The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 090 Dr. Frank Diaz: Mindful Musician

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to the Mind Over Finger podcast, episode number 90. 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 great today. This week, I'm very excited to welcome Dr. Frank Diaz to the show to cover a topic that is at the core of everything Mind Over Finger is, mindfulness. Frank is Associate Professor at the Jacobs School of Music and Affiliate Faculty for the Department of Cognitive Science at Indiana University. He's also the founder and director

Starting point is 00:00:56 of the Institute for Mindfulness-Based Wellness and Pedagogy, where he collaborates with an international group of musicians, educators, and scholars on disseminating research and best practices on the art of mindful living, teaching, and performing. Frank has taught mindfulness to thousands of students across the U.S. and internationally and has served as a guest scholar, teacher, and advisor for numerous academic, civic, and arts institutions across the U.S. and abroad. His research on mindfulness has been published in peer-reviewed and practitioner journals and has been featured on NPR, CNN, Science Daily, and the Huffington Post. In our conversation, Frank elaborates on how he defines mindfulness, some mindfulness techniques that can

Starting point is 00:01:46 be helpful for musicians, the sequence he likes to use when he teaches mindfulness, performance-related trauma, how we owe it to ourselves to tap into our inner resources, and much more. It's an information and inspiration-packed episode, and I hope you enjoy and find value in our discussion. Let's go to the show. frank diaz it's an incredible honor to have you here today thank you frank i'm so happy that we're going to get to discuss one of my favorite topic mindfulness which stands at the core of

Starting point is 00:02:32 everything i do with mind over finger and before we dive into our conversation please tell us about you, how your artistic path has unfolded, and how you got to where you are. Yeah, I always tell people that when I talk about this, I think I just look back in my past, and I recreate a nice, tight little narrative about what happened, and I think that's sort of human nature, but I'll do my best to do a quick, you know, sort of synopsis of what happened, and, you know, I grew up in Miami. there are musicians in my family but they they were mostly in Cuba so I didn't really get to interact with them I came to the states when I was six years old but there was always music in my house and everybody sang and and there were people in my family who played who weren't

Starting point is 00:03:20 classically trained so they played drums they played guitar you know sort of a lot of amateur musicians so I music's always been part of my life and as a kid I was just a multi-instrumentalist I played guitar, I played bass, I played trombone, uh, you know, I, I played whatever I could play and at some point had to decide what to do. So I went to college. Um, I was gonna study either jazz bass or classical trombone, um, and decided to go the classical trombone route. Uh, when I went to Florida state university and was a music education major, uh, and at the same time could play my bass. Uh, so trying to keep both things going at the same time, but studying one. And so, That's what my training was like. I did an undergraduate in music education, but I did a lot of performing. Went to Brevard Music Center, kept taking auditions, always kept my head in that world.

Starting point is 00:04:11 Once I graduated, I moved up to Philadelphia area and freelanced and taught school for a while at the same time, and then came back to Florida to get my advanced degrees and keep teaching. So basically, the trajectory has been for many years just to sort of keep teaching and playing various instruments. And finally, after about 10 years of doing that out as a public school teacher, I went back to get my doctorate. I was very, very interested in applying what I had learned as a meditator. I had learned how to meditate when I was 13, 12 years old, and got really serious about it at around age 18. And I was just fascinated by the intersection of meditation and music and teaching and conducting. And I thought what would be really cool is to go back to school to get a Ph.D., get a doctorate and learn about the scientific foundations of this. Because I was I knew it worked for me and I had been in those communities, meditation communities and for a long time. And I knew that especially the the the the approach, you know, what we call mindfulness worked really well for students, like teaching students to do that, incorporating into my teaching seemed to really affect them. And I kind of wanted to know more about the science.

Starting point is 00:05:30 So I went back and during the Ph.D., became very interested in cognitive science and neuroscience and tried to figure out, you know, there's something to it. And, uh, that has been basically my career since then. I graduated from Florida state university in 2010 with a PhD in music education and orchestral conducting. Uh, but I was doing a lot of research in this area. And after my first, you know, did my dissertation on mindfulness and then started applying it at the university of Oregon. And it's now been, boy, it's been 10 years since I took that idea really 13 from, um, boy, that's really crazy. No, one's going to take this seriously uh this was a fad that'll go away to now what i do at indiana which is essentially about i would say a good portion of my job is doing research on mindfulness teaching mindfulness

Starting point is 00:06:19 to the musicians teaching it in the community going around the country talking about it um so that's sort of been my career track i mean i still i'm still a musician i conduct i i teach i i play on occasion uh i don't know that i would uh put my playing up there as a exemplar of outstanding technique anymore but i still enjoy playing and uh but but most of my work really now is on meditation uh specifically mindfulness approaches for musicians and and to some degree also uh teaching it to other people as well so that's that's sort of where that's the big picture for where i am right now i love hearing that and it sounds like you and i should sit down in person one day and just talk for hours and hours because everything that you say resonates with me so

Starting point is 00:07:06 strongly. Oh, great. Before we sat here today, I asked you in an email if there were any specific topics or questions you would like me to ask you. And the list you sent me was so perfect and it covered all the angles I think could be so beneficial for my listeners. So if that's okay with you. I just would like to go down that list that you sent me and thanks for making my preparation. Yeah, no problem. I'm excited to talk about these things. The first thing you mentioned was how we define what mindfulness is. So what is it for you? As you said, there's so many contradictory approaches and definitions. So please tell us how you define mindfulness. Yeah. So I what I call this the family resemblance approach. And it's not my idea. It comes from some really interesting work that's being done in neuroscience and psychology by folks like Cliff Saron and Amishi Jha and John Dunn. And I'm missing somebody, Antoine Lutz.

