To anyone who want to retrain to resolve Musicians Focal Dystonia. I have a very bad news and a very good news for you. The BAD news is that you'll never be playing the same way as you did before the onset. The GOOD news is that the new way of playing, your version 2.0, will be much better than the old way. As Albert Einstein said, "Insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results", you can't try to play like you did before the onset a

I was initially very confused as to what retraining was all about. I thought it was all about coming up with set of exercises to ease the excessive tension, but I was wrong. I later figured out that focal dystonia is a state where the body is craving for sensory information to be able to carry out the movements smoothly. The more sensory input I retained, the lesser dystonic reaction I had. I realised that I could input sensory information by making conscious effort to 'feel

A dystonic reaction is what it is... it's a REACTION. A reaction is a physical response to stimuli such as touch, pressure,impact, feeling of a movement, sound, force such as gravity, a thought... or any combination of those. As I a quickly found out that a dystonia reaction is pretty much binary (it's either turned ON or OFF), I have explored ways to find out exactly what was turning the reactions ON in various situations. Here's a short version of the story...

My childhood teachers often told me that I should ease my tension when I'm playing the piano and that should try to relax when I get tense. There were teachers that mentioned that my sound was harsh when I was tense and I should use my ears to listen to 'soften' the sound. I completely understood what they were telling me, but the problem is that those words did not translate directly into un-tension for me. I did not physically grasp the idea on what it was to not be tense w