The results of this study suggest that learning mindfulness is highly beneficial to violin practice. Based on the results, violinists who choose to learn mindfulness should feel confident that they will find particular benefits for themselves in their practice goals and their every-day lives. Considering how short the meditation time was in this study (around two hours between all the week meditations), the fact that participants noticed changes in their level of awareness during musical practice it is quite remarkable. Moreover, it was outstanding to see that after noticing minimal benefits from the meditation, participants claimed that mindfulness may actually help them in the long run if they continued meditating.
Concerning the mind-wandering part of the experiment, this study is the first one to scientifically demonstrate that musicians mind-wander during musical practice. Despite not being able to draw any correlations between distraction and mindfulness, measuring participants frequency of rumination and making them more aware of their level of distraction may have been useful for the purpose of this study. That is, by monitoring their wandering thoughts, participants may have developed a greater ability to clearly distinguish between a distracted and a mindful mindset.
It was really interesting and challenging to monitor participants' levels of mind-wandering during practice by means of two different phone apps. In the context of an era featured by "digital distractions", finding which variables (e.g. motivation, fatigue, stress) trigger musician's mind-wandering and examining how much musicans ruminate during practice are questions that need further exploring and experimenting. By knowing more about the nature of mind-wandering during music practice,we may be able to develop tools (e.g. mindfulness meditations) that are more effective to handle distractions.
Personal benefits from mindfulness in the long run
Learning how to deal with emotions and not to be overwhelmed by them is learned through encountering and dealing with them often. In our daily lives we don’t often do this, we usually decide to distract or occupy ourselves with distractions so we can continuously postpone the moment of being alone and without stimulation. And that is to say that meditation is hard, especially the first attempts one makes to meditate. When one becomes still and is connected to the the breath, physical sensations, or sounds, one realizes how distracted we are and how much we mind-wander. One of the things that mindfulness is helping me achieve is to have more self-control of my mental content. Of course, deciding upon what content we want in our heads in each moment seems pretty complicated. However, by meditating every day for a few minutes, that is, by bringing my focus to thepresent consciously during a reserved time every day, I have been able to gain more control over how long these thoughts linger in my head. The first times I meditated, when I saw how much "noise" there was in my head, I got a bit scared and reluctant to meditate. Meditating was bit scary in the first times also because I identified with my thoughts emotionally, I saw them as part of me, of my perosnality. I cannot always control how much certain thoughts affect me, but when I derify these thoughts, or see them as non-real but just as confections that my mind naturally comes up with, they lose their power to make me anxious or depressed. As a result, while before I would punish myself when realizing that I was distracted when practicing my violin, now I am more forgiving and compassionate.
Finally, mindfulness has given me more acceptance and trust. Mindfulness teaches us to accept ourselves as we are, to accept our thoughts and feelings. But to take the step to accept, we need to dare to do it, we need trust, trust in that after accepting we will not suffer any catastrophic consequences, as our minds want to make us see. By meditating, one is capable of learning how to accept oneself in an outside the practice room. It gave me such a relief to start accepting and be able to make mistakes without the incredible fear of judgement that I had before. Finally, mindfulness meditation is allowing me to practice and improve artistically with an increased attitude of curiosity and interest towards my musical work.
Hopefully, violinists and other musicians who read this study may also feel motivated to become more mindful by incorporating short meditations into their daily musical lives or to take an even bigger step by trying formal meditations such as MBSR or MBCT.
My personal experience with mindfulness.
When I collected the results of my study, I could notice similarities between participants' reports and how I felt when I started practicing mindfulness meditation. Increased awareness of mental content and physical sensations while playing, more focus, more serenity, increased awarenes of the breath and instant mental clarity are some of those shared similarities. After these points in common, I have become very enthousiastic to see how mindfulness may affect violinists and musicians in the long run. Perhaps, with an extended period of practice, we might be able to observe deeper changes and increased more benefits such as those observed in the participants of the reviewd literature or that I could experience myself by the enf of the fifth week of a 8-week MSR course I took part. Some of the benefits that I experienced by meditating were:
Mindfulness in the conservatories
From the promising results of the current study and other studies in the literature, it is clear that a partnership between conservatories and mindfulness is likely to succeed. Czajkowski et al. (2020) recommend that mindfulness courses should be made available to students at university music departments and music conservatoires. Mindfulness should be made readily available to all music students helping them develop of their musical skills and health during their studies. Some schools in the United States, such as Indiana University, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Bowling Green State University, and Michigan State University already have mindfulness implemented in their curriculum. In these institutions, formal mindfulness training is offered to collegiate music students in the form of a class, summer clinic and campus club. These may be early signs of a more widespread implmementation of mindfulness among the musical community.
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