Starting point is 00:08:11 uh and basically what what one of the things that started to happen in the scientific community is you know the idea of um or the problem of how we define mindfulness has come up because if you're going to study something scientifically you've got to define what it is you can't just have you know various definitions and then you know uh do research on it and then you and i both let's say we both do research on something and we get a a particular outcome and i go back and i say well well, what did you do? Well, I did this. Well, I did this. Well, that's not the same thing. And if we're not doing the same thing and we're talking about outcomes related to mindfulness, that's problematic. But at the same time, mindfulness, that word is a word that was

Starting point is 00:08:55 adopted by Jon Kabat-Zinn primarily in the mindfulness-based research program and the Massachusetts Stress Clinic. And he used that sort of as an umbrella term to talk about contemplative practices, right? So you have to sort of go back to that time and go, why did they call it mindfulness instead of contemplative practices or meditation or whatever? It's because the word meditation at that point was really, you know, a no-no, right? You really couldn't talk about that scientifically. So all that to say that what my approach is, is a family resemblance approach is to look at what is it that all of these things that we call mindfulness have in common. What is there a common ground? Is there sort of a bridge between the meditative experience

Starting point is 00:09:38 of the science, the psychology, even to some degree, which we have to acknowledge, you know, the fact that mindfulness was cultivated as a particular type of practice within Buddhist communities, you know, thousands of years ago, right? That's another issue that I'll talk about later. So, so what does it mean to practice mindfulness? What does that mean? And so to me, it really does, I think you can boil it down to roughly speaking, four processes, psychological processes that we can talk about that most people have access to, all within the space of a particular ethical and intentional space. So let me flesh that out a little bit, because I think it sounds confusing, but it's actually, I think, quite simple. All human beings, as far as we know,

Starting point is 00:10:23 or at least what we would call neurotypical human beings, because there's some folks, you know, so much diversity in the way that we think and process, you know, we, we can pay attention or attention gets us, right? All of us have the ability to, in some way, manipulate our attention. It's simple. If I asked you right now, just to focus on the sound, the timbre of my voice, most people could just focus on that or on my words, right? We have the ability to shift attention. So attention, right? The ability to focus on something willfully is part of every mindfulness practice that we know of. It doesn't matter whether it comes from Buddhism or secular mindfulness. We are given an object of attention. We're given something to focus on. A lot of times

Starting point is 00:11:03 it's the breath, right? Sometimes it's a sound. Sometimes it's a chant. It just depends on what you consider mindfulness. So attention. The other one is a process called, the scientific literature calls it meta-awareness. But I think this is actually what a lot of people mean by mindful awareness, which is the process of just taking everything in, monitoring your environment for what's coming in. And one of the reasons I don't really like the word mindfulness so much is because for us, mindfulness means thoughts. Mind equals thoughts for our culture and our particular processing. But really, when we're talking about meta-awareness and mindfulness, we're talking about the process of being aware of a lot of things like for example our somatic feelings

Starting point is 00:11:47 like what's coming up in our bodies which is really for a lot of musicians uh you know a deep rich um field of experience that is hard to articulate this is the master musician thing where they tell you i know how it feels in my body to do what i'm doing but i can't articulate it for you which to me tells us that some things are very difficult to conceptualize and think about. So meta-awareness to me is this process of just being aware of your feelings, your thoughts, your environment, your culture, your narrative, all the things that are going on at the same, that are around you that make up your experience, right? To use a fancy term, your phenomenology. And so you have attention, right? Focusing on, so you should really, those two go hand in hand.

Starting point is 00:12:35 Mindfulness practices will tell you to access your phenomenology or your experience and then ask you to pick something to anchor on, right? Or vice versa, to let go of everything, right? So you're always, no matter how you do it, you're always dealing with your own experience in mindfulness, attention and awareness and the relationship between those two things. The other two that I think are really critical is, and this isn't for everyone, but this one you will find in a lot of practices, which is this de-centering. and decentering is of course, just noticing your experience without getting caught up in it. Um,

Starting point is 00:13:11 so noticing that I have a thought, not that I am a thought, noticing that I I'm having an experience, but I, I'm not that experience necessarily. This is one aspect. I don't reduce my entire existence to this one thing. Right. Uh, and there's a lot of terms for that. Um, you know, I think some people call it de-reification, uh, when you know, a thought is just a thought, you know, and it might be, it's real, but it might not be true. Right. And so de-reification is the process of just seeing things like thoughts specifically as events, but not necessarily true events or things that you have to get caught up with. So it's the process of letting go. And sometimes in meditation, you'll hear something like, just let, you know,

Starting point is 00:13:50 let the thoughts arise and go. We're not fighting them, but we're not becoming attached. And then I think this is incredibly critical and it's often missed it's the intentional set but we're finding out more and more about uh in the research on mindfulness and and some philosophers have brought this up and practitioners as well is that if you don't have an intentional set if you don't know why you're doing these practices then we're not entirely sure they're actually effective so for example one of the things that we hear a lot about is if you practice mindfulness you're able to pay attention better maybe um but but if you don't know that that's why you're doing it you're not necessarily going to notice any changes in your attention.

Starting point is 00:14:29 Or, you know, I'm practicing mindfulness because I want to be more aware of my feelings. But if they don't tell you, if that's not what you're looking for and you put, you know, an app on and all of a sudden you're doing like a mindful awareness practice, they're not telling you why you're doing this. And sometimes they don't give you the opportunity to set an intention. And so without that, I'm not, you know, how do you know your practice is doing anything? And so there's a big divide in the scientific and spiritual world and sort of practice world about is mindfulness just this natural process that if you do it, you're going to discover all these things. Maybe, maybe, but we're human beings and we need to make sense of our experience.

Starting point is 00:15:07 And often the way we make sense of our experience is that we compare it to something. We compare it to an intention. So in mindfulness, one thing that we activate is a sort of what we call a curious or non-aversive disposition. which is we look at our experience with curiosity or neutrality, or when we're doing like compassion practices, we activate a positive affect towards ourselves or others, right? So there is what I would call the affective or emotional state of mindfulness, which is neutral positive. You know, you're always either noticing with curiosity or you're becoming positive. So a quick review, So attention, awareness, decentering or letting go, and then non-aversive or positive affect

Starting point is 00:15:52 within intention. And those things are part of almost every mindfulness practice. I hope that's not too technical for people. I mean, I think if very simple, if you just look at a breath awareness exercise, right? Most people know, have done breath awareness. So what's the object of attention and breath awareness? The breath, right? So that's where you hone most of your attention.

