The Relationship between Curiosity, Play, Attention, and Movement.

In this episode, Shawn and Karen discuss the role of curiosity, trial and error, and external focus in learning and movement. They use Karen's son's experience of learning to walk as an example of how the body naturally learns and adapts. They explore the concept of flashlighting and floodlighting attention, and how our attentional system affects our movement. They also discuss the importance of play and the impact of safety and belonging on learning and development. In this conversation, Shawn and Karen discuss the importance of body mapping and the Alexander Technique in changing habits and improving performance. They explore how our body maps are formed from infancy and how they can be changed through mindful movement. They also delve into the role of the nervous system in coordinating complex movements and the need for a more holistic approach to teaching music and other disciplines. The conversation highlights the importance of embodiment, personal development, and challenging traditional narratives in order to create a more empowering and effective learning experience.

Takeaways

Curiosity and trial and error are essential for learning and movement.
Flashlighting attention allows for high-resolution focus on specific details, while floodlighting attention allows for a broader awareness of the whole.
External focus, such as focusing on movement or a specific goal, can improve coordination and reduce effort in performance.
Safety and belonging play a significant role in learning and development.
Overriding natural maps and adopting new ones can be challenging but necessary for societal expectations and safety. Body mapping and the Alexander Technique can help change habits and improve performance by addressing cognitive dissonance and creating new body maps.
Our body maps are formed from infancy and can be changed through mindful movement and exploration.
The nervous system plays a crucial role in coordinating complex movements and is best engaged through external focus and intention.
Traditional teaching methods often overlook the mind-body connection and can lead to burnout, injury, and imposter syndrome.
A more holistic and person-centric approach to teaching is needed, one that values creativity, curiosity, and individuality.

Chapters

00:00
Introduction and the Evolution of Learning

04:30
Curiosity, Trial and Error, and Play

10:20
Flashlighting and Floodlighting Attention

14:53
The Power of External Focus

19:08
Safety and Belonging in Learning

26:39
Overriding Natural Maps

29:56
Changing Habits and Improving Performance through Body Mapping

32:12
Using Body Mapping in Teaching

34:22
The Role of the Nervous System in Coordinating Complex Movements

36:41
Challenging Traditional Teaching Methods

Becoming mBODYed is a production of and copyrighted by mBODYed, LLC, 2024. www.mbodyed.com
Follow me at https://www.instagram.com/mbodyed/ and https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61566020594221
The intro and exit music is Dark Matter by Carlos Velez,  recorded by Tosca Duo on their CD Dimensions.  
A link to Carlos’s music is available at
https://composercarlosvelez.wixsite.com/carlosvelezmusic/about-me. 

Transcript

Episode 4: The Relationship between Curiosity, Play, Attention, and Movement.

Shawn (he/him) (00:01.612)

Welcome to the Becoming MBODYed podcast, where we explore how safety and belonging cultivate mBODYed creativity, curiosity, and authenticity. I am your host, Shawn Copeland, the founder and CEO of MBODYed, a program dedicated to mBODYed education in the performing arts. Karen Cubidis is back with me today, and she has something that she wants to dive into. And so we're just going to jump right into it, Karen. Take it away.

Karen Cubides (00:28.972)

Amazing. my gosh, I'm so excited. So, you we talked in the previous episode and I mean, we just keep talking about, you know, how we, our bodies just know what to do and, you know, the evolution, like, you know, how to walk, you eventually, know, how to breathe since you were born, you know, all of these things. And, you know, we mentioned my son in the last episode and, you know, he's been walking now for probably a week and a half at most. And I've gotten to see his evolution from

taking his first couple of steps to like full on walking and then also almost like kind of running. And I'm like, this is so fast. What is happening? and it's been really beautiful and healing to observe, you know, as a, as a creative, like when he was first taking those first couple of steps, every time he was looking at his feet, he would fall. And as he got faster and more comfortable and had better balance, you know, all those things, the minute he would get

he would catch on that he was walking and moving and like try and look to see how that was happening. He would fall, he would bump his head. And it just felt like such a great representation of how we can easily get in our own ways, but then also like how the body does what it's supposed to do. Why is that? Why can he walk when he's just looking straight ahead and walking versus looking at his feet?

Shawn (he/him) (01:50.808)

Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. I love this question. I love this question. I can talk for an hour on this. Your son's name is Theo? Okay, just making sure. I have to write that down because once I start talking, I will forget who we're talking about. Names will just disappear from my brain. Okay, so there's so many things to talk about with this, but let's start.

