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The trick is to get yourself in a better state of relaxed and calm than before starting the meditation, I am assuming. Does anyone else get MORE anxious and worked up when they try to meditate?
I know that breathing is a big part of relaxing. I've been to classes on that stuff. But I never really could NOT focus on the breathing, which always lead to a feeling of suffocating and not having enough air...therefore hyperventialating. Not so calming...

For that matter...I supose it is a discipline in entirety. Practicing and meditating and relaxing. To be able to control the mind and as a result control the body is in my mind one of the highest levels of acheivement as a centered and well person.

The fear or worry of not being able to meditate or that something anxious will happen in the process is almost as bad as being tense because one is trying too hard to relax. How many of us have done THAT???

On stage, slow and quiet passage coming up. Lots of important people in the audience. Afraid of the shaky bow..oh no, here it comes...I'm starting to shake..OH NOOOOO!!! (slight tremor turns into a wrist earthquake that the audience can't miss).
*sigh*

Buri, your words are very thought provoking and at least gives me momentum to try these things again or for the first time. What made it habit for you? I do certain advises a few times and then wheee it is gone from my brain and I forget to do it once and never again remember until reading another Buri-blog or article or essay or masterclass or something. How did you get things together cognitively so that you didn't just rush to the instrument and start playing and THEN remember oops I didn't stretch?

THe only one I've basically mastered is my practice routine which involves a gradual workup into the intense and labour-heavy practice so that I don't injure my wrists, fingers, arms, neck, jaw etc. That took FOREEEVVVEERR.

Sals,
Jennifer

William Starr, disciple of Suzuki and great educator in his own right, recommends something similar. He says that he has traveled and taught around the world, but the Japanese kids have an advantage over all the others, a sort of relaxed focus, that he attributes to Zen in Japanese culture. He advocates some form of deep relaxation before practicing. He has his own way, but different ways work well for different people. Buri,

I’m not surprised that you like Japanese calligraphy, which I find is somewhat analogous to violin practice, as it is much a performing art as a visual one. Unlike western oil or acrylic painting that allows you to go over the same spot again and again until you get the result you want, Chinese and Japanese calligraphy are extremely temporal in nature – the minute the brush touches the paper, the ink starts to run and creates a permanent trace much like a sound we draw out of a violin that is unalterably announced to the world.

The grinding of the ink gives one a lot of time to get focused or to examine the model if there’s one. I sometimes feel rosining is a bit like the meditative part of this traditional preparation for calligraphy, so is tuning, son file and vibrato warming up.

When I do calligraphy, each stroke and the expression of each character are just as textured and meaningful as each note, tone and expressiveness I try to make in violin playing. Of course, I don’t mean skills of calligraphy and violin playing are interchangeable. They are categorically different, but there is such similarity between the two, the sense of the artistic appreciation, that I wish I knew how else to better express it.

What I know the best is not Japanese but Chinese calligraphy, which I’ve practiced since a little kid and kept it for many years after I came to Canada. The ink we use in Chinese is more intense, and this gives more shades of ‘color’ (you do sense colors when deal with only black & white). By ways of subtle variations of brush-strokes, Chinese calligraphy allows a greater range from the softest to the most intense in ‘color’ that the Japanese one. Japanese calligraphy is, as it were, Vivaldi played on a baroque violin, but Chinese calligraphy is Brahms on a Strad.

I’m biased of course, but if you look at some of the work by Song Dynasty masters, I don’t know how you can deny that it’s just as good as it gets. Go to the link below and take a look at Huang Tingjian and Mi Fei, and see what you think:

http://www.chinapage.org/callig1.html#chu

Cheers.

Yixi

Su Shi's Cold Food Festival is still haunting my bones. Thank you so much for sharing some calligraphy with us, Yixi. Yixi and Buri,
Your descriptions of the somewhat meditative calm that comes with doing traditional calligraphy reminds me of the state of mind I get into when I'm painting. I don't do much in the way of actual hang-on-the-wall type paintings, mainly elaborate folk art on little wooden boxes and such, but it still has a way of focusing my mind and driving away all distractions. I just had two bad rehearsals in a row and I'm all scattered to bits--maybe I should go try painting something.