The Journey of Embodied Creativity, with Dr. Lea Pearson, Part 2

Summary

In this episode of the Becoming Embodied podcast, host Shawn L Copeland engages in a deep conversation with Dr. Lee Pearson, exploring her extensive journey through music, education, and personal growth. They discuss the challenges faced by musicians, including feelings of inadequacy, physical pain, and the impact of family dynamics on one's identity. Lee shares her transformative experiences in education and the importance of inclusion in the arts, emphasizing the need for systemic change in music education. The conversation highlights the significance of finding one's voice and the ongoing journey of self-discovery and validation in the creative process. In this conversation, Lea Pearson shares her journey from self-publishing her doctoral dissertation to becoming a leader in musicians' wellness and education. She discusses the importance of addressing musicians' injuries, the impact of arts education on gifted students, and the evolution of teaching methods, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lea emphasizes the need for resilience and confidence in musicians, the power of vulnerability in teaching, and the distinction between coaching and traditional teaching methods. In this conversation, Lea Pearson and Shawn L Copeland explore transformative teaching techniques in music education, emphasizing the importance of inquiry, curiosity, and creativity. They discuss the significance of self-expression and body awareness for musicians, the need for inclusive practices, and the value of building a supportive community. Their insights highlight the joy and connection found in music, as well as the barriers faced by individuals in communication and expression. The conversation concludes with an invitation for listeners to connect and engage in the ongoing dialogue about these vital topics.

Becoming mBODYed is a production of and copyrighted by mBODYed, LLC, 2024. www.mbodyed.com
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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

Shawn L Copeland (00:00)
 So I want to go back to the story because you haven't, you know, we're sort of worse. You're leaving us, you know, on the cliff here. It's a cliffhanger of I'm injured. I just got back from Finland.
 
 Lea Pearson (00:02)
 Okay.
 
 Yeah.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (00:17)
 And I know it's coming, you know, so I can't wait for everyone to hear it. I know it's coming.
 
 Lea Pearson (00:21)
 Well, you know, the question is,
 
 what do you do when you, when you get your doctorate in performance? Well, I wrote my book, which was my doctoral dissertation. So that was the first thing I did was to get that published in 2000 and bring it out. I brought it out. We were doing, Leichhardt and I were doing summer flute classes in body mapping. At that time we just started and
 
 Shawn L Copeland (00:28)
 Yeah.
 
 Lea Pearson (00:47)
 The Flute Convention, National Flute Convention happened to be in Columbus where we were living at the time. And so on the second day of the convention, here come the boxes into my booth and there was my book. It was all self-published at the time. Later on I went and got it published properly at GIA. But ⁓ there was a lot of interest as I started talking to people about it and showing people and...
 
 I was at that flu convention every year from 1999 till now, except for a couple of years, talking to people, giving lessons. So it garnered a lot of interest. got me invited to a lot of places to speak and do workshops and not performances so much, a few, but not as much. And people were just really interested.
 
 issue of musicians' injuries was only, this was so, this is 2000, only just beginning to scratch the surface. But I also had to have a job.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (01:46)
 Yeah. This is, by the way,
 
 by the way, this was about the time that I graduated from my undergrad. So I'm coming into graduate school around 2002. ⁓ I was introduced to Alexander Technique in 1997.
 
 Lea Pearson (01:54)
 Okay.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (02:08)
 And so I'm coming into the educational environment as this conversation is beginning around musicians and musicians wellness and musicians injuries and the research. Yeah. And the importance and the need was starting to ramp up.
 
 Lea Pearson (02:19)
 Yeah. And the research was starting to ramp up. And, and yeah, absolutely.
 
 ⁓ And by the way, to give proper credit, Barbara Conable had written her book by then. It was very generic for musicians. It was a completely different style from what I wanted to do. Cause I wanted my book to be for teachers. I thought it would be more accessible to people then and less threatening. ⁓
 
 And I didn't want anybody else to go through what I had been through. It was just so excruciating because it wasn't just the physical pain, it was the emotional pain of not being able to do what I basically spent my whole life studying to do. we feel it so deeply, us musicians. ⁓ And so my work was based on hers.
 
 I took it a step further by offering a little more anatomical descriptions. I tried to pull together all the little, what I call, movement etudes that I had learned from Barbara and from my teacher Lisa and from other people, just so people could do ⁓ all these movement experiments ⁓ and tips for teachers. I tried to put all that together because I thought that would be helpful. But I did have to have a job, so I ended up, ⁓ actually ended up...
 
 running an after-school arts program in the inner city. So a friend of mine and I, we were the co-directors and these kids come running out of school at three in the afternoon, total chaos. And we're doing arts education stuff with them and bringing in talented artists from the community and playing with them. And we had music classes and art and theater and drama and African drumming and all kinds of stuff.
 
 I also at that time got a job working. This is a very unusual job and there'll probably will never be another one like it. The state of Ohio had passed a law saying that you had to identify, they had a whole gifted identification program, but not in the arts. And so they say, you have to identify students who are gifted in the arts. Everybody's like, how do you do that? And we found a, ⁓
 
 program from New York City led by Barry Oreck, who was a dancer. And he came to Ohio and trained us how to do this. He trained me, he trained a bunch of artists in the schools, and he trained a bunch of teachers. And I got good enough at it so that I could help do some of that training. And we went into two schools. We went into an inner city school in Cleveland, worked with all the fourth graders there, and a more suburban school near Cincinnati.
 
