Jacqueline's Story: Tempo

I had no real sense of the impact which dissociation had upon my ability to learn for many years. As with many other insights, it wasn’t apparent until I moved away from the area in which I was born and in which I had grown up. Moving from Hampshire to Cornwall freed me from a daily background of being in difficult places and tolerating immense unhappiness. This in turn has brought different challenges but they are the waymarkers of a pattern of understanding and sometimes liberation completely from symptoms.

After many years of wanting, I had started to learn the piano before we moved counties. It had been very painful at times. I had become aware that I could barely play even simple scales whilst in the same room as my teacher, unable to put down my fingers without extreme effort and a lot of physical discomfort. At that time, I just felt these things as blocks or frustrations. I didn’t attach any deeper understanding to them. I couldn’t see a way around them. Every lesson seemed like back to square one. I had a new teacher and although I advanced slightly, it was ultimately no better an experience. My teacher then didn’t have what it took to say that there was a problem but was happy to take my money. After Lockdown, I found another teacher with a very different attitude to teaching altogether. She once told me: ‘if you can’t play something, it’s because I haven’t found a way to teach you’.

I have learnt more about resilience and being present (or not) whilst working with her than anywhere else. Until then, I had no idea how little I remained present in a situation or even that I didn’t notice it myself. I had become a very socially polished individual with a sense of the gap inside myself but nothing more than that. Trying to make some tolerable music has actually produced the biggest step forward in identifying my needs and accepting that I can change and thrive.

Faced with the lifelong wish to play the piano, I had to acknowledge (from the safe place of Cornwall) how much I shook or simply sweated or most disturbingly couldn’t see what I was doing. It was horrible at first, just sitting with the physical problems. I never had myself down as someone who panicked, simply as someone who disappeared. What I learned was that I didn’t have obvious panic attacks but I did become very hot. I also actually could barely see or concentrate properly. Some part of me was seeing something, clearly, but I couldn’t share that information outside of my own head. I never really knew these things about myself. I was aware of a painful absence of self but nothing more. In safety, I can discover and not be afraid.

The processes of music have supported me; tempos, spaces, rests. I am circling over my own beginnings with my metronome next to me, the new experiences of being someone who is all in one place, at once. I am feasting: I am grateful.