Starting point is 00:16:15 Then they tell you, you notice when thoughts come up. So that's meta-awareness, right? Notice if any thoughts or feelings come up. So you're holding your mind sort of steady. You're watching thoughts and feelings come up, right? So that means you're holding meta-awareness so that stuff can get in, right? You're not ignoring it. You're saying, yeah, emotions are going to come up.

Starting point is 00:16:32 Thoughts are going to come up. So that comes up. And then they say, well, you either, there's no mindfulness task that says, now go chase those emotions and those thoughts and get highly involved in them that's rumination and daydreaming right nothing wrong with that but that's not what mindfulness is necessarily so what they usually would say is just notice when they come up and come back to the breath right which is reorienting or they'll say let them go or just just label them just thoughts right and then they're telling you all this and saying keep a neutral and positive affect as you as you do this process even tell

Starting point is 00:17:05 you from the beginning don't worry don't get up you know if you feel yourself getting upset just let that go and just return to the breath and to being neutral, right? So all these things put together are sort of the mindscape of mindfulness that I think every practice has. So I took a long time, but I hope that makes some sense. It makes so much sense. And, you know, I love everything that you said in terms of how it connects to neuroscience, because sometimes I feel like it's so easy for some people to dismiss mindfulness as something that's too woo-woo. But I find that when I can really connect that with some studies and data, and I can show how it's actually proven that it can be so beneficial, it's easier for me to bring in some people who

Starting point is 00:17:53 might have been hesitant to try it. And I really resonate with so much of what you said, because And I remember when I was at the beginning stages of creating what I now call the deep practice model, which is what I did in my research, I had this desire to help my students practice more efficiently. And at the root, I realized that some of them didn't have, not only did they not have techniques and they didn't know how to practice. And I realized when I would ask them, what does it sound like? How do you hear?

Starting point is 00:18:31 What does it feel like? They didn't know how to experience things. So where do you begin? So I really set as a goal to figure out a way that I could at least in a short time that you work with the students at the college level is four years. How do you teach that in four years? Or, you know, some private students you have at a younger age. How do you get to introduce them slowly to that? And drawing from my experience, I started to think, well, you need to teach both the practicing techniques. Yes, those are important. How to practice all of that. But also, how can you start to bring their attention into their practicing? And I realized that if I could distill it to some mindsets, I decided to go with teaching some elements of bare awareness, beginner's mind.

Starting point is 00:19:25 Yeah, that's such an attitude. Exactly. Yeah. Yes. And what I find to be more and more the most important, self-compassion. Yeah. And that's, yeah, we can talk more about that, right? Which is, especially for our field, that is so important, right? And one of the things that I think comes up in mindfulness is a student, when we give a mindfulness test to a student, whether we incorporate it into what they do as musicians, right, or we just give it to them as a side, we have to know what it is they need. There isn't one mindfulness practice. There are various forms of mindfulness. And if a student is doing an attention practice, but what they really need is a self-compassion practice, then that's nice.

Starting point is 00:20:08 it's like saying, well, I'm practicing my, my, uh, you know, I'm working on shifting today, but, but it, but it's really like my string crossings that are terrible, you know? Yeah, sure. I can work on shifting, but, but if my string crossings are terrible, uh, you know, maybe that's what I should be working on. If, if I'm not having, if I have a narrative of negative affect towards myself, doing a breath awareness practice is not necessarily going to help that. Now, it doesn't mean, I think the breath awareness practice can support parts of the self-compassion practice, and you need it in some ways, because otherwise you can't stabilize your mind, right? But this is exactly what you just mentioned. Those things are a bright part of what we were talking about. beginner's mind, right, which is a thing we adopted from the Zen world, from Suzuki Roshi's old beginner's mind, Zen mind, beginner's mind book, right? You know, that's another way of

Starting point is 00:21:02 saying holding a non aversive, or positive affective state where you're curious. Right? Yeah. So right, bear awareness is meta awareness, right? It's just being aware of what's going on. And what you mentioned, which is, I think, so critical is that these all these things are trainable. Not only are they trainable, they have to be trained. Not everybody knows how to do this, right? And not only do they have to be trained, but also when you talk about the scientific side, one of the things I like about the model that I'm speaking about is that it does tie to things we know about psychology and neuroscience. We know that there are psychological processes and neurological sort of dynamics that relate to attention, right? We know that to awareness,

Starting point is 00:21:46 to all these things. There's a bridge there to the science. So if the mindfulness practices are actually affecting people the way they claim it's affecting them, we should see one of two things. Either it's not consistent with changes in brain chemistry or dynamics, in which case we are measuring the wrong thing. Or you should see changes. If somebody says, I can pay attention better, then their baseline, the way that their mind or their brain processes attention, pre and post mindfulness should look different in some way. Right. And, and you're right. Some people, I always say as a practitioner, I, you don't need the neuroscience to, to, to, for it to be effective. You, uh, I don't, you know, uh, people who were practicing this stuff for 3000

Starting point is 00:22:32 years, didn't need to understand the neuroscience, but in our world, in our sort of Western scientific framed world, it does give some validity to some of these practices. And we can see that it does affect us on some level, the brain on some level. But I also have really weird ideas about the brain and our overemphasis on this giant piece of meat in our head without regard to the fact that we're this embodied creature, that our brain is really distributed. Our minds are really distributed systems from our brain and our bodies and our environment. And so just reducing everything to their brain is like saying, I'm going to figure out exactly why riding a Lamborghini is awesome by looking at the way the pistons fire. Yeah, that doesn't tell you anything about the experience of

