Relief! For now...

My cat Frances keeps putting her butt in front of my face. And I have a really bad case of dry mouth. Because I just practiced for 3 hours straight. I get dry mouth because when I get focused on playing, my mouth usually starts to fall open a little and I forget to salivate. The practicing doesn't explain Frances's behavior, just the dry mouth. But the main point here is that I was able to play for 3 hours without taking a break and I am still pain free!

After a lesson with Prof. Niehaus, my teacher from WM, everything started to click because I finally realized what I was doing wrong. She noticed my octave looked really uncomfortable. First she gave me a really cool image to help structure my hand better--she told me to pretend popsicle sticks were taped to the ends of my fingers and then try to bring my hand into a fist (the sticks force the fingers to stay nice and open). She also pointed out that the fingers that weren't playing in the octave were doing some kind of superfluous, strained-looking movement. So I tried focusing on those fingers rather than the playing fingers, which was counterintuitive to me since the playing fingers are the ones doing the action and therefore most important. But when I focused on making the non-playing fingers as relaxed as possible (sorry to the Golandsky people, who hate the word 'relaxed'), something awesome happened. All the strength and energy which had I had been dividing between playing and non-playing fingers flowed into the playing fingers and it just felt right. For so long I had been using opposing muscles at the same time, causing so much unnecessary tension in my fingers that it traveled up my arm all the way to the elbow. My brain got so used to that sensation that I came to expect pain as soon as I sat down at the piano (at my worst, I would tense even just hearing someone else play). But I guess that idea that I shouldn't let my muscles contract in opposite directions, simple enough, I know, was the light bulb I needed. Or maybe just the last piece of the puzzle, cause I'm definitely still using all the other info I've learned this year from Golandsky people, physical therapists and teachers I had occasional lessons with. Either way, I feel like even if I find myself experiencing pain again, I have the tools to fix it.

I'm too scared to say it's all over and I'll never hit a wall with physical problems (or any problems for that matter) in piano anymore. Maybe I'm just lucky and it wasn't because of my own work that I came out of my struggle. Maybe there is no explanation for what I went through for the past year and a half. I don't think my life philosophy is developed enough to be able to address stuff like this; all I know is every time I want to get comfortable, in any part of my life, it seems like I always get bit in the butt, so I don't want to ever let myself get comfortable.