Karen Cubides (02:00.146)

Yeah.

Shawn (he/him) (02:17.636)

Let's start with what we've kind of built over the past four or five episodes now at this point. We are designed to learn through curiosity. It is our first learning process and our most primal learning process.

Shawn (he/him) (02:41.922)

you know, particularly for humans, you know, we're born with the inability to see, our eyes don't work all that well. And, you know, our senses, compared to like our dogs or our cats, our senses are not anywhere near what they are for animals. So those initial like first two months were...

We're so dependent upon our moms for taking care of us. But then our vision starts to come in and things start to become more and more clear. And we start looking at things and we start moving towards them and start turning our heads. babies don't know that they can only turn their head so far. They just keep turning and turning and turning and head, head leads, spine follows and they roll over. And we've kind of talked a little bit about this, that this is the, that organizing principles

of movement that Alexander discovered and kind of not discovered, you know, put his finger on and said, hey, this is how we move. This is how we are organized to move. You know, and that process is vision leads the head and the head leads the spine and the whole body follows that process. And for...

you know, just to kind of take it even further back. It really is the nose, you know, because the nose leads the head towards food and we eat. So this whole system is designed basically in a very rudimentary way to get us to food. Now, we are, of course, obviously much further along in the evolutionary chain from this from the beginning of the system. But this it's all centered around curiosity.

And what's so fun about curiosity is the role that trial and error plays in curiosity. Everything is a game. Everything is play. And that's what's so important about that word. When we are in play, the stakes are low. It doesn't matter if you take a couple of steps and you fall. You just get up and you do it again.

Shawn (he/him) (04:59.848)

And if what you did worked, you repeat it and you form a map around it. You know, because that was the best choice.

And if what you did didn't work, you try something else. And that works. And you try it again. And then that works. And then you form a map until all of sudden, you know, I've taken about five steps, but there's something in the floor that I have to get around. if, and I, you know, my map of just picking up my feet and putting one front, one foot in front of the other, isn't going to work anymore because I've got to get over my toy. So I've got to learn another map, which means I got to learn to pick up my leg higher. You know, you get where I'm.

going with this like we're constantly learning a map and then using it repeating it and then abandoning it and getting a new one and then getting a new you know and refreshing it and building upon that refining it and it's all done through this realm of curiosity and trial and error and play and it's fun now

Mind you, sidebar, what's the verb that we use in music when we talk about our instruments? When we pick up our instrument, what is it that we do? We play. For all of you listening, when's the last time that you picked up your instrument and actually thought about it as play? No stakes, fun.

When was the last time you did that? Sit with that one for a while. That one will take some time to unpack. But now let's come back to Theo here. So there's this other little interesting thing that you said in there that when he was looking at his feet, that's when he would get himself into trouble. But when I got his head up and got him out of that,

Shawn (he/him) (06:53.696)

So there's a balance here that has to happen between the micro and the macro. You need to be in the micro for a little bit. You need to be able to see, I've got feet. And I look down at them, and right now what's happening is I'm looking at my feet, and my brain is running.

synapse after synapse, know, all the way down through that nervous system, all the way down to my feet. And that pathway through my nervous system is really lighting up, you know, so that I go, their feet down there and they do something, you know, I pick them up and I learn to locomote and I can ambulate and I can move, you know, and...

I'm going to make that error a couple of times. I'm going to just study them and pick them up and realize, I'm going to fall if I keep doing that. And I probably am. I probably did fall a couple of times. And then he realized, I don't need to do that. So you watched his map change. When he got out of that, he realized, OK, I've got feet. I know that they're there. I don't need to look at them. I've

I've assured myself that they're there. I've built that map. And then I came back out into the macro. So in my work, in Becoming MBODYed, we call that flash lighting something versus flood lighting something. When we're flash lighting something, we're going directly down to it. I'm setting a laser beam of focus and attention down to the minutia, the very, very small thing.

And that's an aspect of my attention. It can do that. It costs a lot to do that, especially for long periods of time. If we repeat that over and over and over, we call that concentrating. And that is highly caloric. Calorically, it costs a lot of calories for us to do that. We have to really burn.

Shawn (he/him) (09:11.146)

a lot of our resources. And our ability to do that is limited. We can only do that for so long before our capacity to maintain that level of focus disappears. We burn it out.

