Musicians Dojo

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To say the least, I have had quite an interesting life, both in the positive and the negative. But people notice I am pretty passive in social situations. They wonder how I’m able to keep a strait head when times are rough. For a great deal of my life, I wondered the same thing. How did I always keep my head in line when my environment became so hectic?

On a not-so-separate topic, there are points in my life when I stopped playing guitar for a period of roughly two or more weeks. Sometimes I just felt burnt out. Other times an event prevented me access to a guitar for some time. But here’s the interesting part. When I finally did get back to it, I seemed to play with incredible passion. I found myself free-styling guitar riffs that simply sounded brilliant. It seemed they just came out of nowhere.

I often questioned why this was and as time passed I finally figured it out, thankfully to a point I was able to explain it.

During extended breaks, life just happened. Life took over and its events seemed to fill up something inside of me. Whether stressful or exciting, these events simply charged me in some way.

A few years ago I came up with a name for what this was. I called it my “battery”. I discovered a connection between the stress of life and my ability to play. As much as it weighed me down, it was also filling up a part of my conscious that my guitar playing seemed to feed from the next time I’d go to play.

Later on, reading on martial arts (I’m an info-holic, what can I say?), I finally found a more appropriate word: Chi. Different disciplines have different names for this, such as “Ki” in Aikedo, but it’s the same idea. I chose “Chi” because it’s more recognized than “Ki” is. You can call it whatever you want.

After a point, I noticed something bigger. There was a pattern across virtually every artist, every genre, and every song that I’ve ever heard (and I’m not including rap songs about bitches and 40’s). Every developed musician has this Chi. You can detect it within lyrics, rhythm structures, tempos, change-ups. The whole picture paints it. There are artists that seem to shape their behaviors and environments around them to charge this Chi intensely.

In fact, those who don’t even play have it. You have it, I have it, your neighbors even have it. The more I learned about this Chi, the more a whole picture was put together.

Controlled Stress

Virtually every chronically stressed person I’ve asked “Do you have a hobby right now?”, says “no”. Every musician I’ve ever met has had problems in life just as much as the chronically stressed person. But the musician has more control over their reaction to stress. They maintain it through a consistent building to, and feeding from, this Chi. Many of them don’t even know it. They figure it’s just how they are period. But if you ever ask them what they would do if they didn’t have their instrument to play, they’ll say, “I’d go crazy!”

As a musician, it’s important you acknowledge and use this Chi. Every time you experience something stressful, it’s sent and collected inside, waiting to be burnt up as fuel for your playing. This goes just the same for every positive experience. The more of each experience you have, the more charged up you become.

Wielding Chi

If you don’t have access to play your instrument, fret not. Don’t assume you won’t have the spark to play after the recess is over. Instead, keep in mind that everything that has happened in other parts of your life has collected inside. The next time you play, don’t worry about whether or not you still have it. Focus your mind and energy on how you feel toward these outer-events. This triggers your Chi and purges it out into your playing. Notice how much better you sound then the last time you played.

If you’re just learning the art of being a musician, this is something you should learn now. You’ll gain more value from learning it and using it early in the game than later on. In this way, you’ll have conscious experience in building and harnessing this chi to use.

Chi can build in small quantities or in large quantities. It can build rapidly or slowly. It takes consistent mental practice and experience with the ups and downs with life to really control these factors. I haven’t even mastered it myself – far from it. But I didn’t even have much knowledge of it until a few years ago.

Collecting Stress

Every time you experience a moment of great stress, create a new conscious reaction. You may want to scream and punch, destroy things, burn buildings, take a squeaking of a plate and fork to someone’s ears. But don’t. Instead of venting it out right then and there, say nothing and do nothing. Close your eyes and imagine a glass. Imagine the feeling you have during this moment as an amount of liquid. Imagine this liquid pouring into the glass. The greater your feelings, the more volume this liquid may take up inside this glass. Now that these feelings are stored away in your glass, put the glass up and forget about it for the moment. It’s taken care of. Feel free to create any metaphor in your imagination you’d like, just as long as it behaves in the manner of taking what you feel, and storing it up inside of you to use later during your play.

A lot of people say “It’s bad to bottle your feelings up inside”. And in the general scheme of things, it is… if you don’t create a conscious system of managing it. Reality proves everybody has stress built up inside of them, in one form or another. Everybody has it collected in different amounts, even if it’s in single grains of salt. The important thing is to be conscious of it. Take advantage of conserving it to channel it out through your playing.

Let Life Happen

If you feel you’re burning out on your playing, that’s okay. Take a break for a set period of time, be it one day or a whole month. Let life happen. Let its events collect inside. You’ll be surprised how much power it’s granted you once you pick your weapon back up.