The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 085 Kenny Werner: Effortless Mastery

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to the Mind Over Finger Podcast, episode number 85. Welcome to the Mind Over Finger Podcast, discussions on mindful music making, efficient practice, and building a purposeful career. And now your host, violinist, teacher, and high performance coach, Dr. Renée Paul Gaultier. Hi, everyone. I hope you're doing incredibly well today. In this episode, I speak with world-class pianist and composer Kenny Werner, whose prolific output of compositions, recordings, and publications continue to impact audiences around the world. In 1996, Kenny wrote his landmark book, Effortless Mastery, Liberating the Master Musician Within. Using his life

Starting point is 00:00:54 experiences as a microscope into the artist's mind, Effortless Mastery is a guide to distill the emotional, spiritual, and psychological aspects of an artist's life. In the book, Kenny explores the barriers to creativity and mastery of music, showing that mastery is available to everyone, and he provides practical, detailed ways to move towards greater confidence and proficiency in any endeavor. Today, it's one of the most wildly read books on music and improvisation, and it's a required reading at many universities. Kenny, without intention, touched off a revolution of inspiring musicians to do inner work on the mind, body, and soul in an attempt to upgrade their musical experience from the mundane to the profound. The book is

Starting point is 00:01:43 also popular with artists of other mediums and business professionals. Kenny has also created videos, lectured worldwide, and authored many articles on how musicians, artists, and business people can allow their master creator within to lift their performance to its highest level, showing us how to be spontaneous, fearless, joyful, and disciplined in our work and in our life. Kenny was awarded a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship Award for his groundbreaking work, and he continues to lead a very active performing and composing career. He continues to teach and give clinics in the United States and abroad, and he's the

Starting point is 00:02:22 Artistic Director of the Effortless Mastery Institute at Berkeley. Not surprisingly, Kenny and I will discuss effortless mastery in this episode. I discovered the book years ago at a time when I was starting to reflect more intensely on my approach to practicing and performing, and it had a profound effect on me during this period of examining how to make practicing more effective and enjoyable. So I'm really excited to have had this chance to sit with Kenny and bring you this incredible content today. You'll hear about his journey leading to the exploration of effortless mastery, how the

Starting point is 00:02:59 need to play well is the thing we should yet will never surround her, how focus behaves like water, how to access our inner master and let that master play. We discuss fear-based practicing and performing, how detachment can help us play better than ever, and where lack of flow in performances come from. And Kenny describes what effortless mastery is in a nutshell. Kenny is an artist and pedagogue of great depth, and I know the things he talks about today could transform your approach to practicing and performing. Let's go to the show. Kenny Warner, it's a great pleasure to have you on the show today. Thank you. Great to be here.

Starting point is 00:03:56 Kenny, your work has had a great impact on countless musicians throughout the years, including myself. And you continue to do so through your teachings and performing. And I'm really excited to have this opportunity to dive in and talk about some of the principles you've shared in your book and your seminars for my listeners today. I actually, the listeners can't see this, but I have my copy of your book with lots of post-its and yellows. And this has been a companion for many performances and auditions for me. So that makes this conversation extra special for me. But before we start and jump into all of these wonderful ideas that you're sharing, I would love to hear more about your background. As we know, nothing is separate. Everything we do stems from who we are.

Starting point is 00:04:45 And I would love to hear about your musical journey and how this path has unfolded for you. Well, it's very different, I've been told, than almost any musician that my friends have ever met. I've never heard this before. I was always not that terribly committed to music. I liked as a child, I was kind of a prodigy, but what I enjoyed about it was the effect it had on other people and my image in front of them. I became an entertainer in my mind very early. Before I even played the piano, I used to get up on chairs at adult parties and fake sing opera and do imitations of television characters. And I grew up in Long Island, New York, which was a completely television culture. And I listened to a few records, but I mostly watched television

Starting point is 00:05:41 because by the time my parents had me, they were old and television had been invented and they basically spent their time watching television. So that's what I grew up in. and of course as I practiced classical music and then I was accepted as a classical piano major at Manhattan School of Music with absolutely no interest in it but I never thought about that I just thought I can do this you know but when I got there I saw that all these other talented people but they were committed to what they were doing and I really wasn't so then I went to Berkeley and a Berkeley College of Music in Boston and I know it was a supposedly a jazz school but basically all the thing I could do from the minute I played well from an early age

Starting point is 00:06:30 was improvise with anything on anything it's a tap dance I used to you know and I heard that at Berkeley they improvised so I just went to Berkeley and there I think I became branded a jazz musician because i don't think and this is where all my jazz musician friends can't believe how different my situation was to theirs because they grew up really venerating jazz and listening to all the records and i grew up watching television and listening to the occasional record i had a stride piano style which is very unusual for any young player and anybody in the latter part of the 20th century only because a couple of the records my father had was a Fats Waller fan so we'd listen to Fats Waller Fats Waller was one of the great stride piano players and entertainers

Starting point is 00:07:24 um so that's the way I played and then uh at Berklee I found other people that were kind of lost like me and I found some great jazz musicians who are still my friends today and so when I came out of there, I guess I was, like I say, more or less branded jazz musician, but without the attachments. So most of my life, I always felt guilty about not being attached to music the way everyone else was. But I had two major teachers that turned me around. One was Madame Sharloff in Boston. She was a legendary teacher of pianists, but it was all about the spirit of touching one note. That's why I love your mind over finger because she had me practicing one finger for like three months. I had to drop the finger and the arms defy gravity. And I didn't

Starting point is 00:08:16 know what she was talking about. And I don't know, I think one time she said, okay, the next finger, and I almost fell off the bench. I don't know. It was like Zen and the art of archery. I don't know what I did to satisfy that, but it put me on a different path. And then my next teacher in Brazil was this guy who had a nervous breakdown, classical pianist, and had come back to a very self-forgiving place. And I was living in his house because I was playing with his brother around Brazil. I was living with his family. And he just told me to do this.