 We tested every single fourth grader in music, dance, drama, and art. And it wasn't a one shot deal type of high stakes test. It was a ⁓ progression of like four classes over a period of time to see how they developed so that you could take someone who had had, you know, five years of piano and someone who didn't even know what a piano was. And you could actually tell who was more innately talented, which I found fascinating. So I'm starting to see this
 
 exclusion from the arts on both ends, from the socioeconomic and racial end, these kids who didn't know anything, and kids who were gifted and started getting the education that they needed. Their teachers started learning how to, ⁓ well, this kid is sitting in the back of the room drumming on their table all the time.
 
 maybe they have something that maybe there's some music that could help them learn or there's some musical skills, sorry, that could help them learn. And this is a kid who's moving around all the time. Maybe they need more kinesthetic ways of learning. So we did all that training. We brought in trainers from the Kennedy Center, ⁓ did all their artists in school training. So I'm actually a Kennedy Center trained teaching artist. And
 
 Shawn L Copeland (06:39)
 Mm.
 
 Lea Pearson (06:40)
 I then started doing workshops in the Columbus Public Schools and all over the state of Ohio, not only in the gifted identification, but also while in training teachers how to use the arts in the classroom, arts integration is what they called it. But I also was able to bring in some of my body mapping stuff and we were developing arts standards at the time, national standards. I don't know if they're still using them even, but so how do you...
 
 teach breathing according to the educational standards. You know, I developed a five day lesson plan in that, or how do you teach, you know, posture, standing and sitting in the curriculum that you're supposed to be teaching students. So was teaching music educators as well. So I had this whole piece of teacher training, which I really loved. And I gained some great skills and out through the Kennedy, they had, you know, I sat in a lot of those Kennedy Center workshops and
 
 learned a lot about how do you structure a workshop, how do you do participatory exercises and games and stuff like that, because we were doing all four arts. ⁓ With these kids, the most stunning one to me was a ⁓ boy who had cerebral palsy. So he couldn't move very well, but he was actually identified as gifted in dance because of the way that he thought.
 
 and the way that he expressed himself. I'm like, that's it. We have got to find ways of educating these kids that speak to their strengths. So there were about six years when I did all that work in Ohio and still going and doing body mapping stuff. Because I was done with school at time. And finally, just said, and I was also the other, you know, a lot of what we do, Sean, I think we all know this, but.
 
 especially those of us in the body mapping world, we do this stuff because we have a personal reason for it. It was very personal to me because both of my children were identified as gifted and I saw them, you know, being, they weren't the kind of kids who were left behind and acting out because of that. They were just really smart and mostly getting a pretty decent education, but I could see, you know, and I could, and just.
 
 Remembered my I finally started to get over my horror of being in school. I just hated school for so long I didn't even want to go near a school building, you know But we we did a lot. This is a $300,000 five-year research project That I wasn't the official director, but I did a lot of the work for it and it was very powerful experience I finally decided okay. I can't be in both of these worlds at once. My kids are off to college I'm just gonna go back into body mapping and so then I
 
 then I really started thinking about coaching. ⁓ So that was all happening in my 50s. And I think what
 
 What was really hard for me at the time, and I didn't really understand is that there was a lot of depression underneath it. And I think this is something that a lot of musicians experience. And it didn't even occur to me that I could be depressed. Cause I was like, I have this life, I have two kids, have, you But when I was in Kentucky, I found myself whenever I was in a car driving, I was just crying all the time. Finally, I said, well, I guess I better go talk to somebody about this.
 
 She said, yeah, I think you're depressed at that point. You know, I decided it was okay to go on medication, which I was on for several years, ⁓ and began to learn a little more about what was going on in my family and the intergenerational stuff that was going on, which came up again later in COVID, but which I'll tell you a little bit more about. But I want to say I started trying to become a health coach.
 
 And I went to health coach training at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition in New York, online program. This was also about the time I decided to get divorced and move back here to New England, which I'd always wanted to do. And then I was like, oh, I'm in Boston. I'm going to start a flute studio. I don't think so. I do not have the energy to run student recitals and curriculum. Oh, I'm going to try to perform.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (11:07)
 Mm-hmm
 
 Lea Pearson (11:14)
 I don't think so, not with all these conservatory grads running around. This is not something I wanted to do at age 60. So I really wanted, at that point, all of our body mapping teachers were working in person. And I just felt this need to reach out to people in other places who had no access to a teacher. So it was also about the time that online videos started to come in, around 2013, 14.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (11:21)
 Mm-hmm.
 
 Lea Pearson (11:44)
 And I said, all right, I'm gonna offer, I'm just gonna teach anybody online. And so I started studying how to coach, how to run a business. I did several workshops with Brendan Burchard at the time, if you know who he is, yeah. Wild and crazy man. I then went into a business training program for three years. It was in California and Texas, took several trips out there. Met a wonderful community of people who like saved me. It was just sort of this love bubble. And these coaches that I had,
 
 Mark and Shannon were, think, the first time I felt that somebody saw me, that like they saw me, who I was. And here I am at, you know, 63. That was the first time I felt that. And they like, they could see what the potential was here. And we were training, the model we were training in was ⁓ speaking. They called their program, Speak Your Path to Cash. So how do you learn to give a short,
 
 Shawn L Copeland (12:23)
 Mm-hmm.
 
 Lea Pearson (12:43)
 speech that gets people interested in what you do and then they want to sign up for more. That's basically the model. And then you do a free consultation with them, which everybody's doing now. But it was relatively new at the time. They were fully in the coaching world, which is another whole world. And we didn't talk about that in music. For musicians, coaching means coaching a string quartet or an ensemble. know, it has nothing to do with the inner life.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (13:06)
 Right.
 