And the longer that we do it, the more we have to engage our muscles to hold our attention on point like that. Which I bet you can tell me a story with Theo of some time when he was really trying to get something and stayed in that level of flashlight attention, concentrating, and got more and more frustrated and tight until... And got frustrated even as a...

know, 14 month old, you know, we all do that. Eventually we have to let go and we have to come back out into the macro. The thing is, you know, or we have to floodlight is what I call it, which is the reverse process in our minds.

Flashlighting is sending our attention in one direction. Floodlighting is allowing information to come to us as opposed to going to look for it. So we become like a radar as opposed to a sonar. Did that make sense? Okay, I just went real science there for a minute. But we become a receiver as opposed to sending out the signal.

Karen Cubides (10:39.66)

Totally.

Shawn (he/him) (10:50.39)

What's really amazing about that process is that we don't lose any information. So when we flashlight something, we have to parse out a lot of other information.

so that we can gain a really high level of resolution of information from what it is that we're looking at. So think like, you know, we're going to go through the forest to get down to the level of the bed of the forest to find a rock that on top of that rock is a ladybug. OK, and I'm going to have to really flashlight to get down to the bottom of that deep forest to find that ladybug.

When I floodlight then and I come back and I see the whole forest, I know that somewhere in that forest on the bottom of that forest floor is a rock and sitting on top of that rock is a ladybug and that ladybug has three different dots on each wing. I still know that, but I now know that that ladybug is sitting on that rock inside this vast forest underneath this blanket of canopy of trees.

Now I have all of that other information available to me as well as the information about what I learned down at the micro level.

That's the way that our attention works. And that's also the way that our movement is best organized.

Shawn (he/him) (12:18.146)

This is one of the failings of some of the more traditional teaching of Alexander technique and body mapping is that it can you can get very hyper focused in the micro.

If you think about a traditional first Alexander lesson, we talk a lot about the head -spine relationship in the AO joint, the atlanto-occipital joint, which is the joint between your head and the top of your spine. And immediately,

I bet all of us went, ooh, and they turned their internal flashlight to go, okay, where is the joint between the top of my spine and the base of my head? Where is that? And you start directing that internal flashlight to try and find that place within you. And what's crazy is that most of us will probably also tighten our neck in order to find that, which is the exact opposite of what we're actually trying to achieve.

You know, we want that joint to be coordinated, not tight, not held. We want it to be free. And by bringing our attention to that level of, that high level of focus, you know, we're hijacking our nervous system and hijacking our attentional system.

and recruiting our muscles in order to do that, which is the exact opposite of what we're trying to get at. Now.

Shawn (he/him) (13:56.876)

What we ultimately want is to go, okay, you've got a joint at the top of your spine, at the base of your head, but that joint functions in relationship to your whole body. So notice that joint, but now go boom and expand. Floodlight your whole body and notice that when you tip your head forward,

or lean your head forward, your body follows that. When you turn your head sideways, your body follows that. Nobody can see me because I'm demonstrating this and this is an audio podcast, so you have to wait till the video comes out when I'm demonstrating.

Your son was such a great example of that, of going, okay, here's the micro. I learned what I needed to learn about my feet. Now, boom, here I am at the macro again, and I'm looking at something that I want and letting my legs coordinate to get me to what it is that I want.

You know, maybe you showed him, you said something about like dangling something in front of him, like, look, come get this, come get this, you know, to get him to walk faster or something. You know, you're giving him something external to focus on so that all of the internal parts coordinate around that. And it's brilliant how that happens, but we don't have to manage it. It's part of our nervous system.

Karen Cubides (14:59.393)

Yeah.

Shawn (he/him) (15:21.556)

It our nervous system is designed to do this. It's kind of what I was alluding to in the last that last episode where I was saying, you know, I believe at the core that our body is designed to do these things and that the the least amount of interference from us, the better those systems coordinate. We are not smart enough.

in our front cortex part of our brain where we talk to ourselves at, that part of our brain functions in a very linear fashion. One thing to the next thing to the next thing to the next thing. It is not powerful enough or nor is it designed and wired in a way to manage the complexity of walking.

The number of things that have to happen in order for us to be able to stand up and balance on two feet and take one or two steps, it is unbelievable what's happening in the level of our nervous system. If we try to manage that with the part of our brain that we think from, we're going to trip and fall. We're going to fall all over ourselves. If we can get

out of that, back out to the macro level and go, okay, I got my feet, now I just need to get over there. And I get my attention directed to something external. My body will organize around that. It's designed to. There's a body of work that has come out of the University of Nevada in Las Vegas.