Starting point is 00:08:56 I don't even remember why. I guess I said I wanted to study with him. because he would play list but he would look like he was just rapturous and he was barely looking at the piano so he told me to play that in the left hand the right hand then walk away from the piano for two weeks which was very hard because every time you get to your instrument there's a subconscious need to do something valuable on it but i did it you know but after six days i cheated and went to this party where my friend and I, his brother and I played, and I said to them,

Starting point is 00:09:30 I don't know what's going to happen. This is all I've been doing for six days. It was supposed to be two weeks, you know. And that's where I had the epiphany. I put my hands on the piano, and they started to play without me. All that time of separating my ego from the simple dropping of a finger on a keyboard, and my hands started to play by themselves.

Starting point is 00:09:52 and here is the real kicker they played better than either they played without any of the excess without the uh stress of touch um i was still a jazz player in in in training so i always used to say it took 13 notes to find eight good ones you know uh but suddenly everything was symmetrically perfect my touch was like uh suddenly i didn't recognize my touch because they recorded it. And it sounded like Bill Evans. If you know who Bill Evans is, he was a great jazz pianist, but most known for his touch. And the balanced approach of touch came more from the consciousness of knowing exactly the material that he was playing. So he let the hands play them. And that had to do with the way he practiced. So I then started to practice from this,

Starting point is 00:10:41 what I call space. And for the first time in my life, I found a way in. I had to almost start from this and go back to it from time to time because i had never really learned to practice everything i had gotten was just from this phenomenal talent i was given i would just will myself to play better and rarely practiced which can be verified by every woman that's ever been in my life all the way back to my mother very very rarely was i practicing you know but i was still evolving um after that i found it was this block i put up to practicing uh the same block i had to doing homework i saw all the books at once i didn't see one book and even if i saw one book i didn't see the page that i had to work on or maybe i might have gotten in so this space

Starting point is 00:11:31 taught me to get in and i started practicing not a lot but very efficiently because it was all done from, as you had said, a mindful place. And if I lost the mindful place, I would get quickly overwhelmed trying to do too many things at once. In my case, that would result in not practicing at all. So it set up a way of practicing that was so targeted on the thing you were practicing that it created ownership of the thing you were practicing. And the other things I cut that I had to do in order to stay in that space is cut down the amount of things I was practicing way down so that each thing I looked at, I didn't have the thing in behind in my mind. I have seven more things to do here. I could do just this thing this time and maybe sit down later

Starting point is 00:12:19 and just do that thing. I wouldn't even often do two things in a row. I would do some practicing on one thing, then take a break and do, that's why it had to be down to like almost no more than three things. And since I was an improviser, it had to do with rhythm, harmony, and melody. i was trying to master the elements of music rather than the page which is of course the classical players absolute necessity that's where the music is so as i kept developing that way i kept developing more and more effortlessness with more and more groove and precision so i could be precise i mean anybody can be in the space they just have to not care what notes come out and that's like that wing that you were talking about in your philosophy uh where it's all

Starting point is 00:13:09 about self-love and and mindfulness and as long as you don't care what the music is anybody can have this experience and if anybody can have this experience then non-musicians can have this experience because they can easily suspend qualitative judgment because there's no quality that's been even started yet you know so i but i learned how to combine that with targeted practicing so that more and more proficiency or efficiency or precision would be happening without any more stress than if I was playing a fermata or a whole note. And then I observed certain players and noticed that they played rhythm with the same relaxation in their body that I played rubato. And then I realized, how could they do that? Rhythm must have gone from

Starting point is 00:13:54 an external thing to a muscle memory. And then I started to practice, and teaching played a big role because a lot of the stuff I straighten out for myself while spontaneously articulating it for someone else. And what I mean by spontaneously is I may never have said it before and it was exactly right. So then I started to do it myself. And teaching has given me a lot more guidance as to how and what to practice because of my advice to other people. And so that's how it got to be today. Today, well, first of all, the first thing that happened is that style of music became irrelevant to me. It's been that way for decades. It had more to do with where my hands wanted to go. And if they had to go a specific place, like a piece that was written, then I have

Starting point is 00:14:43 to practice. For a classical player, it means you have to practice the piece, not just until you can manage it well, but until it more or less plays itself. You put your hands up there and that's what they do. So unfortunately, it's not realistic for all but the most naturally virtuosic people, because if you were to get to that level, you would have to cut down the amount of pieces you were working on. So what I developed is a parallel approach. You do what you have to do in the world. You have a repertoire to get together. You scuffle, you hate yourself, do whatever you want to do to get their stress. But on a parallel, you're practicing the perfect practice and you're practicing attaining absolute effortless mastery, which may only apply to two or four bars here and

Starting point is 00:15:32 there, but they do have a collateral effect on that other more, you know, ruckus way of practicing. So, and I found this all out as I was solving other people's problems as a teacher of some kind, you know so um could someone say well yeah so now i sound like a master on these four bars but what when are these four bars going to come up then i had to think and i said well play something else right now and they went wow it was much easier yeah then i came up with this phrase only five or six years ago it's not practicing what you're going to play it's practicing for the effect it has on your playing. So while a classical player might very well have to practice what they're going to play, I mean, a jazz player does too. If they're given a set and they don't know the music,

Starting point is 00:16:26 they have to practice the music. But this other practicing, which should go on in the parallel, is practicing absolute virtuosity. There's a way to get there. The fourth step in my book articulates it. But it's only done on a few bars of music. And then what's the reason for it? uh became i didn't even know it when i started to do it or started to recommend it that the muscle memory you develop on those few bars starts to apply itself to the music you never did this on so in other words two four tops eight bars practiced on this level of nothing less virtuosity means it's gone beyond the management of the conscious mind and into the muscle memory of the player that's why whoever is a virtuoso sounds that way every time it's muscle memory

Starting point is 00:17:18 like using a fork you know or close to it so but once that's experienced by any player they notice everything else they do it was such a focusing thing everything else they do has been raised a notch from the experience of mastering a small amount of music and that became the whole integrated system of effortless mastery the first step was go into the space which i can say to your and then only a few years ago from you know since i've been at berkeley i'm the artistic director of the effortless mastery institute which was a great gift to me and i hope to the students and the teachers i see students and teachers because teachers i like to say are just students that have been wounded for a lot longer you know so so they suffer from the same uh delusions all created by

