The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 152 Jennifer Johnson: Body Mapping

Episode Date: November 25, 2022

In this episode I bring you violinist and body mapping expert Jennifer Johnson. We discuss what body mapping is, its effect on our body, the daily actions she recommends in order to stay healthy and mentally balanced, how body mapping helps with nonphysical issues like stress, and much more. Jennifer shares many impactful concepts. I know you're going to walk away completely inspired by this conversation with her.   MORE ABOUT JENNIFER JOHNSON Website: https://jennifer-johnson.co/ Her books: What Every Violinist Needs to Know About the Body Teaching Body Mapping to Children   Practicing for Peak Performance: Your Step-by-step Roadmap to Optimal Performance! Get you self-paced program HERE and transform how you perform TODAY!   >> DOWNLOAD THE TRANSCRIPT FROM THIS EPISODE HERE

You're listening to the Mind Over Finger Podcast, episode number 152. Welcome to the Mind Over Finger Podcast, discussions on mindful music making, efficient practice, optimal performance, and building a purposeful life and fulfilling career. I'm your host, violinist and certified performance and life coach for musicians, Dr. René-Paul Gauthier. Hi, everyone. I hope this episode finds you doing amazing. Today, I'm very excited to bring you the incredible Jennifer Johnson on the show. Jennifer is a violinist and body mapping expert. She presents body mapping workshops internationally, teaching musicians to enhance their musical ability and prevent injury through a clear understanding of how their bodies are

designed to move. Jennifer has written three books on body mapping, what every violinist needs to know about the body, teaching body mapping to children, and musician heal thyself, free your shoulders through body mapping. We cover many topics in our discussion, including what body mapping is, its effect on our body, the daily actions she recommends in order to stay healthy and mentally balanced, how body mapping helps with non-physical issues like stress, and much more. And speaking of stress, before we dive into this conversation with Jennifer, I have a special invitation for you. If you're looking for the solution for your crippling performance anxiety, if you're wanting to start experiencing optimal performance, visit mindoverfinger.com and jump

in practicing for peak performance today. With my step-by-step approach to preparing for performance, you're going to learn how to channel and use your activation to unlock magic on stage and transform what used to be performance anxiety into something that works for you. With clear practicing methods, conditioning exercises and the proper mindsets confidence in performance is 100% achievable so don't wait practicing for peak performance is the solution to performance anxiety and you can get started today you're going to get video trainings that you can watch and implement at your own pace clear and detailed step-by-step guidance through the preparation process and live online support from me to help you through all your stumbling blocks. Unshakable Confidence

is waiting for you at mindoverfinger.com. So click the link in the show notes and access it today. And now to my conversation with Jennifer. Jennifer shares so many impactful concepts with us ahead. I know you're going to walk away completely inspired by this chat with Jennifer Johnson. Let's go to the show. Hi, everyone. Welcome. I have an incredible guest for you today. You're in for quite a treat. I'm so excited to be speaking with violinist, teacher, author, and body mapping specialist, Jennifer Johnson. It's such a pleasure to have you here today. Thank you so much. It's great to be here, Renee.

Jennifer, you're one of the most prominent body mapping experts in the world right now. I feel so lucky that you came twice, actually, as a guest expert for body mapping sessions with my Music Mastery Experience participants. And as we were just discussing before we started recording the episode, I met you for the first time, I think it was in 2018, I believe, at the ASTA conference, where you gave a workshop on breathing. And I walked out of there feeling like I had just learned how to breathe properly for the first time in my life. It was amazing. But as I just said, you're one of the most prominent body mapping experts. And I would love to hear what that journey was that what that journey was like for you. So what? How did this unfold? And let's hear everything okay all right well um i grew up in london ontario in canada and um had a wonderful

