The Journey of Embodied Creativity with Lea Pearson, Part 1

Summary

In this episode of the Becoming Embodied podcast, host Shawn L Copeland engages in a deep conversation with Dr. Lea Pearson, exploring her extensive journey through music, education, and the challenges faced by musicians. They discuss the importance of safety and belonging in fostering creativity, the impact of family dynamics on self-worth, and the systemic issues within music education that contribute to feelings of inadequacy among musicians. Lea shares her personal experiences with pain, validation, and the quest for inclusion in the arts, emphasizing the need for a supportive community that recognizes the diverse voices in music.

To contact Dr. Pearson:

Website:

MusicMinusPain.com

Articles: 

Cultivating the 21st Century Gardenhttps://thebabelflute.com/cultivating-the-21st-century-garden/
Helping Students with Pain and Anxiety Part 1https://thebabelflute.com/helping-students-with-tension-pain-and-anxiety/
Helping Students with Pain and Anxiety Part 2https://thebabelflute.com/helping-students-with-tension-pain-and-anxiety-part-2//

Resources for Student-Centered Teaching:

https://musicminuspain.kartra.com/page/TeacherResources

Becoming mBODYed is a production of and copyrighted by mBODYed, LLC, 2024. www.mbodyed.com
Follow me at https://www.instagram.com/mbodyed/ and https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61566020594221
The intro and exit music is Dark Matter by Carlos Velez, recorded by Tosca Duo on their CD Dimensions.
A link to Carlos’s music is available at
https://composercarlosvelez.wixsite.com/carlosvelezmusic/about-me.

Transcript

Shawn L Copeland (00:01)

Welcome to the Becoming mBODYed podcast, where we explore how safety and belonging cultivate embodied creativity, curiosity, and authenticity. I am your host, Shawn Copeland, the founder and CEO of mBODYed, a program dedicated to embodied education and the performing arts. Today, you'll notice a new guest on the podcast today. This is Dr. Lee Pearson, one of my dearest friends. She is a master teacher.

Licensed body mapping educator, founder of Music Minus Pain (MusicMinusPain.com), and author of Body Mapping for Flutists, What Every Flute Teacher Needs to Know About the Body, which I think, Lea, was the first book that I read about body mapping. I think that was my introduction to it. So I'm thrilled, delighted.

Lea Pearson (00:35)

Here we go.

Shawn L Copeland (00:56)

to have you here. We've been talking about doing this for a while and I'm just thrilled to get to introduce you on the show and share with my community all the amazing work that you're doing with your community.

Lea Pearson (01:12)

Thank you, Sean. Thank you so much. I am also so excited to be here because every time I get to have a conversation with you, my brain starts going, hoops and spinning circles and all kinds of things. Yeah. So I want to share some of my story, but I want to ask you a question first. So, you know, I ain't no spring chicken anymore. I've had, I've been living for 73 years and

Shawn L Copeland (01:12)

So welcome.

Same. Same. Same.

Yeah, of course, of course.

Lea Pearson (01:41)

A lot of things have happened during that time. had rather a circuitous path to where I am now. So my question is, do you want to hear the long story or the short story? Because the long story has some typical parts of it and not some typical, but I think it has some things that are instructive. And it's not really long because I want to talk about myself. It's because the things that have happened to me have also happened.

to a lot of people and I think by the time I'm this age, everything that I've done has come and fed into what I'm doing now.

Shawn L Copeland (02:21)

I want to hear the long story. think it's so valuable for our community, our music community, to know that there is no right path. And it never goes the way that we think it goes. It's always a circuitous route all over the place. But all of our lives are that way. Yeah, there you go.

Lea Pearson (02:37)

Yeah.

Kind of like your orchids back there.

And my shirt.

Shawn L Copeland (02:50)

So no, tell us the whole story, please. Tell us the whole story. Off you go.

Lea Pearson (02:52)

Okay, all right. Well, it's

just great to be here. For those of you who don't know me, I live in or near Boston, grew up here, grew up, loved the ocean, always wanted to be around the ocean. I actually grew up in what was a fairly typical musical situation for the time in the 50s and 60s. I was actually blessed to be born into a musical family. My parents met.

playing string quartets. My mother was a violin teacher, even, know, very interested in pedagogy. When she was in her 60s, she used to drive down to Sarah Lawrence to study with Dorothy Delay. You know, I wish I could ask her now what that was all about. But it also had its share of trauma. I was the youngest of four. All of us were musicians. We all started piano at six, and then we picked another instrument up. My mother was like...

