Kenny Werner- Effortless Mastery

Kenny’s Early Life

[00:04:40] Sean:Kenny, welcome to What Got You There. How are you doing today?

[00:04:45] Werner: Very good. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me.

[00:04:47] Sean: Your work has had a big impact on me, so I’m really looking forward to exploring this, but I always love pulling back the curtain and  getting a better understanding for the person behind the journey. I would love to hear you articulate some of your early days and what the early version of Kenny Werner looked like.

[00:05:02] Werner: Well, I was kind of a prodigy, which was a positive and a negative. So the early days looked like dazzling teachers and parents and relatives, but nobody really saw all the deficiencies that I didn’t have to work on because I had this shiny object that everybody was liking. So there were other parts of me not developing emotionally, psychologically, physically. Today I noticed that there are parents that when they have prodigies they’re much more mindful of rounding out their life. 

But the parents in my time, I think they didn’t know a lot about parenting. They were good parents, but they didn’t participate. So this thing came up and that was it. You could flunk algebra, but the teacher didn’t care. Because she said, oh, we’ll see you in Carnegie hall. Or you could be bad at the gym, but then you can get a note from the music director that you have to go. So it was empty. It was kind of lonely but impressive. I kinda got a little numb about it.

People’s reactions were just like something on the outside of a shell and I was inside like, don’t you guys see, this is no big deal, you know? Earlier on playing weddings and bar mitzvah. Basically at my bar mitzvah we had a hip band. My father found a hip band, so I sat in next thing, he hired me. So from 13 on, until about 30, I was playing weddings and bar mitzvahs. And I always had a philosophical leaning and philosophical knowledge, but I also had a lot of negatives and went through the negatives and abused certain things.

And then I got to college and it went crazy, and the music continued to play itself. That’s the funny thing. The music didn’t show anything about what was going on with me. It could be the worst day in the world, and when I played the music had a life of its own, which kept everybody at bay. Oh, he’s cool. Did you hear that? He must be in good shape. He just played that, and that just kind of continued until I started filling in the rest of my life and stopping certain things. 

The Change

And that came about the mid thirties and then more and more of the philosophies that I articulated came out more. Just around that same time I was asked to teach in different places and those things just emerged. And from a period of 10 or 15 years of teaching off the top of my head, the evolution to the modern era for me, which was 96, having written that book, the Effortless Mastery. 

[00:08:02] Sean: I’m wondering why this change happened for you. You mentioned in the mid thirties, was there something that happened where this new awakening for you took place?

[00:08:13] Werner: It wasn’t so much a new awakening of the fact that on some level of my creative mind, the awakening was there from the beginning. And then the rest of my life felt like it was stuck in the mud. And I couldn’t actualize that except when I played or I talked. Even to this day, I consider my talent two-folds, music, which entails composing. And this is the more unique talent being able to explain it. Usually the people that are that talented have very understated explanations that don’t actually…  you just get it as a personality thing, but not, well, what do you do or what is it. 

And I seem to be very detailed and explaining it right from the very beginning before I was even trying to explain it, I was just answering a question or showing up for a lesson. And by the mid thirties, it was just not appropriate. I thought I would be making changes when I left my twenties. I thought, okay, you did a lot of fooling around, you did a lot of crazy stuff. Now you’re 30, I guess you’ll be just getting it together and becoming more of a responsible person. I mean, the seventies was a crazy time. 

You could be crazy and you weren’t necessarily that aware of it because there was a lot of craziness around you until some of the viruses of the eighties, and everybody suddenly had to cool out. But so I thought around, as I’m turning 30, this will naturally happen as I mature. And then I realized that I was addicted and stuck here. I was still doing things that I said, well, I probably won’t be doing those things anymore because I’m 30 and mature. And I’m thinking about my career more, I mean, I was performing sometimes really nice things, but very sporadically and still doing these weddings, which I grew to hate and then hate myself for playing them. 

So when it didn’t change, it was really kind of rough. And then I met my wife who I thought was healthy in every way I wanted to be. And I thought, well, that’s perfect. I was like 31. I’ll just grow along her lines and then fill in what I never was able to do before. And it didn’t work that way at all. She’s still here, she was my girlfriend. She’s one of those people that doesn’t give up, but it got to be a very big schism because I couldn’t change my life. The fact that the clock had turned to 30 didn’t change anything. 

And until I intentionally around 35-36 said, well, I’ve got to do whatever I can do to change because I’m not getting the maximum out of my talent. I’m spending little, very little time thinking about my talent. I’m thinking about what I was thinking about in my twenties. My wife and I, well, my girlfriend and I, that this could never be a thing unless I could become more of a person. And so I started to do different disciplines. And from that time I’ve done one thing or another to learn the lessons of life, not music, and it’s just gotten better and better with some huge dips and then getting better again. And in many ways, this is the best time of my life.

[00:11:40] Sean: Well, you mentioned the dips, that’s life, right? And we think it’s gonna be this linear process and life’s not linear at all.

[00:11:47] Werner: Yeah. And you think you’re filling in substance and then you go off that, and that can be 14 years or 50. And you’re still doing stuff, life is really complicated and my favorite movies are the ones that show all the dichotomy and not just hypocrisy. You could be all that, and you could also be all this, you know?

Ability To Articulate Talent And Distill It Down

[00:12:15] Sean: 100%. One of the things you bring up that I love is, this conversation, this is going to be about life. This is not going to be about music. I have no musical background, no musical talent. That’s my wife. But, I first read your book, Effortless Mastery and it’s centered around music, but for me it was whoa, this is 100% applicable to life. And I grew up playing sports. And something that you mentioned a minute ago is your ability to articulate your talents and distill down that, that’s one of the things I saw. 

You might have the most talented people in the entire world, and they have no idea how they do it. And that’s one of the things I appreciate so much about you is the creative elements that make up some of these things. I’m wondering for you, is that just a talent you’ve always had, that you were able to distill and articulate this? Or was this an evolution for you?

[00:13:01] Werner: It was a talent I always had. I never worked very hard for anything until I learned to work for things later. Way later, from that healing period in the mid thirties on, I learned how to intentionally work on something, but all the “wisdom” that came to me, it just seemed like it would just arrive. In fact, the book is the end of a process, not the beginning of a process. I started teaching, things were coming out of my mouth and those things were blowing people away. And I knew that and part of me wanted that to happen, but the wisdom would just come. When I wrote the book, I actually went back to, I mean, it’s not like I never did, I read a few books that were very important to me because they agreed with what I already “organically” knew.

I didn’t like them because they agreed with me. I liked them because they were ancient, which meant what I knew was drawing on a wisdom that has always existed. It wasn’t me just making something up. I found out after the fact. Scholarship, it was never a scholarship, but that came after the fact of something I knew like, you know, what color the wall is. So it was kind of natural, an avatar kind of relationship to it. And what’s enhanced it more than anything is passing it along to people through teaching and over and over again, it just kinda drives deeper into your consciousness. And finally, I’ve noticed the integration into other areas of my life.

It doesn’t disappear because it’s not music anymore. It’s life. And I had a long time like that. The knowledge for music was so easy to grab onto, and even the psychology and everything. But it wouldn’t necessarily translate in terms of the whole watch, controlling one’s emotions or not getting caught up in the future or not obsessing or anxiety or depression. And that’s been a long road. I wasn’t particularly talented at that. I had to work at it. I already knew it existed because of my relationship to music. That was the craziest thing. 

