Yoga: It's all in how you duet.

I’ve started a whole new thing: playing music with another person.

Learning to play and sing songs on my guitar (or ukulele or banjo) is something that I did a lot during 2020 and 2021, mostly by myself. I’ve been yearning for the chance when it would feel relatively safe to play music with another person. Now I’m doing it and it’s a little terrifying.

Though it’s always been awesome to play music with someone else, here’s what happens internally: I feel like I sound completely different in this context. The mental frustrations of not liking how I sound or forgetting the chords or playing the wrong notes, are coming up strong. I had done so much inner work to quell those demons while playing by myself, but with another person it’s a different ball game altogether.

It's one thing to mess up a song by yourself, but it's another to do it on display for another person.

Though I've played for a live audience recently, somehow this feels more vulnerable. Since we are playing together, me messing up means I mess them up too. There's more than just my performance on the line.

With all this on my mind, I went to my yoga study group today. We are reading and discussing the yoga sutras, the foundational text of yoga philosophy. That's when I zeroed in on this message from the text:

There are two parts of yoga: the practice itself and non-attachment. Of these two, non-attachment is more important.

This truth bomb put me at ease.

The reason is that when I apply this to the yoga of playing music with another person, I can see two parts of what's happening. There is the practice of playing together, something we can repeat over and over (and maybe even improve). But then there's the letting go of what happens, the non-attachment.

Once I see that the letting go is more important, it feels like it matters less how it all sounds. Besides, it's all practice anyways.

I'm learning to see all aspects of my life as a yoga practice, and playing music and singing duets are not separate from that.