Shawn L Copeland (03:37)

Great.

Lea Pearson (03:49)

dedicated to our education and our musical education in particulars. You my parents paid for instruments and music and music camp and lessons and all of that. mean, how lucky were we from that perspective? The stuff that was difficult, I didn't even begin to understand until I was in my 50s. I had no idea. All I knew was that I could never be good enough because my sisters were always better than I was because they were older.

And so there was this sense that I just could never quite catch up. But I started like a lot of people do, know, band in fifth grade with the flute. I picked the flute because the last thing I wanted to do was play a string instrument and have my mother try to teach me. Because I heard violin screeches every afternoon after school. And I knew I didn't want that. And I had my teacher was a band director for the first few years. you know, then

my mom figured out how to get me to some better teachers. And I studied with several regular teachers, you well-known teachers in the Boston area. Through high school, even got to have a year of lessons with Fenwick Smith, who was second flute in the Boston Symphony at the time. And I got really interested in education at the time because I hated school. School was so oppressive to me. And...

I ended up going to a progressive college. was in the first class at Hampshire College, which started in 1970. And I even was accepted the year before, so I got to help in the planning of this school. And it was the most exciting thing ever. We made up our own exams. We didn't have grades. We had conferences with the teachers. We got to make our own projects and curriculum. And it was just so empowering. We didn't actually have a music curriculum.

I did my music all at Amherst College and Smith College and Mount Holyoke College, which were all connected in the area. But I did have regular flute lessons. And I loved that empowered sense of education. I didn't know at the time that it was called student-centered, but we called it progressive back then. But the funny thing was that I also knew, even though I did...

I did a lot of work in Dahlkros Eurythmics. went to, I got to study in Switzerland for a semester at the Dahlkros Institute, which was probably the best thing I ever did. And I went on to get almost certified in Dahlkros teaching. Did some movement therapy, did some music therapy, was interested in all these aspects. My major, by the way, was music, psychology, and education. You could major in three things in Hampshire if you wanted to.

I actually knew that I didn't want to be a musician because I saw my sisters going and playing gigs that they just didn't like, you know, being bored in the pit and having to scrabble for money and all that stuff. So when I graduated, I actually went into the field of mental health when I finally got a job and was involved in starting the area's first early education program for infants with disabilities from birth to three.

called actually early intervention. And that was fascinating. I learned a whole lot from that. In the course of that though, I then realized, my God, nobody here knows that I am a musician. And I felt so keenly the lack of not playing. I basically stopped playing for three years. And so at that point I said, all right, I'm gonna go back and get my masters. And I went and studied with...

Doria Anthony Dwyer for a year, which was very interesting. That's another story. And I ended up going to Stanford University, which had a fantastic early music program at the time. So my master's actually is not in flute, it's in performance practice, which was very exciting. We had to learn Baroque dance and we had to learn the harpsichord and figured bass and all that kind of stuff. It was a great place to be.

for two years, also in the Bay Area. And I met my husband there, who was a conductor. So we moved to Michigan, where for 10 years, I had your basic freeway musician lifestyle, driving around playing in three and four regional orchestras, teaching at two and three colleges, having babies, raising two tiny little ones. It was crazy, crazy.

Shawn L Copeland (08:36)

You did the hustle. You did the hustle.

Yeah.

Lea Pearson (08:38)

Yeah, crazy

life. we had the, I had gotten really interested. There's sort of a theme that comes through here, which was that I remember my dad saying to me when I was young, like in elementary school, I was root for the underdog. And, I was like, what does that mean? I wasn't sure what it meant, but I realized that that's always been a theme for me because

When we had to do a bibliography class, remember bibliography classes? Where there's before computers and we had to look everything up in books, you know? I got really interested in women composers. Like, wait a minute, how come there are no women composers on the programs and in the books and all this stuff? And there weren't actually that many materials at the time. There were just a few books. So I got, I got really interested in that and started looking for works to perform.