Starting point is 00:23:18 driving a Lamborghini, right? Or I'm going to, you know, by understanding how much these neurotransmitters are, you know, happen in the brain, I'm going to understand why musicians love playing this particular type of music. Well, no, I mean, yeah, you can learn something about the neurotransmitter or the changes in the brain, but that doesn't tell you about the experience of being there. So our science needs to expand a little bit to include the actual experiences that people are having, the context in which they're having them, and the sort of ways that we can bridge those things together. So I love, I mean, I think what you said makes a lot of sense in that way. And how do you go about teaching mindfulness to musicians? Yeah. So as you can

Starting point is 00:24:02 imagine um you know having spent some years researching this and being a practitioner myself there are a few things um first of all i think teaching mindfulness to musicians happens on three levels um when i teach here class here at iu called uh it's just called mindful uh mindfulness of music and it's a 16-week class and it's a lot of performance majors take it and each week you learn a new practice a new set of skills you you practice it you log about it and then you come in do the next thing next week. And then we have master classes. Sometimes students will perform and I'll show them. I'll say, hey, play something that really bothers you, that makes you stressed out. Let me teach you how to use mindfulness to maybe work through that a little bit. So it's a

Starting point is 00:24:42 really awesome class. It's been going on for about three years here at IU. So there are a couple things. Number one is I have a specific sequence, which I can tell you about, which I think is really important. It's like anything else. You have to learn how to hold the instrument before you can play it. You can't just go to playing it. So I think there's some things that we should sequence. Uh, and then what I, what I like to think about is first of all, there's formal meditation practice. So I teach musicians to, here's some things you can do that are just basic practices that don't have anything to do with music. They're just universal. There are ways of it. And then there's musical practices. So there's using these mindfulness processes that

Starting point is 00:25:20 you talked about in the context of playing and performing or practicing. And then finally, what I call just informal or everyday practices, which is just now that you do that, how do you bring this into your life? So it's really an integration of the formal practice, the musical practice, and your life practice, what you do every day, your diet, your health, your relationships, and all those things. And so when we look at it that way, it's a much more ecological process than just saying, try this meditation practice and let's see if you play better. So those are the those are the three so we teach exercises um every week you have to do a formal musical or you know you have some one of those three or two of those three or and then there's a process and

Starting point is 00:26:01 the process for me is very clear um first you teach students to stabilize their physiology so their practices that with breathing uh what we would call pranayama in the yoga world that stabilize the the way the body responds to stress after that i go to centering the mind practices, which are like breath awareness and sound awareness, just settling the mind. When the body is calm and the mind is calm or steady, then we could do more meta-awareness. We focus more on just being aware of all the different things, the way our body reacts to things, our emotions, what we do in specific settings, what triggers us. And then really after that, we move into a much more, I think this is sort of the third process, a much more

Starting point is 00:26:44 difficult section, which is letting go of narrative. So once we've established all this, we can really clearly see how our internal narrative causes us pain or causes us to sabotage our own playing and our own lives and our relationships. And even what our goals and values are. Sometimes students in my class go, I have this voice in my head that is basically a combination of my studio teacher, my mother, and some friend I have who's telling me I have to do this. And I have never realized that that's just a voice in my head that I don't have to listen to, I can create my own. So the last step on this is sort of intentional framing, which includes practices like self compassion, you know, read things that help us shape our relationship to the

Starting point is 00:27:29 world, into our experiences in a way that are going to be more positive and affirming, and aligned with our values. So that's the process that we take, roughly speaking, that everybody ends up, you know, some people skip around a little bit, but when you do that, I think you cover mindfulness sort of as a, as a curriculum from, and by the way, that last one, like doing, like you mentioned before, doing self-compassion practice is really difficult if you aren't aware of your body, for example, because that's where you feel sometimes. I mean, it's in your body when you feel emotion, it's an embodied process. It's not a thought necessarily. So how do you do self-compassion? You know, if you've never been able to hold your mind steady or notice your body,

Starting point is 00:28:09 So it's not that you can't, but if we don't start there, it's like, how do you do shifting if you've never learned how to finger first position on a violin? If I don't even know that there's a first and a third position, how am I going to understand what a shift is? And so this process is very systematic and we tweak it, but we feel it's very effective. this is so powerful and it's and i love that it starts with understanding what's happening in the body and you talk about understanding the emotions there's one thing that we discussed a lot this summer in the music mastery experience which is my group coaching program yeah that i actually had talked about in a blog which is sometimes all you need to do is look at your case or the piano or and you feel this sense of dread yes and understanding that that feeling is coming from years of experience facing feelings of inadequacy in the practice room feeling um you know walking away from a practice session feeling like you didn't accomplish your

Starting point is 00:29:19 goals getting yelled at in the lesson you're standing in front of your case and your brain is bypassing all of these experiences but they're all encompassed in this feeling of dread where you don't even want to open the case to practice exactly exactly right and and and to add to that and as i'm sure you discover students sometimes they're not aware that these things are already influencing the very next step they take it's like we have all these i wouldn't say unconscious because they can be made conscious. I mean, it's part of what mindfulness is, is bringing in many ways unconscious mental

Starting point is 00:29:55 and physical and emotional habits and relationships to bear, you know, that we see them, we bring them to light. And then we say, okay, now that I know this, I know that I'm triggered in this way and that my body feels this way. And then I do all that. Can I let go of that

Starting point is 00:30:10 and create a new set of intentions and narratives that are going to be more helpful, more kind, more compassionate, right? In my music making or in my life, really. I think I'll say that it's very hard. You know, it's hard to just be mindful in one area of your life and and and keep it compartmentalized. I feel like sometimes like if we don't address these things in our lives to some degree, they're going to bleed into our practice and in our practice out into our lives. I mean, you can to some degree keep these things separate. But that's why I like thinking of it as a sort of all encompassing thing. but you're, you're 100% right. How do I, you know, one of the things that I train students to do is