Shawn (he/him) (17:15.296)

And it's centered around the idea of external focus. you put me on the spot here, so I can't tell you the names of the people. But I'll put it in the credits for this episode, the bibliography of who I'm talking about. This is not my research. This is someone else's research. all of this work was done in sports science around

The idea that our bodies coordinate measurably, there's a measurable improvement in terms of coordination, accuracy, and in perceived effort and measurable effort in the body when we coordinate around something that's external versus internal.

Let me break that down. What they did was take a golfer or a basketball person and said, OK, I want you to right now. I want you to pay attention to how are you holding the club? How are you setting up your hands to make the shot? You know, and to really think about all of the minute things that have to happen for that golf swing to happen or for that shot to happen and then take the shot. And they recorded like muscle firing and muscle effort. And of course, they, you know,

said we want you to do this 10 times and they measured the number of how accurate you were and then they said now I just want you to focus on letting your body coordinate and you getting the ball into the hoop or you getting that golf that golf ball over to that putting green and let your body coordinate however that happens and the effect on performance

Effort is significantly reduced and accuracy is significantly improved. When we place our focus on something external to our body and we allow our body to coordinate around that external focus.

Shawn (he/him) (19:28.684)

That changed everything I did when I learned this. It changed everything I did in my teaching. Immediately I went to, what does that mean for musicians? What's an external focus for a musician? Well, the first thing was the obvious thing, sound. Well, actually no, because sound is reactive.

What do I mean by that? I hear the sound after it's already made. So my focus can't be on the sound that I'm hearing because that's after the fact. And also for me and for you, the sound that we hear is false.

because we hear the sound from our outer ear and the sound from our inner ear because that reed is sitting on our teeth and that the vibrations from that reed is being conducted through our teeth, through our jaw and into our inner ear. So we can't, and this is true for singers, it's true for most musicians, that the sound that we create is not the sound that we hear. We can't be the judge of our own sound. So sound isn't a reliable external foci.

So at the time I was working with students at EMF as my colleague James and I were developing this, James Kanal. And we came to the conclusion that for musicians, the best external focus that we can have for what we are trying, for the sound that we're trying to make, for the music that we're trying to make, is for us to place our focus on the movement.

that makes the sound, the movement that expresses the phrase. For us to sit with and think about what do I want this phrase to say? What do I want to express? What's the message behind that? And to be with that until it embodies a movement.

Shawn (he/him) (21:46.794)

and for us to then follow through with that movement in the creation of that sound. So our external focus is the movement of us moving the violin bow or moving the instrument, moving the keys on the instrument or pressing the keys on the piano and being aware of how we're interacting with the instrument itself and letting that be our external focus.

but paying close attention to not directing how we make that movement, just what does that movement look like so that we could figure out what isn't that external focus for us. So even within that, and I'm going to go into a whole other level unless you want me to stop so that you can ask a of questions.

Karen Cubides (22:40.958)

No, no, I love where we're going. I just wanted to interject really fast because I also noticed and I think it'll tie to perhaps what's coming. know, when Theo started walking, that became our new normal. But then I also observed him going back to crawling and then looking at his hands and being like, OK, but like now my hands are doing and then bumping his head again. And until he kept his head up, he was able to do that. So it just made me even reflect on my own musical journey of like how sometimes going

backwards can feel, I don't know, not great, but if you keep looking up, you can make even more progress. And I don't know, that just felt like such a, I keep going back to healing, but just such a thing to observe and see how it's part of our perhaps idiosyncrasies at time. But if you just look up and keep going, like it'll kind of, your body will just do what it needs to do to get you from point A to point B. So I'm curious like why, why that also happens.

Shawn (he/him) (23:37.858)

Well, who am I to tell you why that happens? I have no idea. But let me give you my interpretation of that based on what I know. And take it or leave it, you know, who knows? My understanding of what he's doing is going back. So he learned something new. Now he's going back to that old map and.

trying it out and realizing, no, I need to let go of that old map. I learned something new. That old map isn't working anymore. I learned something new. need to update that map. And so he's updating it. And what's crazy is if you sat here and really thought about it, you watch him do this hundreds of times per day. Those maps change.

because they're being led by curiosity and wonder and play. We do it constantly. He also knows that he's completely safe and that he's free to explore in this way.

Mom and dad are right there. The doggies are right there too. an watch on him too. His whole realm of safety is completely right there so he can play. And there's no stakes at this. What changes as we become older is safety and belonging become more a part of it.