Impactful Books in Kenny’s Life

[00:15:05] Sean: Well, you bring up one of the beautiful things as well. And that’s around teaching. By teaching, we absorb and we learn those lessons so much more than even the student. That’s the beauty in that. You mentioned reading some ancient wisdom so you could see, for thousands of years. Any of those books that you still remember that had a deep impact on you?

[00:15:24] Werner: Yeah, well, it was ancient wisdom, but it wasn’t an ancient book. The Sufi Message has Hazrat Inayat Khan. I don’t think he’s alive anymore, but he’s a 20th century man, but Sufi-ism is very old. Reading parts of the Bhagavad Gita, which I didn’t read at all, but which talked about constantly, don’t get caught up in what you’re doing. This is all a play. This is a play on the physical level, and there’s a whole thing going on in another level. And you know, anything. Then when I was kind of getting sober in the eighties, I started reading Louise Hay and creative visualization and things that were, you could call new age, but of course they were based on ancient principles Zen In The art of Archery, which I read back in the seventies.

I really was captivated by that. And so that’s quoted a lot in my book, how to really master something. You have to get the mind out of the way in order to stay with the process. Otherwise the mind talks you out of that process before you’ve arrived at what you were trying to achieve. And all that kind of came together. And then I started teaching at Berkeley in what they now call the Effortless Mastery Institute. And suddenly what I was teaching here and there for a day at a school here, three days, there were courses and that was about 6, 7 years ago, something like that. And that meant every week I had the parcel.

The answer in the book is the four steps. They are reprogramming steps, not just changing your habits, but really reprogramming old neurotic, actually yes, neurological patterns and just starting to create new ones that support what you’re trying to do, even if you’re not trying to be the wisest person in the world, but your old patterns are what keeping you from mastering, whatever you’re trying to learn to do. So in a way it still was about music or mastering anything. But yes, the spinoff from it. What I found when I wrote the book is how many people were getting things from it that weren’t musicians. So, as I mentioned to you, my new book, which is coming out October 19th, is fully open to what people found in the first book.

It’s called “Becoming The Instrument”. And it follows up on what effortless mastery was but Hey, I’ve learned so much more from having taught these philosophies courses. That meant you stayed with the steps for a whole semester and you went onto the other two steps the next semester. It caused those steps to become much more vivid with other levels that you could achieve within them, instead of just doing this, and then you just do that. And of course I being the one that was putting it out there, it refined my own actions and understanding. I felt my own vibration elevating, as I had to repeat, back to your original point, as I had to repeatedly disseminate this information.

Effortless Mastery

[00:18:42] Sean: You mentioned getting deeper on those extra levels. That’s one of the things I love about the pursuit of mastery is the games inside the game you uncover. There’s so much more depth that you can explore and you can go to. Your original book, Effortless Mastery. When I first read it, it just clicked for me. So, I grew up playing lacrosse and trying to develop my mastery around that sport.

And one of the things I started to understand, and then your book just made so apparent for me was when I wasn’t thinking too much, that is when my best play was happening. When I was over-analyzing, when I was thinking that’s when I was getting caught up in my ego, and being concerned with how I was going to perform. So I would love it if you could describe how you define effortless mastery.

[00:19:24] Werner: Well, that’s the common denominator. That’s what made the book so popular. Everybody has had that experience. There’s a few experiences they’ve had. One is they’ve had, well, of course I was always talking to musicians, one or two gigs where it was all happening and when it was all happening, they almost were watching themselves play. They had that separation. Now that’s an ancient principle from India the Vedas, they call it the witness consciousness. When you are the witness consciousness, you watch the physical person or the body perform, or you watch a situation, you watch the sadness.

It doesn’t mean you don’t experience sadness, but that part of you that witnesses it is already kind of risen above it. And the more you practice witness consciousness, the more consistent the thing you’re watching tends to be. So everybody’s had that experience where for whatever reason, they didn’t care and it was the best gig of their life. They’ve also had this experience. The next gig was terrible because they were more interested in that result than what got them there. If not caring, at least in a strategic way, not obsessing about their performance made them play better, then logic would dictate work on not being attached to the performance.

In other words, let the body perform. That’s very much of a sports thing. You program the body, but the mind is best left out of it. That’s what creates those super moments. So, but once someone’s had that result, they’re thinking about the result the next time, they’re more concerned about having that result again. And of course it goes worse than ever, and then they can never choose to have that experience. And they can never show it to anyone else. And that sets up the appetite for effortless mastery. Effortless mastery is the study of having that experience more consistently. And eventually that just being your experience and you don’t even react to it.

And the way it is is by touching the instrument or doing the action without attachment. Learning to do it from the body. The way I bring people into it is very simple with a breathing exercise. That’s very easy and very short. What I realized about breathing exercises is that people’s egos have time to overcome it. Okay. I’m just breathing. I’m beginning to think. Oh, let me just keep breathing. Let me keep breathing. And the ego is always smarter than I am, so it takes over. So I’ll just watch myself breathe for 20 seconds. Like I’m doing right now, go and then stop. And actually, if all you did was watch yourself breathe. 

In other words, not thinking breathing is a spiritual thing, or it leads to something, but literally there’s a little pump in there or whatever they call it. And you’re just watching that machine work for 20 seconds. That is what I call the space in the book. When you work in “the space”, you’re always ready to have a great performance because you’re not going to reach out to sabotage it. Ironically, you don’t think you’re sabotaging it. You think you’re trying to keep it going, but the action of getting in the way and keeping it going is what breaks it. 

it’s like you’re sitting on the side of a stream on the rocks and you think you can keep this stream going by getting in the stream and paddling, all you’re doing is getting in the way. If you imagine a stream is always happening, that your job is to witness it, that keeps it flowing, and then you have to teach your body to be part of that stream. So it all sets up that way. There are a lot of things that kind of teach a similar thing, but I came at that organically step after step, especially from the evolution of teaching.

[00:23:43] Sean: Do you remember the first time you entered that space?

[00:23:46] Werner: Well, you see, that’s the weird thing why I can explain it and why I could come up with exercises for people is even more weird because I never really had that problem. I felt so inadequate. And I’m one of those people, like Judy Garland or a person that was always in pain unless they were performing. So no one ever had to tell me to let it out because I was really ready to. And don’t let an artist ever tell you that’s like that, that they don’t feed off of how everybody’s blown away or the eyes opening or the ear. Of course we are at that moment, we feel valid. 

The problem is you can’t be blowing people away all the time. You have to have substance that’s not dependent on people being around going, wow. But it makes for a hell of a performance. The reason I was able to come up with all the things that people can relate to in whatever area, not even music is because I had to solve my other life problems. And as I figured out ways of doing that, they also became tremendous ways of practicing the music or as anybody that read the book, practicing other things, or just the way to look at this moment, instead of being burdened by the future. 

And then the next book really teaches getting into “the space”, getting into this moment. From this moment, there is no past, there is no future. From this moment there’s nothing to compare. From this moment you don’t worry about success or failure because entering this moment itself is a success. So for example, from the conscious mind, which is what I call, it’s the ego. It’s whatever you want to call it. I don’t know if you curse on here, but I have a name for it too, that I love…  

[00:25:37] Sean: You can say whatever you want, Kenny. 