teacher there named richard lawrence um uh was studying kind of alongside some fantastic young players the uh scott and laura saint john were amongst that crowd when we were growing up together and actually Jeff Nuttall who I understand just very sadly passed away recently it was a real contingent of you know a really hotbed of violinists and I was a bit of a late starter and I kind of came in late and you know I was kind of in awe of these incredible young players around me and knew from a really early age that I wanted to make it my profession but you know by about the time I was 12 13 I was starting to have a lot of real discomfort in neck and shoulder region

and you know my mom tried everything she had me at chiropractors and you know some of the first acupuncture and I think I might have even only been 16 or 17 when she heard about the Alexander technique and I had a few lessons in that but I wasn't quite mature enough yet to really take that information on and know how to apply it to my violin playing so um I kind of just stumbled along for a long time uh probably all through my you know university education I was you know to have a little injury here and have to stop for a week and then pick it back up and you know it was just kind of trying to get by. So that went on. I had, you know, kind of an early professional career. In my mid-twenties, I got a job playing here in the Atlantic String Quartet in St.

John's, Newfoundland, which was a bit of a dream job for me. So much fun. I loved playing that repertoire but you know really within the first year already of intense rehearsing I was hurting and didn't know what to do about it and you know had to take some more time off and it kind of went on like that for another year or two. I had a physio who you know helped me get back from that initial injury and then it was probably two years later I met an Alexander teacher who was coming to he was visiting here from the uk he would come and you know spend two weeks uh teaching several of us and he'd do that three or four times a year and that really began to turn things around for me and i thought oh boy i've this feels so amazing after a lesson but how

am i going to apply this to my plane so eventually i kind of had this revelatory moment when i'm lying on the floor after an at lesson i thought i just got to go do this for a while and and figure out how to make this work in my plane. So I took a sabbatical thanks to Canada Council. They helped me fund a sabbatical in Europe. I went to study with a lot of music Alexander Technique teachers, mostly in London, but also in Paris, and had a wonderful sabbatical. Still didn't really know how to apply it to the violin to make myself more independent with it. Somebody said to me, you really should go meet Barbara Conable. And I hadn't heard of her at that point, but I looked her up, found out right at the end of my sabbatical, she was teaching a week-long summer course in

Princeton, New Jersey. And I went, joined her course, and that was kind of the beginning of it all. After just an hour or so of listening to her talk, I went up to her, I remember with tears in my eyes, and I said, I have been looking for this information for as long as I can remember as a musician. And so at the end of that week, I asked her if I could train with her. She had started training people to teach the information. And I did that. I took about a year to just really, I just dove into the information, studied it voraciously. And she licensed me just a bit over a year later. And that was 2005. So that was kind of the beginning of my professional career as, you know somebody who teaches the body mapping information then she asked if I'd be interested

in writing the violin specific book because she'd already had a few books written by you know a pianist and a flutist applying it to the instrument so I gladly took on that task and that took me five years if anybody's seen the book it's kind of a big book so yeah that was a five-year undertaking it's a great book i was saying i wish i had my copy right here next to me so i could you know show it but i can wave it it's this one that's what every violinist needs to know about the body yeah so that i don't know how much uh farther you want me to go but that that kind of you know takes us up to about 2010 and since then i've just been continuing to teach it uh wherever anybody wants it around the world. I love how it was a little bit like serendipity that you

heard about her in that last week. And by that time, you were probably ready to receive the material in the way that a lot of people are not with this study that you had done of the Alexander technique. It's really wonderful. I think you're right about that. I think it really took putting that wonderful foundation down of just understanding what was happening in my body to begin with and waking up my kinesthetic sense and having wonderful experienced hands guiding me and showing me what it could feel like um for me to kind of then be able to go that extra step and say wow i really want to figure out how to do this more independently when i don't have a teacher beside me and that really is what barbara gave us all was a breakdown um of what the