Starting point is 00:18:15 the ego ego is the creator of delusion so um so the first thing is that i'm working with several teachers on touching the instrument without expectation without thought and i think you can imagine because of what you do how difficult this is to them which just proves there's a delusion because then i say well close the lid now drop your finger oh now there's no consequence whatsoever that's what it should feel like when you play the instrument you know so we start there then it rounds off into improvisation you might say but it's not about improvisation let's say you're on the violin and you've learned to let the body play the note and the mind is focused on its own breathing or in the space right after that you're challenged to play consecutive notes which

Starting point is 00:19:04 means improvisation but instead of the classical players knee-jerk fearful reaction to that not everyone but many it's not about you improvising it's about you allowing the hand to go where it might want to go without interfering and every time you interfere you actually drop the instrument and go back to the space so and then the you know and so on before i stop this little monologue because it should be a dialogue um i'll just say what is the space and only a few years ago i found the most foolproof way of getting into this space it has to do with something that's so easy to do that you could never fail to do it and it has to do with a very short amount of time that's the difference between this exercise and most breathing exercises so i'll just say it very

Starting point is 00:19:51 quickly. Everyone already listening is breathing. I don't have to meet them to know that. I know they're breathing. So we don't need a breathing exercise because we're breathing all the time, no matter what our state of mind is, from the saddest, most negative, to the most positive, most self-loving. In all situations, we're breathing. Now, for only 20 seconds, I would like the listening audience and perhaps yourself to just watch yourself breathe. Go. And stop. Now, because it was so short, even though you were given permission to stop, you're still in it but if you had tried to see how long you could do it it would morph into thinking again that's right yeah now from that space now everybody knows what the space feels

Starting point is 00:20:59 like you would touch your instrument and if you're not in the same place you would take your hand off your instrument and that's how to train getting the space or the super conscious mind that part the mind that's collected you know or the universal mind or your fondest spiritual aspirations if you think jesus is the source of your life then why does he disappear every time you touch your instrument because at that moment the narcissistic need to play well replaces everything so whatever your spiritual root is or if you just believe in the science of super conscious mind you can never get there unless you surrender and the thing that a musician will never surrender is the need to play well so if you surrender that anybody can play you know so we get into the space which is

Starting point is 00:21:56 as easy as watching it you know when someone tells me i couldn't get into doing the space after a while i know they forgot how simple it was and i say well let's say if i asked you to look out the window for 20 seconds every day, no matter how your life is going, would you have trouble doing that? Of course not. Well, this is no more meaningful than that. Just watch yourself breathe for 20 seconds, then go back to your problems. And this I have found is a seed that is small enough to get into the even thickest amount of delusion, or the Sanskrit word, maya. And all these things have happened now because I teach it as a semester rather than I used to go to schools like a lone wolf, do two or three days, bring up everybody's vibration and now expectation, and it would be lost in three more days. Now we have semesters, and the whole thing has gotten much more focused than it even was when I wrote the book.

Starting point is 00:22:56 There's so many powerful things you just said. I don't even know where to start unpacking. the last thing you just mentioned about these expectations, I can't help but think how it also shows up in our interactions with people. A lot of the problems happen when we have expectations on how people should behave or how they react to the things that we do. Same happens on the instrument. Well, what's really interesting is that every lesson that can be learned through music i mean these kind of lessons can easily be applied to life so what happens most people musicians actually learn it better in life in other words let's say they have a meditation

Starting point is 00:23:38 class and a tai chi class and a qigong class and they read uh you know kashmir shavism literature they have a guru i mean they they take gigantic strides in their spiritual life and the maya or the delusion of music is so strong that they can't find that when they touch their instrument it all goes away and suddenly it becomes about this need to play well and the reason is because they've got this unhealthy link between how good they play and how valuable they are that day so their value goes up and down like the stock market but the the main reason people can't let this go no matter what they think it is respect for music respect for dead composers you know which they could care less it really is one simple thing if i play bad

Starting point is 00:24:33 i'm going to feel bad about myself now here's the problem when i start a class i say think about a time when you felt like you really needed to play good how do you play and most people kind of give me the thumbs down, you know, they couldn't play. I'd say, now think about a time when it didn't matter for whatever reason. You know, you were playing and nobody was listening, or you were playing with friends, or you had a beer or whatever, and they say, well, I played better. So in other words, when you cared about how good you played, you couldn't play. But when you didn't care for whatever reason, you were tricked into not caring, you played better. And everyone went, yeah. So great. Now that you know that,

Starting point is 00:25:12 you're never going to care again, right? And they would laugh. And that's where it starts, because even though you know that, you might get two bars of not caring, then you're quickly going to care, because the mind is a programmable thing. If you're programmed to care, even if you knew that caring was getting in the way, you couldn't stop doing it. And that's where the steps begin, reprogramming that. One other thing I really love, and what you said also earlier, is that thing about effortless mastery, where once again, if we don't feel like we're experiencing effortless mastery all the time, we're failing at it. But when you were talking about the collateral effect that it has on just practicing these few measures and how experiencing that into

Starting point is 00:26:03 these few measures starts to affect everything else, I feel like it's very comforting to know that mastery is a path it's a journey it's not something that we reach it's something that we live and to just have as i don't think goal is the right word but to know that if i just dedicate myself to investigating that exploring that for a few measures it's not as you know some people might feel like i must experience effortless mastery at all times otherwise i am not reaching it another block and that they another it just becomes another expectation yes yeah we know that in general expectations uh take you out of the moment they they can even sabotage things you already know you can do because you suddenly have an expectation about how the audience is going to

Starting point is 00:26:55 take it we'll say and then suddenly something you know you can do is trudging through it in order to do it you know so yeah things it's same reason about getting completely in the space but only for 20 seconds you can give it up because you know in 20 seconds you can have back all your cares and concerns and neurosis so you can totally give it up it's the same thing because it's only a few bars i talk about concentration as a certain quantity of water so the audience can't see this But if you have a container that's very, very wide and you put that much water in the container, the water is very shallow. If the same amount of water and you put it into a very small container, a small perimeter of it, like a vase, we'll say, then the water becomes very deep, the same amount of concentration. So the smaller the example you're practicing, the deeper you can go into mastery of it.