[00:25:39] Werner: I lovingly call it the shit hole, the quick sand or the mud, whatever that I let my mind go into. And now I’ve learned I don’t have to go there. I kind of take this other fork and I watch myself breathe. And once I am brought into the moment, all I’m thinking about is what I could be doing of substance right now. Or if I’m having “a mood”, the mood is gone for 20 seconds. When I come back, I don’t necessarily have to go back into that mood, or if I’m overwhelmed by all the things I have to do, when I come out of that space, I just pick one of them and I start doing it, everything that binds us, it’s not the pandemic and it’s not the quarantine, and it’s not anything external.

It’s not who gets elected president. It is our mind. And when you really realize that and you have time that that’s what you want to work on, then you tend to be tenacious. I tend to be tenacious. Everything was in the mind. Okay. The way I’m feeling now, what’s in my mind, that’s causing this because the moment thus doesn’t have that, this moment is… I call it “the space” because there’s plenty of space between you and the clouds. I look at you and me, the analogy, I like the best is we are like the sun. We have “a light”, we have “a power”, we have “a heat”, we have “a brightness”. That never changes, but we feel differently every day. The analogy would be clouds.

So there are some days where at three o’clock in the afternoon, it looks like it’s almost night time, but you would never say, wow, the sun is so weak today. It has no power. It has no light. Your knowledge of outer nature assures you that the sun is just as brilliant, just as lit, just as powerful as ever, but clouds. That’s why it’s such a great analogy. They are temporary and they block something that never changes. So more and more I just kept thinking about one thing. I just kept thinking about that. No matter how I feel, I’m simultaneously aware that I’m the same light with the same love and inspiration that I ever had, but I’m blocked by some temporary clouds. If I went back into “the space”, I would feel the sun peak through immediately. 

That doesn’t mean the clouds wouldn’t come back. And in fact, another trick I found is don’t try to block the clouds. Don’t try not to feel a certain way. It’s just exactly what it wants to pull you in. So for 20 seconds, I am the light. Now I’m ready to go back to my problems willingly. I might find where’d you go? What happened? Yeah, sometimes that stays or it’s so much lighter than it was before I took that break. So for the people who have been trying to reprogram themselves for years, there’s a couple of things I discovered through the gift of teaching. One, when you watch your breath, don’t think of it as a particularly meaningful gesture. 

If you turn on your engine in the open, you lift the lid of the car and you watch your engine, you wouldn’t think, oh my God, this is so profound. Well, there’s a little motor in there that sucks in and pushes out, a pump or whatever. You’re just going to watch yourself breathe. And I like this phrase, “you’ve been doing it all your life.” I’ve always been breathing, so I don’t need a breathing exercise. I’m “a virtual” also. I breathed through every mood and every good news and bad news and tragedy and new relationships I was breathing, but I’m just going to watch it breathe. Watch it breathe for like 20 seconds or whatever. So make it short. It makes it portable. Keep it from being meaningful. 

It’s just watching. It turns out that if you’re just watching, so breathe, all the clouds disappear. The light shines on you in that moment because that’s actually all we are and everything else is, as they say in the Vedas or the Mahabharata or the Bhagavad-gita, it’s all a play. So, if you keep working on one thing, the weight of your attention shifts more and more in that way. And the difference between having that philosophy and actually manifesting it is having an exercise without an exercise philosophy remains philosophy, and you remain unable to do that philosophy, you know, simulate it. If there’s an exercise that embodies the change, then you gradually become what you may have many years ago, conceptualized what you would like to be.

[00:30:32] Sean: I love the analogy with the sun. I just have to know, is that ball that orange and yellow ball on the cover of Effortless Mastery when it was originally released, is that the sun there?

[00:30:43] Werner: I think that was the idea. I don’t know if I was thinking of it exactly as a sun, but I was thinking of it as an energy. We made that, me and my friend. It’s funny what a homespun book that was and what happened to it. We made it with my friend with an early graphic art program. He put a thing in, actually originally the first book was blue and then the inside was I think, a dark blue and it just looked dark to me.

So I think the second printing, it went orange, yellow borders and a few people have shown me the blue book. They had it when it first came out. So it’s interesting. Yeah, it is like that. I understand it more today than when I was there with my friend using rudimentary graphic arts or take that circle, put it in there, make that yellow, make that. Ooh, that’s great. Isn’t it? The nineties and, so yeah, that’s what it represents. Absolutely.

Reprogramming The Deep Programming

[00:31:41] Sean: Well, it’s even funny how you mentioned that you uncovered even more of the meaning behind that. It’s like you’re going the extra levels even now with the meaning there, which I think is beautiful. You were mentioning something a minute ago about just being in the moment. And, I think that is the deep programming that we need to reprogram, right? 

We always have those expectations of what our teachers do, what our parents do, what everyone else around us, what are they going to think of this? And I know you’ve written extensively about this,this is such an important part because so many people are walking around with these burdens on their shoulders and expectations around them. I would love to just double click on this with you for a minute.

[00:32:17] Werner: Well, the pandemic I’ve talked to people who have had a very heavy heart. First of all, I’ve talked to people who have been affected and I would never judge. I don’t think I have any kind of special detachment. If really bad things happened to me, I would experience all the pain anyone else would. But don’t forget 99% of your life, day after day, nothing bad is happening. How many of those days have we thrown away contemplating things that made us sad or scared? 

So how much of life is wasted thinking about the future or regretting the past? So to me, the dominant religion in the moment is being in the moment. So under these circumstances, I also talked to many people who had a very heavy heart emotionally for the whole thing, but nothing bad actually happened to them. So I know they’re empathizing, but the question is what did it do to their life? They weren’t sick. These two hardships from this that you feel for people, either health or finance. Pretty much that’s the two things that people have had tragedy. 

But I talked to people that were walking around like this all the time because of the pandemic and because of the president at the time. It’s probably people walking around that way because of the president of this time, but not for me, but for that time. And they just insisted on having a heavy heart. And I said, I can’t afford that. I can’t be of help to others if I’m trudging around. So many people would lead the conversation. I say, how are you doing well? “Under these really weird times, we’re having..”, I said, how are you doing? You know I have to say all it was, was time.

If you weren’t affected physically or financially, then all it was was a long period of time. And if you used it to keep practicing, getting in the moment it could have been…  And I did talk to a few people like this too. They don’t like to admit it in public because we’re aware of the real experiences, but not going to have a lot of sympathy for people that made themselves sad and heavy hearted, they could’ve just shut the radio off or shut the internet, and closed the computer. They didn’t have to do that. But for the people who were actually sick or financially destroyed, you know. 

But I would admit, this has been the best time of my life. I’m not going anywhere. I’ve always been traveling. I haven’t been going anywhere. I wake up, I read some spiritual stuff to remind me of the truth. I just want to know the truth. So no matter how the sun, no matter how far I get away from it during the day, I know it doesn’t really matter because I could do the worst thing in the world, and I’m still the sun. And the more I think about it, the more the lower stuff has less weight to it.  And I have more negotiating power to get closer to the sun. 