alexander technique does for us and she is an alexander technique teacher uh and her first book is called how to learn the alexander technique but it's kind of the introduction to body mapping so she she really just helped us you know figure out what was going on in the body in very literal ways with bony models and images to identify you know when a movement looked like it wasn't according to the actual design of the body you know and so we could we could watch ourselves and figure out oh yeah that's why i'm hurting there and then we can learn how to watch others and say oh well i know why you're hurting in your wrist because that bone isn't moving the way it's designed to it's really interesting and it struck me what you said when

you met her and you said i've been looking for this information all my life because what you said getting this injury here and there getting by i feel that so many people so many musicians have experienced that are still experiencing this and they feel this way they're looking for this information so i'm gonna try to get all of these answers out of you the first thing i'd i'd be curious is if that works for you let's start at the beginning and if you can please shed some light on what body mapping is for anyone who's not familiar with this modality And you've already talked a lot about Alexander Technique and how body mapping sort of stems from Alexander Technique. And I know that one of my listeners was wondering the difference between body mapping and Alexander Technique.

So can you unwrap this for us a little bit? What is body mapping? Yes, absolutely. There are several differences between the two techniques. techniques but if you look at any somatic method and and i'll just define that for those of you who aren't familiar with the term somatic it it's a study of the mind and the body together so feldenkrais is a somatic method and um i would say therapeutic pilates is a somatic method um you know there are many of them and and there you know there's kind of this one universal truth

about the body and how it's designed to move and all of these different modalities are just different entryways in to that one universal truth so we always encourage people who are studying you know any one of those to cross over go go have some work with the local at teacher or the local Feldenkrais teacher and start to find the the common ground not the differences so much but like what do they all share because that's where the truth is going to lie so it's you know that's just as a kind of a foundational starting point it's really important to understand that at its most ideal all of these somatic methods will enhance one another not be in competition with each

other which sometimes happens so body mapping is a way to understand how to move with the least amount of unnecessary muscular work in the body and the way we do that is by examining bony structures you'll see my skeleton hanging behind me here and we you know care like when I travel I carry around a bag of bones in my suitcase, which the border people love. I always get stopped and have that suitcase searched. But, you know, so it's very literally, this is the way this bone fits into this bone. And when it's working really well, it's sitting nice and centered in its little socket. And when it feels like that, it means that, you know, these muscles are going to be

working less hard and these muscles might be working more. So it's just kind of tying together the truth about our design and then people can go absorb it visually play with the models figure out okay what would that feel like if I did that on my body and we so we imitate what we're seeing in the bony models and that leads us to all of these discoveries about oh that feels so different than how I was moving five minutes ago and actually it does feel easier to place boccato that way or to vibrate that way because some of the unnecessary muscular work that happens when we're moving against our bony design has dropped away and when that drops away suddenly we have a balance in muscles and it feels just much easier to

move and it becomes a really exciting journey when you start applying that to a musical instrument the other important thing to know about body mapping is that barbara did develop it specifically for musicians and i mean she taught it to everybody that she did alexander technique with but she had been working with musicians for many years and she'd seen how injured so many of us were and she wanted to kind of dedicate this work to really you know the people who are already committed already know how to stand in a practice room and practice and make change happen she was really excited to work with musicians because they move so much faster she said once

than other parts of the population who maybe don't have that same discipline that daily discipline of you know changing their movement so it is for musicians specifically although lots of people do use it now

outside of music and it has to do with how efficiently we can move according to our actual design that information is so important to have you know is it Maya Angelou that says, when you know better, you do better. And I'm butchering that a little bit. She's far more eloquent than I am. But when you have this information, it's so true, this

awareness that it brings that every movement makes everything work differently. And I remember the very first time you came in the Music Mastery Experience, you brought your bag of bones And you explained to us the functionings of the shoulder and you showed us how the movement of the arm does not originate from the shoulder, but actually more from the collarbone. And that just blew my mind because I was already well advanced in years and had never known this. And when you look at an arm movement as a violinist the bow arm movement no longer perceiving it as originating from the shoulder down but more from the collarbone down it was just incredible it's so crazy that we don't all have this information available when you're you know when we're younger I agree yeah

