Next week I’m teaching a class at the Nashville Jazz Workshop called Soul Song: Setting your Inner Musician Free.

The purpose of the class is to explore the blockages that keep us from practicing and playing/singing from a place of pure joy.  Once those roadblocks are known, they begin to let go of us.

Kenny Werner has a magnificent book on the subject called Effortless Mastery, and this text, along with Victor Wooten’s The Music Lesson, will be our texts for the class.

I also add music exercises involving visualization of the keyboard from Marianne Ploger’s work, and some of Byron Katie’s self inquiry process called “The Work.”

It seems that the most pressing issue we have as a collective species is the matter of evolving into a more mature consciousness.

With the world experiencing so many manifestations of escalating chaos, it might be more imperative than ever to take responsibility for our internal states of mind.  As musicians I believe we have the opportunity to experience presence through the performance of music – because music can only be experienced in the present moment.

Think of music as something that we channel.  If our channel is not clear, or rather we are resisting the flow of the present moment, we cannot fully experience music. Or, share it with others.

When we go back and remember why we started playing music in the first place, we find clues about our BEING which is the foundation of literally everything.  Including music.

In a mind-bending blog post by Leo Babauta at Zen Habits, I’m reminded that instead of trying to reach goals we could just do things out of the love for doing them.  Would Kenny Werner agree with this perspective as it pertains to playing and singing?

Just because you don’t have goals doesn’t mean you do nothing – you can create, you can produce, you can follow your passion. -Leo Babauta

Click here for Leo’s full post called: the best goal is no goal

If you play music of any kind, you are welcome to join the Soul Song class.  Even if you can’t make the class, please enjoy Kenny Werner and Victor Wooten’s books. 

Here’s to more allowing, especially as we play and sing music.