 Lea Pearson (13:11)
 And that was just fascinating to me. I worked hard learning how to do that. And it was, it was hard. And started to have some success with that. So I developed a whole, you don't know this program, but I developed a whole, my first program was called Play Your Way Out of Pain. And it was a six month program. People got private lessons and ⁓ group classes where I went in the group, the classes were on video and
 
 I just basically taught the body mapping information through those video classes. And then we had private lessons and master classes. And that was great. I had a small group. I was maybe 10 or 12, but some of the people that are now trained body mapping, licensed body mapping teachers started in that program. It was very exciting to me. I could see the potential here. ⁓ Video was pretty primitive at the time, but I still have those videos somewhere. I don't know where.
 
 ⁓
 
 And then after I had been back here a few years and then COVID hit.
 
 And that was really, I know for all of us, it was such a difficult time. wasn't just the income loss, because I wasn't performing a lot. It wasn't like I couldn't work, because I was doing all my work from my home. I couldn't go places. I had been doing summer master classes at a flute camp in North Carolina for 12 years. I couldn't do that anymore. There were a bunch of things I couldn't do. But it got me really interested in the
 
 potential of video teaching because we can't we try not to touch our students anyways that's one of the you know the rules in body mapping you don't touch your students unless you have permission and it's not part of how you have to teach not necessarily part of the learning process so how do you and plus there were the sound quality issues I still can't hear people play the flute on zoom it just disappears into the ether and I haven't bothered to try to get
 
 know, equipment that will help me do that. But how do you set up situations so that, because you can't tell what they're doing, you can only watch the way they're moving. And we know that that's a really important piece of the sound that is being made, is the way that they're moving. So I'm watching people play, but I have to ask them, well, what do you notice? What do you hear? How is that different? What feels better? I can see a lot of it through the movement, but they have to be able to articulate what's going on.
 
 and first of all to notice and then to articulate. So it made me realize this is a whole concept of teaching that we don't do most of the time. We're just telling people, you know, telling people what to do. So the comment, I can see that they can't, but yes, I know you get this. is.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (16:02)
 You can't see that I'm smiling right now. I'm like, this is huge. You're
 
 agency and autonomy rather than this dependency on the teacher.
 
 Lea Pearson (16:16)
 Absolutely.
 
 the more I did, so I started doing some little workshops on how to teach on Zoom. And then, you know, by the time I got going on that, then it was over. But I think there's still a lot to be said for that. People just, they try to do, you can't do the old style. And then, and then I think it was that three things really happened that I think helped crystallize what I'm doing now. That happened. And then I started thinking about,
 
 Well, I know my arm went numb when I was 18, but when did that start? It didn't start when I was 18. ⁓ it started when I was 10.
 
 None of my teachers ever asked me how I felt, what I noticed, what that felt like. None of them recognized the amount of tension that I was carrying in my body. They would say things like, okay, tense up your stomach so I can come and pound you in the stomach. You know all that stuff. Yeah. But the point is, I just could see so clearly the system of teaching that was set up
 
 Shawn L Copeland (17:22)
 to take that diaphragmatic breath. Gotta do that diaphragmatic breath. Yep.
 
 Lea Pearson (17:32)
 to make us injured. It was set up to disembodied us, take us away from ourselves, to not know anything about how our bodies worked, to criticize ourselves, to have this toxic self judgment, to take away our creative instincts. It's just, was a set up. That's all I can say, it was a set up. It is an old one, been around for 150 years.
 
 And the third thing that happened was what happened to me during COVID, which was, and I know I'm not alone in this by any means, especially as an older single woman, but I was living alone in one room over a garage. It was a beautiful place and that was, that had that going for it. But the isolation was horrific and the sense of not being safe.
 
 I think it was the first time, mean, there had been a lot of times where as a woman I hadn't felt safe, but this was like, nothing is safe. I was afraid to be around people. I was afraid to go places. It just like, it dredged up everything from my past and it made me realize, ⁓ this is the issue. And it made me, it made me begin to understand my relationship with my mother at that time, because what I had found out through just
 
 through talking to therapists, not because anybody did any diagnosing, but she probably
 
 was had a psychiatric condition called borderline personality, which is one of the hardest to live with and deal with. And it's what I call the push me, pull you, you I love you now go away. And what it meant for me, and maybe I got more of it because I was the youngest, I don't know. It meant for me that there was no room for me in that world. I couldn't, we could not coexist. It was all about her. And I had to
 
 eviscerate myself. That's a strong word, but it was what I felt like when I look back on it. had to completely eviscerate myself in order to be in her world. And I never, she never said, I love you ever until she was like had her stroke at 95 and became nice and sweet. There was, I know she did, but there was, it was always judgment.
 
 And I know where that came from in her life. That's why I say it's intergenerational trauma. But when I realized that that was the root of everything, that I had never felt safe psychologically. I mean, we had enough to eat. It wasn't that. But I had developed lot of compensatory behaviors for that. And I could never feel safe playing.
 
 ever, you know. No, it didn't.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (20:28)
 You never belonged. You never could,
 
 you never belonged in your family.
 
 Lea Pearson (20:32)
 No, to this day, still have, I'm still triggered by anything that makes me feel left out. It's that feeling of being left out, left behind. Yeah. And I'm working on that all the time, but this was, this, what I want to say also is that along the way in all this arts education stuff, and some of the performing arts medicine conferences, I started learning about what they call
 
 adverse childhood experiences or ACEs and resilience and how we help, especially this was especially relevant to the work I did in arts education in the inner city school. These are kids who had, mean, you never knew when they come in today, whether their dad had been carted off to jail or their mother had had an overdose or somebody had been shot. mean, you just, was no way of knowing, but you know that their lives were tough and realizing that.
 