Starting point is 00:30:49 imagine yourself going into a situation that makes you tense or angry. Okay. Use that. Okay. Tell me exactly what you see. Tell me exactly where that shows up in your body. Tell me exactly what that feels like. Now look at that feeling. So, oh, you're feeling anger. When you think about your case, you're feeling anger right here in your jaw, but you're feeling tension in your jaw. Touch your jaw. What does that feel like? Is it, is it hot? Is it cold? is it okay now tell me the thoughts that are coming up as you touch your jaw you see how all those things arise at the same time and now imagine trying to do the next thing that you're going to do already colored by all of this stuff without you being aware of it right so our moments of mind

Starting point is 00:31:30 bleed into each other our experiences bleed into each other is it some by thing where oh god now i'm going to practice and what i i'm leaving everything behind no you you're bringing your outside life and your experiences and your set habits into that room. So the quicker you become aware of that, the easier it's going to be for you to start realizing how this changes what you do and letting go and creating new things, which is the last step. So yes. And again, this is something that you cannot get from somebody telling you, okay, let me teach you this breath awareness practice. It's, it's more complicated and, and it requires a lot of trial and error and a lot of understanding. And each student is different and it's going to have different levels

Starting point is 00:32:17 of understanding and being able to process this stuff. And so, you know, that's one of the reasons I decided a few years ago to start the Institute because I felt people, I have people who attend the Institute and do the teacher training. And by the way, for those that don't know, the Institute does teacher training. People do a one year, you know, training with practicum and readings and group meetings and they apply it. And why does that matter? Well, because I think you get people who are really good, who understand kind of what's going on, but don't have a way of organizing it in a meaningful way. Or maybe they have a great idea about something, but they're not quite sure that it makes sense based on the science or the experience. Or some

Starting point is 00:32:56 people who are like, I taught this thing and it seems to make sense, but it doesn't work for everybody, and I'm afraid of it. And so you go through a year of training to understand all these things and to practice them the same way you would anything else, so that when you go back and teach them, you're very well informed about all the different things that affect mindfulness. It sounds like you're doing some of that in your training, in how you work with students, you know, is that you're combining your experiences with what you've learned, and you're understanding that it takes time to take people through these processes. Absolutely. And I absolutely want to hear about the Institute later, but what you just said reminded me so much of another thing I wanted to ask you about, which is, you kind of gave us a recipe to deal with this, but I'd love to hear your perspective on a recurring topic among some students and coaching clients, which is how to deal and hopefully recover from performance-related trauma.

Starting point is 00:33:55 Some people have had some scary experiences and performance and or, you know, I've had some maybe negative feedback from teachers or mentors or peers. And some of them have, you know, had some scary. And some of them have developed debilitating stage fright as a result. Like, how can someone deal with this and things that they can do? Yeah, I don't think people like my answer when I tell them this, but I'm going to give them the answers. I'm very interested in truth. First of all, this is part of the problem with the I did a workshop, one weekend workshop of mindfulness and now I understand it, is that first of all, we have to be very clear, musicians who do this kind of work, to not believe we're therapists. We are not therapists.

Starting point is 00:34:42 We are not psychologists. We do not have specialized training in those areas. And so the very first thing I think is to teach people who teach this at whatever level of intervention to realize what their limitations are and to realize that trauma at some level, when it's real for somebody and it's physical and it's debilitating, is not your thing to work on. What you do at that moment, you say, look, this is significant. I would recommend talking to a mental health professional because you have everything from physical abuse to mental abuse to all sorts of things to just borderline sort of like, yeah, people were really bad to me, right? So it's on a continuum, right? Trauma is usually something debilitating, which a lot of times we have absolutely no conscious control over, right? Or even sometimes we're not even aware of it.

Starting point is 00:35:29 OK, so first of all, is knowing what our limits are, knowing that we have to be trained to see when the trauma is something that we should not be working with. Right. OK, so how do you get there? Well, first of all, I think when we're working with students with mindfulness, the very first thing we say is if at any point you're uncomfortable with what I'm doing or with this process, please let me know and let's stop. let's stop don't go further on anything because actually mindfulness can trigger trauma for some people yes especially when when you do body scans for example a person who's gone through physical some kind of physical abuse or has had something happen in their bodies a body scan is going to send them off the deep end because now you're hyper aware of something that you've been managing a different way and if you don't have training and how to work with that you're going to end up

Starting point is 00:36:20 in a situation can be very dangerous for that person. So it's the Hippocratic Oath of mindfulness where I tell people, you know, I'm a researcher, I'm a practitioner, I'm not a therapist. So we have to be clear right away that when we're teaching these things, I believe people should be able to opt out at any moment, the minute they feel uncomfortable, and that we start interventions very lightly, very easy, you know, a simple breath of water, say, if you're uncomfortable doing this, don't worry, just go ahead and stop, do something else, right? I'll take you as far as you'll let me help take you based upon what I know. Okay, number one. So that's one. Two, when the trauma occurs, I think we have to build rapport with our students so that they know that person's got your

Starting point is 00:36:58 best interest at heart and is going to recommend action that is going to be helpful to them that maybe they're not qualified to do, right? So, you know, if a student has something trigger us, are you feeling uncomfortable in that part of your body? Okay, if you can't go any further, you feel something's going to be triggered, let's just stop. Let's just stop. You might need to talk to a therapist about that. If you want to talk to me about it and it's something you're comfortable that you feel is outside, you know, then I'm happy to hear you, you know, and be there, be a, be a, give them teacher presence, right? Be compassionate, give them a positive regard, right? So, so a lot of people don't do that. A lot of people push or like, why aren't they doing

Starting point is 00:37:36 this? Why aren't they interested? It's because it really shouldn't be pushed, right? Okay. So let's just talk now. So, so let's just say that right away. We should be able to do that. We have to understand there are people that are neurocognitively diverse in the world. So some people can't do or do some of the things we're asking them to do. So we have to find modifications. You know, a student might not be able to notice their breath, but they might be able to notice, you know, a sound or may be able to touch something that's very physical as a sort of object, right? So knowing that there are different anchors helps to sort of make it more neurodivergent, right? Allowing people to process their experiences, the way they're processing without us getting in the way and