This very period has been one of the most fertile. It started with me finishing the second book, which was almost done anyway. Then I did a lot of teaching. That was the gift. I decided that everybody at Berkeley, where I teach Berkeley College of Music, first of all, I was afraid they’d all quit. And then I might not have a job, but also heartwise I thought anybody that has the courage to keep going to school, sitting in the bedroom of their parents’ house again, after they were at school or sitting on the couch in their apartment, they should get something from this that they wouldn’t have gotten had there not been a pandemic and a quarantine.

And I decided to mentor anybody from the school, teachers, which I often work with or students. I would work off the clock. I worked through the summer of 2020. I’m not hired, I’m hired for the semesters. I do three days of work in the summer, but I saw five to six hours a day, different students and teachers. And I just worked with effortless mastery with them and helped them diffuse the clouds and get closest to the sun of their music, of their right to play. All you gotta do is practice enjoying it. A person that plays shitty and enjoys it is doing it the right way and a person that plays reasonably well and is obsessing about it is really wasting their life.

I saw people transform in Zoom, student after student, groups after groups, and it elevated me. And it had me continue my work on myself when I wasn’t in front of the computer. And then at the beginning of this summer, I started writing because I have a project that is going to be performed by orchestras next year. And all I’ve basically done except for an online course, which I did outside of the school. And one week in Mexico, all I did all summer was wake up and write this music. And I haven’t written music with this kind of stream of one thing in my mind, and maybe never, and I’ve never written better music than I’m writing right now. And I’m thinking, wow, you’ve actually become the person you wanted to be 50 years ago.

Kenny’s Writing Process

[00:37:57] Sean: I would actually love it if you could describe this writing process, what it looks like. 

[00:38:04] Werner: Well, it’s for the hundredth birthday of “>Toots Thielemans. I don’t know if you know who that is. He was the greatest harmonica player and the most famous in the world, Stevie Wonder said he played harmonica because he heard Toots Thielemans. And he had a hit in the fifties called bluesette where he was also a guitar player and he played whistle. It was a big hit in the fifties. And then he was on shows. He was a harmonica player on Sesame street, harmonica player on Midnight Cowboy, some of the most iconic harmonica things with him, but he was also a jazz player, and a Brazilian master, even though he was in Belgian. So they’re doing big stuff next year.

And I’m writing this orchestral music to be played next year. But for the first time I decided to start basically a year early so that I wasn’t just writing to fulfill a deadline. I wanted to see if I could keep the sun. Actually this was my concept, if Tootsie’s roaming around a different dimension now, what his music sounded like there. And would I have the chops to orchestrate something to make it feel like that. And I brought in somebody that’s been helping me on the orchestration side. So here’s how I compose. I start writing without questioning if it’s any good. And then when I lose that easy flow to keep writing, I shut the computer down.

I write on the computer because I am left-handed and I have terrible handwriting. And it’s just hard to write music. You have to keep your wrist up because you’re moving to the right. So as soon as it feels like it’s important that there’s a right way and a wrong way, I shut it down and leave. When I come back, it’s obvious what I should do next. So then I do that and I keep going and then sometimes it just goes and goes. And then you get to a point where in the middle of the process, it shows me what it was I’m doing. So now I’m going to go back retroactively and make it look like that’s what I was always going to do. There’s so much effortless mastery to composing.

I let things compose themselves. The big fear with doing anything is that you’ll do it badly. That’s the only thing that makes drama out of trying to do things whether it’s sports or music. Trying to do it right creates a drama that’s been superimposed, a cloud in front of the sun. What would be the sun or what would be the space? It doesn’t matter how good you do it. The fact that you’re doing it as a success from the ego, it doesn’t have any meaning unless you’re doing it well. Now what’s wrong with that seems reasonable. The problem is in trying to do it well, most people stumble and they find that they do what is better for a moment when they didn’t try to do it well.

So with that thing, being such a human nature, we practice not needing to do it well, but rejoicing in the doing which leads to doing it well more consistently than they ever have. And that’s the practice. So in writing, it’s the same thing. If I think this has got to be great music, and I have had my moments. But the moments that I thought this has gotta be great music, because this is going to be really celebrated, I couldn’t write anything. So what good is, if you have all this respect for it, and you can’t write, what good is it? You might as well write something, and later on you find a thread, but that’s still part of it, but it never would have been part of it or things come together so in a way, organically. 

Because when you plan things with a lot of composers, except the greatest ones, I can hear their “thinking”. Now I’m going to do this. Now I’m going to do that. And I can hear what they’re doing. You don’t really want to see the creases in the wallpaper. You just want to believe from the whole journey. So when I write out of sequence, I don’t know why I’m writing this, but that’s what’s coming out now. And then later on it fits here in a way I would have never thought of. It actually gives you the feeling like, you look out and you see leaves blowing. 

They don’t conform to a pattern you can pick up on, you don’t sense them trying to organize it into different movements. And you don’t sense a Sonata Allegro form, where they have to return to the original way they were shaking. All that stuff was made up by humans. We don’t need it at all. Music could move just like leaves as long as it. And so when I see this come together, it just kind of moves without my intention because whatever I wrote at the time I wrote it, I didn’t mean it to be that.

Does that make sense?

Achieving Mastery Faster 

[00:43:14] Sean: It does. I want to dive a little deeper on this because I think one of the problems a lot of people are going to have is, as you mentioned, when you’re not playing in the space, you just pull your hands up, you walk away. And so I think a lot of people are going to wonder, well, how can you put in the necessary amount of time and practice to develop a skill, let’s call it even just golf. If someone is to hit a 300 yard, you’re gonna need a number of repetitions. And I’m wondering, can you reach that level of mastery without actually putting that focus time in as opposed to… 

[00:43:44] Werner: You reach that level of mastery faster if you do this. You get up there, you get “into the space”, you move your hands, you’re not concerned how you hit the ball, if you hit the ball or where it goes. Okay. And you just do that. Right? And as long as you’re “in the space”, you recreate that thing and you will find out something that the body will program itself to do on a much higher and economical level. In other words, the body doesn’t have an ego about it. If your intention is there, you’re going to zoom into it, maybe you do it in different ways. 

Maybe one time you go so slow and you’re “in the space” that you have time to see exactly what the trajectory is before that thing hits the ball. Right? Then you take a break, you go into this space and then you see if your arms got it yet. And if it doesn’t, from the space, you have no regrets. Maybe you do that a few times. If you’ve lost patience for learning it from the space you walk away, but you might come back in five minutes or you might come back in 10 minutes. You might do a bunch of repetitions, but practice repeating without tightening yourself up to make sure you do the right thing, because that might be functional, but it’ll always be below the guys, the women and men for whom the body does it.

So if you want to train the body to do it fast, you may get there by trying, or you may end up on one of those sub levels. That’s good. But you notice the difference between what you’re doing, what’s between you and this guy. It’s not just better for what you’re doing, for what he’s doing the same act is easier. Why is it easier? Because that’s become muscle memory. Why has it become muscle memory? Keep the mind out of it. And the muscles will conform to the act and then it’d be more dependable because it just feels like that’s what actually the highest sports guys do. I mean, batters are looking for certain things.

Pitchers are looking for an arm slot so that they don’t have to think about it. So it’s not like there isn’t some thinking at a certain point, but what you want to do is just let it fly and see the body’s doing that yet because if the body’s not doing it, and you have to make the body do it, you might be good, but you’ll never be great. And if you still have to manage the act, then you probably won’t manage it as well when people are watching you or when there’s money on the line. So the best thing to do is to train so that you’re not doing it. If you start with this idea, I’m not doing it, the body’s doing it. So my new book is called Becoming the Instrument.