Shawn L Copeland (09:10)

I do.

Lea Pearson (09:33)

Also got interested in the music of African-American composers because my husband was black. He happened to be the only black faculty at this school that they had ever had. It was in the heart of conservative Republican country. They didn't know what to do with him. And he experienced not a wonderful time there, but he had an orchestra and he had a jazz band and he was able to start some programs.

We did there, what we realized is that the population of the county we lived in was 99.9 % white. And that was not where we wanted to bring up our kids. So he took a job. Well, I'll say during that time, I was in the most pain. Because what happened was when I was in college, starting at age 18, I played a lot. I mean, I might as well have been a music major. was playing eight times, eight hours a day.

with rehearsals and practicing and concerts, chamber ensembles, two orchestras, know, all this stuff, student composers. And my left hand started to go numb. And I asked my teacher, my teacher said, well, I don't know. I asked another teacher, they said, well, I don't know. I went to the musician's clinic at Mass General Hospital in Boston, which was like the hospital, you know. They watched me play and they said, well, we don't see anything that could be causing that.

which I know now was completely wrong. I know exactly what I was doing that was making my hand go numb, but I had no idea at the time. My decision was just, okay, I'll practice less because I wanted to play. So by the time I got to this, you know, freeway career, I was in a lot of pain and it turned out not to be just my wrist and my shoulder and my arm, but they went into back pain and foot pain and a whole bunch of other stuff. And I, it was just...

I was playing principal in a regional orchestra and then eventually piccolo. But I would just sometimes just sit there and look at my flute case and cry. I couldn't even open it and take out my flute because it literally hurt so much to play. I just, couldn't do it. And then of course, along the way I was playing piccolo without earplugs because I didn't know any better at that time, which was the beginning of my hearing loss. So.

By the end of that period, when we decided to move to Kentucky, I had known three people who were killed in car accidents on their way to concerts. And I said, that's it for me. I have two small children. I'm not doing that anymore. What I didn't know was that, you I always thought I can teach flute anywhere. I can go anywhere in the country and teach flute. Not in Kentucky. We moved to Kentucky.

And I will say the four years there felt very much like a black hole to me. There was very little work. I ended up doing three different jobs, working seven days a week. My husband's job did not last. They just didn't get him at all. Lots of microaggressions going on, completely different experience being a black man in a de facto segregated town. And it reinforced even more my desire to

get to know the musicians and the composers who were being left out. For me, it's always, the question is always, who is not at the table? Who is being left out? And more and more research was coming out. My husband, Tony, got really, he was also, you know, fascinated by this because of course being a black man in a white profession was challenging to say the least. We didn't have a lot of black conductors at the time.

And he got very interested in the whole idea of minority outreach and helping orchestras develop a repertoire of pieces by black composers that they could use on Martin Luther King concerts or just reaching out to the community because so many of our symphony halls were now in segregated neighborhoods, mostly black at that time. This is in the eighties and early nineties.

Then that was another time when I couldn't play. And it really, this is what I think a lot of us go through. It forced me to look at, you know, if I'm not a musician, if I'm not playing, who am I? What am I? I even went to the state counseling, you know, employment counseling bureau and took some tests and interviewed with someone and tried to figure out what the heck is it that I do that is not

Shawn L Copeland (14:05)

Mm-hmm.

Lea Pearson (14:21)

only limited to music. What are the skills that I have? You know, what is it that I do? you know, the idea of being a coach kind of came up at that time. I somehow managed to do some concerts and performances. I got a grant from the Kentucky Arts Council and I started to get interested in arts education. And I thought, geez, I'd love to be an artist in the schools. Wouldn't that be fun to go around and give concerts at schools? That'd be great.

I did have this education piece and I never thought I would get a doctorate. That was like the farthest thing from my mind. But I had met Barbara Conable, who as you all know, is the founder of Body Mapping. And I had, she was in that point just sort of doing workshops in a lot of different places. I, every time I went to a workshop of hers, it just blew me away. I said, well, this is, this is pretty cool. And

At around that time, I would say in about the early, early nineties, I met Lisa Ruho, who was a flute teacher from Finland. And she was doing some master classes up in Maine. said, I'm going to go study to with her. I'm going to go and study with her in Finland. I don't know when, cause I just had a baby, but I'm going to go. And that took me 12 years to figure out how to do that. Anyway.