Starting point is 00:27:52 Yeah. And then there's another thing to mastery. There's something in the book no one ever understands. There's meditations where you go, I am a master. I am great. Well, then people say, but I can't play anything well. Why am I a master? Because the other interpretation of mastery is the idea that a master dwells within you in whatever belief system you have.

Starting point is 00:28:20 you know and when you start from the point of view of mastery then you want to train the body so that the master can express his or herself or their self through your efforts to train and even if you don't train the master can still express itself if you think it's not me but the perfect version of me inside the god inside or whatever that's playing this instrument that's mastering so the other interpretation is allowing the master to play right and then the game becomes i'm going to allow the mess i want to work on this piece till the master can play it and i am the vessel through which and now a musician becomes in a way much more effective than a minister because there it is there's the message i'm not playing

Starting point is 00:29:19 He, she, it is playing. Whatever. Whatever you believe is the power. You know, if you believe in nature, so you master the piece, and then you let nature play it. You're part of nature. There's a tree, and there's you. The only difference is the tree is not burdened with the kind of thinking we have.

Starting point is 00:29:37 So become a tree, but the branches play this piece perfectly. And then what the people feel is nature flowing through you. I mean, there's no higher power metaphor that doesn't work. If you think there's no higher power, then you're just arguing on the side of really mastering the piece, you know. But I believe as soon as I play one note, I am receiving it, not playing it. When you make that transformation, it changes the whole perspective, you know, what you can see.

Starting point is 00:30:14 and then the only thing once you realize that music is something you receive by allowing the body to play the instrument and then you the consciousness receives it and then if you obliterate the idea of bad and good which non-duality is not one of the highest principles of any spirituality whether it's uh india you know hindu you know the equanimity of good and evil and still keeping your focus in one place or even in the bible if thine eye be single thy sight be divine so why does that apply to everything but music oh no bad music is ungodly you know i mean if you get rid of this delusion anybody could play and i believe when someone that thinks that experiences that for the first time i believe it would change everything

Starting point is 00:31:10 in the outer life and the music itself the ability to play the instrument which the piano or the drums would be the most natural thing because it takes not much expert takes no expertise to play them immediately you know so if we want this as a therapy i would say the piano is the best because as soon as a person hears a note they don't understand but if they play it in the space, they will understand that they don't need to understand that every note they play is the most beautiful sound they've ever heard. You know, this is kind of the subject of, I have a new book, but it's not published yet. I have an agent and she's very excited about it and she's taking it around to the publishers now. So it's not out yet. We hope it'll be out early next year,

Starting point is 00:31:57 but it's called Becoming the Instrument, Lessons in Mastery from Music to Life. And what happens as i'm kind of a weird bird in that way i've always had mastery in music even when i couldn't play it never occurred to me that i couldn't play that's mastery you know you redefine a lot of these these terms as a mastery as a state of mind or perfection is loving one's mistakes that is you know and then it's very much along the lines of uh hindu jainism uh christian mysticism the kabbalah you know it's along those lines so this book i'm giving lessons that i've clearly learned on music and that i'm admitting i'm still a student of in life right if i could live the way i play i would be a guru because i know that what i'm doing is beautiful without exception

Starting point is 00:32:55 and not important without exception very hard for a musician you know one of the biggest mayas or delusions about music is its importance right you know i can tell you what's important if you put a bag over my head and i couldn't breathe inside a minute i could tell you what's really important now why would i try to denigrate something that you know is always struggling to survive because if you were convinced it wasn't important you'd play better and that's actually in the end even if a musician doesn't evolve to these lofty ideas everybody wants to play better it's a surrender well the practice of effortless mastery even results in the good old ego's desire to play better you know so it's a

Starting point is 00:33:43 very uh fully after all these years fully uh reciprocal system one thing affects another and the other thing gives you the justification to do this and then that creates the result that you can't argue with. I just enjoyed the piano for the first time in 20 years. Well, what else were you going to do that was going to give you that? Doesn't that block out every other – wouldn't you rather have that at this point in your life than even be a good player?

Starting point is 00:34:13 Yeah. Some people spend their whole lives trying to be good players and have never gotten the joy of music. So at a certain point, I'd say, I'd like to know what the joy of music feels like. But in order to do that, you have to take your eye off of this constant neurotic need to rate yourself as a player. Because if you don't think you're a good player, then you don't think you should experience any joy. Right. So, you know, sometimes it becomes like that.

Starting point is 00:34:44 You know, so many of the things that you talk about now, I see how much they've stayed with me all of these years. Because one of the things that really struck me all of those years ago, reading the book many times, was those things you talk about in terms of fear-based practicing, fear-based performing. And that is so true when you talk about enjoying practicing, enjoying performing. That's a big part of what I teach in the deep practice model is how can we enjoy practicing? I have a series of questions that I find are very efficient in helping students and clients solve problems. And the last question, which I know they're always going to be tempted to skip, that I tell them, please do not skip this one. It's very important. And the last one, sure, identify the problem, find solution, all of this.

Starting point is 00:35:38 That's good. The last one is, how can I enjoy it? How can I enjoy working on this passage? and I have found that for me especially at a point when you reach a road you're working things are stressful and you say I haven't had fun in weeks why am I still doing this and then you realize that anytime that you're with your instrument there are ways to make this meaningful there are ways to make it personal and there are ways to have you know enjoyment in what you're doing I love what you say in terms of this is the most beautiful note I've ever heard because if we

Starting point is 00:36:12 approach practicing from that standpoint, then it all becomes a completely different experience. There's one thing about that that I have to, I hate to say the word disagree, but when you're practicing, you're using a certain part of your brain. Enjoyment is not, it may be too much to ask. Focus what you want. That's why you narrow the amount of bars or even how this note goes to that note because if you don't find the muscle memory from this note to that note it will never feel good encased in a phrase you get that focused on what is blocking and enjoying it is the fruits of that practicing yeah yeah so i always say and then what happens is why haven't you enjoyed it for weeks because you've only been even when you've

Starting point is 00:37:05 been playing you have been infected by the virus of what you experienced when you were practicing even though you're playing you're still judging and controlling and so i really just like when the people aren't seeing us right now but we have a split screen as we're looking each other talking to each other split the screen when i play my only job is to is to love every note that comes out of me, bad or good. You can't make it a qualitative thing and ever achieve that. You must surrender. For a human, in order to find liberation, there's a great deal of surrender. I think every spiritual path will put that in some kind of language. And you have to surrender consequences. So a person says, well, I'm in a really

Starting point is 00:37:56 devotional state of mind now my finances are okay i didn't lose my job and then suddenly things go wrong and everybody becomes agnostics all of a sudden oh is there a god what it is why is he doing this to me you know that is the dual state of mind that the promise of spiritual attainment is that one will remain focused well one will remain liberated from within And no matter how much the externals modulate to bad, to good, to bad, to good, and then one finds liberation when they find that their vision has not been contracted by the fear of the external consequences. Right. So that's a practice. I'm sure some people get there.