It means it goes beyond being the player, and becomes the instrument that plays the instrument. Then learn that, teach that instrument, allow that instrument to learn the most efficient way of playing the instrument. And that raises your technique, a level above anything you could have done with effort. So effortless mastery is like using a fork you’re precise every time. You know, you may think nothing of that, but I don’t think there’s any other species in the world that’s even capable of it. And if they are, it takes a lot of concentration. That’s effortless mastery. You could be doing five things and you still never miss your mouth. You want what you are doing in sports or music to be as close to that as possible.

[00:47:30] Werner: Who’s playing?

[00:47:32] Sean: For those on audio only, Kenny was just staring directly at the camera. 

[00:47:35] Werner: Oh, that’s too bad. 

[00:47:37] Sean: Absolutely beautiful. Believe me. I think anyone, even just listening. 

[00:47:42] Werner: You see, I want that in my equipment. I want the body to do it. That doesn’t mean now my mind, having been written off the negative things that pull my playing down, can appreciate and listen. The simplest explanation in music for effortless mastery is the body plays and took a lot of teaching to get this simple. The body plays, the mind receives. Now, if the mind receives with gratitude or intoxication, it gets pretty spiritual. But when the mind doesn’t receive because it is busy quantifying, qualifying, and in general judging, that’s a very inhibited performance. And that was what relates to anything anybody tries to do.

Visualization Practices

[00:48:28] Sean: I think a great visual for all this. I’m sure we’ve seen those great sportsmen or even someone presenting something, and it’s just so effortless, it’s like, how is that even happening? That is what I think about when people talk about going to that next level. And you mentioned visualization earlier. I think about someone who I know has studied a lot of Zen, a lot of ancient tradition is the Lakers and Bulls former coach Phil Jackson. And he used to sit before a game for 45 minutes and visualize, did you do any type of visualization or do you do any type of visualization practices?

[00:49:06] Werner: I did it in the eighties, when I set out, like I was trying to practice rink substance, it was an early attempt. And I can’t say I had some results that I would want to teach or share because I don’t think I did. I liked the idea that you can visualize the life you want but I found some flaws in that idea too.

[00:49:30] Sean: What are the flaws you found?

[00:49:32] Werner: Well, you start visualizing it, but have you let go of needing it to happen? It’s very easy once you start visualizing to also get attached to it happening, and then you find that you really visualize. It’s like you said, I want this reward and I’ve let go of it. But you keep looking over your standards.  I’ve been a good boy, where’s the reward? Where’s my abundance? I found that that’s an easy thing to fall into. I never did visualize a gig. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I might be watching the Twilight zone a second before I get onto the stage of Carnegie hall. It doesn’t have to be the Twilight zone. It could be mad men, or it could be the Crown, or I might just be really wasting my time because I want nothing. 

I don’t really want to anticipate anything. I want to walk out there and find out what’s happening to me right that moment and not get in the way. And then I find that the body reacts organically to exactly what that situation is now. For other people that might…  I shared a dressing with Herbie Hancock and he chanted Nam Myoho Renge Kyo for about 50 minutes before we went on. And that’s what he likes to do. What I like to do is like, have no thought of it whatsoever, and I walk out. I remember one time I was performing in Europe and I fell asleep in the dressing room and it was a really nice nap.

And someone woke me up, “you are on” like that, you know? And I went, oh my God, and I woke up. And I literally just kind of strolled over the piano. And I wasn’t even there yet before my hands started to play and they were playing their ass off. It was great. I didn’t want to wake up. The one thing I learned is to stay out of the way and imagine the hands playing by themselves seems to cover everything that all the other disciplines, physical and mental, try to do from the outside. From the inside if you’re looking at hands and they’re not yours, and so therefore, why would you? If you were watching someone’s hands play, why would you have any desire? It doesn’t affect you if they play well or not. If you can really get all the way over to that, of course they’ll never play bad again.

Kenny’s Big Limiting Factors

[00:51:45] Sean: I’m wondering for you, what held you back the most? One of the things I see a lot is self limiting beliefs. People don’t even believe they’re capable of playing things. Or one of the things you read about is fear of ghosts or even inadequacy. For you, were there any big limiting factors?

[00:52:01] Werner: Yeah, it was all life stuff though, not music. I had my resentments, I said, I’ve done records that I thought should have won Grammys. I’d done records I thought everybody should know. I think they’re as great as the records everybody does know. I could get on that. I could start to focus on that cloud, but again, it’s a cloud because whatever is happening is what’s happening. I could get on a negative thing, but mostly my biggest negatives were being able to be happy, not being anxious, not being depressed, not being jealous of somebody, and not wanting to escape. Oh, man. I think when I was a kid before 10 years old, my parents babysat, we’re talking about the fifties. Parents babysit their kids with television, what a great aid for them.

Suddenly if you put the kid in front of the television, they would just sit there like a, not a robot, but yeah. And then they were quiet. The problem is that it becomes the meditation for a child, but it’s not tuning in. It’s actually detaching and tuning out and becoming known. And then you get addicted to that numbness. And I think that numbness is what I’ve been fighting all my life. I wanted to feel what a human being could feel. And literally that’s been an entire life thing that held me back. Didn’t hold me back from music, actually helped me in music. I could play something and everybody in the room was crying, but me.

And I went, wow. Geez. Okay. Yeah. I’m looking around. Okay. My wife would come over there, “did you see what you did?” I said, no, I don’t know what I just did. It’s very strange. It doesn’t go along the lines that I can recommend to anybody else, but I could be not even involved in the effect of the music. I don’t know why it’s like that, but it has been that way, but in my life I wanted more. So to answer your question, it has nothing to do with music. It was great music when I was completely messed up, but it could have been greater and I could have written more of it or whatever. I think it is even greater now that my life has come into agreement with it. 

Greatest Piece of Music

[00:54:17] Sean: Not to take a detour here. But I’m just wondering for you personally, what is the greatest piece of music you’ve ever listened to?

[00:54:25] Werner: Wow. Well, for me, whatever had the greatest effect on me because you could go there forever. A couple of things that are not probably even well known at all. One is that there was a composer, Michel Colombier, who I always admired. He really wrote movie soundtracks, but he was a very brilliant guy. He could have written a symphony if you wanted him to write a symphony. But he really knew how to orchestrate. He did a record called “>Wings , and for me, that was, and probably is still my favorite record. It has one orchestra, a big man, a rock ensemble, and a percussion ensemble. Herb gave them an unlimited budget. 

He said, write something that’s the whole world. So he used his movie scoring chops, plus his knowledge of Stravinsky Mozart, and he made this journey. The closest thing I can say is it’s like Sergeant Pepper’s or Days of Future Past, Four Musicians, because one thing just morphs into another and it’s just the most amazing. Now, if you have a short attention span, which is what I had, this is perfect because before you even lose the thread of what that was, it becomes this. So that is probably my favorite record. If I put it on now, I would probably be hooked until it was over, which is only about 20 minutes because it was a record.