It was, I knew that I had to do something. had to either basically, as they say, shit or get off the pot. And so I said, all right, I can go get a doctorate. I can study with Barbara Conable. If I can, you know, go to get to Columbus. She wasn't teaching at a university. She was just private teaching. And I can maybe learn how to play or forget about it. So boy, was I fortunate to get to study at Ohio State.

with Catherine Burr-Jones who really needed a TA at the time. Her husband was dying and she had a lot of responsibilities. He had cancer. She had a lot of responsibilities. So it was helpful for her, I think, to have somebody who was a little bit older in the TA position. I was 45 at the time I went back to school, which is another interesting story. And that was the real beginning of transformation. I used my, I had...

you know, got my little school loan to there. We had no money. We were just living on air. And we would do stuff like, you know, sell our plasma to make 60 bucks. And my husband would get up at two in the morning and deliver newspapers till nine and then come back half asleep on the road. And he eventually did get some full and part-time jobs and a...

a fellowship with Arts Midwest. He went and worked with the St. Louis Symphony for half a year and an organization in Minneapolis for half a year. But I spent one hour every week with Barbara Conable, mostly on her floor. She didn't use a table at the time because she said, I stopped using a table when somebody came in one day and said, I'm here for my treatment.

Shawn L Copeland (17:37)

yeah.

Lea Pearson (17:38)

She said,

that's the end of that. So she did use her dining room table in her home for a while, but mostly on the floor. And I think many of us who studied with her and who came from difficult situations would say that that saved our lives. Definitely our careers and for me, definitely my life. Cause we would talk about everything and she would just be working with me. And what I learned from that is that, you know, in Alexander technique, she was always doing body mapping work.

I wanted to know what was happening and why it was happening. And other times when I've worked with other Alexander teachers, I found it very frustrating and disappointing because they didn't do that. It was when I worked with them in Helsinki. And he'd be like talking about the news or something else and working on me. was like, well, tell me what's going on. He had nothing to say. was like, how can I learn if I don't know what's happening? So that was fantastic. And about the end of those three years,

was the time when she started putting, my last year with her, started putting her concepts about body mapping into practice. I was also, by the way, at the same time taking courses with Bill Conable at Ohio State. You could take three quarters. I took everything I could get. That was a really interesting time because she was developing this whole way of teaching. And there were about 15 or 16 of us who would spend a weekend studying with her, just like go to somebody's house and...

and study. And she would practice on us and have us practice. We didn't do a lot of hands on work because it wasn't. She said, you don't need that. You don't need to do that. You can, this is about understanding how the body works and helping people learn that. And she was formulating the most important things she thought she should teach. And she was beginning to put her book together. I did all this work at home. I'm sitting bouncing on my ball, practicing and my kids are going like, mom, please.

stop. And I did have a fair amount of time to practice. All of my recitals at Ohio State were women composers. When I came back from Finland, I'd done all this research on Nordic women composers. I did a recital of that. I did a recital of Ohio women composers. I did a recital of Black women composers. I did just a generic recital of women composers. But for all of this, I did the research to find out who these people were.

picked the pieces that I That about the time at the end of those three years, and I had my opportunity to go to Finland, I applied for a Fulbright. And that was the other reason I went back to grad school is I knew I had a better opportunity to get a Fulbright. And I got to go to Helsinki for six months, which was horrible, leaving my two children behind and wonderful for me. And studied with Lisa Ruohall. She gave me so much free time. had

private lessons, had pedagogy classes, we had performance classes, we had practice teaching, we just had all kinds of stuff. And she would teach in three languages at once, English and Finnish and German, because they international students there. So that was, you know, maybe you've had this experience, Sean. Every day I would wake up and think, today's the day I'm going to feel it. Today's the day I'm going to get it.

Shawn L Copeland (21:02)

You

Lea Pearson (21:04)

You know, but it doesn't work that way. I do remember standing in my little studio apartment in Helsinki at the kitchen, was a little tiny kitchen thing. And for the first time that I could remember, I actually felt the ground under my feet, the floor. It was like, my God. Now you have to remember I'm like almost 50 by this time.

