Grade 43

A podcast entailing 5 kids, 3 dogs, 2 cats, 1.5 fish, a lizard and 13 guitars

Mental health and Guitar

Mental health and guitar
I meet with a therapist every week to talk about pretty much everything. I don't believe I'm dealing with any sort of clinical problems but talking with a therapist helps me work out issue that cause amongst other things fatigue and general crankiness. Take guitar playing for example. For the last year I've been focused on "I need to learn jazz so I can be a better player all around". And while I always suggest to everyone that playing should always be fun, I believe I've left that out of my own practice. It's been a year of "this are things I should really work on". And now I've found myself in a spot where I'm pretty hard on myself because I feel like I know even less music now. But really, the mistake I've made is to literally only work on things I don't know very well. So obviously I'm bad at them! Duh. I forgot to mix in playing things I know well, or creating fun music and only worked on hard things. So for the next month or two I've "given myself permission" to only play things I think are fun, even if they might not be part of "that supposed path to awesome". Or might seem like a waste of time. I don't believe you should always purely tinker and noodle in your practice. I just think that it should be a component of your practice. Play something fun and you are good at, and then practice something new and challenging.
Here's a small video noodling along to Eric haugens new course caged zen. It's terrific and just what I needed at the moment: https://youtu.be/Y7_Ps6WOxjA
Cheers

    Update: I just learned about this excellent article on music and mental health https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-start-making-music-alone-or-with-others?utm_source=pocket-newtab