Starting point is 00:38:14 say, Oh, you should be experiencing this, which is actually antithetical to mindfulness. It's kind of weird, right? Some people do that. No, you, you're, if you do this enough, your stress will go away. Okay. So, so then finally, I think for trauma, what, you know, where is this mostly going to happen? Well, you can think of it as basically two major sort of three major places. I think in music, one is physical trauma, something that happened in your body that you're holding and you know if if it's not terrible if it's something you can work through you can work through students or a body scan and say okay what are you aware of how your feelings coming up you know to a certain degree and you're okay but then is it really trauma right then is it just discomfort

Starting point is 00:38:52 right um you know sort of psychological uh narrative sort of self-talk right and and how that goes on and then the third one i think is relational so triggered by specific types of relations. But these are, there's many types, right? But I feel like people who work in this field and who do this should get some training. We need to, just like a teacher has to be, you know, trained to understand when their students are in distress and they recommend, you know, to go to a professional. I think that's part of what we need to do. And that does not exist right now for a lot of mindfulness, sort of ad hoc mindfulness teaching, is that we don't have a really clear certification process that works for everyone. I don't think there has to be one, you know,

Starting point is 00:39:34 the one way to do mindfulness. I'm not one of those people. I'm not a, you know, my way or the highway guru, but I do feel like it is our responsibility to understand that mindfulness can cause trauma or exacerbate trauma. And that we need to be aware of who to send people to when trauma is exacerbated beyond the point that we can work with them. How do you know that you have to get training? You have to be trained. You have to understand how that works. So we're doing a little bit of that in the institute. We're trying to get people in. I have a therapist that is a good friend of mine who works with specific, she's a trauma therapist, who I will have come in and talk to students about noticing signs of trauma, knowing how to transition students from

Starting point is 00:40:13 that. I also have a teacher who works with neurodivergent students, students who are on the autism spectrum or who have other ways of processing where, how do I work with that particular kid you know how do I do that or that student so we need to keep learning that's a long answer to say we better be careful right we don't want to make we we you know I really get scared that some people get a little bit of information and then they're like oh I totally know how to do this I'm gonna I'm gonna cure your problems with your parents because they're seeping into your music better be careful uh because we're you know we're not exactly trained that way so okay that's sort of my thoughts on it I don't know if that makes sense yes 100% and I think you're

Starting point is 00:40:59 absolutely right in terms of being able to identify these signs and there's just no easy answer in terms of you know how do you recover from performance drama how do you get ready to step on stage again and get that beyond other than granting yourself a lot of grace yeah experimenting with what works for you and one thing i like to say too is building a list of little wins of creating experiences where you can perform in a safe environment so you build up your confidence little by little yeah and and it just takes a lot of insight fullness hopefully that's a term in english yeah well yeah and you you know i always tell people anyone with a doctorate can make up a term. So you're, you're, yeah, you're, you're right. And that's where we can

Starting point is 00:41:49 help, you know, pointing, you know, when, when I hear you speak about these things, what I think of as being a good, a beat part of being a good teacher, a good coach is having being understanding, have enough rapport with the person that you're working with, that you can help take them where they want to go and maybe even push them a little bit more, but not push them beyond the point that you can help them. A good coach is no one they when they're no longer, you know, this is beyond me. Right. But at the same time, it can serve as as as somebody who's supportive and who can point out good things. Part of the mindfulness thing is to point out to be able to focus your attention on victories. Right. I have an exercise with my students where I'll say, OK, so this terrible

Starting point is 00:42:31 thing happened to you. I had a particular student who who is who is a perfectionist and they had a really bad experience in a competition and you know they really beat themselves up so we we you know years of rapport with the student with this client and i sat down and said okay let's talk about this well that's so you know that there are various ways of looking at experience can we take i want you to step outside of that experience and tell me what are some things you learned about that and some positive things about the thing that you're calling a failure which it could be a failure in some way in some universe it's a failure but in another universe it's actually a positive thing that you're learning from is going to make you stronger how could we

Starting point is 00:43:06 frame that and and be able to see that every single situation has a variety of interpretations and that our job is to understand that um that to some degree we have some agency about which interpretation we want to use to right so maybe you know if if the point is to be a masterful musician never has any problems has no performance anxiety you can try that narrative and you can embody it, but it's going to hurt you long-term because that's not possible. But maybe I performed for the first time. This is the first time my leg didn't shake. That's a victory. How can you see that both of those things can be negative and positive and that you don't have to stick to either one, that there's a vast array of interpretations of something that your mind

Starting point is 00:43:48 can give to something that are true, but some are going to be more helpful for you. And some are going to be interpretations that help you be kinder to yourself and others, right? So your values are really involved. But that takes time. I mean, that's not an easy thing to do, to train people to do that. Frank, I love this window into your mind. And before I take you through the round of rapid fire questions, which I joke is never very rapid, I just want to ask you, is there anything I didn't ask that you really feel like you'd like to give to the listeners? Yeah. So I think the bottom line here i think that when we want to boil down mindfulness why is mindfulness useful mindfulness gives you choices right mindfulness gives you choices i i want we grow up our entire

Starting point is 00:44:40 lives being told you're this you're that we internalize so many narratives about the world and who we are who we should be and what our and you know some of this we can't help it's just part of life, right? But, but I want to know that where I do have a choice in choosing the way that I, I respond to my life and my reality, if I do have a choice, I want to know where I have those choices. And, and I think that the, the path of mindfulness is to constantly be, I would use the word vigilant because I think that's too much of a word, but let's just say some level of vigilance about, wait a minute, wait a minute. Is that just a set of mental habits that I have that I applied to the situation without thinking about it? Or is there a better

Starting point is 00:45:23 set of habits that I can develop that are going to make me, first of all, for me, most importantly, a kinder person. If it's, you know, in music, I think we need that. We need people to be kinder to themselves, to others, more cooperative, which I think leads to creativity. So what I tell people is, do you want to know what's driving your life? Do you want to hold a mirror? And do you want to start taking some small actions to start affecting that so that you're not a victim of everything that happens to you and that you feel like you have no agency or resilience to work with it. Does not ignore the fact that people are terrible, that situations can be bad, that there's everything from systemic racism to sexism. I mean, does not deny any of that.