Shawn L Copeland (21:32)

What was it like?

Lea Pearson (21:32)

but I could

feel my feet and I could feel a relationship to the ground and a lot of things shifted at that point. I still hadn't resolved all my pain. There was still a lot going on, but that's where I was. And I didn't know what I know now. I will just say, you keep thinking, you're peeling through the onion layer after layer and then you discover that there is no center. There's no end.

to it, maybe you come out the other side. It's like, you just keep going. Yeah. So I'll pause there for a minute because I've been talking a lot. I want to tell you more about what happened after that, but I just, I'll pause and see what questions or thoughts you might have.

Shawn L Copeland (22:03)

There's just more layers. There's just more layers.

First, thank you. Thank you for sharing all of that, your story. I've known you for almost 20 years. I didn't know any of that.

How?

Lea Pearson (22:34)

Well, you know, that happens when we meet people when we're adults.

Shawn L Copeland (22:39)

But just how? How do I not know this? But also, my goodness, we were destined to be friends. We were just destined to be friends. And so really, really, which was, I think, 2007.

Lea Pearson (22:51)

I think so. From the first moment we met.

I have no idea what the year was, but it was at a conference, a body mapping conference, yeah. Okay.

Shawn L Copeland (23:04)

at Denison, Denison University

and, yep, I remember so very clearly. My goodness, there's so many themes here that, first, you're the new poster child for Embodied. I mean, if I were to take the list of the values of what I'm trying to do with this work.

Lea Pearson (23:12)

This

Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Shawn L Copeland (23:32)

you embody them, not to make a pun about it, but your life.

Lea Pearson (23:34)

Yeah, like what? What

are those values that you're trying to teach?

Shawn L Copeland (23:41)

safety,

belonging, creativity.

I don't, you know, we're afraid to use this word now, but living in an inclusive environment and advocating for inclusion and advocating for marginalized populations in our field, just your career has been about, you have just lived these things before they were even things, you know.

Lea Pearson (24:16)

Yeah, right.

Shawn L Copeland (24:19)

And no,

Lea Pearson (24:19)

We didn't know what microaggressions were back then.

Shawn L Copeland (24:22)

most people still don't know what those things are. But my goodness, there's so much. I have a couple of thoughts and questions that I kind of want to come back to that I think are pretty important themes for many people who might be listening.

You said, you know, growing up in a musical family with both parents and older siblings who were already musicians by the time that you can kind of remember. Is that correct? Yeah. And you said, I never felt good enough and I always felt like I was having to catch up.

What, how did, how did you know that those were the feelings that you had? What were the ways in which they manifested for you? If you can look back.

Lea Pearson (25:25)

That's interesting.

Interesting question for a child.

Shawn L Copeland (25:34)

course, you know that now that you, felt those things now, but what.

Lea Pearson (25:36)

Yeah, no, no, but I felt that. I always felt that.

I think it had a lot to do with my mother. And, you know, I can tell you more about that later when I learned, I didn't really learn about my relationship with her until I was late 50s, early 60s. So, you know, it took a long time for that. There was a lot of intergenerational trauma there going on, but you could never be good enough. You just could never be good enough.

for her. And I could hear my sisters playing, you know, stuff and getting rewarded for practicing whatever I never wanted to practice. I was always afraid. I was, you know, going, I was anxious going into lessons. I was anxious practicing. I, you know, I did have the opportunity to perform with my family. had sort of, you know, lot of opportunities, but it was always fraught with anxiety.

Family anxiety. The epitome of that, I will just say, what that came down to was when my mother finally passed away at 98 after three years of a stroke. I had asked her, said, what is the, what's the one thing that you would really like to have, you know, at your memorial service? And she said, she always wanted this. She said, I just want all you girls to play together. Nobody would do it. It wouldn't happen.

So, I mean, it was just, it was messy. It was very messy. And, you know, I was in, I think a lot of it happened in music camp because there were a of great players at the music camp I went to. People who ended up, you know, for example, forming Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and becoming big time soloists. And I was not, I knew I was not that caliber. I also knew that I...