my my mission in life is to get it into music education from day one and certainly at the university level i i find it just crazy that it's been around this long already it's 30 years a little more since barbara was developed developing it and um you know there's still just the odd isolated music school around the world who's using it um so anyway that is my mission to to try to get that entrenched in uh you know just general that's just how we teach music. I think this would be a good time actually to mention that you did write a book on how to teach body mapping to children, which I have, and it's great. And you signed it for me. Thank you for that. And unless I'm wrong, you are also working on another one coming up soon, also for

children, correct? The third one that I wrote is about the shoulder region. Those are the three that are actually kind of in the can okay there there are some plans on how to uh elaborate a little bit yes and I'm not sure if that's going to take book form or another form yet but you know on that early teaching um I'll flash this one just because I know your origins I don't know if you know that that book that you just mentioned has been translated into French I saw that on your website love body mapping your body mapping yes so that in that particular book you're talking about teaching body mapping to children is um really geared towards uh like the you know quick answer i was thinking of even classroom teachers who you know i might have 30 people in front of

them and they have you know a few minutes before you know after a long day of teaching at school to try to find an answer so it's kind of like the top 10 mismappings that we see particularly in younger people um so it's a very basic uh you know here's the problem this is what it looks like here's an idea or two that you can use to try to help your students even in a classroom you know explore that part of the body and then move on with the lesson and see excuse me if they can put that into their plane. So it's, yeah, compared to the other two books, which are highly detailed, it's pretty basic, but, you know, a fairly good overview of the common issues that we see and ways to address them. And I would invite any teacher who's listening to this conversation to

go on your website. I'm going to put a link in the show notes. I believe it's jennifer-johnson.co and just check out or is it underscore jennifer i'll put the link in the show note but you're right and check out these um these resources that are available and you know you just said mismapping and i i'm wondering if you could maybe paint a picture for us of what it looks like when someone is engaged in a movement playing with what they know and then with this mismapping and once they have the body mapping awareness what are some of these differences that you see can you maybe just paint a picture for us sure so just give a few examples of mismappings and and what it looks like okay that'd be great yes yeah absolutely a very common one

which we see across the board of all musicians singers included because even though they're not necessarily using their hands to make music with you know they're they're certainly gesturing with their arms and the way they're they're gesturing is um will affect how they're breathing and therefore their sound uh when people turn their hand palm up from palm up to palm down they frequently end up turning both bones and that can lead to a lot of injury and misery at both the wrist and the elbow, because the bone that runs down the pinky side of the forearm is only meant to bend for us. It's a hinge joint, basically. And the bone on the thumb side is meant to rotate for us in this way. So that's the one that really is designed to turn a hand

from palm up to palm down. So what I'm demonstrating right now is a really healthy rotation. You'll see that this bone is not moving out of my fingers it's it's rolling a little bit but it's not actually snapping out of my fingers and going somewhere else like that so that what I'm doing right now is a really unhealthy way to turn a hand down and you'll see the hand gets a little bit turned off to one side so that's one of the red flags we often look for is you know this is neutral for a hand if this is happening a lot it you know it's fine to go in that direction there's nothing wrong with that but if that's happening a lot and people are playing on a violin like that or you know both side might look like like this um or driving a car with this shape or turning

on you know a doorknob all of those are pretty clear indicators that the person has turned their hand palm down by using at least some of the bone that isn't designed to do that it's designed to just be a hinge I'll grab a model it's just easier to see it when it's on the bones and anyone who's listening to this on the podcast app you can hop on YouTube and you're going to see everything that Jennifer is showing right now in video version that is the joy of YouTube yes and by the way everything you're showing right now that looks a lot like what I do well it is common so yeah that one is the hinge joint i'm talking about and so that comes that's on the pinky side of the hand and then on the thumb side we have this other beautiful bone that's meant to swivel