 What the research has been showing for years now is that one committed caring adult who spends time with a child once a week over the course of a year, I mean, this is not huge change, but this is what it takes, can change the trajectory of that child's life into more successful schoolwork, more successful job life, more successful personal life that can help that build the resilience for them.
 
 And when I started putting all this together, the trauma and the resilience and the student-centered teaching and the safety and all of that, I was like...
 
 This is what we have to do. This is what we have to do. So I have this. I've done a lot of writing and a lot of thinking and a lot of waking up at three in the morning with ideas that I write down and then never do anything with. But this is on my computer on the side. And it says, you can't read it, but it says, nurturing, resilient, pain-free, and confident musicians with student-centered teaching.
 
 And this is what I share with teachers. Create a safe studio. Start where they are. Ask. Don't tell. Stop telling them what to do and just ask the damn questions. Collaborate and validate. And these are all things that are in student-centered teaching, in trauma-informed work, and in somatic work, which I'm now starting to call somatic inquiry.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (22:48)
 Yeah.
 
 Lea Pearson (23:05)
 Because those are the questions we need to ask. In fact, I'm doing a workshop at the Flute Convention this summer called The Power of Somatic Inquiry. Because I think that's what we're all doing. you're starting to see the word somatic a lot more, but still a lot of people don't know what it is. I see it all the time on Facebook because those are the things I click on. But I don't think other people do.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (23:29)
 Right. Right.
 
 Lea Pearson (23:34)
 So then I said to myself, all right, if it started with me when I was 10, and we're doing all the research, 90 % of the research, that's a made up statistic, but I made it up, is being done at the college level, and students are coming in injured. Finally, the research are saying in the past year or two, ⁓ we're too late. We need to start it earlier.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (24:01)
 Yeah.
 
 Lea Pearson (24:05)
 Even Chris Chesky, who is one of the leaders in the field and Eckhart Altemuller, who is like the expert on focal dystonia, they're saying this. So I said, okay, we have to train teachers. That's the future. have to train teachers. So I started my teacher training program and I have one, I had one, it started two different programs. One was sort of a beta program. The second one was my goal was to offer a certification and I had, I had,
 
 about eight students, six of whom stayed with me for two years. They just kept coming back. They wouldn't go away because they were getting so much out of it. Because it wasn't just, I wasn't teaching body mapping. I mean, we were doing a lot of body mapping stuff, but we were doing master classes to help them with their own ⁓ use. And we were doing teacher trainings, practice teaching, which nobody ever gets to do except you do with your students. they would bring in, they would teach each other.
 
 and give feedback on what that was like to be the student and the teacher. And they were learning to ask questions and they were bringing in videos of their students so we could talk about what's going on with your student and how can you help them. They shared ideas with each other about how to help students. We ended up having a retreat last summer, a weekend retreat where we dove much more into the
 
 kinds of things they would need for certification. We still haven't finished that. It's been a hell of a year for me, but that's where I'd like to go with it eventually. It's for your average studio teacher. And we had studio teachers from this country and one wonderful viola teacher from Brazil who was involved in it. And so they had, you know, beginning community teachers. She was a college teacher. It was quite a variety, but they were all able to support. They loved that community.
 
 There's some of them are still meeting every week. ⁓ And that was wonderful. I want to do more of that. I don't know yet. I sort of stopped the year long model and I was thinking about doing a six month model, but I feel like right now is not the time for people to be investing in long-term stuff with what's going on in the country. That's the feeling I'm getting. Certainly the way I feel. ⁓
 
 So I'm not sure yet. I'm exploring a lot of ideas. Meanwhile, I still have to make money. ⁓ I still have to find someplace to live that does not eat up all my savings. But I really think that's where you and I are really in sync. I think you're coming at it from a slightly different angle with different populations, but we're doing the same stuff.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (26:38)
 Right.
 
 We really are. ⁓
 
 Lea Pearson (26:59)
 and we feed
 
 off each other.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (27:03)
 Gosh, I have so many questions, but again, well, Lee, thank you.
 
 Lea Pearson (27:04)
 Hmm, fire away.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (27:16)
 You're a hero for so many people. And the.
 
 Like, the underneath requirement of the work that we're doing is the vulnerability. And...
 
 The level of vulnerability that you just modeled for us is remarkable. Like just in telling your story and the bravery and the courage to have lived it, but then again, for a second time to share it ⁓ is powerful.
 
 Lea Pearson (28:03)
 Well, thank you, Sean. It's possible partly because of who you are, because we know how to have a safe space with each other, which is what we always are trying to model for other people. for me, that's a number one, and it's something that a lot of folks don't understand. But it's also not hard for me. I think it's just part of my personality. I spent so many years of my life being afraid to say anything.
 
 you know, and I finally decided not to be shy anymore. And so in this whole process, I think, you know, through the business training and the community that I've been in there, by the way, I still have ongoing mastermind groups with six people from that community, three different groups, ⁓ made me feel, it was like I finally grew up, I think.
 
 I stopped thinking of myself as just a musician or just a music teacher. was like, okay, we are leaders. We have to be leaders and we need more leaders in our field of teachers. We're not just little studio music teachers. We are leaders. We have that option. We have the power of being there for students an hour every week. If we do it right, we can change lives even more than we are already doing.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (29:28)
 I wrote this as you were talking. You see, you seized your story and your power. You, you became the narrator of your own story.
 
 Lea Pearson (29:37)
 Absolutely.
 
 Yeah.
 
