This ebook, An Alexander Technique Approach to Banjo Technique, is published on this website in a PDF format. It is very detailed and practical, and it will give you the physical tools you need to take the limits off of your ability to create an extraordinarily accurate and kind banjo performance.
This ebook is also for sale on all AMAZON websites in a KINDLE format.
Located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A. (MOVEMENT THERAPY)
The title of this article is rather unusual, but I feel it is very important to write about. Another way to say what the title says is, “You may be recreating the limiting banjo technique you have, rather than creating the loving technique you want.”
In other words, you may be fooling yourself into believing you are pursuing the banjo technique you want, when in truth you keep recreating the limiting banjo technique you already have. Why would you do that?
It is an extraordinary thing that human beings do when they don’t get what is loving as a child. Instead of giving themselves what they didn’t get, now that they know it would be loving, they keep recreating what happened.
Here is a very personal example:
When I was a child things were so incredibly painful in my family, that I wanted to run away. As a child, of course there was no way to run away, so I buried these feelings and became part of the problem to survive. It was a harsh, competitive, and critical family, and to survive I became as harsh, competitive, and critical as the rest of them. (It was these characteristics that I used to turn myself into a competent classical guitarist.)
All of these years later, I now have finally realized why I pursued better and better guitar teachers, why I have moved so much, and why The Lost Horizon by James Hilton is one of my favorite books.
The Lost Horizon is about Shangri-La, which is a small monastery and village in the Himalayas that is an amazingly peaceful and loving place, free from the insanity and violence of the world.
Clearly, this is the little boy I was who wanted this place of peace more than anything, since I was living in such a tough, unforgiving, frightened, and frightening family, a family that expressed all of their unhappiness out loud and at me.
So, I have moved and moved and moved looking for Shangri-La, but I never let where I was be Shangri-La! Eventually every place I lived I found fault with, the people who lived there I found fault with, and ran away.
What I just described, and just realized for the first time in my life, is that wherever I went, I turned it into my painful birth home, rather than Shangri-La. (Realizing this is finally freeing me of this unconscious cycle of me recreating what was.)
So, are you recreating the limiting banjo technique that you were taught, even though you want more than anything a technique that makes the banjo an effortless joy to play, even as you are being offered the banjo technique that will free you at the instrument?
If not, you may be doing what I had done in my family. If as a young beginner you weren’t getting what you needed from your music teacher, you may be recreating a limiting banjo technique. At some unconscious level, you may have known you weren’t getting what you needed from your banjo teacher, but like me and my guitar teachers, you suppressed your doubts, so you could continue to accept what your music teacher was teaching you.
Here is another huge piece of my story. Because I wanted to be a great concert guitarist, I kept pursuing better and better guitar teachers, and what is so weird, is my best guitar teacher was an Alexander Technique teacher who taught me how to create my own great guitar technique.
My other “best guitar teacher” was the book New Pathways to Piano technique by Luigi Bonpensiere. From this book I learned to play the guitar fearlessly, lovingly, and incredibly accurately. (I have a chapter about this book in my banjo ebook and how to apply it to your playing.)
What did I do after I had finally found in my early twenties the holy grail of guitar playing in an Alexander Technique teacher and the Bonpensiere book? I quit! Why?
I quit for the same reason that I had been moving from place to place all of my life. I couldn’t handle the effortless and loving technique that I had finally found, because I had pursued a freeing guitar technique as ruthlessly as I had moved from city to city, and because I was unconsciously stuck not letting myself have that I hadn’t gotten.
LET YOURSELF FIND WHAT TRULY WORKS ON THE BANJO, LET YOURSELF APPLY WHAT TRULY WORKS ON THE BANJO, AND LET YOURSELF HAVE SHANGRI-LA ON THE BANJO.