Starting point is 00:38:43 Most people don't get there, but they incrementally grow in that direction if that's the ultimate goal, is to see. The Shakti or the life, the God energy, but detachment then lays the groundwork for true connection. Or maybe the true connection doesn't fail you, so you're detached from things that would be a distraction to the true connection. So you take that all back to music, and making the true connection is what's important. uh playing good or bad is just uh external circumstances but of course from that place you play better than ever and on a very profound level because you're not music is not the message music is the sound of your connection with whatever you call the divine that that energy you know so practicing is preparing something to be played so well that you can go to the other

Starting point is 00:39:47 side of the ledger and play it from that's the most beautiful thing i've ever heard but it may be too in fact i'm sure it's too distracting to try to bring that philosophy into a purely mechanical situation what you can do is retain a sense of self-love when you're practicing just like you can retain a sense of self-love when you're working on your car you know that is a state but focus is the main quality of practicing total self-acceptance is that so in other words let's say you've practiced it and it goes wrong during the performance that wouldn't matter because the point of performing is self-love and self-acceptance and you've cultivated that regardless of the circumstances so you see now you're in it's not duality anymore yes i'm grateful

Starting point is 00:40:39 if i played well no you develop a gratitude that's not connected to playing well but the paradox of that renee is that you never play badly again and if you do everybody thinks what you did was preferable for the original thing the the great thing about jazz is that whenever a musician was in that state of mind it became the new music yeah and i suspect in the classical world too it's just that the classical world now is far more weighted on the performance you don't hear about that much about the composers living composers and what they're doing i'm sure the innovations are still happening from different ways but that music is rarely played in public you know in jazz the player is usually the composer so if they can attract people by

Starting point is 00:41:30 their playing they're also going to hear their compositions yeah and as as it was i'm sure you know 400 years ago 300 years ago but now the performers are only performers so the reason i bring this up is that you can hear the evolution of the consciousness of the of the of the performer through his compositions and he can change the music through his compositions but you can't because you're already playing someone's composition. And for the orchestra or the opera to survive as a company or whatever, you're probably playing the hits as much as you can in order to afford to actually take a chance on something

Starting point is 00:42:10 that's actually happening in the day. But in jazz, it's still this way. So what happened was Thelonious Monk, for example, would play stuff. This is what I was trying to get to. But Thelonious Monk came along, and the piano was played much more cleanly than he played at that point. Even the beboppers just had much more fluidity in their right hand. And he comes along with this hunky-clunky kind of rhythm thing, and just these long kind of raw lines down or up that are certain finger combinations. And his blanket, except the state he was in, was so devoid of self-reflection while playing.

Starting point is 00:42:55 In other words, he would never get in the way of what he was playing. He was the instrument. And whatever was motivating him, it could be anger that he wasn't discovered quick enough. It could be they actually postulate these days that he might have been bipolar. but whatever it was whatever he was doing it absolutely was expressed on the instrument without any interference from coulda shoulda woulda you know and so what happened was let's say there was i always like to tell this fake story let's say there was a musicologist that was teaching at columbia and that day the musicologist said whatever you do don't ever do

Starting point is 00:43:36 this you know don't ever do that because it's absolutely clashes and he goes there that night and monk does it and suddenly the guy is like aware that he loved it you know so by the sheer force of the personality of the player the player composer and also jazz musicians compose on a song So you could be playing someone else's song, but they're composing on it. They're improvising. And by the sheer force of their connection, it becomes the new music. Yeah. So that is very inspiring in music and, of course, very frightening in politics.

Starting point is 00:44:24 Yes, indeed. That personal human power is available in any arena, and it's very inventive. I think if you're a CEO, it's great to have this luminosity from within, or if you're a manager or whatever. But in certain situations, it's been a nightmare all through history. Yes. So we're getting very far afield here, I'm afraid. I know this is all so powerful, and I hate to take you back, but you were mentioning earlier four steps. of that effortless mastery.

Starting point is 00:45:04 And for the listeners who haven't read your book, first of all, I think they should definitely procure themselves a copy today. Would you mind just walking us briefly through these four steps? No, sure. The first step on whatever instrument is first to go into the space.

Starting point is 00:45:23 Now, before we watch ourselves breathe for 20 seconds, as simple as that was, everybody should understand that's the space. The trick is, if you're really just watching yourself do it, like looking out the window, if you're watching yourself breathe, you can't think. And if you're thinking, you're not watching yourself breathe. And even if you suddenly think, wow, I'm not thinking, you're no longer watching yourself breathe.

Starting point is 00:45:49 So you practice the space. However you get into it. Maybe there are good meditators out there, but they certainly don't retain that when It's time to play because that old narcissistic thing comes up. Am I worthy? So whatever method you have, I mean, you could use that 20-second thing because I like to say it's so simple, even an American could do it. But anything you use or staring at a spot on the wall,

Starting point is 00:46:16 you get into a space where you're not thinking and maybe staring at a spot on the wall and watching your breath go in and go out. And while you're in that more natural state, the hand reaches over it, either picks up the instrument or, in the case of the piano, reaches over to the piano, and with the fingertips touching the keys or with the violin there and the bow poised to play, you make sure you're still not thinking, that you're still not thinking, I hope I sound good.

