This ebook, An Alexander Technique Approach to Mandolin 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 the accurate mandolin technique you want without sacrificing your body.
This ebook is also for sale on all AMAZON websites in a KINDLE format.
Located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A. (MOVEMENT THERAPY)
To INTEGRATE changes to your mandolin technique and posture is to MAKE THE CHANGES RIGHT. You stop resisting the changes to your posture and technique that you know are valid, and you accept that they are better. In other words, you stop MAKING THE CHANGES WRONG and you let yourself learn easily.
The reason that incorporating changes to your mandolin posture and technique can seem to take forever, is you are unconsciously resisting them. On the surface you really see how valid the changes are, but unconsciously they are a threat to who you are on the mandolin, because of what you’ve always done.
Integrating these changes is much easier than suppressing them. A major reason for suppressing them, is because they challenge what you’ve always believed is good mandolin technique and posture. And the stronger your identification with what you’ve always done on the mandolin, the more resistance to the new, and the slower you integrate.
MAKING SOMETHING WRONG is how mandolin players block what is in their best interests. When you integrate something, you aren’t doing something, you are letting go of the massive work it takes to resist what is new and true.
In other words you cease to make the changes wrong, rather than work at making them right. You have to work at making these changes right, if unconsciously you are making the desired changes to your technique and posture wrong. This is the psychological equivalent of non-doing.
In the Alexander Technique non-doing is to do the physically minimum necessary to play the mandolin. It means you have created a posture and technique that allows you to play the mandolin as effortlessly as you can. When you truly non-do, it feels as if playing accurately is effortless.
SO, WHEN YOU INTEGRATE CHANGES INTO YOUR MANDOLIN TECHNIQUE AND POSTURE THAT MAKE THE MANDOLIN MUCH EASIER TO PLAY, YOU HAVE TO LET GO OF RESISTING WHAT IS RIGHT. THIS IS A STATE OF BEING; IT IS NOT WORKING TO DO SOMETHING ELSE.
You can’t integrate changes that are loving to your technique and posture on the mandolin, as long as you aren’t experiencing how much work you do to maintain a technique and posture that makes playing the mandolin hard work.
This sounds obvious, but it is amazing how sneakily a mandolin player’s ego can make it impossible for the mandolin player to realize how much hard work the mandolin player is putting in to do what he or she always done on the mandolin. In other words, the mandolin player is unconsciously blocking him or herself from being able to sense how hard their inefficient technique or posture is. Or, if the mandolin player’s technique and posture is good, how much unnecessary muscular effort the mandolin player is making.
So, let the loving new changes to your mandolin technique and posture be right, and they’ll quickly become an effortless part of your playing.