Effortless Mastery

Ahh, finally a post for the musician side of me. I've been reading Effortless Mastery: Liberating the Master Musician Within and I guess a bit of me is still finding it hard to accept some of the things the author talks about. However, there's a part of me that feels that he makes a lot of...spiritual sense.

The author keeps talking about how you are a master when it requires almost no effort/skill to do something. That's quite true, how often do we stop to think about how good we are at breathing? We barely notice breathing to even see how freaking good we've gotten at it. In many ways, now that I look at life this way, I've noticed the moment you get good at something, you often feel you're not that good perhaps because you don't need to put in that much effort and you find something else that does require all that effort and so what you do know now feels so weak compared to that challenging stuff. For example, 1 year ago I could barely do double strokes (playing on the drum pad, each hand hits the pad twice in succession, in other words, you have your right hand (R) and left hand (L) and so you play RRLLRRLLRRLLRRLL but it has to stay even), today I won't say I'm really good but at least I am quite smooth and it doesn't require me to keep thinking of my hands playing correctly.

I think I'm going to give the authors techniques of practicing a try and see what happens. I kind of want to just play drums but I think what I'll do it I'll dedicate time to tap into that realm of effortlessness and see how that works out for me. The worst that could happen is that I lose a month's worth of practice. Bleh :P

If anyone's read that book or experienced what the author talked about, that space he mentions, do share it with me because I'm still not 100% convinced about it since in my mind I'm thinking "go practice that exercise!!!".

Once again, good luck to me in yet another thing I want to do. Speaking of good luck to myself, I must say I'm quite impressed with my ability to not only maintain but properly post entries on this blog. And speaking of posting entries, I was featured on lifehack.org! Wahoo!! Work hard to be lazy! (Let's ignore the fact that I sent them my post to see if they're interested in printing it on their website :P)

As Anthony Robbins loves to say, Live with passions!