Shawn (he/him) (25:16.918)

the ability to play with trial and error. Error has more cost. there's a greater investment in success because safety is contingent upon your success.

you you're belonging to your band class, you're belonging to your dance class, you know, all of those things, they become far more important, you know, not necessarily consciously, but subconsciously. So it's just a very fascinating thing to watch. I have this theory, you know, for years and years and years, you know, I've been doing this, gosh, almost...

I'm really close to 20 years in this. And we have always said, you know, where do you things go wrong for us? Like right now for Theo, everything, his coordination, his nervous system, everything's working exactly like it's supposed to. You know, and in about 10 years, it's all gonna be screwed up. you know, why?

Karen Cubides (26:38.623)

Yeah.

Shawn (he/him) (26:39.776)

Why does that happen? And there's been lots of ideas around like, well, know, it happens when we go to school and we have to sit still. And all of those things are true. Like right now, he's a kinesthetic learner. He gets to move and play and experiment. And then all of sudden, yeah, he goes to school and the stakes get higher. And he has to sit still. And his nervous system isn't designed for that. But that's also where...

Safety becomes questioned. He's not in his home environment anymore. He's in a peer environment. He's got teachers telling him what he should do. He's got mom and dad telling him how he should behave when he's not with mom and dad.

Shawn (he/him) (27:31.83)

What we don't realize is that those lessons...

override our design. They override the naturalness of what we have learned prior to that. You know, because he knows I should be moving around all the time. I should be playing. Well, no, now you have to sit still. No, no, no, no, that that that that is cognitively dissonant with my map right now of my life and my world and my existence. I can't resolve that.

The only way that I can resolve it is to understand that my safety and belonging is contingent upon me overriding that map. So I have to work hard at taking that on. I have to practice it. I have to think about it a lot.

I have to invest a considerable amount of time in it to adopt that because on some level I know that that's not necessarily the best thing for me, but it is the best thing to ensure my safety. This is it's but it and I think that's where these these maps come from.

Karen Cubides (28:49.366)

So big.

Shawn (he/him) (28:59.254)

You know, these maps of like, know, that translate to a first body mapping class for, you know, freshmen in college. And we say things like, how many curves do you have in your spine? And they say, my spine is curved? What? I thought I was supposed to sit up straight. Isn't my spine straight? No. Well, I guess it has one curve. No, it has four.

Like, and people's minds get blown because they had to override that map that they inherently knew. They had to override that to learn to sit up straight in sixth grade, seventh grade band class. You know, or fourth grade string class for me. You know, whenever someone said, okay, now everybody sit up straight and be attentive, you know, I was clarinet player. I'd sit in the front row and look like I was in a military band. You know.

And so we override that and it's my theory that those maps that we need to change through body mapping and and the the habits that we're trying to to change through the Alexander work come from these moments of cognitive dissonance between our world

As an infant and learning that our world as an infant isn't is changing and we need to adopt and assimilate to these communities Otherwise we're you know, we're not gonna be safe and we're not gonna belong and so we've practiced them and That to me is why they're slightly more difficult to change

There's more connected to it than say Theo's map of crawling versus walking. There's not a lot invested in that right now. You know, because he's going to change that five times today. You know, or 10, and then he's going to pick up a toy and go, wait, my hand. Five minutes ago, my hand was something that was flat on the floor that was helping me locomote.

Shawn (he/him) (31:19.988)

Now my hand is attached to this bell that I can ring really loud and bang on something and mom and dad come over and give me a cookie, you know? So his map of his hand is changing and developing hundreds of times a day based on the context that he's using it.

Karen Cubides (31:33.959)

Yeah.

Shawn (he/him) (31:44.31)

And so then when he goes back and goes, well, wait a minute. Now I'm locomoting. I'm getting around the room. But wait a minute. My hand was a part of that. So I need to get back on the floor and figure that out. What is my hand supposed to do now that I'm walking? That map has to change. So you're watching this happen. Like, that's brilliant. Now.

Could we figure out a way to use that way of teaching in a studio, in a dance studio or a music class? Yes, we can.

Here's what's really fascinating for me. Here's now all the neuroscience is going to come in and we're to get really crazy. Think about think about how we teach embouchure. You know, and we have to place our lips this way and our jaw this way, and then we have to put our tongue in this shape and then we have to breathe in this way and inhale in this way. You know.

