Please watch this video blog by clicking on the link below:
Quality Verses Quantity....Beauty Verses The Beast...Art Verses Athletics...you are just as unique...just as important...just as precious...as anyone else on Earth...in spite of how fast, how strong, how smart...everyone else SEEMS to be.
I try to keep these posts in the five to seven minute time period, about the time of the average short talk common to many speaking clubs.
My wife, Jill, recently remarked that I sometimes try to get too much into some of my posts, my blogs here, my video blogs. I used to have a musician friend that, like many of the musical associates in my early days, viewed “becoming a better musician” as an athletic event, instead of as an art....mmmm...something relating to strength rather than beauty. Just as an example is a guitar player I used to “gig” with, let's call him Carlos.
When we were “on the road”, cooped up in our motel room, Carlos would sit in the bathroom...because of the natural reverb of the porcelain...and the privacy, I suppose, and play scale and arpeggio exercises to the metronome on his guitar, increasing the speed a little each day and week.
He came out one day all excited, the most excitement I had seen in weeks, tears of joy in his eyes, and proclaimed, “I just played my scales in sixteenth notes at quarter-note equals one forty-four!!!”
Now just to cut through all that muso jargon, the musician talk, THAT meant that he could play a stream of notes real fast, in a blur...on his guitar. Now, the thing is, with playing for speed, is that, just like Gunslingers in the Old West, there's always someone faster. And even if you are the fastest, you gotta maintain that speed.
Pablo Casals, the famous Cello player once said, at the age of eighty, that if he missed practicing one day, HE would notice, two days, his fellow players would notice and three days, the entire world would notice...on that third thing, I think he exaggerated at little...
The problem was, when we said, “Take it, man,” to Carlos, he would play dozens of notes in the first three seconds of his solo in a continuous blur and you could see the average crowd's eyes widen for a split-second in amazement, then they'd go back to socializing and completely ignore him. He was fantastic, practiced and polished, but he left most of the audience in a blur of notation in the first three seconds, not taking them along with him on the musical journey of imagination.
This kept Carlos playing in groups as a guitar player, because, to other musicians, he was over-the-top impressive. BUT...when we played a gig featuring a sax player, an undergrad from a local university, who played at warp speed by comparison and who's imagination had been touched by the finger of God, Carlos packed up his guitar and went home after the first set, probably to practice on his speed.
While I was looking down at my feet and noticing my socks had been blown off, I think that Carlos said something like, “Hey Rock, here's my keys, would you mind following me out to the parking lot and backing my car out while I put my fingers under the left front tire? After Tommy plays, there's nothing left to say...” meaning anything Carlos played after the crowd heard Tommy the Sax Player, would be... second place...and the guitar player could not take second place, because of the way he approached his art...in my opinion.
The reason I'm telling this story is because of something I covered, maybe glazed and blurred over,...in a previous video...
And that is what we do at the Flow Center during our sessions. And that's called Ego Strengthening. And Ego Strengthening has two parts and these happen toward the end of the focused relaxation part of a visit to us.
The first is to have every part of the client's mind agree with the statement that everyone on the planet is a unique, important, and precious individual. And once that agreement in qualified, in other words, all parts of the clients mind and inner mind agree to that concept, then the second part of the Ego Strengthening is used.
And that is, once the client's subconscious mind has agreed to every human being, being unique, important, and precious, and the subconscious already knows that the client IS, of course, a human being, then all parts of the client's mind is asked to agree with the statement that HE...or SHE...is just as unique, important, and precious as any other human being.
Listen, going at life in terms of competition, from a quantity oriented frame of mind, more is better, often ends in dissatisfaction with life, because, even if you ARE the fastest, strongest, smartest, and/or wealthiest...time will chip away at your winning status...and you'll be left, at some point, having no point, to your life.
On the contrary, Beauty is in the eye of the beholder...living a life of quality, rather than quantity, is open-ended...to infinity....and beyond...and we all...know...what is beyond infinity.....don't we?
BEYOND.....INFINITY.....