and so that's what actually takes a hand from palm up to palm down at that swivel joint on the thumb side so that's an example of a very common mismapping and one that can lead to some of the worst misery that musicians suffer there are many things that can indirectly stem out of that mismapping one is that um you know if you're if you're really turning that bone all the time uh the thing is we're not put together with wires and nails like that bony model i just showed you is we do have stretchy connective tissues at the at the end of the bones which means that if i do turn that bone and and crank on it and turn it bones aren't really meant to do that but for a little while my stretchy tendons will let me do that uh and the you know the ligaments but if you

keep doing it you're going to inflame those tendons and so that's when we get into things like tendonitis and when if if i'm doing that a lot and my hand is always turned off out of neutral if it's over you know kind of turns like that we end up starting to put a lot of undue pressure on all those little eight wrist bones there and sometimes that can really narrow the i'll show it on the model again can really narrow the carpal tunnel yes yeah like that and then we end up with things getting impinged that are you know like things like nerves and blood vessels that run through that tunnel that you know supposed to be a nice wide tunnel like that but if it's being you know turned one to one side of the other then that tunnel gets more narrow and then we end up with

things like carpal tunnel syndrome so there are many um common and horrible injuries that come out of that one single mismapping of not understanding how to take your hand from palm up to palm down it's such a simple movement that can have so many severe consequences yes absolutely right and to see it like this is just you know it's very eye-opening yeah that's amazing it is I still uh you know almost 20 years on I'm still kind of thrilled and amazed every time I get to teach somebody a lesson about it because to watch them change their movement sometimes within days and sometimes their sound is an immediate improvement because the quality of movement has improved. I mean, it's just exciting. It's just downright thrilling. Yeah. And I love that term

that you're using to the quality of movement. Yeah. Yeah, we we often say that the well, Barbara used to teach us that the quality of our movement depends on the quality of the body map that governs the movement. So in other words, you know, the part of the brain where our body map is stored and where those messages are going to and from about our movement and I like to back up one more step and say the quality of our sound depends on the quality of our movement and the quality of our movement depends on the you know the quality of our body map and how accurate how accurately we've conceived how our design is and I'm smiling because I'm thinking all roads lead to mind over finger there you go exactly yes yes very good parallel there i have a listener question

um nicole was wondering if there's a wrong way to do body mapping um yes it's a hard answer but i will elaborate the most common mistake that beginning students in body mapping make is they study the manuals and they memorize all this anatomical information and they can list off you know all you know the hundreds of names of the bones in the body um but if it just remains in the part of the brain that's intellectual i if i'm if i'm remembering correctly it's frontal cortex but you know if it just remains as as intellectual information it's not going to change it's interesting but it's not

going to change your movement so the biggest leap we have to make is to kind of try to get away so much from the um i mean if you're interested in anatomy that's fantastic it's a great way to start but we pretty soon thereafter need to get it into practice and how it feels in our kinesthetic sense so we take that information that we just talked about those two bones at the elbow joint and immediately i you know i plunk somebody's arm down on a table and i draw a line here and i say okay let's not move that bone let's see what it feels like if you just rotate from here and leave this on its line and what you know how is that different than what you were doing this by rotating this way and you kind of make that person put it into their own words so they

remember what feels different and boom now you've got you're down the road to correcting a mismapping and actually changing the movement for good but it does it has to go into um what does it feel like and barbara was very very good at asking you know just insisting that people come up with some answers there's a famous story of her uh asking a young student what something felt like and as younger students often will do the person kind of shrugged and said well I don't know and her answer was well if you did know what would you tell me so she wasn't going to let them get away with not digging deeply enough into the kinesthetic sense to find out what it feels like you know they they she she felt very strongly about that and she