And we have to say, you know, my tongue needs to be forward and arched this way and between these two teeth and, you know, and then, and then, gosh, and now we're going to add articulation to that, which means the tip of my tongue, which really means the top of the tip of my tongue, which means really the space slightly behind the tip of the top of my tongue, like has to hit the center part of the reed, but slightly behind the tip of the blade, but above the heart, like.

talk about degree of specificity, right? And we expect someone to be able to do that. Okay, well here's what's really interesting. Your orbicularis, which is the muscle here in the front of your mouth, your tongue, your entire breathing apparatus, all of these things are not innervated by your peripheral nervous system. These are all innervated by your cranial nervous system.

Shawn (he/him) (33:53.59)

which means these are part of your autonomic, the autonomic side of your nervous system. And you can go autonomic, that sounds a lot like automatic, because that's what your autonomic nervous system does. It governs the systems in your body that are designed to be automatic and in the background. Like chewing, swallowing, breathing, heart rate, blood sugar level, digestion.

the movement of your eyes and blinking. All of those things are supposed to be happening in the background so that our cortex can be thinking about what is the next sentence that I'm about to say. The cranial nervous system doesn't respond well to direct commands. And let me give you an example of that. Swallow.

Shawn (he/him) (34:52.352)

Now swallow again.

Shawn (he/him) (34:56.959)

Now swallow again.

Shawn (he/him) (35:00.96)

Right? Now one more time. It's like, it's like, wait, if you can, if you can get your body to swallow a third time or even a fourth time, it's like you're choking. Yeah. Because there's nothing to swallow. So that part of your nervous system doesn't, is not meant to function in that way. But now if I tell you,

Karen Cubides (35:01.985)

Yeah.

Karen Cubides (35:12.641)

Yeah.

Shawn (he/him) (35:30.326)

somebody's baking chocolate chip cookies, you're going to start salivating and you can swallow again because you're thinking about food and that engages that system.

Shawn (he/him) (35:48.15)

So we're up against, there's a couple things happening here. We're trying to teach music at a level, at a micro level that our nervous system isn't well designed for. And as the case with your son proves, we're not designed to be able to command that level of micro movement.

all at the same time without tripping over ourselves.

You know, and so you come into a clarinet lesson and you're thinking about my tongue has to be shaped this way, my armature has to be shaped this way, I have to breathe a certain way. Okay, if I manage that and I play a phrase, ultimately the next thing my teacher's gonna say is, well that was nice, but maybe you could play it musically.

Shawn (he/him) (36:41.096)

How on earth do you expect, how do we expect anyone to have any creative connection because they're literally sending their nervous system and their mind in the opposite direction of their creativity. They don't have access to their creativity because they're so busy directing all the itty bitty parts.

Karen Cubides (36:43.655)

Yeah.

Shawn (he/him) (37:12.514)

But what's really cool, again, which your example of your son demonstrates, is that when we give it an external focus, the body loves to coordinate around that.

And I'm not really sure that she said it, but I always hear Amy Likar, who is the head of training for the Association of Body Mapping Educators. She always says, our bodies love to coordinate around a musical intention. Now, I'll paraphrase that and say, our bodies love to coordinate around a creative intention or a playful intention or any intention.

we will coordinate around, particularly if it's an external intention. We will coordinate around that and it will be beautiful. Now, for our sake, yeah, I need to know something about how to shape an embouchure. So I need to work slowly, carefully at that level of minutia for a little bit. And then I have to come back out to the macro.

I can't do the macro, play the music and read the music and play the right articulations and the right rhythms and make the right sound and it be in tune if I'm still thinking of what's my tongue doing. It's not possible.

Shawn (he/him) (38:44.14)

Thus, why is becoming mBODYed important? Because through this work, we learn that. And we can stop beating ourselves against that proverbial brick wall. I gotta let go of the trees in the forest so that I can actually see the forest. I gotta do that. I gotta work on the trees a little bit.

But in order to see the whole forest, I gotta step away. I gotta let go of it a little bit. I gotta stop looking at my feet and look up at something and give my feet something to coordinate around. And then boom, they do.

Shawn (he/him) (39:34.584)

That's what happens when you ask a question. talk for 40 minutes straight.

Karen Cubides (39:38.944)

No, this is amazing. And I'm having so many light bulb moments. The first one was, I mean, there's a billion, but the one that's coming to mind right now is when you made me swallow a few times. And then that also thinking about the hundreds of times that my son through play is trying to get up and down and do his thing and how that's so much easier than like forcing myself to swallow and like essentially choke. And then I got to tie that to how I got injured.