I think I somehow knew that I wasn't getting that much better the way that people were supposed to when they practiced. I don't know why, how I knew that, but that really came into clarity when I was at Stanford. My teacher was Frances Blaisdell, who had been the principal of New York Ballet, one of the very few women principals in the country in the 50s and 60s. And she basically had me locked in a practice room.

practicing technique for a semester, no repertoire my first semester because nobody had ever made me do that. I was way behind on my technique. And of course, the more I practiced, the more tense I got. I didn't get better. I just got more tense. I asked her one day, said, you know, my right hand just keeps getting tighter as I play. She said, no, that's not supposed to happen. You're supposed to get looser as you play. Well, fine. Thank you very much. How do I do that?

So yeah, it is.

Shawn L Copeland (28:36)

and then you were met with,

don't know.

Lea Pearson (28:40)

As I think about this with students, as I'm teaching and I watch children, you can tell when they don't feel that they're good enough. You can just tell because if they tend to be perfectionistic at all, they're never celebrating, they're never validating themselves, nobody else is validating them. I got validation for being,

part of my family and playing and all that stuff, but not from my family itself.

which is of course is what is the most meaningful.

Shawn L Copeland (29:25)

And so that comes forward as an adult and manifests as anxiety and pain, know, trauma, imposter syndrome, you know.

Lea Pearson (29:32)

Yeah.

Yeah. Have you, Sean,

have you ever met a musician who thought they were good enough? I have not.

Shawn L Copeland (29:47)

No.

Lea Pearson (29:48)

I call it the musician's curse.

Shawn L Copeland (29:52)

And the interesting thing about that statement, this is a question that I am asking a lot of people who are coaching with me right now, is to write a letter to yourself from the person who you always needed to hear it from.

Lea Pearson (30:02)

Mm-hmm.

Shawn L Copeland (30:17)

and to really think about what is it that you needed them to say that you would believe that would finally fulfill this, finally validate us in our work. And the interesting piece of that is...

Lea Pearson (30:25)

Yeah, yeah.

Shawn L Copeland (30:41)

Most people can't come up with it. It's this elusive thing that we are continuing to search for and can't find. if we do hear it, we don't believe it. We think they're just being nice and not wanting to hurt our feelings. Just brush it off. That couldn't possibly be me. You didn't hear all of those other things that went wrong.

Lea Pearson (30:59)

yeah, absolutely. Just brush it off.

Yeah, yeah.

Shawn L Copeland (31:11)

I've.

No, in 30 years of being a professional musician, I don't think I've ever met someone who had a real grasp of this, of, and just their own personal health around this and learning how to internally validate. I certainly have met

Lea Pearson (31:29)

Yeah.

Shawn L Copeland (31:45)

I certainly have met people who have done a lot of work in that area. That's a big important piece of my own personal work is that.

Lea Pearson (31:48)

Yeah, yep, yeah.

Shawn L Copeland (31:58)

you know, learning to personally invalidate or internally validate. But man, it's like a glass floor and it's so crystal thin. And if it gets shattered, I feel like the climb up to it, every time the ladder has one more rung in it, you know, and it just gets to be a bigger climb each time. But it's, you know.

Lea Pearson (32:23)

Yeah.

Shawn L Copeland (32:27)

It's work that's worth doing.

Lea Pearson (32:29)

yeah. think I've,

well, this is why I love the work that you do talking about belonging to yourself because I think that's a big part of it that we have to find that way. And you know, the other part of it is that sometimes the more you have to do it, the better you get at climbing back up. And it doesn't go so deep and it's a little quicker and it doesn't last as long, know, those things. But for me, when I started thinking about this, you know, the past few years,

I just realized that it's, everybody thinks it's their fault. It's not anybody's fault. It's a systemic failure. It's a systemic problem with our profession because of the way we are taught. And I will talk more about that later, but I really do believe that. And we are so segmented and separated and isolated that we can't even see that. We can't see the picture. Can't see the forest for the trees, I guess is that apt analogy.

Shawn L Copeland (33:31)

It's the outcome of the teaching style. It's the piece of it that's in shadow.

Lea Pearson (33:38)

Yeah, the outcome of years of being told that you were wrong.

Shawn L Copeland (33:43)

Yeah, yeah.

Either directly or indirectly, but most of us, it was just plain direct. That's just not right. Yeah.

Lea Pearson (33:50)

Yeah, being corrected, being corrected.