always used lots of questions always wanted the student to come up with their own answer about how it felt so they could then you know find that feeling again when they were in the practice room alone and that's so important to remember at every level in music making because so often we do this I call this over consuming of information where we try to find all of these answers outside of ourselves and we consume information both in an attempt to well maybe not consciously but in the way to find all of these answers and have them just happen and see results in instantaneously that's a hard word for a french canadian um in an instant there we go that's better um and at times we use that also as an excuse to stall and not take action but it's so

true that we need to take that information from the cerebral aspect and really make it come to life literally in our body yes exactly and that's the only way we're going to hear a change in our sound and it's the only way that we're going to get past the yucky feelings of you know tension or spasm or you know uh or pain just you know right out pain tendonitis is definitely one that stops people in their tracks because it's so painful so yeah it's um i have seen people try to just take it on intellectually. And they weren't that interested in actually how it could change their own movement. Now, frequently, I'll just add that those are often the musicians who are interested in teaching the information, but they never had an injury themselves.

So, you know, frequently, those people, in a way, they have a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to teaching the material. They have a huge advantage when it comes to playing music, because they were just natural movers and maybe never had very many mismappings to struggle with. But those of us who've had our backs against the wall and we know what it's like to have to stop playing many times in a career because of injury, first of all, our empathy is way up. You know, we know how miserable it is and we want to help other people prevent it. But it also, we were forced to make those changes in our body. There was no way we could continue if we didn't get kinesthetic about it um so you know there's there's sometimes a distinction between the

people who are fascinated in it as teachers but have never really had to retrain their own movement patterns um and then the folks who've been through it from you know a to z and had to figure out how to move it every every joint of their body in a different way those those are people who make really natural body mapping specialists. I have another listener question here. And it says, what are daily actions you recommend in order to stay healthy, mentally, healthy and mentally balanced? That's a fantastic question. Big scope there. I would say the thing that I have done myself, which has kept me most balanced, both physically and mentally is what we call floor work um some people call it constructive rest it's simply lying down on the floor like you do

in an alexander technique lesson maybe with your knees up maybe not but sometimes you're on your back most commonly i do it on my back on a yoga mat and i map from there so if there's a particular niggling sensation i have that i woke up with that morning i go in you know with my fingers and i start walking along my bones and I go, okay, there's one end of my collarbone. There's the other. Okay. Oh yeah. There's the ridge of my shoulder blade. Okay. So that's one whole unit that's going to move from this joint. And I just, you know, talk myself through it as I go into movement explorations and go looking for feelings of release. Now that's just one example. Most of the time I end up on the floor improving my breathing. You know, like you mentioned earlier,

when you first heard about the body mapping breathing information it seemed like you were breathing differently for the first time in your life uh as non as a non-singer and a non um you know wind or brass player uh string players you know frequently don't learn how to breathe at all uh in healthy ways so a lot of my floor time is spent with my hands on my ribs following the movement of those ribs from where they join the spine in the back each each of them forms a joint here and i just spend five or ten minutes just making sure that i can feel all of my ribs moving all the way up to here that i'm not exerting undue muscular work in my belly because i used to be a real belly breather and you know i mean i don't need to

tell you that some really good breathing every day does a lot for our mental health but it also frees a lot of the torso and arm muscles because you're just getting ribs moving in a regular way and that's giving a lovely little massage and stretch to a lot of the muscles that lie over the torso on the surface you know we kind of have surface muscles that move us around and then we've got really deep muscles that have more to do with supporting us so if you get a lot of those superficial muscles just massaged through beautiful breathing um you you're if i don't have a lot of time that's my go-to that's i just get on the floor and i breathe according to my design. If you're not quite sure on a really good map yet, you might end up

reinforcing some of your old habits. So it is something that you'll want to map and figure out exactly how those ribs are designed to move first. That's fascinating. I think it could be so helpful. And also, it is very much in line with something that I advocate, which is I call priming before practicing, which is to connect somehow with your body and your mind, your goals, all of this before practicing instead of just launching into the work mindlessly. That is such a wonderful way to bring this awareness before the work start. And you know, actually, that I think it ties into the next question I have for you from the listener, which is the last one before I take you through the rapid fire questions which are never rapid anyway but um and helena was wondering and i think

