Resources for Healthy Musicians
Workshops & Coachings

Breathwork for More Expressive Performing
uses musical elements such as the pulse, the melodic contours, the lengths of phrases, and harmonic colors to articulate the breath and to encourage a diversity of breath patterns.
Emotions have movement, so the music needs to breathe with motion to express the emotions.

BETTER CONNECTIONS:
With ourselves: We improve the specificity/timing of our technique.
With our music partners and the audience by cueing with non-verbal gestures. 

How to Listen Better through Chamber Music
(from amateur readings to orchestras)

The art of negotiating the musical, emotional, social components of rehearsals is a skill set. Finding the balance of who needs to speak up more, and other less, with the when and how and why, all depends on the listening skills of each member. Hands-on coaching that focuses on communication and group awareness, as opposed to targeting one person's imposed vision, is a highly transformative experience that improves both function and awareness.

Mental Practicing through Visualization / Audiation
Music is an incredibly creative tool to practice the mental acts of visualization and audiation. By "audiation" (using a term by E. Gordon), I mean the mental practicing that my uncle/mentor Fei-Ping Hsu and I use and teach - an internal realization of music with understanding that integrates temporal, spatial, amplitude intentions of what we are preparing to do and the momentary recall of what we just did. This improves perception and motor skill learning, as well as expands our flexibility to reframe emotional perceptions and release repressed thoughts, sometimes extending into our personal lives. 

Listening in Music and Health

• Cultivate Your Creative Mode Through Consistent Practice.
  Conscious Listening™ Café is an ultimate musical playground for the inquisitive listener. With four easy steps including Musical Breathwork™, this monthly social engagement invites better flow for communication with yourself - emotionally and physically , and to enjoy concert music more fully.

Want to notice the beauty of the music, elevate your collaborative listening skills, and get in touch with your creative mode?

• Get into Contemplative Practices. 

Music can give us pleasure as we contemplate self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-inquiry.

Music can give us better connections
With ourselves: We learn to listen to our bodies and protect them.
With our community: We learn to listen to the energies around us so that we can respond more kindly.

• Take Piano Lessons. 

"When 13 older adults took piano lessons, their attention, memory and problem-solving abilities improved, along with their moods and quality of life. You don’t have to become a pro, just take a few lessons." - Excerpt from John Hopkins Medicine: Keep Your Brain Young with Music

• Book a Group Discussion. 

Self-Awareness

Musical self-expression is the result of integrating ideas and concepts we gather about ourselves, our relationships, and our purpose in the world. When we practice music listening skills, we are working on the same self-awareness skills that will open up our imagination and creativity to find a personal pathway forward, I hope in a way that makes a positive impact in the community.

Rest and Pacing

Just like in music, it is in the silences that we can process and digest and savor and delight and contemplate. Setting up a rhythm of rest is essential to our health. Career advancement methods often stress the importance of dreaming big, and yet in actual practice, our ability to listen to what our bodies need and pace well is the endurance factor that will lead to long-term success. Oftentimes, breakthroughs occur just at the moment when one is ready to give up, releases the internal pressure to meet one's own impossible expectations, and start living out life as is. It is a daily struggle for me to find a wider window of deadlines and to take the time to allow intuition into play, but one that I see to be a necessary skill if we want to encourage creativity.

Balancing Social Media's Effects with Deep Music Listening

In this day and age, social media is required for creatives to connect with our audiences, but we all need some protection against the worry and constant comparisons brought on by social media's "vanity optics" (termed by author Paul Jarvis). We need new ways to manage the chronic stress and diluted focus that are the costs of constant visibility. One solution is to commit to a daily time ratio of social media minutes to deep musical listening.