Starting point is 00:46:43 Because this is a training of the mind. So the first step is literally learning to play A note without thought. And as soon as you think, you drop your hands. So you're not training your hands yet. you're training your mind to stay out of the way. So once that becomes as ridiculously easy as it actually is, and the only reason someone would think of it as some kind of epiphany is because they've tried to manage it and control it all their life. Here's something, dropping a finger on an instrument or one down bow, regardless of what that sounds like, there's absolutely no

Starting point is 00:47:21 consequence whatsoever and yet it really takes the professional a while to realize that so that's why we take one note at a time we do one note if we're still not thinking we do another note if we're still not thinking we do another note maybe in succession you know so there's no choice involved and as soon as we like what we're doing even we drop our hands because it's about playing without the conscious mind now once you've achieved that we turn up the heat a little bit the second step is moving around the instrument let's say you would commit to a certain cadence of quarter notes we'll call them it doesn't matter you'd be thinking immediately but what i would keep reminding you is that you're not playing them the fingers are choosing where they want to go on

Starting point is 00:48:12 the fingerboard and as soon as you think you're choosing them you drop your hand until you get this sense that the hand has come alive and for a violinist or a guitar player or a banjo player that the two hands are talking to each other and do not need to reroute them through the conscious mind where they think they need to be managed and what happens is it's the beginning of the body taking over this is you know while the mind is mindful but not interacting so it has to be safe enough and free enough so that you can't do anything wrong that's why the second step is moving around but it's not what i call free improvisation because you know there's a style of jazz called free improvisation free jazz but that's a real joke because most people try to

Starting point is 00:49:01 play free jazz correctly so what's free about it there's only one kind of free music music free from self-judgment and in that case period music or bach or vivaldi could be free music if you're free of self-judgment that becomes free music so in the in the abstract second step you experience it by anywhere the hand wants to go almost like a ouija board now as your hand moves up and down the you remember the ouija boards you didn't think you were moving that thing You believed it was moving after you asked it a question. So you see, there's another example of when you reprogram where your faith is or where your belief is, you can change your whole life.

Starting point is 00:49:47 So if you believe the hand's going where it wants to go, because spatially, you start regarding the violin purely spatially, and no note is suggestive of anything. And when it is, you actually drop your hands. and there's another way for the other way you do it for for a chordal instrument there's three ways one is you move your hands you can't really see my hands now but neither can anybody else but i'm talking to you i have nothing to do with it it's just where my hands seem to want to go so for a chordal instrument then you practice chords this way

Starting point is 00:50:22 holding the hands over the keys you let them go and as soon as you respond in any way you stop you drop your hand but once you get to the point where you're not part of it you realize that this is all there is to playing chords the hand is up the hand drops down and the third way which you can do on the violin is to play very fast without any true notes at all if necessary your goal is to wiggle the fingers as fast as possible i call it practicing flight without flight patterns it's like this you know so those are the three abstract ways the instruments so you might be going

Starting point is 00:51:19 you know like that and the bow might be on the right string it might be not but you're not involved so it doesn't matter this kind of raw thing i'll tell you how i discovered it and then i'll get to the third step fourth step when i was learning to drive my father took me to a parking lot of a grocery store one day back in those days they were closed this is this huge vast expansive part of parking lot where you couldn't hit anything he got out of the car and he said now just go around and do anything you've ever wanted to do with a car step on the gas all the way down hit the hit the brakes do a uh you know wheelie do a figure eight do whatever you want just go crazy and i did he had a kind of sporty car too and when i got he never even told me why

Starting point is 00:52:06 he wanted me to do that i got i just had a ball i couldn't hit anything then he got back in the car we drove home, I was a hundred percent more in control of the car when I was employing my management skills. And I remembered this many years later and realized that in the abstract, like if you do this on the violin, you know, whether it makes sense or not, drop your hands, go back into the space and then just play anything. And for a moment you realize, wow, this is so easy. But I kind of discovered this stuff by taking lessons. I told you the name of the book, right? Becoming the instrument, lessons from music to life. So how would a person do that in their life? Act irresponsibly enough so that when they bring the controls back, the controls

Starting point is 00:52:56 are more effortlessly mastered, you know? So that's the second step. Moving around. The third step, now you've really learned how to keep your mind out of the way. You take a piece of music that you really know but i mean really know most people don't even know what that means because if they can play the piece correctly they think they really know it but if i ask you to play it from the space you might find out that you don't know it so usually we have to pare it down to something you know if it's just this fine but it's something real not something abstract i mean real music of some kind. And once you find it, you go into the space and you let the hands play it. And as soon as you get involved, you drop your hands. See, it's the same thing. Now you're

Starting point is 00:53:46 actually playing material, but starting with material you really know so that if you leave the hands alone, they will play it. Everybody has, even if it's a C major scale, the idea that you weren't part of it, is what the instrument we're trying to build. From this point on, it's keeping the mind out of the way so that the body can be trained to be the sharpest instrument possible, the instrument that plays the instrument. But we couldn't have done that if you could not care for even one note, which was the first step, you see? So it takes two steps to get used to, and I really do wait until I think someone's used to it. They can do this. and the mind is in you know when you take your mind like even when you watch yourself breathing

Starting point is 00:54:33 you are making a connection to a higher source so when you steer yourself away from the conscious mind and into that space or mindfulness why is everybody talking about mindfulness now because mindfulness first of all it lets go of the crowded corrupted wasteland of thinking through mindfulness and then the big spiritual question i'm mindful who is the one when you become mindful you sort of witness yourself doing things you become mindful of others you are witnessing them rather than being affected by them the spiritual question is who is it that's witnessing it and so by by becoming mindful it's actually the first step towards union with the universal mind or union with your deity whatever that is or union with uh your creativity

Starting point is 00:55:32 you know the thing is it translates into all languages that which is beyond the conscious mind and everybody knows there is something when you disengage your conscious mind you become mindful and the person that's becoming mindful is a lot more, putting it in religious terms, godly than the one that's trapped in the, you know, if you're sitting around thinking about what's going to happen with the pandemic, for example

Starting point is 00:55:59 everything is useless about what you're doing because you have no answers you all you're doing is ruining this moment because this moment you could be doing something meaningful but you're not in this moment you're in the future

