Connecting with your internal guidance system

People would be surprised how much time I spend as a piano teacher helping people drop back down into their bodies.

By this I mean putting a pause on their rational brains and help them seek out the emotions that their bodies are trying to surface during the learning experience.

The reason I do this is because I want them to learn to identify and respect their internal guidance system. This may seem strange coming from a piano teacher, because in piano lessons the pace of the lesson is often set by the teacher. Most of my students do start their lessons expecting me to set the pace for them.

But I’m not interested in telling my students what to do. I’m interested in helping them uncover their own independence in learning. I don’t want any of my student to rely on me to be able to learn new music, so I need to be able to step out of the way as soon as possible, which means helping them realize the skill they have to teach themselves.

That means helping them learn to listen to their internal navigation system, which many of my students have learned to turn off when they enter the classroom. Emotion isn’t supposed to belong in the classroom, and many people have learned to disassociate from their emotions when they enter a classroom to avoid being called out or hurt.

As a result, when students in my class don’t feel comfortable or certain with something, they hesitate to tell me because the image they have of a “good student” is one who can absorb information effortlessly.

I acknowledge and respect the difficulty of this position, and so I make an effort to invite personal reflection as early as possible. I’ll ask how they feel about the concepts we’re discussing. I find it especially helpful to give them words to choose from to help them express how they’re feeling: “Do you feel confused or do you feel clear about what to do next?”

I think another important element of this approach is to make it clear that the default feeling we’re looking for is one of positivity and excitement, rather than discomfort. So I’ll ask something like, “How do your fingers feel? Do they feel ready and excited to play this line? Or do they feel like there’s a barrier?”

Once I know how my students (and their fingers!) feel, we can honour that feeling by including it in our piano journey. This is the first step to learners being able to identify their own learning needs and take steps to address them.