Personal Developement

Practicing “The Gig” vs. Practicing “Guitar”

In Jack Canfield’s “The Success Principles” he describes two olympic athletes who at each training session would do a “mock olympics”. The coach would call out their names exactly in the format that would go down in the real olympic competition, score them perfectly and award them the gold medal.

Of course the reason it appeared in Canfield’s book was that they did win the gold medal in the real competition. When they were in the competition they felt like they were back at their gym with their trainer.

This is a very deep lesson actually. It’s about bringing yourself through sensations – auditory, visual, and kinesthetic – into the feeling of the ACTUAL moment that you’ll be in. It’s a fast forwarding of sorts, and actually you can take yourself from the 4th dimension (time) somewhere else in the 5th dimension (all possibilities starting from now). By living in the end result, you find your way to get there….auto-magically!

I didn’t readily see how I could use this concept with music performance until last week.

Today is Feb 6, 2010. In about 3 weeks I start an 8 week tour through Germany, Austria the UK and I finish off in Belgrade, Serbia. That’s my “olympics”. I gotta kick butt, but practicing at home is so different from being on a concert stage. (Or is it?)

At home, I can just sling the guitar on and walk around in my pajamas and play a tune 100 times until it feels good. I can have a coffee, chat with a friend on a break, and go back to play some more.

The concert stage is totally different. (Or is it?) In concert…

I need to entertain for 90-120 minutes.There’s no going back to fix mistakes and no playing the same tunes 3,4,5 times.There are lights shining brightly in my eyes so I sometimes can’t see the frets.Playing through a PA presents a new sound problem – all of a sudden I need to adjust to a new sound.Jacket buttons hit the guitar unexpectedly.I get thirsty, I sweat and I gotta make people happy!I have to get the vocal mic (for beatbox) and the guitar to behave together sonically.I have to play a tune or two that may be a bit rusty, and play it like I mean it.It’s a jungle out there!

Doing the first few concerts is disconcerting if I have been off the road for a month or two, to say the least.

Then I realized the meaning of this story about the athletes. As well, after listening to videos and audio programs of great speakers like Jack Canfield, Brian Tracy, Esther & Jerry Hicks, and others – I realized that a SERIOUS amount of prep work goes into what they do. It’s no accident that they pull off their seminars and workshops with total finesse.

I had my AHA! moment. I decided I’d “do a concert” here at home by myself instead of my usual “practice routine”. Of course I’ve done many concerts before but I saw a new opportunity to improve my show and up my game! I could do exactly what the athletes did. For many this would be a “nice idea” but I decided to follow through and really do it, so that I could report back to you.

I set up my PA system here at home (my neighbors got a concert I think…) and wrote out my concert program. I got dressed up in my suit, and even shone my desk lamp in my eyes to simulate stage lights. I set up my mic, set a glass of water nearby, and everything. I put cologne on, and set up the video camera. I tuned up in the bathroom (my dressing room) and came out, announced myself the way most emcees do, and tore up 2 hours worth of music.

Unfortunately the only groupie in sight was my cat, Brina. 🙂

All I can say is WOW. I actually got so many of the “head trips” of playing a concert I saw that this is truly great performance practice technique. Duh, some people call it a dress rehearsal, but once again – this is something not generally “taught” to solitary musicians.

Solo musicians run their “pieces” but rarely “run their show” I didn’t think that it was possible in this habitat (my studio apartment) to access the difficulties of the concert environment, but it actually was!

My biggest goal now is to forgive myself for mistakes on stage and continue with the music, and to be more and more “in the moment” while playing. Great performers “flow” and it can only get better and better. I’m curious to report back from the road and say if this practice technique was in fact helpful.

It’s also interesting to feel the pacing of songs as they fall between other songs. I’ve done this now 2 days in a row, and the “flow” of the set felt much more natural today. Damn, I wonder where this will get to after a week, 2 weeks, etc.

In watching the video (I only caught the first hour, my flip cam hard drive got filled up) I was surprised, as I suspected I’d be. Songs I thought were “B” level were “A” level, and vice versa. I also caught some serious flaws in my presentation, realized I need a wardrobe and especially need hairdo upgrade. 🙂

I am sure my mind will churn for days on this, but heck I’d rather start this thought process now than after the first few gigs! Seeing one’s performance as an outsider is totally different than the inner experience of doing it.

Yes, it’s important to be a great musician, and a great guitarist or instrumentalist – but performance “chops” are a whole other set of skills. If you are performing anywhere as a public speaker, reader, comedian, magician or musician – set up a performance environment for yourself and try this NOW.

“Great musicians can be sucky performers and great performers can be sucky musicians.” That’s my quotable quote of the day. And, guess who gets the bigger money at gigs? 🙂

If you are a performer of any sort, do try this at home! You’ll be amazed at what you experience.