Starting point is 00:46:09 But knowing that, now what do I want to do for my next step? What's the next thing I want to do? without negating that those things happen, right? Where do I have some agency and some choice? And I think that's very empowering to people who have never been told that they have some choice over how they respond to things. So that's what I want to tell people about mindfulness. As a musician or anything else,

Starting point is 00:46:33 you owe it to yourself to know that you have more resources inside of you than you probably think or have been told that you have. It's incredibly powerful. thank you for this yeah you're welcome i'm so glad i asked so how about a round of rapid fire questions sure of course what skills do you think young musicians studying today should acquire in addition to learning to play their instruments yeah i think um mental uh and and emotional skills um so so spending time working on things

Starting point is 00:47:13 like mindfulness or other contemplative practices, skills, you know, all the skills that help us be more creative and open and aware and resilient. So you can do that a lot of different, mindfulness is one way of doing that, right? But I think, you know, the path of musicians is no longer what it was before, right? You can't say, I'm going to go to school and be the concert master of the CSO. Well, good luck. That person has to retire. You have, you know, you hope there is in a pandemic where everybody's unemployed for, you know, that's not the wisest way to go into the field. So one thing to say is just use, take classes that help you think about who you are, what your, what, what life, what meet, what gives your life meaning and how many different

Starting point is 00:47:57 ways can you use music to, to have a meaningful life that, that is not going to tie you to one way of being and so you know um uh psychology classes psychological skills resilience skills uh you know nutrition classes learning how to keep your body healthy right all of that might not be directly related to music but it certainly informs um the kind of life you're going to have as a musician so that's what i would say about that if you could recommend that musicians have one tool in the practice room, which one would it be? Imagination and goal setting. It's two. I realized that, you know, you have to imagine, even if it's not going to work out the way you want it to, you have to have some template for what you, for the kind of person you want to be

Starting point is 00:48:44 and the kind of musician you want to be. Because then I think you go towards situations in your life that are going to, you know, help you meet those goals. If I just sit in a room and do exactly what people tell me to do that may be a fine to some degree but if that's eventually doesn't line up with who i am or what i'm trying to do then i'm not going to stay motivated so i think it helps to take time everyone and just imagine what do you want your life to be like and when you walk into the practice room stop and say i'm going to spend 30 minutes of my life here now or an hour or whatever is what i'm doing here supporting the vision of the life that i want to have as a musician as a student as a teacher right and if and and but that changes it changes as your life

Starting point is 00:49:24 changes as other things happen. But to not connect with that, I think makes us sort of like a victim of, you know, circumstance, everything is just happening, and I have no control over it. And I don't even know why it's happening. I think in a way it whether I always tell people, whether there's meaning in the world or not, whatever your religious or philosophical views are, fine, whether it exists out there inherently or not, human beings need meaning to exist, they need to create meaning. And so you either you can say, well, I don't know if the world has but I have to find meaning because we're wired this way. And music is one of the ways that we find meaning. So spending time in your imagination and goal setting, I think is a part of how you

Starting point is 00:50:01 deal with that aspect of being a human and a teacher and a musician. Do you have a favorite book that you would recommend to the listeners? So I love this book. I met a guy named Richard Wolff a couple of years ago. I went to University of Southern California. He wrote a book called In Tune, Music as the Bridge to Mindfulness. And Richard is interesting. He's a producer. He's worked with a lot of like big hip hop stars and he's a meditator. But what I love about Richard, what's unique about Richard is that Richard was a bad meditator or he says, I was bad at meditation. So what I needed to do is find how music was meditation for me. And so he reverses it. I start from, when we give our talks, I start from all these processes

Starting point is 00:50:47 and then apply them to music and he starts from music and goes backwards to the processes and it's such a good book it's so clear and it and it's really um refreshing and empowering and he's a great guy he's hilarious uh he teaches out at you know at the thornton school um i it's one of my favorite books on on mindfulness and music i think that has come out in the last few years um so so i would highly recommend buying his book and i get no endorsements I just really like him and I like his approach to it. That sounds amazing. That sounds like the book I'll be buying for all my students and clients as a Christmas present.

Starting point is 00:51:26 It's a great book. It's on my list in my class, you know, as highly recommended reading. Thank you for this recommendation. Sure. What is the, well, maybe not best advice, but one advice that was given to you that you would like to pass on to the listeners? Yeah, I actually spoke to somebody yesterday who reminded me of this advice. It's interesting. I had a teacher who, I'm going to paraphrase what he told me. I was having a really hard time in school. And he said, you know, you don't have to accept other people's visions of who you are and what your life should be. You don't have to accept that, right? what the world you you can choose a narrative you can choose a way of looking at the world that is going to uplift you and that is going to give your life meaning and trajectory and and and part of

Starting point is 00:52:16 this career in this life is to just decide you're going to choose the vast portion of that the you know who you are and what you're going to do no matter who you are that was the you know the single best piece of advice i ever had because it reframed everything uh and this incredible teacher uh Actually, I'll name him. His name is Tom Riccobono. He teaches at Interlochen in the year-long program. He's a graduate student. I was really having a hard time.

Starting point is 00:52:43 I'm all over the place. I was having such a hard time staying focused. And I didn't know how to practice. I didn't have lessons as a kid, really. I was just kind of a good musician that didn't have a lot of training. And I just wasn't doing well in music school, as you can imagine. People would already learn that culture. And he just sat me down and says, what do you want to do?