 And you know what? This is funny too, because then I realized that, wow, this is in my DNA. My grandmother, on my father's side, she started a little school in their basement for the kids in the neighborhood. She was instrumental in bringing Maria Montessori over here ⁓ way back in the early 20th century. She started a teacher training school at Tufts University. It's still there. It's called the Elliot Pearson School. My mother's older sister,
 
 who talk about stories, she was a violinist. She and her family were interned in a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines for three years during World War II. She lost her ability to play violin because of the malnutrition that she experienced. She became, for many years, she was the lead ORF teacher trainer in this country and in Canada. And she traveled all around doing this. And I'm so
 
 Aren't I blessed to have that in my history that I can feel connected to? that sense of being connected to a bigger picture is really powerful. Not everybody has that. And I have friends who, their entire families were lost in the Holocaust and they don't have them.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (31:06)
 It's powerful to... It's a testament to the work that you've done. To get through the stuff on the surface, the pain and the suffering, to find that deeper sense of meaning and that deeper motivation and connection. And well, it goes back to what you said earlier. Who am I if I can't play? Who am I?
 
 Lea Pearson (31:16)
 Yeah.
 
 Who are we if we don't do that? We have to.
 
 Yeah, which you're facing right now.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (31:36)
 ⁓
 
 It's what I live every day. Who am I? ⁓ I wanna come to ⁓ an intersection for the both of us. ⁓ We talk about our work ⁓ as coaching as opposed to teaching.
 
 What does that word mean for you? And why does the coaching resonate for you?
 
 than differently than teaching. I think most people come to come to us, you know, and I think this might be one of the reasons why like people still don't really know about us or know what we're doing or like, you know, they pop on our websites and they're like, I don't, I don't know about this. This is because, you know, my goodness, I remembered the first time that I did a workshop for musicians and I had like six people show up.
 
 And I asked other people like, why didn't you come? You know, all this stuff. And they were like, I didn't know what this was. We don't. And then I thought, ⁓ duh. We do workshops in the somatic world. We do those all the time. But musicians don't do workshops. Musicians do master classes. Like it's a nomenclature kind of thing.
 
 Lea Pearson (32:54)
 Yeah.
 
 Yeah,
 
 only in the, I think in the Flute community, they do it a little more. The Flute community is pretty organized because they have such, yeah. Yeah, no, they have, because they have so many people who want to share so much knowledge, you know.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (33:08)
 Yeah. The clarinet community is getting there, but it's not quite like the flute community, you know.
 
 Well, and they have the gift of, of your 50 year career working with flute players. You know, we don't have that in the clarinet world. We're getting there.
 
 Lea Pearson (33:30)
 There's still, it's
 
 still very rare to find a workshop that is truly centered around transformation of the participants. If they do something, it's more likely to be some kind of a lecture.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (33:42)
 Yeah.
 
 and not the glorification of the person who's teaching the workshop, right? So what is, coaching?
 
 Lea Pearson (33:50)
 Yes.
 
 Well, I love that. I love that question. And I have heard a few people try to parse that. I think probably teaching still has a little bit of the old.
 
 poison to it. That's probably the too powerful a word, but teaching still has an element of top down to me. And when you see what coaches do, they're basically just asking questions, whether it's a life coach or a health coach, you know, they're, asking questions and they're helping you figure out, or, like a physical, a PT or a
 
 exercise coach, they're helping you figure out what's your next step. Where do you want to go? What is meaningful to you? They're not all like that, it's also out of the therapist world. This is what therapists do. I've spent a long time in therapy. I've even come to change my views in therapy a little bit, but I think it's the equality of the relationship.
 
 Not in the sense that we know the same things, because we don't. It's obvious that I know a whole lot more than the people that I'm working with in certain things, but they're the only ones who know their life and themselves. And, you know, they'll ask me a question, should I do this or that? I I don't know. You're the only one who knows what your body feels like. I can't tell. I can ask you questions. Yeah. Yeah. So who am I?
 
 Shawn L Copeland (35:22)
 They are the expert in them. There's only one expert
 
 in the room. Yeah, that's what I say all the time. There's only one expert in the room. You. You are the expert of you.
 
 Lea Pearson (35:31)
 Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So that,
 
 you know, we go back to the underdog thing. Like all my life, I've had a horror of things being unfair and it just makes me see red. If I see somebody picking on somebody else or putting them down or bullying or anything like that, I get so angry and it's so unfair. ⁓ And it is unfair for teachers to be
 
 And because I feel the, you know what, I discovered this recently, I always knew I was sort of an empath, but I am a kinesthetic empath. You probably are too. I feel what other people are feeling in my body. And that makes me a good coach and a good teacher, but it's painful sometimes. You know, I watch people and it's like, no, it's just...
 
 Shawn L Copeland (36:12)
 Mmm.
 
 I can't, I can't exactly. Yeah. All right. I'm just looking down because I, I just, I just want to hear it. I, and it, it, it, it both physically affects me, but it also like my, my empathic nature. like, I just want to help. Can you give me three seconds? I can really help you. And you.
 
 Lea Pearson (36:31)
 I don't want to see it. Most of the time at concerts, my eyes are closed.
 
 I know.
 
 I you can't say
 
 that. No.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (36:59)
 You can't say that, you
 
 know, it's the whole, it's kind of leads to kind of my next question, which is, you know, it's the whole, how do you help someone who doesn't know, who doesn't know that they're part of the system and they don't know that it could be different?
 
 You know, they don't even know what they're looking for.
 
 Lea Pearson (37:25)
 Well, I've learned a few things exhibiting at flute conventions. Cause when I'm there, I have sign up sheets for every 15 minutes and people come and they say, they come into, they see my sign. Oh, music minus pain. What's that mean? And I say, well, you do you ever, you ever, does you ever get sore in your wrist or your neck or your back or anything, or you have trouble with breathing? Yeah. I said, well, they'll offer you a free lesson, a little mini lesson. Um, see if we can figure out what's going on.
 
