January’s Exploring Improvisation
Classes on Jan 15th & 29th — Resonance, Fun, and Amazing Music
January’s Magical Improvisation Sessions!!
Open to anyone desiring to make music with others — regardless of experience or comfort level, instrument, style, etc.
The best place in Boston to experiment with strangers, uncover your most authentic selves, and renew your connection with the spirit of Play.
Weds Jan 15th — sign up here!
Weds Jan 29th — sign up here!
more info at nateshaffer.com/signup
“Music is what language would love to be if it could” — John O’Donohue.
“This is a promise with a catch / only when you’re looking will it find you
Cause true love is searching too / but how can it recognize you until you step out into the light?” — Daniel Johnston ‘True Love will Find you in the End’
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Since the dawn of humanity, music has been one of our most profound teachers and loyal companions. Endemic to each and every culture on Earth, the call to music initiates us into both our humanity and our other-worldliness. In fact, the Soul’s desire for expansion often encodes itself as an urge for music.
Answering the call gives us embodied activities that harness and ground the potency of our vital, essential energy. Music activates relationship with our bodies, sharpens our intuitive felt sense, and fosters generative intimacy with the mind. Daily practice, performance, and collaboration with others softens and affords generous depth to the cycles of our day. In bringing us into more harmonious connection with our perception, music guides us toward the intrinsic joy of being alive — witnessed bountifully in children, animals, and flowers.
And yet, our inner-children are often wounded — the animals feral, untrained and ignored — and the thickets of imagination’s flowers grow wild and tall — beautiful, yet painfully out of reach. As we strive to live musical lives, we brush against limitations and challenges: how long it takes to master anything; our patterns of evasiveness and guarding; unwillingness accept life on life’s terms; frustration at our lack of ability to translate the ineffable into tangible music; lack of trust in the process. Aspiring to connect to the muses surfaces these unconscious imprints in our being.
Inside we are not one but many. Delving into music forces confrontation with these neglected and repressed experiences of Self. These not-yet-attended to parts of us may not be ready for joy. However, they don’t simply stand in the way: they are the most direct pathway to liberating your inspiration.
Practicing music invites us to contact the stillness in our center, to express the full-spectrum of what lives within us, and embrace all energy as pure creative energy. Music invites us to witness our pain and transform it into magic.
Authentic self-expression means that we say “yes, and” to whatever energy shows up. We acknowledge the experience of reality we are having, and we take a generative action in response to that. This is the initiation and gift of creativity, and improvisation in particular.
As more of us “comes online”, energies within, once blocked off, becomes fuel for creation. When we drop-in and allow, we open the faucet to vent pent up energy. As we channel inner feeling into music something profound happens: what was hiding becomes felt, and truly played with as sound. Thusly, our inner world finds hospitality in the outer expression of musical form. In this way, music’s beauty shelters us as we visit on our brokenness.
The process of improvising music invites us to lean into the unspoken tensions living dormant inside us, then gifts us with balance and release. As play more often, more and more of ourselves becomes available to us, for creative endeavors and life in general. While this can be done as an individual, it takes on additional potency when done with others.
“You alone can do it, but you can’t do it alone.”
Most of us don’t know how to allow feelings of dysregulation and self expression around others. It’s for good reason: in most places in society, it is quite simply not safe to do so. Most artists are constantly dysregulated, going in and out of lucidity, struggling to be that thing — to “go there”, to capture that essence, to ground the inspiration in material form.
While big projects nearly always have large stumbling blocks, Artists know that “the art can handle it” — as they mature, they learn to root in the process with grace, and ease, seeking the inevitable excitement and satisfaction of completing creative work. Improvisation forces us to embrace these creative cycles in the span of a few minutes: allowing it to emerge, be experienced, and dissipate.
Being a free improviser means being okay with life as it is — including ‘not being okay’ — and tenderly accepting it all as part of the process. It’s our birthright to become artists. Practicing Improvisation is the most direct study of that that way of being.
My Offering
Exploring Improvisation stems from my desire for Tikun Olam — the Jewish ethos of “repairing of the world”. We have so much disempowerment around experimenting with music, under-indexed childhood trauma in music education, and a lack of reverence for improvisation as a liberatory social practice. This space addresses the brokenness I see in the world: an absence of welcoming spaces to play.
My facilitation makes the radical assertion that you have everything you need to improvise ecstatic, connective, satisfying music with others — right now!! Participants routinely feel expansion, catharsis, and a productive discomfort: one that catapults them into a new paradigm they wouldn’t have arrived at on their own.
I love hosting this space because I love watching people transform, and go beyond what they thought was possible. The limiting stories we have are just that: stories. When we step into a different story — bam! — a whole new set of possibilities. Jumping timelines, stepping into a radically different reality becomes easy when we do it with other people. Here are a few quotes from recent participants:
“This is like five years of therapy in five minutes” — a participant, after being allowed to play around on a cello for the first time in their life
“I love coming to this class and I have a fear of this class for the same reason, which is: every time I transform and grow in some way I did not expect. Challenging myself to come to this class and to be brave always reveals something to me, something I didn’t know about myself. It encourages me to connect with people in a way that I often feel starved for, and is rare to find — although I seem to find more the more I’m looking.”
“It makes sense that we could all come together and make music… and it makes sense that people could improvise really amazing music. But I'm surprised that it's actually works for anyone and that the music is so beautiful every single time! "
Participating will change your life. The pedagogical is practical, deep, and daring. It will alter not only how you listen to and perceive music, but invite you into state of conscious different from your every day. Alters states of consciousness are also a birthright. Music — flute, drum, voice — are the chief pathways to alter states of consciousness through human history. Music invites trance.
Improvising music cleanses us and integrates the totality of our past; it brings us to the present and prepares us to receive the future. The art process hosts mystery beyond what can ever be discussed — and activates us in ways we cannot measure. As well, it invites us into seeing our whole lives as one big improvisation. We have awareness, and we make choices. That’s it. That’s all life is. Awareness and Choice. It’s all one long improvisation.
I have mentored thousands of improvisers in the 12 years. Lecturing at Tufts and Harvard, bringing my inspired teaching to cultural festivals up and down the east coast, and led many iterations of this workshop in and around Boston. I host retreats, work one on one with engaged artistic seekers, and hold space for the spiritual dimensions of life (astrology, intuitive body work, and facilitation). Exploring Improvisation is a wonderful pathway to getting to know my work, my communities, and my love of both music and life.
Come be a node in the network of a cultural renaissance, come let your music be a prayer to the rebirth of a New and Ancient humanity: where every person sings to the trees, catches songs from their dreams, and nurtures their babies with the music of their ancestors.
I hope you’ll join us! Twice a month, new comers always welcome.
Weds Jan 15th — sign up here!
Weds Jan 29th — sign up here!
more info at nateshaffer.com/signup