Starting point is 00:53:03 and he goes, okay, let go of any ideas that you can't do that. And, and, you know, maybe you don't accomplish that goal. Sure. Maybe I teach you all this stuff and you don't accomplish the goals that you want to accomplish, right? Who you want to be, but you're going to have a much higher chance to do it. If you believe that you can do it versus thinking you're never going to be able to do it. And I was like, gosh, thank you. You know, I had some ridiculous goal. By the way, I didn't accomplish the goal, the two goals that I set out. And I'm glad I didn't because my life is a lot better for it. But I remember I wanted to be a principal, at that point, a principal trombonist of the New York Phil. And he was like, okay, well, what would you need to do in order to have a

Starting point is 00:53:41 chance to make that happen? And that was it. I was 19 years old. He didn't say, well, that's impossible and you should have a more realistic goal. He said, you know, whether you accomplish it or not, here's how you might get there. I love that. That really changed my life in a lot of ways that's extremely beautiful and so liberating and i can think of so many listeners that probably need to hear this right now so thank you so much for giving it to us oh you're welcome my pleasure finally how about a quick actionable tip that listeners could implement today in their musical life yeah the next time you go in a practice room pause just pause for one moment um get in your body. Notice your breath, pause and think, what do I want to do right now? What is it that I want

Starting point is 00:54:30 to get out of this? And how are the things that are going in my happening, my mind, my emotions and everything else? How are they either supporting that or not? They're not supporting whatever you're going to do at that moment. Let it go and go for the things you want to do and take a moment to do that. Every time you step in a practice room, anytime you start a conversation with somebody, anytime you do anything at all take pause more we we can get off the boat you know it's like we're on a river we're on the boat that the river is going to keep going uh but but you don't want to wake up all of a sudden be on the boat in the river not knowing where you're going you can take the river to the shore stop and look at where the look at where the stream or the river is going so

Starting point is 00:55:09 okay i can get back on the boat now but at least i know kind of where it's going and so take that make that a mental and uh yes i could even call it a spiritual practice pausing to reconnect with who you are and what you want to be. I love that. Frank, you mentioned the Mindfulness-Based Wellness and Pedagogy Institute. Please tell us a little bit more about that. Where can people find more information and check it out, maybe sign up? Sure. Yeah. So we're in a little bit of a hiatus right now because of the pandemic. We're restructuring a little bit. So this year, we haven't done our usual teacher training, but we will be back hopefully either spring or summer of this year with some retreats, online retreats and other things, I would say go to www.mb-wp.org.

Starting point is 00:55:56 www.mb-wp.org. You can get a sense of what we've been doing. It's the website. I'm not the best website manager and it's a small institute, but we've trained a lot of teachers and they're doing a lot of really amazing things. And I think if you're interested in learning more about the specific way that we uh do mindfulness at the institute which is just one way uh in teacher training uh starting a retreat we have a great group of teachers and a nice institute and uh we're learning and growing so come check it out and uh you know and oh you can always send me an email uh the email contact information is on there and i can put you on an email list and let you know when our next event is so i feel like i never learned enough about this so you might see my

Starting point is 00:56:41 my face popping. I would love it. You know what? We just had a wonderful person go through our teacher training program who was a longtime meditator and mindfulness practitioner. Laura Talbot Clark. She's a violin professor at Oklahoma State. She came in knowing a lot. She had already her own system, but going through a year of learning how to put it into words and practicing was so significant for her. So we welcome people with a lot of experience, people who have no idea what's going on and are just curious. And we build a really nice community. So we'd love to see you there. We'd love for you to come out and spend some time with us. Sounds amazing. Frank, you shared such important information, so much wisdom with us

Starting point is 00:57:21 today. I'd say life-changing information. And I cannot thank you enough for accepting to chat with me. Oh, thank you, Renee. It was my pleasure. I really enjoyed talking about these things. And I hope some of what I said today is useful for people. So I really appreciate it. Thank you for doing this and having this show. I looked through the podcast. I was like, ooh, that's a lot of really cool people that I admire. I'm going to go click on this. Thank you guys so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Dr. Frank Diaz. If you're guessing that I loved it, you would be right. Frank is speaking my language. And I think you can see from what he said, why mindfulness is at the core of the deep practice model in everything mind over finger. Because it's not about constantly seeking more knowledge, watching one more tutorial about vibrato, getting the latest practice tip from an Instagram personality.

Starting point is 00:58:28 Those are great, sure. But progress on your instrument and growing as an artist is about the ability to be in your experience, to be able to hear yourself objectively, to assess your playing objectively. It's about being able to understand the physical sensations you're experiencing while you're playing and nurturing the ability to analyze problems and come up with solutions. That's how you can improve your technique and your expressivity through awareness in combination with the information you already have and continue to gather. And even more than that, it's how you are as a person, how you show up for yourself in everyday life, how you're able to control your thoughts and guide yourself through the process with objectivity, self-compassion, and a positive attitude. because yes the information can come from the outside but your results will always always come from the inside so if you relate to this conversation let frank and i know by getting in touch with us and let's keep this conversation going i'm mind over finger on both instagram and

Starting point is 00:59:46 Facebook, and Frank is on Twitter at MusicZenDude. As always, I'll have all the information related to this episode in the show notes, and you can find them via your podcast app or by visiting mindoverfinger.com. And if what we talked about today resonates with you, I hope you'll join me this summer for the Music Mastery Experience. It's my life-changing, highly personalized group coaching program where I take you through a massive transformation in your music making. We're going to cover all of those beautiful things we talked about today, and I'll give you all the tools to bring more mindfulness, presence, intentionality, and efficiency in your practice so you can start to experience the results you want in performance and in

Starting point is 01:00:36 your musical life. Ingel, a previous participant, said this about the Music Master experience. Renee has brought incredible value to my life as a musician. With her sincerity, she creates a safe space to grow. The support, knowledge, and guidance she provides has deeply transformed my practice and my confidence as a violinist. Definitely the best investment of 2020. And it's not too early to save your spot.

Starting point is 01:01:05 And if you sign up now, you get access to some pretty cool bonuses. so go to mindoverfinger.com slash amami and let's talk and one more thing before i sign off this february in the tribe we're talking about performance related trauma how it happens how it affects us and strategies to overcome it so if this is a topic that occupies some space in your head and your heart join the conversation at facebook.com slash groups slash mindoverfingertribe. That's it for today. Again, thank you and à bientôt.

The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 090 Dr. Frank Diaz: Mindful Musician

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