Lessons From Injury, Healing, and Re-Embodiment

Playing piano is a rare blend of the mental, the emotional and the physical. It is easy enough to appreciate the mental and emotional sides when listening to a good pianist, but people don’t always realize just how physical it is, or how much of the body is involved in high-level piano playing.

Sometimes pianists learn this the hard way, like I did, by getting injured. I developed tendonitis in my early 20’s and had to totally reevaluate my physical approach to the piano.

Fortunately I had the ideal teacher to help me through that process. One of the first observations he made was that I went “too high” when I was playing. I was up in my head. The relearning I went through over the next year involved getting back into my body and developing a healthier relationship to the piano from that place.

During the same year I also saw a medical specialist in musicians’ injuries who reinforced the same perspective. He gave me a rather unexpected prescription: to go watch a football game. He wanted me to be inspired by and model the athleticism of the players. That felt like a step too far for my sensitive artist-self, but I did follow another of his recommendations and start working out at a gym.

We play music with the same body we use for everything else. Embodiment at the piano comes easier when you cultivate it in other areas of life, and practicing at the piano nourishes the rest of your life in return.

Most of us have some memory of an embodied learning process, whether it’s through an art form, playing a sport, or building sandcastles as a child. This has been a standard feature of human life for the entire history of our species.

Modern times are exceptional in that it is possible to stop learning with your body as you get older. The natural embodiment that children display gets trained out of them and many people shift into a life of the mind, making their living through ideas and abstractions.

I can appreciate the achievements of the collective human mind as much as anybody, but we can’t thrive while living permanently in that realm. Piano or no piano, we have to cultivate embodiment or else our physical and mental health deteriorates.

It turns out playing piano is an excellent way to get into your body if you approach it with that intention. It’s an entirely different ball game from typing on a computer. We are traversing a 4-foot-long piano keyboard, moving keys of significant weight, producing real sound vibrations in the space we inhabit, and engaging our emotional self, which also resides in the body.

The early stages of my re-embodiment at the piano were sometimes awkward and frustrating, which is to be expected when you learn a new way of moving. Then came fleeting moments of excitement when it clicked, followed by unsuccessful attempts to recreate them.

In the physical world, you can’t always repeat the same success using the same method.

Reality is infinitely variable. When you play the same piece again the next day, your body, your mind, the piano, the humidity and temperature, the ambient sound, all parts of the system will be a little different.

The only way to get reliable results is to allow things to be different and keep some flexibility in your physical approach. You tap into a physical intelligence that adapts intuitively in the moment to the ever-changing conditions.

There are some standard patterns of course; patterns of notes with corresponding patterns of movement. These are an essential part of what I pass on to students, but the patterns are applied with endless variation. How else could they work in a piece of music I’ve never seen or heard before?

I do my best teaching when seated at the piano, which is why I’m happy to be doing more and more of my teaching online.

When there is a technical challenge I don’t yet know how to deal with, I need to feel it in order to know what to do. I might be able to imagine playing a passage and give a recommendation, especially if I know the piece well, but in many cases I absolutely need to touch the piano. I turn the question over to my body and it can usually find an answer.

Sometimes the answers surprise me. They are solutions I never would have thought of.

The joy of those revelations reminds me of how I feel riding a bicycle, which is a perfect example of embodied knowledge. You can study or read about riding a bike all you want, but you can’t “know how to ride a bike” until you’ve been on one and ridden it.

Playing piano is one path among many to get back into the body, but in my view it’s a damn good one. I’m grateful to have found it myself and grateful to be helping others down the same path.

I help pianists expand and injury-proof their technique through whole body integration. For more information, click here.