Starting point is 00:56:14 and you're creating anxiety or depression you know now everybody knows that but how do you not do that because you the one thing you can't do is try not to think because the i like to say my ego is smarter than i am i'll just try not to think and it'll find a way in usually you'll say wow you're really doing good not thinking i go yeah i am aren't i you know next you know i'm thinking you know so you have to just refocus away it's like after the first trump biden debate they decided to mute the microphones so that one could not interfere with the other or if they put a glass between them you can do the same thing with your mind if you focus on something else yeah the ego's still talking but the microphone's been muted because you really do focus on when

Starting point is 00:57:03 you focus on one thing, other things disappear. So for example, if I told you, focus all your attention on your left shoulder. With all your awareness, put your awareness on your left shoulder. And if the audience is there, do it too. First of all, you notice an energy in there. It's literally just the energy of your being aware of your left shoulder. Or it's Shakti, it's whatever you think it is. But suddenly there's energy in there. But the other thing is, while you're completely focused on your left shoulder, your right shoulder has disappeared until you think about it. So if I focus on my breathing, then suddenly all the noise of the ego is in a booth that I can't hear. And if you keep practicing doing that in your life,

Starting point is 00:57:53 and these are in the book, Lessons from Music to Life. So what I learned in music is if I learned to focus on the space, then every note I play is the most beautiful sound I've ever heard. If I focus on how good or how successful someone else is, I immediately feel ungrateful. But that's in the conscious mind. So in life, this seed I'm talking about becomes this. You're worried about things you can't control, the pandemic, the economy as a result, your career, blah, blah, blah, whatever or you start thinking what somebody else had or an investment if you knew you should have made that investment if you didn't make that investment the whole body starts to feel like its gravity is increased you know you go oh man i've been down this road many times

Starting point is 00:58:39 this never ends well i think i'll take a break and watch myself breathe and every time i do it i become a little more divine This is so simple, I like to say, even an American can do it. You can have a chicken leg in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other, and I said, hey, and you're watching the Super Bowl, are you breathing? The guy goes, yeah. Watch yourself breathe. And suddenly he will be that much closer to his essence.

Starting point is 00:59:12 So it's very important that it be something everybody can do because even the laziest among us may have aspirations, but they can't find a way in. so once you find that place if you're a musician you want to share it with the instrument if you lose it you if the purpose of that particular exercise doesn't don't do it with your whole life it'll be a disaster you're not ready but when you're doing this exercise do this exercise and for this exercise while you're watching yourself breathe you're not thinking And while I'm breathing, somebody's over here playing an instrument, my left hand, right?

Starting point is 00:59:51 And as soon as I get involved with that, if I get involved with it, which I never do anymore, because it's never me playing anymore, then I drop my hand and go back to the space. So now can you play a piece that you know very well while being in the space? Maybe you can play eight bars of it. It doesn't matter, but now you're on the runway, if you're a professional musician, of being able to at least play what you know with more uh flow than you ever imagined because the lack of flow doesn't come from not knowing the piece it comes from caring about the piece so now you're finding out what it feels like to play it without care and you're realizing

Starting point is 01:00:34 that flow isn't just like something that happens to you like winning the lottery once in a while You don't know why it was there that day, and you don't know why it isn't there today, and it's certainly never there when you want it to show it to somebody else. But now you're practicing being flow. That's all you're about. There's no more duality. Well, you haven't gotten there yet, but that's what you're practicing. So you're in the space, and the hands play the piece, or the piece plays itself.

Starting point is 01:01:01 Once you have learned those three steps, you're ready for a lifelong practice in the fourth step. what is it you can't do? Maybe those eight bars do play themselves, and certainly always the first eight bars, because people are guilty of starting from the beginning way too often. Even if you tell them to practice spots, they'll still way more often start from the beginning. So it's no accident that even a child plays the first four bars the best, and then it decays because the teacher never said to just start, just play the top of the second page all week and never go back to the beginning. You see, you can refine a whole new paradigm for teaching when focus is the thing

Starting point is 01:01:44 you're developing. And that focus can be transferred from music to life. So the fourth step is practicing something from the space. In other words, and there's a thing in the book, what you've seen, it's called learning diamond. And basically there's four ways you can practice a technical spot. Four goals, I should say. It's a diamond because at the top is effortlessness. Suddenly effortlessness becomes the most important thing because it'll become your teacher. So let's say the other three things are playing it correctly, and then we'll say playing the whole example, and then playing at the right tempo. In order to achieve any three of them, you have to sacrifice one. And the one you never sacrifice is the top one, effortless.

Starting point is 01:02:34 That will guide your practicing. So let's say I want to play the whole example perfectly. What am I going to give up? Tempo. But how slow? It's not a revelation to tell somebody you should practice something slow. Ego is usually still involved, and it's not slow enough, ever. It's just slow enough to be playable, not slow enough to experience mastery. So the equation is this, how slow should it be? As slow as dot, dot, dot from the space or effortlessly. That might mean and you are in the space. The hands are registering. It's almost like entering the data. So then let's say you want to practice it at the right tempo and you want to play it perfectly. and of course effortlessly what do you have to sacrifice how much of it you're going to play

Starting point is 01:03:32 but we know to play little phrases but maybe some how much can you play as much as dot dot dot from the space or effortlessly that might be two notes you might go play the first two notes there you go there's mastery yeah feel that now add a third note oh now you feel the difference stream mastery. Now just play the two notes, the second and third. That was easy, right? When you put the first note back, okay, now go into the space completely and let the hand mess that up. And suddenly the hand found a choreography or an ergonomic way of playing that that you had never discovered because you weren't ready to go that small. But you're still in the space. See, the space is your teacher at that point until you get a phrase a bar then you might start from the

Starting point is 01:04:25 second half of the bar and you will have the experience of playing on a level you never played before because you're not doing it the hand so then that was that collateral experience i mentioned when you really empower the hand to completely master the phrase you will feel its effects in everything else you're doing so you spend the rest of your life no matter what else you have to practice for your career, you spend the rest of your life on the inner spiritual practice of virtuosity. The practice of virtuosity becomes a spiritual practice because you don't care if you reach virtuosity or not, but every time you stay out of the way and the body plays it, that is virtuosity. And those little specks of virtuosity are going to rub off on you as you at least move

Starting point is 01:05:12 towards virtuosity even if you never achieve it most people's complaints is they never move anywhere because of gigantic expectations they remain permanently unsatisfied the only way to solve it is to keep complaining or to stop playing because they may not be that way with other things in their life this can bring anyone back to their instrument because you're practicing only the joy of touching it, moving around on it, playing something you know from it, and even learning new things from that place. And that's the four steps. This is really incredible, these four steps. Like I said, I hope everyone gets the book, start following you. I think we all probably want to enroll in Berkeley right now, right?

