When you have little time to practice shakuhachi, what should you do to make progress and be happy with your practice?
Here are some tips to help you. Let me know which one you find the most useful!
Continue reading 6 Shakuhachi Practice Tips for Busy PeopleWhat is your relationship with your breathing? Do you ignore it, train it, observe it?… Has the Covid-19 pandemic affected your awareness about your breathing in any way?
Blowing the shakuhachi is a deep breathing training. Over the years, I notice that my breathing’s awareness and quality have improved, and as a result, the connection with my breathing has increased my inner peace, my ability to manage my emotions, and more generally, my feeling of happiness.
Since February 2022, I give live meditation sessions of the app Insight Timer. I share with the participants the deep breathing meditation training in relation to the musical tradition of shakuhachi, which combines the unique sounds of the flute with inspiring music.
Being connected with people from all over the world at the same time is really special.
These sessions are FREE, so don’t hesitate to follow me and attend my sessions!
You can also train by yourself anytime, listening to my audio meditations on the app. Keep reading to discover how.
Subscribe to my blog here and don’t miss any post:
When comes the end of the year, let’s take a moment to look back, reflect and celebrate accomplishments!
What milestones did you reach this year? What new pieces, techniques, did you learn? Can you be grateful to yourself for your efforts? (and your teacher’s?)
Even holding on to your practice is already an accomplishment. More, (more pieces, techniques, etc.) is not always necessary.
Or was it blowing RO? Gaining in awareness? Listening to yourself? Releasing excess tensions?
Is there anything related to shakuhachi, even small, that can you celebrate?
Think about your work, your personal life, your social life,…, what milestones can you celebrate?
Doing less can also be an accomplishment: what things, thoughts, did you let go of that didn’t serve you anymore?
Did you make space for new things, or just made space for… more space in your life?
Could you pick up (up to) five milestones and celebrate them? What were the five most important things for you this year?
Allow me to celebrate with you my top 5 shakuhachi milestones!
Continue reading Let’s Celebrate Milestones!I don’t know for you, but for me 2021 is being even more challenging than 2020. Or is it that, thanks to my meditation and shakuhachi practice, I become more and more aware of my own stress? And others’ stress as well?
In any case, I would like to give a follow up to the two posts about Stress and Shakuhachi that I wrote last year (Part 1 and Part 2).
In those posts, I wrote about the stress you can experience while playing shakuhachi (or any other music instrument) in front of others (teacher, public performance,…) and how to practice to reduce it.
In this post however, I’d like to address how the wisdom of shakuhachi can help you in your daily life to become aware of your own stress… and work on it.
Continue reading Stress and Shakuhachi (Part 3) – Practices to reduce stressIn the history of shakuhachi, there is a strong shift: when the shakuhachi went from being a spiritual instrument to becoming a music instrument. It was at the end of the XIXe century, during the Meiji era. Actually it was a dreadful period for Zen Buddhism, thus shakuhachi. The Komuso monks were not allowed anymore and had to give lessons and concerts to survive. The shakuhachi took its part in chamber music with koto and shamisen to play “sankyoku“.
Apparently the zen tradition was still allowed in a couple of temples (to be practiced secretly?) and after some time, was allowed more officially again. I am not an historian so forgive my approximations in this story.
What inspires me is how the shakuhachi survived this transition: opening to the outside world. Like it followed an underground stream to reappear further, when its time had come again. In the meantime, the Tozan school of modern shakuhachi was born and Japanese music was more and more influenced by the Western culture.
And then, in the 1960’s, shakuhachi was almost dead again. Shakuhachi master Yokoyama Katsuya realised that the shakuhachi had to be brought further to the outside world, meaning outside of Japan. Shakuhachi reached the USA, Australia, and later Europa and the rest of the world, other Asian countries included. The interest for traditional shakuhachi in Japan is still low (please correct me if I’m wrong here), but still exists. And shakuhachi has reached different of styles of music: jazz, pop music , movies, video games, etc.
