My student surprised me with his art the other day. 

"Look what I did over the weekend!" 

He shows me photos of his artwork over our internet session.

Photos showed rocks beautifully piled on top of each other in nature.  

"What is this? This is so beautiful!" 

"It's called rock balancing.  I knew you'll like it, you kind of need the same mindset and awareness as retraining when you're piling those rocks on top of ea...

Ms. Wong is a pianist from Hong Kong. She has been diagnosed of focal dystonia after a left elbow injury in 2015. Ms. Wong contacted me initially for advices over Skype but she has been visiting me to Tokyo for in person training sessions for few months.

Here one conversation we had that we thought it’ll be cool to share with our community. So here it goes.. !

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Me: How did you first find out abo...

Q: I have been making steady progress and I thought I have been playing pretty well recently.... until last night. Everything fell apart as I performed in front of a small crowd. How can all progress disappear in an instance? I feel really bad.

A: First of all congratulations on your performance!

It's great that you have made a decision to start performing although it didn't go as well as you expected. I've certainly have been t...

“ You won’t believe this…….. but my symptoms were completely gone for few hours after meeting other musicians yesterday! “ 

This is the type of emails that I have constantly received after hosting group gathering for musicians who have been afflicted with focal dystonia.  We usually have just enough time for musicians to introduce ourselves, freely express what we have experienced and connect with other musicians who have gone...

Since I have been sharing my ideas and making myself more available to others, I have felt blessed to have received incredible amount of feedback from so many people from different walks of life.   I think it is all worth what I do if I can make even slightest difference in one person's life and I am halfway convinced that my presence is making some difference.   On the other hand,  I increasingly receive questions and comment...

I had fear of performing in the past.

It was not fun. I would have the jitters, my hands would get cold, my heart will race and have the sense that I would loose control of everything.

Focal dystonia seemed to have magnify the performance anxiety at some times, but things got better as I found ways to set intention as to why it was important to play the piano, defining the vision of how I want to see myself play the instrument a...

Failing to Relax

After the onset of my focal dystonia more than a decade ago, one of the first ideas I had for solution was just trying to keep my hand and my body from tensing up.

This tension inhibited me from performing many tasks and dragged me down emotionally.  I was just simply experimenting ways to just not tense up my hand.

So naturally, my thought process was to get my mind , body and hand to relax.  

I thought if I...

In this video, I talk about the importance of aligning the body to a natural position when retraining. 

The misalignment of the hand to the forearm among pianists (or any instrumentalists ) can end up being quite a big problem.

As much as we pianists give attention to our fingers when problem arises, 

giving more attention to the fingers rarely solve problems.  

Our fingers and especially our fingertips have the most heightened a...

In this video, I talk about approaching focal dystonia as vague or exaggerated body image problem. 

When we approach the uncomfortable sensation and even the scary feeling that a musician with focal dystonia experiences when he or she is using specific part of the body as a body’s defensive reaction to not knowing and not owning parts of the body, and start re-constructing a body image that it might be lacking to make sense of...

How much time should I spend on retraining a day?

Is a common question I receive.  My answer is as follows. 

Answer: I don’t know…

I think it depends on where you are currently at.

And moreover, I think it depends on what you actually call ‘retraining’ but, I think the answer should be as much time as you can REALLY spend time retraining and making sure that we are not repeating what is not working out.

This could be 5 second...