Starting point is 01:06:03 and go study with you well my hope is that this will be an independent organization i mean berkeley understands that too but what i haven't gotten to is teacher training and for that we need to be well funded we need to bring people in and like for the next week first we're going maybe the first week we're going to work on your attainment of it as a player and then maybe the next time if you qualify meaning if you took the lesson seriously we'll practice teaching it to others but when someone even learns it they automatically start teaching it to others but i believe it should be an institute every every bit is uh sanctioned as you know what is it alexander technique or i actually believe it's a new technique for changing for

Starting point is 01:06:55 opening people who don't play to, you know, a therapy. I actually think there's a therapy there. Not the last step, unless they decide to play music after that. In that case, you know, everything's in effect. But the first two steps will touch a part of the brain that those people may have never touched. And the question is, and I want to do some research into it, what will that do to their perception of everything else?

Starting point is 01:07:23 because i've had people say like i've done some retreats and then i get a letter somebody would write me afterwards and i mean more than one to say not only did i have a whole new relationship my instrument but i came home and i suddenly appreciated my family whereas i used to complain that my family is the reason i can't really dedicate myself to music you know or whatever you use your family for the reason of you know suddenly i appreciate my family i was grateful for the house we live in i went to work with a you know in other words i found people practicing effortless mastery and having uh big changes in other areas of their life which just caused me to write the second book which actually i learned it from the people that wrote to me i had a soldier

Starting point is 01:08:10 that was in iraq during uh saddam hussein and they had a drill where they had to put on a a suit for weapons of you know wmd you know and they had to get the suit on fast because once they knew the wmd they had oh i don't know how many minutes he said but and he was always scuffling with it and and his his mates would make fun of him you know he read effortless mastery and he got the the suit on in like perfect time i thought that was really you know that's life-changing that's a lesson learn i learned from see what i'm saying is that i learned my lessons from music and another person can take those lessons now easily with the second book but they were already doing with the first book another guy wrote he had i mean i have met if i look at my

Starting point is 01:09:00 email now there'll be somebody that either amateur or professional that will have just read effortless mastery and it changed their life which blows me away because i didn't know you know i didn't work terribly hard for this message. It was just kind of given, you know, but so another guy had stage four cancer. He had been a trumpet player and he had like two books or they was reading and he credits the books for part of the way of how he recovered. And one of them was effortless mastery. So then because of the chemo, he lost all this, he lost a lot of teeth and he couldn't play trumpet anymore of course that external condition is liable to color your whole world dark and negative and he read effortless mastery again and then he was motivated to start playing

Starting point is 01:09:48 the piano and he was enjoying playing the piano and these are things beyond way beyond the scope i was just trying to help musicians get out of their own way and this thing developed more and more from the repeated efforts of doing that and now it's really become almost a science i think scientists would back up what's happening here because of the experience of teaching it multiple classes as uh as semesters and the next thing that would be wonderful is to make sure people really got it and then when they were teaching it they were teaching it from experience at least to start with it would be nice if the first 10 teachers that went out there could demonstrate it eventually people teach things that they haven't even mastered themselves

Starting point is 01:10:34 that's just that's just life you know i mean how many people do you take instruction from on certain things that they haven't mastered themselves but they i always say music used to be taught by masters not people with master's degrees yes you know so the inevitable will happen but it would be nice to send out some teachers that could demonstrate mastery and their lack of mental lack of mental noise and the resultant resonance of their music you know and then they teach and you know so those are the goals for the future we really want to find someone that believes this makes the world a better place sign me up i'm i want to be one of your teacher trainer okay you certainly will you certainly will that would be great you're already you know

Starting point is 01:11:25 And what you described to me, what you're doing, shows a perfect understanding of it. That was beautiful. Kenny, I'd love to keep talking with you all day. In conclusion, is there an actionable tip that you'd like to share with the listeners today? Yes. Just start with that 20 seconds. Whatever you're doing, whenever you think about it, whatever you're embroiled in, stop for a second. And remember, it's simple and it's meaningless.

Starting point is 01:11:52 don't give it meaning or else you won't be able to do it i'm already this is what you say you don't just start watching so breathe you go i'm already breathing so nothing important is about to happen for 20 seconds i'll just watch myself do it it couldn't be easier let's just leave everybody with that that is the seed that grows into all the vines of philosophy and action and spirituality that we've talked about. Just watch yourself breathe for 20 seconds, then forget about it. And if you were neurotic before it, feel free to go back to your neurosis. That's very powerful. Kenny Warner, thank you so much for being here today. My pleasure. My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

Starting point is 01:12:34 thank you guys so much for listening i hope you enjoyed this conversation with kenny warner this is the last interview of 2020 but i'm working on a little christmas bonus episode for you coming out next week so make sure to tune in also a big shout out to those of you who left incredible reviews on Apple Podcasts and Stitchers and kind comments on YouTube. I truly appreciate you taking the time to write those kind words and it makes the hard work completely worth it. Thank you so much. As always, you know I want to know what your favorite takeaways from today's conversation were. So get in touch with me and let's keep this discussion going. I'm Mind Over Finger on both Instagram and Facebook. And of course, you can find me at

Starting point is 01:13:33 mindoverfinger.com where you can read the show notes for this episode and find more information about mindful and deliberate practice. While you're there, make sure to sign up for my newsletter and receive your free guide to an exceptionally productive mindful practice. Also, I hope to see you in the Mind Over Finger tribe, my private Facebook group where I pop in once a week to talk about mindful practice and answer your questions. It's a great community and you can find it at facebook.com slash groups slash mindoverfingertribe. So that's it for today. Again, thank you and à bientôt.

The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 085 Kenny Werner: Effortless Mastery

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