Another thing was, of course everybody knows Antonio Carlos Jobim, but one thing that probably most people don’t know as Jobim did, way back when he was recording for Brazilian companies called Matita Perê, you can find it on YouTube now. M-A-T-I-T-A, Matita Perê. And that whole record is called Matita Perê. It’s just one incredible piece after another. But that song, which he said was, I don’t remember the author, but there’s a very enigmatic Brazilian author that was very hard to understand. And this was his, if you look for it, discusses that this is based on what this author was talking about, what hit one of his books and it’s just this journey.

And it’s just the most beautiful thing. It is in my top five favorite pieces. And after that, I think Joni Mitchell, Blue and Song to a Seagull, I think the first two records are first and third before she got jazzy. Those entire records are my favorite music and she redid one of her songs. You know, she did a song in the beginning of her career called Both Sides Now. And it sounds like a folk song and moons and Jews and Ferris wheels, but she had the distinct privilege of doing it again. I mean, she’s still alive, but as an older woman with the Metropole orchestra and check that out, “>Joni Mitchell with the Metropole orchestra, singing Both Sides Now. Part of it is her.

It sounds like she’s been on both sides now, but the arrangement done by Vince Mendoza is so mystical. It’s probably my favorite arrangement of all time. And it’s very simple in a way, but it’s so mystical. And these things I’m telling you, they’re just very few things. If I put them on whatever clouds are over my head, they disappear and I melt into the music, but there aren’t many pieces like that. Even in music, I find myself thinking and not really just joining music. It has to grab me a certain way. And it doesn’t mean that it would grab anyone else that way.

Impactful Teachers In Kenny’s Life

[00:58:27] Sean: Speaking of grabbing you a certain way, I’m wondering about different teachers. I know you’ve written about and please correct me if I get the pronunciation wrong, Madame Chaloff, an early teacher of yours. I’m just wondering, some of these people who have come into your life and just kind of had that grip on you that fundamentally changed you.

[00:58:47] Werner: Well, I think that’s why I was meant to do this. When I went to Boston. Madame Chaloff, that’s all you said, right? It was the Madame part. She was kind of a spiritual piano teacher. It was almost like if you read that in the Art of Archery, learning to play one note with her was like this guy learning to release an arrow. And it taught me so much. I don’t even know if I got the right thing, but it taught me to be in this space. And also the spirit relationship between where my mind and body is at when I drop a finger on a key. 

But then the next teacher I had was in Brazil, “>João Carlos Assis Brasil was his name. And he had come at it from a different way. He had been a classical pianist practicing eight hours a day. He had been in competitions. I believe he had won competitions and he had a nervous breakdown. And he had to start all over again with an exercise like hers, but it was all five fingers. You just drop your fingers, and the important thing is to be kind to yourself, not to let that build up. And from there, he started to play things again and 10 minutes became 20 and 20 became an hour.

By the time I met him, I had the good fortune of living with him for about three or four months because I was playing with his brother and we lived in his family’s house. He just kept instructing me…  he could sit there and play. And like, I just played that thing for you and his face looked like he was just enjoying listening to it. I mean, the fingers are doing this incredible stuff, but he was just enjoying it. And as I’m going, how are you doing that? And it started with this exercise and he wanted me to do nothing, but this exercise for two weeks, but after six days I played hooky and went to this woman’s party and played duo with my friend.

But after six days of just dropping my fingers on the keys, I started to play and they started to play before I did. And they were playing better than I did. And that was the epiphany that changed my life. I think from that point on, I said, whatever that is, I want to keep practicing for that. And everything unfolded from that. That was the most pivotal moment just playing at that party and seeing my hands or playing stuff that I studied, but I’ve never played them. And they’re playing with a better tone, more balance because my ego is not begging him to play better. Everything unfolded from that moment on.

[01:01:19] Sean: Kenny, were you aware at that moment of the magnitude and the importance of that particular moment in the rest of your life?

[01:01:28] Werner: No. You know, I was the kind of guy that couldn’t practice the way everybody else was. I had ADHD. I had a very bad attention deficit when I was a child, so bad that they used to send me home from school due to the noises or the movements I made. And the last thing I could do is sit there for hours practicing. So I was getting by on my talent only. With this kind of practice, I found I could sit there while… I thought it was a solution for how I may eventually be able to practice at least an hour and focus on something because it just felt like another part of my brain, not the part that was so riddled with attention deficit and duress. I just thought it might really solve my own personal problem.

And for the next seven or eight years, I practiced it myself and I didn’t get to practice 10 hours a day. I’ve never done that, but I did find myself able to look at some things and practice with clarity because I wasn’t coming from that part of my brain, that one that scratched me, I just had to get up, get off the piano bench. I couldn’t stay there unless I was performing. And I could do that all day. But by myself there was loneliness and just not wanting to do it. So the next seven or eight years just practicing and then I would make some progress and then I would sort of lose it. And then I go back to that exercise again.

Which is why I recommend it to people now. When you don’t know where you’re at, start over, you keep watering the route. That’s how you make a plant grow or a new neurological direction, which is how I understand it now. But so after about seven or eight years, people were remarking to me, man, you don’t look like you’re doing anything, what’s going on? And so I started to give a few private lessons because people wanted to know what I was doing and then I started with this exercise, but also my intuition took over as if someone else was teaching and they knew what to say. And they knew what to do. And then that grew. 

And then I did a class, that’s a long story, but I did a class at the new school and everybody kind of flipped out. So they had me subbing for people all the time. Then I started teaching there. And from there I did a couple of lectures and somebody recorded and they sent it to band directors. Our country, people were starting to quote me in what I said, which is very strange for a musician who only really cares about what he plays. And eventually there was enough material in my lectures to write a book. And from that point on it took another level completely.

Lessons For Entrepreneurs, Business Owners And Investors

[01:04:12] Sean: I know this isn’t your domain expertise. I’m thinking about the entrepreneur who’s listening, the business owner, the investor what would practice look like in this context? Thinking about the five fingers dropping in those types of worlds and domains.

[01:04:27] Werner: Well, you know, practice, people just practice things, but there’s a great power in “practicing practicing”. The thing we didn’t really cover that much is that the answer to this stuff is what do you do? Everything I described in the first part of the book, people go, oh yeah, that happens to me. They say, how did he know that? You know, but “the space” is the pure self. It’s the sun, without the clouds. Every time you get into the space, like just watching yourself breathe for 20 seconds, you’re just in “the space”, you think of it as something, you have to go through this, this trudging for years.

And I think that if there is a God that he put this thing in there, that you could immediately go there just immediately focus on the source of your life, which is undeniable. Just watch that thing breathe. So, if you agree that the space is the most in the moment, an intuitive part of yourself, “practice, practicing” without leaving the space. So if you’re an investor, take 10 bucks, go into the space and do anything with it that the space tells you to do. Okay. Boom, boom, boom. In other words, practice without consequences. So what you’re practicing is not success in your action, but doing it from “the space”. 

So if you’re a CEO, you just practice the space and then go be a CEO in meetings, come back to your breathing whenever you can, instead of getting all wrapped up in what everyone’s saying and whether or not you really know what they should say. And after all they work for you and blah, blah, blah, these clouds can always figure a way to insert themselves again There are many exercises for bringing one right back into the moment and exposing those things as temporary. In fact, exposing delusions. So you need a practice of some kind. “>Eckhart Tolle is kind of the master.