Shawn (he/him) (39:50.688)

You

Karen Cubides (40:07.626)

And that's just like the perfect storm of like, let's force you to do something you're not supposed to be doing in this perhaps order, or there's something going on, you know, the flashlight versus the floodlight and all that. And like how it's just so complex and nuanced. And then going back to the main principle of like, we can't teach this way. It has to be, you know, more nuanced and more person centric. And then that coupled with the safety piece, like

Yeah, I can remember when the playing was not fun anymore. And absolutely, it related to community, to being good, to achievement, to love, to belonging, to affection, to success. And I mean, it just gets so much more complicated. And then you start wearing these masks around how you think you should be and then while being injured. And then it's like, well, what is happening? And then you just kind of forget how you got there. But if you go back to the origin of it,

body's designed to do what it's supposed to do and you can't work against it. So I think again, that's really, really helpful to think about.

Shawn (he/him) (41:16.012)

Think about how empowering it can be when you hear, you know, like...

You're saying to me, and I don't know your particular story, specifically, but I've heard so many stories of like, yeah, I was just working and working and working and working and working and then I got so injured and I thought, well, I'm injured, which means I just need to keep working. Like I'm injured because I'm not doing it well enough or I'm not doing it enough or like it'll go away the more I do it. I'll fix it.

by continuing to do it. And how empowering it is to come in and have someone say, no, of course not. The way you're going about this, you're going against your design. Of course you're injured. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Shawn (he/him) (42:20.064)

And it can be different if we start working within our design. And if it can be even better when we start learning to leverage our design. And direct using our intention, using our mindfulness, using our boundaries, using our compassion for ourselves, we can begin to leverage these things for our benefit.

Shawn (he/him) (42:51.274)

Now we're into that realm of mental fitness and becoming superhuman.

Karen Cubides (42:59.03)

Yeah, I mean, this feels like so simple and basic. But I don't I would argue that, you know. The way music is taught and the way the curriculum is developed and so many and the traditions and things that are passed on. Hold us back from being able to take the time to to think about this. And again, I'm just loving that the personal development piece is there because.

something you didn't mention about injury is there's also the narrative that it's in your head and it's not actually happening. And then you get all like, well then I'm just not working hard enough. Maybe I'm just lazy. Maybe I just woke up and I suck. And it's like, well, of course not. so yeah, how would a breath of fresh air to just be like, of course this is not working because what are you doing in a loving way? so yeah, I'm, I'm excited for the more I hear what you're saying, like the disruption of our space with these concepts, like

very exciting.

Shawn (he/him) (43:57.944)

The one that I love when you're saying, you know, the traditions of all of it, and I just kind of go, says who? Who says that? Like for real? And how do they know that that's true? Is that actually true? What's the one that I love? I have to go to rehearsal tonight.

You know, I have a hundred and two fever, but if I don't go to rehearsal tonight, then they're gonna call someone in and they're gonna like that person more, and then they're gonna call them more and I'm gonna lose my spot. I'm gonna lose my spot on the sub list. Really?

Who says that? Do you know that that's true? Who does that happen to? No one.

That's just fear. That's shaming. That's, what's the word for it? Gosh, I can't think of the word for it. Hazing. That's hazing. That's me as the teacher passing that down to my student because my teacher said that and instilled that kind of.

fear and shame in me, you know, that would override my body saying, you are sick, stay home. Pay attention to that.

Shawn (he/him) (45:22.136)

But no, no, no, I got 102 fever, which means my body's dehydrated and I'm not doing well and my immune system is active. Let me go sit in rehearsal and do this 3 ,000 times and wiggle my fingers in an environment that's already not functioning well. My immune system's going crazy and I'm dehydrated. What's going to happen to my muscles and my connective tissues? They're going to get hurt.

they're gonna end up with tendonitis. And we wonder, well, I'm well, but now my arms hurt. Yeah. And plus you're under -functioning because your immune system is active and trying to, lot of, 80 % of your body's energy is being devoted to you getting well.

What are you going to do when you sit down in that rehearsal and you're underperforming? You're going to engage. You're going to work harder than you would normally work just to maintain the same level of consistency that you would maintain if you were well. So the system is under functioning. You're going to push the system to over function when it's already working with less resources.

This is how the worst injuries happen. It's like, I'm going to get in my car. I'm going to drain my car of all of its power steering fluid, and its radiator fluid, and its oil, and all of those essential things. I'm going to drain all of that out. And then I'm going to try and do a cross -country trek.

Karen Cubides (46:49.142)

Yeah.