i know what your answer is going to be but if uh body mapping helps with non-physical issues like stress if this physical attention help with non-physical issues yes definitely it does um i don't know enough about brain chemistry to answer this in any officious way but I know that after I've done some of that work I just described with the breathing on the floor I just I can almost physically sense my brain being flooded with a different kind of chemical and it's what we call well-being just a sense of oh actually everything is okay with the world look at that i didn't feel that way 10 minutes ago um so you know in a in a very general sense i would say uh that it has a huge impact on our uh our mental well-being and we can carry

that through the day with us the other thing that comes to mind is simply the work we do in correcting our movement, especially over time, maybe not right at the very beginning of the process. Over time, we have this remarkable sense of empowerment. That's the word I just wrote on paper. Yeah, we have this sense that what might have stumped us earlier or made us feel less talented than others or you know and I'm of course that I only know this from my own experience you know growing up being a late starter watching others who were just remarkable young prodigies and never quite figuring out as a younger person how how they could move that way how could they make those sounds so easily because it didn't feel easy to me uh so you know you you you grow

up with a lot of self-doubt wondering is is it me what's what's wrong am I not talented I feel the music deeply I love it why you know why isn't this easy for me and the answer is it's not easy because our bodies are fighting themselves we're working against our design and so once you start turning that horse and cart around boy you start going oh this is so empowering and it's also empowering as a teacher to help others within minutes figure out how to do a technique that in the past may have taken me months to help somebody figure out uh but now you know in a lesson i can show somebody how to do a really good spiccato and you know they come back the next week and you know they can they can pretty much do it so uh it's it's that side of it as well as just

feeling like you've got tools and answers that everybody can benefit from yeah so substantial impact on the short and long term. That's wonderful. Okay. Let's go through a round of rapid fire questions. What skills do you think young musicians studying today should acquire in addition to learn their instrument? Well, clearly the most obvious thing that's going to come out of my mouth is I think people need to learn how to move in their bodies first. Some people who have been pioneers in this field have referred to this as their primary instrument and you know we need to practice it in the same way that we practice our musical instrument and when you bring the two of them together if they've been well practiced with good information

it can feel quite easy that is the most obvious thing there are other things that immediately came to mind when I thought of that question certainly I would have really loved having, you know, a really good business course in music school to learn about how to run my business better. That would have been super. But because I'm a movement expert, obviously, my primary answer to that question is just figuring out how to move without hurting yourself. I'd love to hear about a book or two that you would recommend to the listeners and i want to also recommend yours what every violinist needs to know about the body teaching teaching body mapping to children um and anyone go on your website and look all of

the resources you have there but now on to you your books that you recommend well if people are interested in body mapping i highly recommend barbara connable's very first book which is called how to learn the alexander technique and it's just a beautiful informal uh it's like you're sitting down with her and she's just talking you through it um really helpful very you know it kind of tells the beginning of the story uh outside here see i can never just answer with one answer can i always have to give more if people are interested in the brain science end of what body mapping is i highly recommend uh two books by norman doidge who is a psychiatrist in toronto the first one is called the brain that changes itself and the second one i believe is the

brain's way of healing and he has some remarkable stories in there of methods of healing that people in some cases have just stumbled on but that the brain takes to really well um you know using light differently using exercise differently just really alternative kind of surprising ways that the brain can remap itself to come out of disease and out of injury so yeah those are those have been really pivotal in my study um to learn you know just it just reinforces how quickly the brain can change if we give it the right stimulus sounds great and if you're watching this on youtube you see me taking notes i'm going to put all of these links in the show notes thank you so much this is actually adding on to my long list of books to read