 So that's what I do all day for four days. I teach 10 minute mini lessons and I get very good at transformation. It doesn't have to be the most important thing. It's just something that makes them go.
 
 ⁓ you've seen that look a hundred millions of times, you know, and they, never knew that. And that, that's what I want all of us in body mapping to be able to do, which is to, and I think we all want that. We just don't always know exactly how to do it in the beginning, especially once you're an experienced teacher, you know a lot better how to do that. But practicing it over and over and over for those short periods of times has been very beneficial to me. ⁓
 
 Shawn L Copeland (38:42)
 scary to for a brand new teacher to to kind of step out there and with this work, especially because you don't you can't always see what's happening. You don't.
 
 Lea Pearson (38:43)
 you
 
 Yes.
 
 Yes.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (39:02)
 what I say this often to my my co-training cohorts right now, trust the work. The work is the work is powerful and the work is real and your job is just in asking the questions to reveal where the work needs to be done. And if you just trust it, you know,
 
 Lea Pearson (39:11)
 Yeah. Yeah.
 
 Right, exactly.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (39:29)
 It will work. It does work. And the, the teaching moment, the, the, the transformation will reveal itself. It always does what needs to happen. If you can just, and this goes back to that coaching thing, if you can just inhibit, there's an Alexander word. If you can just inhibit your desire to talk.
 
 Lea Pearson (39:31)
 Yeah.
 
 Yep. What needs to happen, yeah.
 
 Shut up!
 
 and to fix.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (39:59)
 and to fix and to flood the person with a like, I have seen this so many times. ⁓ someone says something like, well, I'm exhaling with my diaphragm and the teacher will just lay into a 45 minute discussion unpacking the whole world of breathing.
 
 when all you need to go is really tell me about that. Let's say more about that. How exactly do you do that?
 
 Lea Pearson (40:23)
 Mmm.
 
 Yeah. This
 
 is why Sean, I'm so passionate about just training studio teachers. You don't have to know a lot. You don't have to know all the information about body mapping. You if you want to do that, that's fine. Go get trained in it. All you have to do is know how to ask questions. What did you notice? What do you think about that? How does that feel? Is there something you would do differently that would make it feel easier? What's your intention? What do you want to...
 
 to feel here, what do want to express? You know, there's a million questions and that's what the training is. It's in how to, first of all, STFU and ask questions and wait and wait and wait. So.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (41:15)
 Yeah,
 
 that's what you're talking about with the somatic inquiry.
 
 Lea Pearson (41:18)
 Yeah, that's it. That's
 
 it. I was working with somebody the other day who had a real problem with hand position. They had just awkward stuff going on and they had been to a teacher, their teacher, who had had them try a whole different hand position. And they were in a lot of pain from that. So they, in a very intelligent way, they said, all right, I'm not going to do that. It hurts too much. I'll go back to my old way. But then they wanted to know, well, isn't there something I can do better?
 
 you know, that will be more comfortable for me. So we went through the whole thing about finding the natural way to hold two things that were really that I did know about body memory, but they were helpful. So I was able to ask questions about it. One is how do you spread your fingers, you know, that instead of spreading them from here, you know, so we asked that question and got into that. And the other one was, what do you, where is the work coming from that makes your fingers move and how does that connect?
 
 the rest of your body, you know, how do you hold the instrument? It's usually the question I ask what part of your body do you use to hold the instrument? It's usually, you know, the hands, so they're overworking your hands. And I know that the connection goes all the way to the tailbone and eventually to the feet. And both of those things for that person, it was the rotation of the forearm, which allowed the pinky to be more independent and the connection of the arms. Now,
 
 You and I both know there's a lot more to body mapping than that, but if I hadn't known all of that, I could have probably gotten curious. It's about curiosity, creativity.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (43:00)
 It's about, it's a, it's not only about curiosity and creativity in the music, it's about curiosity and creativity in the teaching. And the, and the, and the practicing and approaching. Yeah.
 
 Lea Pearson (43:00)
 and
 
 Yes, in the practicing.
 
 It's especially, you have
 
 to teach them how to practice in this way, because nobody else is going to.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (43:24)
 with curiosity and wonder and creativity at the forefront of what it is that you're doing and letting go of that right and wrong.
 
 Lea Pearson (43:29)
 Yes, yes.
 
 Yeah, because what that does is it
 
 takes away the self judgment because you're no longer trying to find the right or the wrong way. I'm working with another person in their late seventies who is, you know, had that all their life and they were able to let it go so fast. Just like, you know, learning, learning so fast because they were ready for it. And that that's that. Yeah.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (44:02)
 They want it. People want it.
 
 Lea Pearson (44:04)
 Yeah, that's that toxic self-judgment that we're just...
 
 It's like the goldfish in the bowl, not knowing that they're in a bowl. You know that analogy? Yeah, we can't see it. So I really believe that asking questions is the most important thing. And I got a lot of modeling for how to do that. In my business training program, they would do what they call hot seat coaching, where somebody, you know, be a whole audience of 250 people, but one person would come up with a problem and they would coach that person. And then we'd talk about it a little bit.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (44:18)
 Yeah, I do. Yeah.
 
 Lea Pearson (44:40)
 And I learned a lot about how to ask questions and how not to make judgments and how to find out more. And I think that's probably at the heart of the difference between coaching and teaching for me. But I will say that I am teaching. For sure, I'm teaching.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (44:55)
 Of course.
 
 But the teaching through coaching is a process of discovery.
 
 Lea Pearson (45:04)
 Yeah, yeah it is. And I
 
 will say I have a horror of hierarchical structures. I always have.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (45:11)
 That's that to me, that's the golden piece of coaching is that it undoes that hierarchical patriarchal.
 
