I spent my senior year in high school sitting beside a young woman in my concert band class, whose mother was a TV personality both in Canada and Germany. Kareen Zebroff was the first person to bring the eastern practice of yoga, to western television audiences as a form of exercise, through her TV show Kareen’s Yoga, which aired on BCTV.
As I became friends with her daughter, and spent a lot of time in their house, Kareen taught me a great deal. She exposed me to many ideas that I had never heard of before. Now more than 20 years later, I am still friends with her daughter, and I still regularly see Kareen. She never stops learning about new philosophies and concepts, & I still enjoy listening to what she has to say.
However back in grade 12, she taught me something that I have practiced regularly over the years, but it has only been in the last 18 months that I have remembered exactly what it is, and what its roots are.
During a particularly stressful period in my young life, Kareen taught me how to meditate to relieve the stress. Over the years, as I did more reading on the subject, and had more experience with meditation, I realized that one of the best stress releases I had, playing saxophone, was actually a form of meditation.
Wikipedia defines meditation as:
…a mental discipline by which one attempts to get beyond the conditioned, “thinking” mind into a deeper state of relaxation or awareness. Meditation often involves turning attention to a single point of reference.
I don’t know about you, but when I play horn, I am definitely turning my attention to a single point of reference, while ignoring other things in the environment around me. I find this to be true more during actual shows, or rehearsals with the band, than solitary practice, but nonetheless, playing sax meets the above mentioned definition of meditation. If you doubt this, look no further than musicians who close their eyes while playing. (There are a lot of us out there!)
Playing with Deception. Photo by M. Margison. ©2008
A few months ago a wrote Part I of a post (Part II is still in the works) about Improvising & The Musician’s Brain. In it I said:
I think most musicians will tell you that when they’re playing, they enter “a zone” of sorts, where nothing extraneous gets in, and where they are totally enveloped in the feeling of the music that they are playing. I believe that closing one’s eyes while improvising allows the musician to temporarily separate themselves from their surroundings, and create an original composition (an improvisation) through only the feel of the music, before stepping back into the bigger group of the band and stage surroundings again.
Over the past 18+ months, since the acute phase of my neuro illness has been behind me, I’ve been struggling with not only the physical, chronic remnants of the attack, but also of the psychological aspects of going from well to ill in the blink of an eye.
Although I still can’t play nearly as much as I could before I got sick, through working with my health care providers, I have come to realize how much playing sax is important to my mental health, and thus to my overall physical health.
I found a very interesting post on a yoga blog this AM, that perfectly captures what I’m talking about.
The goal of meditation isn’t to stop thinking, but to enable us to become dispassionate observers of our thoughts. When we’re more detached from our worries and our fears, we develop a sense of ease, of “being” rather than “doing”. This process of “letting go” is not only deeply relaxing, but has a direct healing effect on our physical health, reducing blood pressure, increasing our immunity, easing chronic pain, even minimising depression.
The British-Indian neuroscientist Shanida Nataraja explores meditation in her book The Blissful Brain. When we think too much, she says, we’re over-using the left halves of our brains, the part associated with analytical, rational processing, and neglecting the right side, which is associated with abstract thought, visual-spatial perception and emotions. Meditation rebalances us because it uses the alpha brain wave, a sign that we’re activating the parasympathetic nervous system and giving ourselves a rest from the more familiar “fight or flight” responses of our sympathetic nervous system that stress us out and make us ill. Meditation also improves our concentration, memory and decision-making because it puts both halves of our brains to work.
Once you’ve mastered it, just 15 minutes meditation a day will make a difference, though being mindful of simple tasks such as washing up, walking across your terrace or making a cup of tea is also a form of meditation. Done properly, activities such as yoga, qigong and tai chi are also a form of meditation in motion, as are swimming and walking.
In this hectic, stressful, multi-tasking world, where we are regularly asked to cram more into our already insanely busy lives, and where technology doesn’t allow us an escape thanks to remote email & file sharing, etc. etc., the average person has way less down time than June or Ward Cleaver did! Finding ways to decompress and destress is more important than ever, but finding time to do it is the tricky part.
As sax players we have a natural outlet for our stress…playing horn. Call it meditation, or if you’re not comfortable with that, simply call it stress relieving. But whatever you call it, put on your favourite play along CD like Aebersold or one of the Hal Leonard jazz play alongs, or use Band In A Box, or get together & practice with your band, or just shed by yourself. Bottom line: do whatever works best for you. But as Nike would say: JUST DO IT! Your physical and mental health will benefit from the simple act of playing saxophone.
