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Hi Luis,
Good questions. I think of quieting the mind and getting into an optimal “headspace” (ha!) for performing to be related, but not necessarily the same place. In that the goal when performing optimally isn’t just to quiet the mind, but then use that mental bandwidth to focus on “the music” – i.e. sound, phrasing, pulse, etc.
I’m ok if you struggle with the “be hear now” exercise, in that I think this is really just about cultivating awareness. So if you notice your thoughts wandering as soon as that happens, you’ve really accomplished the goal of that exercise.
The goal then, is to figure out what is most helpful to keep your thoughts occupied with. Where, for instance, if you are able to keep your thoughts really engaged with “singing brain”, there’s not as much mental bandwidth left to be able to think thoughts that aren’t relevant or performance-enhancing. So the skill isn’t to not have thoughts, but be so busy thinking relevant and helpful music-related thoughts, that you can’t think unrelated/unhelpful thoughts. It’s like if I asked you to sing old macdonald had a farm in your head, while asking you to count backwards from 100 by 3 out loud. It would be really difficult to keep the singing going as you did the math. Same sort of thing with performing – you want to be so busy engaged in the music-making thoughts, that you can’t also self-monitor/analyze/critique/worry, etc. at the same time.
And the reason why this is so much more difficult with rep you know well, is that it’s because your brain doesn’t have to work as hard to play something you know really well. So focus becomes more challenging, hence the importance of creating a mental “script” and practicing sticking to that script even when your mind wants to wander to other things.
Does that help to clarify?
Noa