“The body is simply the heavy part of the mind.”
“If my background thoughts are, “Oh, this is really difficult, this is one of the most difficult studies in the world and double thirds are hard”, even if I’m not completely aware of that thought, maybe it’s an unconscious thought, maybe somebody’s told me, maybe the teacher has told me or peer has once told me; I’m going to be ingraining negativity in my practice whether I like it or not, whether I know it or not…So, what goes on in our head, the inner voices that go around; and of course the teachers are largely responsible for that because the student will emulate what goes on in a lesson, they will model what goes on in a lesson. So if the teacher is endlessly negative, which a lot of teachers are because a lot of teachers seem to think it’s an ego trip…that negativity gets embodied by the student whether they like it or not. If you’re sitting on this piano stool and you’ve got a negative influence coming from a teacher, that is toxic to the whole process. And of course it happens all without consciousness; nobody is really aware of it, the teacher is not aware of it, the student is not aware of it, then they come up with all these tensions that are sometimes mental tension and of course mental tension translates into physical tension. I think it’s a Buddhist saying, “The body is just the heavy part of the mind.” It’s quite a good way to think because otherwise people blame tension on bad technique, which it can be of course, but it can be anxiety. For me, anxiety is just mental tension, and because the mind and the body are so inter connected, if you have mental tension or anxiety it’s going to go somewhere in the muscles somewhere and it’s going to come out in the playing.” – Graham Fitch