Yet, the spiritual tradition is still alive and has been developing more and more outside of Japan as well. This is fascinating. It makes me wonder whether you need a balance between the inner and outer world to embrace shakuhachi fully. If so, how do you find this balance?
Continue reading Shakuhachi WisdomWhy is the upper register Kan so difficult for many of us?
When I started learning shakuhachi, I was already a professional flutist, and still, as a beginner shakuhachi student, I found that the Kan register was a bit challenging, especially the two higher notes (Hi and I). There was something there that took me a bit more time to feel and master. Although the lips technique is quite similar to the flute’s technique, I needed to find some adjustments. What was going on?
Continue reading How to play “Kan”?!?!?When I opened my Virtual Shakuhachi Dojo on Patreon last February (https://www.patreon.com/shakudojo), I started to film tutorial videos for the patrons of the KAN Tier. Once a month, I address a specific topic or technique. So far I have published videos about abdominal breathing, embouchure for (absolute) beginners, the basic scale otsu, how to play in kan, how to attack a sound, how to warm up, meditation in nature. When you subscribe, you also get access to a PDF-file with basic exercises for practicing long tones, fingers, octaves and intervals. In the coming months, I’ll be filming how to practice these exercises and release the videos in my Dojo.
Why do you have to pay to get access to this content?
Continue reading Tutorial VideosThe two last months I have been quite busy recording videos in the nature (read previous blog post about it here). It started a bit out of frustration: concert halls desperately closed for so long, impossibility to make plans to work in the short run, living on the hope that it would get better after the summer when most people got vaccinated to start to perform again,… But hope is not enough and I couldn’t just stay put and wait for the situation to improve. The current pandemic has given me the opportunity to challenge myself to find other ways to create and still go on, like creating a virtual Dojo on Patreon (visit it here).
Some artists in bigger structures and/or better network manage to organise live streams, I don’t. Luckily I love birds and birdsongs. Playing and recording in nature turned out to be a very nice activity yet challenging. It means playing in the cold, in the dark, in the rain, in the mud, in the wind, without the supportive acoustic of a concert hall or any amplification… It means going out of my comfort zone and letting go of my blockages. It means playing by heart.
But it also means being surrounded by birdsongs, enjoying space, deep inner peace, being present to everything happening. This is so rewarding!
In this post, I’ll describe how I pushed my limits and I’ll give some tips to play by heart.
Continue reading Shakuhachi by HeartPlaying by heart is a path to meditation.
The student: -I don’t make any progress. How can I make progress?
Me: -Practice.
The student: -But I practiced!
Me: -What did you practice exactly? And how?
Most of the times it turned out that the student didn’t practice that much after all. Or not WHAT I asked him/her to practice. Or not HOW I asked him/her to practice. Why? I wonder. Maybe is it not that obvious for everyone what practicing means?
So here are some thoughts about practicing shakuhachi. And about practicing in general, not only for shakuhachi. I am an amateur photographer and once I asked a friend who is a professional photographer how I could improve my photos and she answered “Practice this and that”. So practice practice practice. Meaningfully.
Even if you think that you know what practicing is, please read this post further. I’ll be happy to hear if it matches what you already know and/or if you have some more tips to share.
Continue reading Practice Practice PracticeIn the Netherlands we entered 2021 in full lockdown. No fireworks, no party. With the hope that the world situation will improve dramatically in 2021 with vaccination, I started to dream more and more of a virtual space to develop my activities and connect with more people. This dream has become a virtual shakuhachi dojo on Patreon! Discover it here.
It is a space where I will share every month the different aspects of my work with shakuhachi: recordings, meditations, tutorial videos and creations. Choose your abonnement and you will receive monthly benefits and exclusive contents. If I get enough Patrons, it will help me to realise some of my dreams!!
When you realise that the ultimate happiness is being yourself and that nobody can be better than you at it, then the competitive ego disappears. Remains the deep motivation to do your best at being yourself, for you and for the world. This is what this project is about.
Hélène Seiyu 聖 優 Shakuhachi 