I don’t really follow him, but if you watch him on YouTube, it’s all about the Power of Now, his book, which was an overwhelming success. Any exercise it brings you right back to now, will release you from the delusion you’re being bound by even temporarily. And you’ll remind the mind over and over again that these are illusions and they can be dropped. And the more you practice, the more you get comfortable with dropping them and going back into “the space”. The truth of the space is this moment, and in this moment, none of that stuff exists.

What Teachers Get Wrong With Students

[01:07:00] Sean: Along the lines of this, are there a lot of other things you see teachers get wrong with students that we haven’t covered yet? That’s just readily appearing.

[01:07:32] Werner: Oh, yeah. Well, I only watch music teachers, but yeah, all over the place. For one thing from the first lesson, all the way through getting your doctorate music, no one ever mentions the word ease. They want you to learn something, but why does this sound good when you play it even though you didn’t make a mistake? Because until it’s relatively easy to play, it won’t be musical and it won’t be intuitive. Now that’s the same thing with golf or anything. Okay. Now you’ve learned how to do something. Now get out of the way and let the body learn to do it with such regularity that it’s relatively easy for you to do. That makes you above the competitor. 

At one point demonstrating one level and another is just the ease of doing it because everybody knows the same thing at a certain level. So what else explains it? And yet learning to play something with ease is never mentioned once. Also the assignment of way too much material, which just ensures that almost everyone, but the most talented of us will only semi learn everything just enough to know they’re not doing it right. And develop a negative thing about themselves that I practiced but don’t get better. I guess I’m not very talented, which they have to submerge because whenever they think that they’re in pain. They submerge it with what, it could be alcohol, it could be partying. It could be “rationale”. 

A lot of people are living in a sort of a purgatory because music has been nothing, but am I doing it well? Am I now? Oh, now I didn’t do it. Well, I’m doing it well. They miss the entire gift of music. I’d rather play badly and constantly be aware of the gift that it is just to play than play okay, and be constantly on this. You know, balancing myself like Humpty Dumpty, trying not to fall off the wall and feel and crack. That’s just one of many, don’t get me started on that. Almost all of it is backwards, which is not why it doesn’t work. It works for the most talented, but that’s why it doesn’t work for the majority of the rest of us. 

What To Dedicate Time And Practice To

[01:09:20] Sean: I know one of the problems a majority does face is what they should dedicate their time to. If they’re going to try to achieve mastery within something, a lot of people are wondering, is this something I want to commit years to? And then we always battle that initially early on. I mean, sometimes it can be frustrating. I know this has to do with ego and everything, but how do you know if what you’re dedicating your time and practice to is actually the thing you should be dedicating your time and practice to? 

[01:09:44] Werner: Because I don’t think it matters what you dedicate your time and practice to. Once you have reached a space, that’s the point of it? The point of it is not doing it well, the point is learning how to do this journey and it’s a success. I think once you really get in the process, you stop asking yourself that question. So it could be a golfer. It could be a musician. If you notice that you have no particular talent for something, then you evaluate whether you should elevate it to a hobby. I think of a hobby as an elevation because you’re not putting your ego on the line every time you do it. 

As a hobby, who cares if you’re getting better or not. If you enjoy the process, it’s not about that. Now, if you’re talking about dedicating yourself to what you’re going to do in life, it’s kind of not easy to decide what that’s going to be, because that’s in the future. But if something keeps drawing you, then you think you want to learn how to do that, and there you can learn it in a much more hyper-effective way by learning how to do it from “the space”. Learning how to practice in the space, learning how to act from “the space”. Actually it seems like a slower path, but it gets you where you want to go much faster.

Falling Out of Love With Music

[01:10:55] Sean: Have you come across a lot of musicians that end up just falling out of love with the music? And if so, what does that look like?

[01:11:03] Werner: Well, it means you’re still doing it, but you kind of, you know, I mean, you see it in teachers, not, not everybody chose to be a teacher. In fact, you would find out unless they went for an educational degree in music. There’s a lot of teachers who teach because they have a reputation as a player. Very few of them would have been teaching if they had had enough gigs. So right off the bat, they feel like they’re doing something by default rather than something by choice. 

And I was the same way, except I found a real passion in my teaching and some do, but the look of it is someone who’s vaguely negative. They’ll take the negative if they can. They’re half-heartedly positive and it’s much more comforting to reside somewhere negative, not negative enough so that people would call you negative. Just not hoping for too much, but because they really haven’t faced the fact that they don’t love music anymore, but music is what they do.

[01:12:02] Sean: Is that a natural progression?

[01:12:04] Werner: Well, I mean, it could happen. And it happened to me. I got to the point where I didn’t care about the music at all, but because of effortless mastery, I played better than ever. It’s really weird. The less I care, it goes both ways. If you care about it and you’re not playing the way you want to play, then you actually start to hate music or you just get out of it, but you still have to go play your gigs or whatever. If you learn that not caring allows another facility to play the music, you may throw it away completely and find that you’re playing with such light and like lightning, every time you play, because it’s not you, it’s the hands. 

I had that experience when I was in Mexico, I was teaching. You had to wear masks the whole time. I have not yet started, next week I’ll find out what that’s like, but I had yet to teach with a mask on, because I’ve been teaching for about a year and a half on zoom. And I kept gasping for air, you know, really. And I just kept ripping it off. I said, hell with it. You know, if I die, I die. I just, then I put it on again. You know? So I’m in this one place where somebody was doing a masterclass and I was supposed to go on right after her. 

And again, I’ve got the mask on, but I’m just so tired, walk out and get some air and come back in. I’m almost fainting sitting there waiting for her to be done. And I kind of fell asleep, which was great. And I wake up stuck plotting, you know, and the person looks at me and goes, you know, now you don’t even take a break. And I walked up there kind of like dredged up. Like I had my bedroom slippers on or something. I had just been talking for hours. So I just didn’t feel like talking. I sat down at the piano and I put my hands on the piano and they started to play from where I was at. 

And they built a piece that was about 15 minutes long, where they were doing this phenomenal stuff. And I was still just sitting there watching them and just resting because I was tired and breathing. And then I did a little talking and that was it. But it was amazing to see when I finally gave up what the body will do with the music. And then I was kind of enjoying what I was hearing. I saw that there’s a documentary on right now called Summer of Soul. Have you seen it?

[01:14:30] Sean: I have not. No.

[01:14:32] Werner: There’s a lot of noise about it. A lot of publicity, basically it was a festival in Harlem, 50 years. And for 50 years, all the video was sitting in somebody’s basement. And Questlove, the guy, I don’t know if he found it, but he produced it. The guy from the Fallon Show , the Tonight Show, found this video and he produced it. It’s a whole documentary that shows a lot of it. And it’s amazing because nobody even knew that festival existed. But Mahalia Jackson played once, she was a great gospel singer. If you don’t know the name, Mahalia Jackson. And she got ill, it was outside, it was probably warm in the summer. And she tells Mabel what’s her name? Mabel, staples, or something. 

This other gospel singer who worshiped Mahalia Jackson, was playing piano for, she was going to sing with her, and Mahalia leaned over. And you see the video and this woman is narrating. Now she’s just said, I don’t feel very good. You should start this song. So instead of Mahalia Jackson getting up, this other woman starts to sing it. Mahalia Jackson was very heavy, was probably hot, you know, and maybe she felt faint, who knows? Heart condition, who knows? Breathing, right? And this woman starts to sing and she’s a little younger and she’s not as heavy. And she’s really doing the gospel thing. All of a sudden Mahalia gets up and she starts to sing and you can still see she’s coming out of the haze of not feeling well. 