Meditation, Affirmation, Vibration and Groove

By Adam Rafferty 3 Comments

In quantum physics, the very very – teeny weeny (the scientific term) small stuff is examined. When we see how the very small behaves – we discover new ideas about how the big stuff behaves. When we see that a photon behaves according to the “observer” we then see that life around us does too, and so on.

Many quantum physicists turn to meditation. Through the study of physics, they actually arrive at similar conclusions that eastern religions, particularly Buddhism, have.

Since I was as young as I can recall I always saw the “time” problem – that clocks do not measure time and that we are in a constant “now”. The idea of time being a string or thread belongs to one mode of our thought. I can recall seeing a second hand move and just thinking “now, now, now” and that the clock was not saying anything real at all.

Imagine if we looked at units of time the way we look at the big and small of the universe and quantum physics. What happens in the smallest moments happens in the biggest moments too, and vice versa. What can we observe?

Did it ever occur to you that if you clap your hands, that sound itself is thousands of moments in time? Don’t believe me? Record it and look at the sound. You can chop it up a million times! Think on this and you’ll see that our notion of what a “moment” in time is is really impossible to measure and is totally relative to our minds.

Did it ever occur to you that you can look back at years and years of time in a single moment? Thousands of people reporting near death experiences indicate that they reviewed their entire lives in a single brief moment.

The measurement of time is strictly part of our apparatus as humans, and has no real absolute value. 15 minutes seems like a lifetime at the post office. A fun activity makes time vanish! And so on.

I am practicing meditation, use affirmations and I set goals. Suddenly I have “peeped” or noticed a thread which binds them together, beautifully. They are the same, when the measurement of time is eliminated!

Meditation as I am practicing it now is a “coming back to the breath”. When the mind wanders and I notice it, I come back. Eventually I hit a flow state, outside time. The main thing to note is the focus of the mind.

Affirmations are something I do daily. Yet the idea is the same, is it not? No matter where my mind is, I am bringing it back to a single point of focus just as I did in meditation – only on a daily basis as opposed to a moment by moment basis. The allowed interval of “non concious focus” is 12 hours (if I say them 2x a day) Isn’t this a sort of meditation on a spread out scale? A regular rhythm and coming back to a mental focus.

Someone once pointed out to me that a musical tone, when slowed down starts to sound like a pulse. When you start a lawn mower you hear the pulse, and as it speeds up we hear the tone. We call these 2 sounds something different, but they are not really different. A high frequency on down to a cycle of thousands of years can still be a groove. “Frequency” is a term relative to our human experience and apparatus but there are high and low frequencies out of the range of our perception. Hearing someone sing an in tune “pitch” is in fact – perfect rhythm.

This is all just food for thought. Just as the quantum physics point to a new idea of behavior of the very large things, maybe we can look at short, fast vibrations of time to understand longer cycles in time, and vice versa.

Maybe in fact meditation, affirmation, vibration, rhythm and groove are different words for ultimately the same thing – just with different frequencies and intervals of time. Even in our regular waking state we often talk about “staying focused” to accomplish things. We set goals and come back to the vision of completed goals to choose our actions of the month, week, day – and down to the moment.

Meditiation is a focus in the moment. Affirmations, going to the gym, practicing an instrument etc are a daily focus. Church, laundry and other things of that nature are a weekly focus. Holidays are a yearly focus. Take time out of the picture and you have focused activity on a regular basis.

Until next time….

Love, Eternity and Watching Life Flow By

By Adam Rafferty 2 Comments

Greets Friends.

Just yesterday I got word that my beloved little cat Brina, is diabetic. Ok, no sobbing out there, stop it! I had a cat years ago who was diabetic and yep, it sucks and eventually they die. Most importantly, I’m gonna make sure this little critter gets a lot of love and comfort for her remaining days here which could be weeks, maybe months.

This brings up a lot of feelings of course, and I start to know what I am made of spiritually. It’s easy to say the words “we are all one, we never die, time does not exist, there’s no real losing or winning in life” and so on. But when things do in fact happen in life, the “rubber hits the road” and then we know what we are made of. Words go out the window, and it is time to “walk the walk”.

And now, I am standing on another peak of my spiritual landscape.

I look back and see that a woman with whom I was very serious for 3 years (we’ve been apart for sometime, no worries) is leaving NYC in a few days. My God – my marriage to my ex seems like a lifetime ago. My little kitty will leave soon, as my others have. Goals which were wild dreams but a year ago have been accomplished and are yesterday’s news. Where did it all go? 🙂

But….

I look ahead and of course there are new things coming, new relationships, new music, new experiences as well. Vibrant relationships, joys, music and more experience awaits.

What’s constant is the eternal “flow of life”. The flow never stops. There is this process of watching it all flow by, and as I watch I know this – when the “stuff” of life appears and dissapears, the only real thing left is love. That which remains after all the “Broadway Show” of life is simply love itself – a colorless, invisible essence that is a delicious, essential vibration and the basis of all that we do and strive for.

