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Madeleine L’Engle on nurturing your guitar practice

Though I’m not blessed with children of my own, I worked with them for years. Some moments they’re pure joy. Other times… not so much. Guitar practice is similar in this respect.

When a relationship is fun and exciting, it’s easy. Those moments are golden. Effortless.

But eventually we feel friction. It may even feel futile. We don’t feel like showing up. It just seems hard or irritating. This may last for a few seconds, or it could last longer.

It’s these moments that require love. Love for ourselves and our larger commitments and desires. Love for music.

Our daily guitar practice is like a child. It’s a relationship. It’s something we nurture with our attention and time. That’s why it’s meaningful.

Love is a verb, not a noun. Love is what we do, even if we don’t feel like it, or it’s not convenient.

“Love isn’t how you feel, it’s what you do.”
Madeleine L’Engle

About Allen Mathews

Allen Mathews learned guitar as an adult, and has been a full-time guitar teacher for almost two decades to students age 4 to 96. He has taught classical guitar at Reed College and Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and has been a guest lecturer and clinician at schools and universities throughout the U.S. Allen is often praised for his creative teaching abilities, and his dedication to helping adults learn classical guitar. He has a popular Youtube Channel offering regular classical guitar tutorials, and has gained fans worldwide for his weekly emails and articles at ClassicalGuitarShed.com.

I just upgraded. I have been thinking about it since day one, but wanted to see how it works out for me. I have to say, even though I did not put as much effort in as I expected to, I already hear and feel Improvements when playing compositions I learned some time ago, before joining The Woodshed.
Thanks!

-Alexey Neyman

These warm-up and stretching exercises are helping me a lot! Because I’m a software developer I have to stay 8 hours typing on a computer keyboard, so I use my hands a lot during the day. At night, when I have some time to practice the guitar my hands and arms are usually in pain because they have been working a lot during the day, but I’ve found that doing the warm-up/stretching exercises in The Woodshed releases me from this pain and I’m then able to practice after doing them.
You are building a very interesting and working guitar course, because for what I’ve seen so far it really works!

-Ulysses Alexandre Alves