it sounds really interesting what is a piece of advice that was given to you that you would like to pass on to the listeners well barbara had so many pearls of wisdom it's it's it's got to be one of hers um she was she was so uh huge in my life as a mentor um and i have so much to thank her for i i suppose one of the ones that i love most that she gave me was what my job as an artist as a performing artist was because quite frankly nobody had ever talked about that to me i had never slashed it out clearly in my mind what the importance was of what I was doing or why I was walking out on stage she said to me in a lesson once that my job as a performing artist is to go on stage and experience the music at the same time and in

the same way that I wanted the audience to experience it which bowled me over because it was such a mouthful of new ideas that I had to really parse it out and figure out oh you mean I have to actually have an idea of what I want the audience to experience uh you know emotions ideas okay all right and then there's this idea of experiencing it at the same time uh and in the same way because I had had I had suffered terribly from performance anxiety probably because I didn't trust what my body could do for me when I walked on stage and I was nervous and she just really put her finger on it you know that if you're committed to experiencing it while you're standing there playing it it it comes way more about the composer you're experiencing

something that's already been created by a composer you're helping bring it to life but it's so much more about the composer at that point than it is about you that it takes a lot of pressure off and it also just forces you to have your musical intention firmly in place before you walk out to perform something so that was that's um one of the one of the best things she ever gave me that's beautiful thanks for sharing this with us you're welcome finally we always have the actionable tip and i'm sort of tempted to suggest one for you but i want to i don't want to steal it from you. But I, whatever you say, I should let you go first. But whatever you say, I want to say what you shared earlier also about the wakeful rest is so interesting. So that could

be something that the listeners could do. So now I don't know if I stole your punch. No. What would you offer as a quick actionable tip for the listeners? Yeah. It is related to that, but it's a bit more general rather than just doing it on the floor in those moments when you're also mapping your body it's what we call inclusive awareness and it's an opening of an awareness from perhaps if you were like me and you were you were a real concentrator and you you know you ended up furring your brow and you were thinking hard and whenever we do that the muscles of the body tighten and shorten and narrow

so when we start teaching ourselves to walk out of the door in the morning and not just have our eyes on the ground or on the key that we're putting in the lock you know as we're locking the door or getting into the car if we can just open that and train ourselves to let even just the vision open so that as I'm looking at the car door to open it I can also see the red leaves on the tree to my right and you know the cat passing me uh on the way into the house on the left just that the your vision just stays wider plus i mean it's it's about all of your senses not just the vision but that's a good place to start if you're going to start practicing it you'll notice that your breathing changes right away it becomes more easy and free and taking that to if you've

Practice that throughout the day and then you come into your practice session. And if you have a shift, you're concerned about getting in tune or a bow stroke that you're concerned hasn't been working great, right before that technique comes, if you just open up and let, even if you're not moving your eyes off of the page of music or off of your bow, if peripherally you can see the movement of a car passing on the street outside the window, it changes everything about how your muscles behave. it frees you. And it's just a really wonderful technique to cultivate as a musician, so that if you start to feel yourself tightening, it's a really quick and easy way to just

widen everything, including your muscles, and then you can trust your body. I love this. This is extraordinary. We're all gonna have to try it. Jennifer, thank you so much for being here I want to invite all of the listeners to visit your website jennifer jennifer hyphen johnson.co for all of these resources um check your books purchase your books we were talking before the episode started about what title to give you and I was kind of joking that we should call you the body mapping goddess and I I think that works I'm gonna go with that. But I feel like what you've shared with us is so powerful. And it could potentially be life changing for so many of the people who are listening right now. So I just really want to thank

you for taking this time to be with us today. Oh, Renee, it is such a pleasure to visit you and your listeners. I'm really grateful for the invitation. Thank you. Thank you guys so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Mind Over Finger podcast. If this content was helpful for you, please share with everyone you think could benefit from it. Take a screenshot, share on social media, and tag me, I'm Mind Over Finger everywhere.

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