And very quickly, she is on the highest level of spirit and means every word that she says and repeats and sings it and growls at it. And in a minute, she totally transcended her physical condition. So there’s history, as long as, as old, as humanity itself of spirit rising above the physical and extending the performance of the physical, like oil separates from water. And effortless mastery then is the study of how to leave the body alone. Let the spirit go into an observation place while the body learns. And then the spirit can enjoy the performance instead of blocking the performance.

Kenny’s Life Outside of Music

[01:16:53] Sean: We said this conversation is about life, I’m wondering for you, how much time are you spending in that space outside of music, just in everyday life?

[01:17:00] Werner: I’d say now a great deal. What used to happen is that I was only in the space when I was performing or teaching. Then I noticed when I started teaching at Berkeley six, seven years ago, when you’re doing whole semesters in two, four hours in a row every day, three days a week, I’d walk out and on the street sideways, I say, wait a minute, I’m still there. This is what I was looking for in life, but then I’d lose it. It’s been an evolution. 

Since I started teaching in courses where more and more, I forget to go back the other way. I just “be that” which changes my whole perspective. Notice the love is still there wanting to hear people talk, what they have to say. Always wanting to be helpful and feeling the light. And I would say in the last two years, much of it because of pandemic quarantine and more teaching than ever. So, because I was just trying to help people, anybody that gets through the school by mentoring them. 

Now it’s pretty much how I go through my day. My wife’s still trying to get used to it. It’s hard to live with someone who suddenly doesn’t typically feel any problems. Well they feel, it’s not that there are no problems, but at this moment it doesn’t matter. Who’s president? It doesn’t matter how many I’m so sorry to say it doesn’t matter how many people died that day. At least if it wasn’t somebody you knew or you, it doesn’t change anything. You know, the moment always has this light in it. It only gets clouded up when you start mixing in by self-will the past or the future.

Misreading Religious Books

[01:18:36] Sean: I know one thing you mentioned over this past year, you spent a lot of time, especially in the morning, reading any new books you’ve come across or just thoroughly enjoyed. Even ones you went back to.

[01:18:46] Werner: Another gift for the last year and a half is I met somebody who I felt was really into A Course in Miracles. And that’s supposedly Jesus riding through somebody who was an atheist and a therapist correcting all the horrible. And I think the greatest tragedies on earth have been the misreading of the Bible. And perhaps the Qur’an if any Islamic terrorist sees that in the Qur’an there’s misreading it as much as Christian fundamentalists are misreading it here. Anybody that thinks they should have domain over anyone else’s behavior obviously is misreading.

And so the premise of this book, whether one believes in it or not, is that Jesus came back and gave this course, like 365 lessons for 365 days, but also many pages of preface and afterwards, and he’s basically correcting all the misunderstandings. And given what I believe is the truth. I believe that before I saw that, but what I liked about the course of miracles is that it doesn’t deal with. I’m also a Yogi. I have a girl, but there’s a lot of facets to that. There are certain holidays, different deities. 

There’s a lot to embrace a certain chance, certain practices, mantras. It’s all great, but it’s all meant to take you to that same place. But I think I was just ready in life for something, it just hit me every day in the head. Hey that man, the thing you’re seeing, it’s an illusion. Just see if you can have a moment where you really see who you are and what this is. And I’ve been going for those moments in the last year and a half and they expand. So I liked just being one thing. Okay. I’m looking around, just be here now.

This is not new stuff, but once you decide that that’s more important than anything else you’re doing, which I had the luxury of doing without having to travel without having to show up to gigs. Well, you know, all I had to do. Oh, I’m not here now. No wonder I’m feeling that weight again, and breathing into it. And I found my own personal exercise, and then I found that this was also the best exercise for my class. So it all just kind of happens by itself. There’s a great Buddhist saying, I’m not a Buddhist, but I’m not anything, but I quoted it in the book. It says, “do nothing and nothing shall be left undone.”

That’s really worth contemplating because the face value of it seems impossible. That’s how, you know, there’s a depth there that you can concentrate on. And that’s the idea. It’s something of a foot and I can play a part in it. In other words, I have another analogy for me: I have a very short life if I’m a separate drop on the kitchen table, probably a few seconds. If I’m a drop in the ocean, I’ll live forever. So that may all be classic Buddhism, but it would take me one step away from it to think of it as Buddhism. It’s just me. And it’s just common sense.

Conversation With Anyone Dead Or Alive

[01:21:54] Sean: It’s beautiful. Kenny, if you could do this with anyone dead or alive, sit down long form conversation. Who would you love to have that conversation with?

[01:21:04] Werner: Maybe Mozart or Beethoven. What was it like for you? I think I compose not on the level, but more along the lines and process of a Beethoven. Because I think I would rework things and rework things and then they turn into something. Whereas you probably never heard of Fat Jones, but to me, he was one of the greatest jazz, big band writers of the 20th century, definitely on anybody’s level, Duke Ellington, Count Bass, whatever. And he would write scores and he would do the parts without hearing them. 

I could do that too, but I mean, what his draft was, was it. And I’m told that that’s the way Mozart was, whereas a Beethoven would rework things and rework things, and then they’d morph into what he wanted. But they had that depth because they had that polish and evidently Mozart would just do it kind of sad would do the saxes as they put the trumpets over there. And so I would want to talk with either or both of them to find out how that worked out for them, I guess.

Where To Stay In Touch

[01:23:15] Sean: Kenny, we’re going to make sure everything’s linked up both with effortless mastery and the new book, but where do you want to direct listeners? Where can they stay in touch with what you’re working on, what you’re doing and continue to learn from you?

[01:23:26] Werner: https://kennywerner.com/ Well, first of all, they should put their name on my mailing list and that way, I very often I do forums online. Now that’s been introduced. That’s going to continue and everybody’s invited. I’m going to be doing, I think later this week a webinar, but it’s on harmony, limitless harmony, I call it. Where you can harmonize anything anywhere. Vivian has the information. I don’t have it in front of me, but I’m actually doing the webinar this week. I’m pretty sure if not next week. And then we’re going to give an online course. 

If people already know harmony, I’m going to teach week after week, how to attach it effortlessly to stuff that’s moving forward without getting stuck, trying to do it. Like I just finished a 12 week course about the first two steps of effortless mastery.  I guess, send it to me kennywernermusic@gmail.com for now. 

[01:24:48] Sean: Yeah, of course. We’ll have everything linked up in the show notes and transcript here. Kenny, I have to ask, any chance for even 30 seconds, you can just play a little piece for us?

[01:24:56] Werner: Yeah. What’s it called the minute walls? But only half of it. No. Okay. I’ll play something.

[01:26:30] Sean: That was beautiful. Thank you for that. Kenny Werner, I really cannot thank you enough for everything you’ve done, and for joining us here on What Got You There. So thank you.

[01:26:39] Werner: My pleasure.

[01:26:40] Sean: You guys made it to the end of another episode of What Got You There. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I really do appreciate you taking the time to listen all the way through. If you find value in this, the best way you can support the show is giving us a review, rating it, sharing it with your friends and also sharing on social media. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. Looking forward to you guys, listening to another episode.

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