical reason why a song should last for so long because on the face of it, it is not clear or deep enough but music and the arts are not intellectual reasoning, and the reality of art and music as Carl Jung would put it is in the imaginal.

It is becoming obvious to many thinkers that this subliminal or imaginal world is real. Carl Jung believed that if you didn’t listen to what your unconscious has to say to you then it would actually become manifest in the material world often as a problem, may be an illness or psychological disturbance.

There are very interesting comparisons between the Jungian active imagination exercises and processes that artists go through in order to create a piece of work, even down to the fact that they are taken over for the piece of work to find its own way into the world.

This way of thinking is sadly absent from the education system that teaches such things as song writing but if songs have real agency and may have a way of changing things than this is an extraordinary powerful doorway to influence and something that we should bear that in mind. Even if you don’t believe in the efficacy of what I am saying even the ability to write better songs with this way of thinking should be reason enough to adopt some of those ideas.

So I suggest we conduct a thought experiment, speak to the notes of chords and allow the songs to rise from our minds unhindered from the strictures of the intellectual process. For those interested in the Jungian active imagination exercises have a listen to this podcast http://www.thisjungianlife.com/heres-the-podcast/ episode 13.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk just imagine what you could do with music

Guard against being a slave to words – Carl Jung. The Red Book

Modern rational thinking has led us to believe that words are simply labels, but as soon as we detach ourselves from that type of belief words regain some of their magical potency of the past.

Many myths and religious texts refer to the potency of words, things being spoken into being, spells being cast by cosmic deities,’ In the beginning was the word’. The fact that we can actually label something with the sound gives us power over it, when something has a name we can express it. We can tell others about it, we can think about it and we can do something about it.

Without a word in a language that names or encapsulates something we cannot express it, we can trace unconscious meaning in a word by looking back into its etymology. It is as if the unconscious speaks through the history of the word even when a word seems to have changed its meaning over time, it can and does cast a shadow or a spell over our reality.

The problem with the rational understanding of words and language is that we have lost our control because we don’t feel there is anything that needs to be controlled but looking at it this way it is a genie that we let out the bottle that has deluded us and now controls us.

It is true that words are loaded and as people listen to a word they will load it with their own significant meanings if you understand what is going on in somebody’s mind you can make them feel those emotions by using the words that they have loaded with intention that is how neuro-linguistic programming works.

Rhetoric as an ancient form of using language to be persuasive and change minds it was the whole idea behind oratory and if we stand and look at that from our modern viewpoint we cannot explain how great orators such as Elizabeth I, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao managed to make people think differently. In the case of Elizabeth I her ability in rhetoric saved her neck, in the case of Winston Churchill he probably saved our necks.

So don’t be a slave to words otherwise you will be following those who have mastery of them but instead spend time using words thoughtfully in such a way that you get what you want by using them.

I would suggest that you get some books of NLP even the idiot’s guide would do (which of course is a terrible title, you will realise that by the time you get to the end of your NLP training) then start writing some songs that use crafted words which express the outcome you want, not what you have nightmares about.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk play music change your life