 Lea Pearson (45:16)
 Yeah.
 
 Yeah. Yeah.
 
 So
 
 this also is the kernel of the essence of helping students learn to own their own bodies so that they don't suffer abuse, whether it's psychological or physical or sexual. They know enough about if we start them day one in their lessons in trusting their own bodies and noticing what's happening and noticing their breathing and finding out what feels comfortable and what doesn't feel comfortable, what feels wrong.
 
 ⁓ And I say that to students all the time. There is no right way to do something. It's only what is right for your body. you know, we could, especially, I mean, these young vulnerable people, and we're reading about it, we read about it all the time. We all know people who've been through this, people don't talk about it much in terms of teaching at the beginning level.
 
 And sometimes when I ask teachers, well, you know, do any of your students have any pain or anything? And they're like, they say, well, my students are so young, they don't have any of that. But you know what? They're not looking at their students the way I am.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (46:33)
 Yeah, they're not asking the right questions or asking questions at all.
 
 Lea Pearson (46:35)
 No, no, I want to,
 
 I want to, going to want to, keep a list on my phone of all these postings I want to put on Facebook titles. the one I came up with last night, I guess, or the night before, they usually show up at three in the morning was, what do you look for when you watch your students?
 
 Shawn L Copeland (46:59)
 Mm.
 
 Lea Pearson (47:02)
 In the flute world, most people are watching fingers and embouchure.
 
 That's one of the first things I teach, I do teach, which is, know, stand back, stand across the room, which I learned from Lisa back in 1986.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (47:20)
 Yeah, I love this as a process of teaching the whole person to journey back to becoming a whole person again. ⁓ It's a beautiful, beautiful explanation of self belonging and being able to learn self belonging.
 
 Lea Pearson (47:30)
 Yeah, absolutely.
 
 Yeah, yeah.
 
 That makes, I agree with that. And that is so much about the body, just being able to hold yourself. I think about this a lot, wait, what was I gonna say?
 
 Shawn L Copeland (47:51)
 Yeah.
 
 Lea Pearson (48:03)
 What were we talking about?
 
 Shawn L Copeland (48:05)
 belonging and self belonging and, and ⁓ your, your teaching approach of hierarch, hierarchical teaching and coaching and teaching and.
 
 Lea Pearson (48:09)
 for that hierarchy.
 
 teaching. Yeah, it had to do with teaching.
 
 it'll come back. I can't remember what I was going to say. It was useful, I thought.
 
 
 Shawn L Copeland (48:34)
 People often say, even if they say, well, I'm not hurting, why do I need this stuff? Why do I need to know about my body? Go for it. Go for it.
 
 Lea Pearson (48:41)
 I know what it was. I know what it was. Two things.
 
 One is that when I started my teacher training program, I invited interest in it by holding a five day, what they call challenge on social media. And every day there was a, I created a little short video with questions. And most of the questions had to do with your experience as a student.
 
 your experience with your teachers. Did you ever have it? You know, how did you feel going into lessons? And I had several things in the video that were about that and about the system. So, and then we had discussions on Facebook and I felt that that was a great way to get people interested in this because once they could identify, we don't talk about this. We don't have a place for musicians to a support group for this, for musicians to talk about it. And they all say,
 
 Oh my God, it's so great to be able to talk about this. I never get to talk about it. You know, and it's personal and private and they'll say, they'll, you know, say things about when they were criticized or when they were abused or any of that stuff. So four and a half days of that really helped them get into the mind, the feeling. don't even use the word mindset anymore because it's the whole state of, Oh, you know, and, and many of them would say,
 
 And I think this is wonderful that.
 
 They've changed their teaching because of how they were taught. Lots of people will teach the way they were taught, but these were thoughtful people that say, you know, I never want to do what my band director did to me. And they figured that out. That's great. So that's one thing. The second thing is that two things, actually. I went to a concert. There's a wonderful African-American, a black artist group in Boston called Castle of Our Skins.
 
 And they have musicians and composers and dancers and artists that they all collaborate. They were doing a concert at this fantastic charter school, which is a music charter school. All the kids have music lessons from grade one through grade eight, every day. They all learn to play instruments, which I think is like the most amazing thing ever. Part of it is the El Sistema method. But they, in the beginning of the concert, before the professionals played, they had five students.
 
 And immediately I could see that three of them were in trouble. These were like third graders.
 
 I'm thinking, hmm, a school where they have a whole stable of music teachers who are... and so I asked the director, said, how do you find your music teachers? He said, well, some of them are performers and some of them are music educators. I'm I'm betting you anything that somatic inquiry is not part of what they teach. They teach in their whole system of education is inquiry based, but I bet it's not so much in the music lessons. So I'm...
 
 going to try to have a conversation with him about that. And then last Saturday, I went to a concert at Berklee, which is now Boston Conservatory, they're joined. And it was the Music Inclusion Ensemble, which is an ensemble of musicians who have either visible or invisible disabilities and their allies, any kind of ally.
 
 So the faculty member who leads it is this man named Adrian, I can't remember his last name. And I had seen him perform at a performing arts medicine symposium years ago. He was born without a forearm. So he has his bow strapped to his right elbow and he plays that way. And he's a beautiful player. He's the leader of the ensemble. They had
 
 I mean, this concert that several of the arrangers were in the ensemble, they were Berkeley students who were incredible. The concert opened with a solo cellist who was plucking and he was telling the story of being autistic while he's making this music underneath it. It's just, it just cracked me open. ⁓ He was talking about how he couldn't even hold a conversation with people yet he could read something in public before an audience, know, what it was like.
 
 being autistic and it was beautiful music and beautiful speech. And then another one of the arrangers ⁓ led, it a violist led, really passionately led some of these works. And he said, when he was born and diagnosed, he didn't say what he was diagnosed with, the doctors told his parents that he would never speak or talk to anyone. He would never have relationships with anyone. And here's this kid graduating from Berkeley, making these amazing arrangements.
 
 leading a whole ensemble. And I tell you, Sean, that was the most joyful concert I have ever been to in my life. And I had, like you, have been to thousands of concerts. It was phenomenal. all of this stuff is like swirling around in my head. You know, maybe they weren't perfect body mapping players, but there was so much movement and joy and connection and community in that ensemble. They weren't just looking down at their music the way a lot of chamber music players do. They were connecting and grooving and...
 