By seeing what changes, you then can see what doesn’t change and what is eternal. It then becomes clear that Love and Eternity are intertwined, and maybe even perhaps 2 ways to describe the same thing. Maybe they are other ways of describing and/or knowing God. They are certainly closer to knowing the Essence or Source of life than words or imaginings could be because they are an experience – not an idea.

When everything rises and falls, we see that Love alone is real.

Until next time…

Adam Rafferty – Message to UK Fans & Free Cd Offer

By Adam Rafferty Leave a Comment

Greets Friends!

This is a big thank you to friends and fans worldwide, but a message especially aimed at my UK based fans. I will be doing some concert dates there April 2-15, 2010.

I get emails constantly asking when I am going to be on tour there and am eager to play there.

This is part of my “full court press” to get the gigging, touring and most importantly – friendship – going full steam ahead there.

Free Autographed CD Offer to UK fans

Just send an email to the email address ukfans at adamrafferty dot com and you’ll get a “secret passphrase” immediately. Of course I will also personally answer your email and we’ll have a nice dialog!

Be the first person at any UK gig to tell me the secret passphrase and you get a FREE autographed CD.

This seems like a fun thing to do. As well, by sending me the email I will get to meet YOU and at a glance see my UK fan base.

Dates are on the itinerary page at adamrafferty.com

See you on the road! 2 minute video message to UK fans below…

Adam

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nY3hdIlIjI0]

Diving Back Into Life

By Adam Rafferty Leave a Comment

Greetings Friends!

Upon returning from my last tour, I felt oddly disconnected when I got back to NYC. Yes it was my apartment – just as I had left it, yet it felt like a memory. Relationships with family, friends and everyone here felt distant as if they were a memory from a past life. I had been away almost 2 months and went from daily European trains, planes, automobiles and people 24/7 to – total silence! AHHHHH! 🙂

When I got back I thought – that’s it. I’m gonna be “the monk” of Jackson Heights. I meditated a lot and looked at the contents of my mind. I didn’t want to go back to the “old life” of running around NYC and the b.s. drama of people, family, and egoic pursuit of anything wearing high heels. The quiet and calm felt great and made me feel very in control.

I then had a good taste of the waters that demonstrate “life is not outside it’s inside”. It’s weirdly and beautifully true when you see without a doubt that you, we, I create our own reality.

We assemble pictures in our minds, an add meaning to them. Even if something out of control happens, we create our story and mental organization of what hits our eyes and ears and we are 100% responsible for the story we tell ourselves. (This is a tough one to swallow.)

I realized that many people don’t get the chance to have this quiet experience that I was having – to sit on top of some kind of peak (which felt a bit lonely) and able to look at life in this quiet, still way. I am not saying it was “deep” or even pleasurable. I am just saying it was quiet and clear(er).

I have no kids, no pressing drama, no madness that I am caught up in the way most people are. Most of my friends and family are caught up in the drama of work, the non stop noise of raising a family, psychotic behavior in their interpersonal relationships, the drama of debt, and so on.

To be honest, the quiet and spaciousness was delightful at times and very disconcerting at other times. I’d feel “now I am free and my spirit can now soar into the heavens”. This would be swiftly complimented with waves of lonliness and wanting to also “have a story”, have human interaction and contact. It was equal parts of pleasure and pain.

It’s a helluva lesson to see that everything is okay in one’s life and negative feelings can still bubble up. It’s the cure to blaming others and blaming circumstances. I had to take a look at this and had to admit that I am not done developing and learning.

The little jolts of pain and lonliness were not something though I just wanted to “squelch” and look away from, repress or escape from. “What is this quiet? What is this lonliness?” I thought. Then I’d see how just with my own thoughts I could change feelings. I could make lonliness vanish without actually having other people involved!

I saw one night that a state of “seeking and wanting” rather than a state of “having and loving” was my own responsibility and that the latter would be an attitude of joy, the former resulting in lonliness.

I noticed also – and amazingly – that all these sensations were all inside, and that I was 100% responsible for my reality. Thoughts and pictures led to emotions, and I get to choose the thoughts and pictures. (Another hard one to swallow.)

Unlike most people whose life feels like a runaway freight train of outer circumstances and blaming other people, I got to take a quiet peaceful and sometimes lonely look at the whole picture. It felt sober and healthy to wake up on some chilly sunny winter mornings by myself and simply “be”, and reduce my “thinking and spinning”.

At that point in my spiritual readings the passages about relationships being “the basis for our growth” started speaking to me and making sense. The next biggie to see is that others (YOU) and myself stem from the same source, and that we are truly “one” in nature and not separate. Thus, having others in my life just allows a deeper inquiry into who I am and why I am here. And, relationships with others will surely show me weak spots the fabric of my personality and psyche.

The joys of giving and receiving, the birth of new friendships, and the sometimes gritty dealings with family and close friends are something I am not done with just yet. I felt it was time to dive back in and saw that the perfect situations for spiritual growth can actually lie in everyday relationships.

Straight ahead! Until next time….