Shawn (he/him) (47:10.55)

Yeah, that's going to work out really well.

You'd be lucky if you get out of your neighborhood, you know? But yet we expect that our bodies are going to do that. No. And we're not gonna be safe and we're not gonna be well in that. And that's the part of it that we really need to start teaching differently. And I think you've mentioned this a couple times that Gen Z and

you know, we could go millennials and everything back is has really started saying, no, I want nothing to do with that. That is not true. You know it and I know it like they're calling us out on that and they're demanding for things to be different. They're demanding change. You know, they are they are hungry for information.

and instruction in a way that truly connects the mind and the body and connects their wellness to it. And they see those types of mind -body separate kind of things. They come at that like it's an allergy. They're like, no. Nope, I'm not buying that one.

We've got to respond to that. We've got to really hear that and change. And the time for that is now. You see it, I see it. Lots of people are hearing that and asking those kinds of questions. And that could take us in a whole other realm of discussion. But it's amazing how

Karen Cubides (49:03.243)

you

Shawn (he/him) (49:08.566)

just something as simple as you saying, you know, my son is doing this, like, explain this to me, can lead into like, this is how we need to teach. Like, just watch that and watch the simplicity of that.

You and we're going, you know, you're saying, well, this is really, this is really deep and this is really complicated. Not really. It doesn't have to be. We just need to be honest. Like whose narrative am I living by right now? Whose expectations am I living by right now? It's exhausting to live by other people's expectations. It's exhausting. You're living in the, in the realm of comparison.

There's no artistry in that. There's no creativity in that. There's no curiosity in that. It's just a recipe for shame and disaster.

Yeah. And it just, yeah, we just live in exhaustion by doing that. And we live in burnout. And of course, because we're living, we're living according to someone else's expectations, we're living in imposter syndrome because there's nothing authentic about that for us. So of course we're in imposter syndrome. Cause we're not, we're, we're acting outside of our own integrity.

Shawn (he/him) (50:40.748)

And that just some simple little question about, hey, my son is doing this. Like, it's such a clear example of all of this. So it seems really complicated. And the only reason why it's complicated is because we can explain it.

at the level of neuroscience. But really, it's just quite simple. Sure, the complication, it's like walking. It's just one foot in front of the other. Well, underneath it, there's a whole lot of things happening. But it's just one foot in front of the other.

It's just learning from a point of curiosity.

Shawn (he/him) (51:32.888)

play and having fun and recognizing error, redo, trial and error, redo, learn, assess, redo. It's that simple. It can really be that simple.

Karen Cubides (51:53.056)

Yeah, I think a good thing to expand upon for another episode would be how to do that with baggage. Because that's what has been really transformative and healing of just watching my son do all of this is, of course, like every parents thought of, like, I want to mess up my kid, but knowing you will. But then also, like, what about what he's doing? Do I need to be doing too? And with all the things that I know, and there's a reason I don't play. How can I go back to that?

Shawn (he/him) (52:01.933)

Mm.

Karen Cubides (52:22.58)

And how can I heal that part as I'm watching the simplicity of his existence unfold? And how can I bring that into my life with all of my baggage that, know, you're actively, we're all actively working on. And I just feel like that, that just is filled with so much hope to know that there is a way to do it with all that stuff. because you're right, it is complicated, but the weight of the BS is what really holds you down in the pursuit of that. so I feel like that would be also just a, another exciting thing to explore.

Shawn (he/him) (52:52.982)

I wrote it down.

That's episode six or seven or whatever we're at now. But great, great, thank you. As always, I love it, I love it. I'm gonna have to write all this down eventually because I'm creating in the moment. My mind is exploding, it's just brilliant. again, I've said this before, but I'm just really grateful. This is just huge for me, the opportunity to.

Karen Cubides (52:58.732)

You

Karen Cubides (53:03.02)

Yeah, this was so good.

Shawn (he/him) (53:24.406)

be able to create in this way. We're watching brand new things happen.

As always, thank you so much for being here. And for those of you who are listening, please DM us with questions, possible topics, things that have come out of any of these episodes that you want us to follow up on. Dive deeper into, unpack further. We definitely want to hear your voice and know what you're thinking.

And for those of you who are interested in Karen's work, you can visit her online at www .karencubidisagency.com. And she can bring greatness into your life, like she's bringing into mine. So I appreciate it very much. And find us on all the socials, please. Like us, review us. We love to hear from you, and we appreciate you for listening. Thank you so much.