 You know, it was just, it was, it was wonderful. Loved it. Yes. Yeah. So all of this, I'll say one other thing about inclusion. And this is important for, I think us aging and, ⁓ ill people, people who have physical elements. I started getting really interested in, for lack of a better word, disabilities because of my own barriers.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (54:18)
 There's hope. There's hope. There's hope.
 
 Lea Pearson (54:42)
 you know, when I, when my hearing started to go and now I can't hear people, what they say. And then it was COVID and there were masks and my hearing aids weren't very good. And so I just was like, okay, I just don't want to be around people because it's too frustrating because I can't hear what they have to say. I cannot connect. You know, it's frustrating to me to be around here in this particular part of the city where I live, because there are so many people who original language is different from English and, especially with softer consonants.
 
 And I cannot understand what they're saying. And I hate it. I hate it. ⁓ I had mobility issues. had knee pain and knee surgery and foot arthritis in my feet. And then this whole piece about this, which was particular to my faith, which is that it tends to be somewhat intellectual and with a lot of educated people in it. So they tend to talk in long sentences.
 
 paragraphs and you don't know when to be quiet and they... It's just too heady for me. I'm such a kinesthetic person that I want stuff to be immediate. I want to be able feel it. I don't want to have to wade through a bunch of long words. So it got me very interested in working in what we called our accessibility and inclusion ministry. this whole thing that inclusion now is, and we've talked about this, and I, is...
 
 everything. the whole spectrum of people. It's not just racism or just sexism or just disabilities. Everybody's on a spectrum of something. And we're all, there is no normal anymore. I love Gabor Maté's book, The Myth of Normal.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (56:32)
 Can we all benefit from inclusive practices? Everyone benefits from it. Yeah.
 
 Lea Pearson (56:32)
 So.
 
 We do.
 
 Absolutely.
 
 my heart is really there because I just feel that it's so important for people to understand that. It all makes us better when we can be open.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (56:52)
 Yeah, it changes the world.
 
 Lea Pearson (56:55)
 Yeah, and now we're faced with, you know, all these things that are trying to shut it down.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (57:04)
 You
 
 Lea Pearson (57:04)
 Which
 
 makes it more important than ever. We have to do, we have to do extra.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (57:06)
 Right.
 
 So Lee, how do people get in touch with you if they want to be a part of what you're doing?
 
 Lea Pearson (57:15)
 ⁓ Well, they can go to
 
 my website music-pain.com. I will give you some links to put on the end of the podcast. You can send me an email. My email is really simple. It's just my name at mac.com or at music-pain.com. And I love to talk to people. I will be happy if you have an issue you want to get some feedback on. I'm always offering.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (57:26)
 Great.
 
 Lee Pearson.
 
 Lea Pearson (57:42)
 Complimentary consultations where I'll talk with you for half hour and we'll try to figure out what's going on With whatever you're struggling with. This is all Sean it's all about reducing the barriers to self-expression And we are so desperately in need of self-expression
 
 Shawn L Copeland (58:05)
 And we are here and we want to help. And all you have to do is reach out.
 
 Lea Pearson (58:06)
 Yeah, we do. We do.
 
 Yeah. I wish I didn't have to make money. The truth is, I wish I could just go and do all of this all the time.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (58:17)
 Yeah, but.
 
 Lea Pearson (58:21)
 I I know. I know. Yeah.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (58:21)
 There's that too. But we are here and
 
 ⁓ I will put all of those links in the credits for this. ⁓
 
 Lea Pearson (58:29)
 Okay. Yeah. And,
 
 and we're open to also workshops and residencies and, ⁓ doing something for a studio. ⁓ all kinds of stuff. Yeah. Even if we're not, you know, I've noticed that the guests that like flute studios and flute, like, ⁓ flute choir exhibitions and stuff like that, the ones they bring in are always the big performers. You can bring us in too.
 
 We don't have to perform, we've got a whole lot of other wonderful stuff to share.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (59:04)
 Yeah.
 
 Lea Pearson (59:05)
 That's
 
 my, that's my dream. What's my dream? One of my dreams is to do keynote speeches. We should do it together. Mutt and Jeff.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (59:14)
 Yeah,
 
 I'm there. I'm there. Thank you, Lee. Thank you so much for spending the afternoon with me. ⁓
 
 Lea Pearson (59:24)
 Thank you, Sean.
 
 It's wonderful to be with you, as always.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (59:29)
 We could do this all day, all week. Well, thank you so much. ⁓ As always, everyone, ⁓ send us ⁓ a direct message if you have any questions. We want to hear from you with any questions that you have or things that you would like us to follow up with on a ⁓ second or third episode.
 
 Lea Pearson (59:30)
 We could. Yeah, nobody else wants to hear it, but we could.
 
 Yeah,
 
 and we want to hear your stories too. Everybody's story is important.
 
 Shawn L Copeland (59:59)
 Absolutely. Thank you, Lee. Thank you so much.
 
 Lea Pearson (1:00:02)
 Take
 
 care. Bye bye.