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26 Simple Ways to Nurture Your Creative Life

#20: Tune In

To the life within seeking to be known.

By Chris Dunmire

Have I told you about my piano lessons? For two months I've been sneaking away for an hour each Tuesday night to attend a "Piano for Beginner Adults" class at a local college. It's a great learning experience — there's eight of us adults doing this together every week under the helpful guidance (and hearing ear) of an attentive piano instructor who gives private lessons in her home during the daytime.

I've never had serious, money-paying music lessons before in my life. Further, my parents weren't musically inclined nor did my grandparents have a piano in their parlor. My musical background consists of K-5 music classes and one junior high choir class where I learned the names of the notes on the treble clef staff (Every Good Boy Does Fine, F-A-C-E) and all the words to "Camp Grenada." Well, there was also that guitar class after lunch in eighth grade where I learned how to pick the beginnings to "Skip to My Lou", but I hardly count it because the band instructor had a hands-off approach to teaching and I had a hands-off approach to learning... those finger-callusing guitar lessons.

What prompted this new music-making path for me now when I have a creative banquet full of art, writing, and teaching filling my life? Assuredly, it's not because I desire to become a famous classical pianist or join in on the ranks of musical geniustry ala Alicia Keys (at least not yet). But as a huge proponent to both creative expression and exploring everything that interest me, my desire to learn music is a direct a response to a deep questioning seeking resolution.

Yes, before I started taking piano lessons, "music" was a universal language that I loved and longed for, but didn't understand. I knew its sounds were pulsing, impacting, and integral, but was frustrated by my lack of knowledge and understanding at how notes were composed and read and translated into key-striking sound vibrations to make this beautiful noise we call music. Oh, I get the mechanics of it: keys, hammers, strings — it's the nuances I'm after.

The mystery unravels more each week around my new musical vocabulary: whole notes, dotted half-notes, sharps, flats. Treble, bass, melody, accompaniment. The more I learn and practice, the better I get and more I want to know. In all this I realize what's at the core: a desire to express myself melodically through music. It's emotional and powerful and layers like collage.

This process reminds me of what writing coach Naomi Rose speaks to in her piece Is It Commerce, or Is It Art?, a thoughtful discussion on commercial product orientation vs. tuning in to the life within you seeking to be known.

She writes (beautifully, I might add):

So it’s essential to make one’s own acquaintance deeply, to learn how to hear what’s there, to give it passage, to honor it, to be able to recognize when one is off-center, and to return. This is an intrinsically spiritual process, and it’s what we long for in our soul of souls.

• • • Take Action Now! • • •

Tune in and listen deeply to what's there. Do you have questions begging to be answered? Longings to be satisfied? New territory to be explored? A life within seeking expression? What is the life within you seeking to be known? And how will you allow it to emerge? •

© 2008 Chris Dunmire, CoachingYourCreativity.com. All rights reserved. (11/10/08)

About the Author
Chris Dunmire is the founder of the award-winning Creativity Portal® Web site and is a Master-in-training Kaizen-Muse™ Creativity Coach who supports clients through overwhelm, procrastination, perfectionism, and other blocks to their creativity AND celebrates the joyful, expressive parts of being . . . an imaginary being! Connect with Chris to experience how creativity coaching can enrich your life.