Last year, I thought I needed a spiritual director. It turns out I needed music lessons.

About 6 months ago I was at a bit of a crisis point. Work was really getting to me and I was very concerned about burnout. I polished my resume, looked at the possibility of changing careers, and got a counselor to help me discern what to do in the middle of what seemed to be a gigantic mess. I thought maybe I needed a spiritual director as well, seeing that this was weighing on me spiritually.

Just before that all began, I also decided to do something I had thought about doing for a while: learning guitar. I had played tenor saxophone for many years, starting in elementary school and playing consistently all through high school and college. It was something I enjoyed tremendously, allowing me to socialize with my fellow “band geeks” while being creative and expressive. After college my sax sat in its case for a long time – it’s really hard to just play sax by yourself it turns out – until I eventually sold it. While I was sad to see it go, I also couldn’t see the use of keeping it when my kids weren’t interested in it.

When I decided to start guitar, I had no idea at all what I was doing. I had no experience with stringed instruments, and the only other musical experience I had, playing piano, had been excruciating. I simply could not get my left hand to do something different than my right hand at the same time. I got on Craigslist and bought a secondhand Yamaha from someone who had started learning but then gave up. I was hoping that I wouldn’t be that same person in a few years, but who knew. At first I got on YouTube and watched some videos about learning to play, but I immediately felt overwhelmed and confused. I didn’t understand what the instructor was trying to tell me, and had no idea why I sounded so horrible. I decided then that I needed to take lessons. I got online and found a guitar teacher, a jazz and classical guitarist named Matt, that had lessons just down the road from me at a local music store. It turns out that not only did I end up getting music lessons, but spiritual lessons as well. Lots of them. Here are some examples.

• “Loosen up your grip”: One of the first things I had to learn, and am still learning, was to not try and strangle the guitar neck while trying to press down on the strings. Doing so only hurt my fingers and hand, and made it nearly impossible to move up and down the fretboard.
  • Lesson – be light. Ease up. Force only binds you up.
• “You’re trying to find the right way to play it, and there is no right way to play it”: This was another early lesson. I’d usually come back a week after being assigned a song with questions about my technique. Were my fingers in the right spot? Was I strumming right? Is this right? Is that right? Matt would laugh and tell me that there was no “right” way to play it. The same song could be played any number of different ways, even by the artist who wrote it. The right way was the one that worked for me. If I could find a way to play other than what he showed me, that was great.
  • Lesson – perfection isn’t the goal, joy is. Find a path that works for you and follow it.
• “If it hurts, stop”: Once I came in and mentioned how I had practiced one night until my left hand was almost cramping. I thought this was a badge of honor, showing just how dedicated I was to learning. He told me without hesitation that if my hand starts to hurt I should stop. Guitarists have at times played so long and so hard that they physically injured themselves to the point of needing surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome.
  • Lesson – don’t be so hard on yourself.
• “Knowing you have a problem shows me you’re learning”: Early on my my lessons I would come in with a problem and say “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.” As I started to get better, I began to come in with more specific problems, such as trying to figure out an odd rhythm or how to make a quick fingering transition. To Matt, this was a success. If I was able to describe my problem, that meant that I knew what I was doing wrong – in other words, I was learning.
  • Lesson – problems aren’t failures. Failing to learn from a problem is a failure.
• “I’m not here to teach you to play a song, I’m here to teach you to learn how to play a song”: This was a big one early on as well. When I first started lessons, I brought in a couple songs I wanted to learn, firstly because I liked them and second because I thought they were easy to play. Matt thought that was fine, but told me he wanted to start me off on that classic rock song that every novice student learns, Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water”. It’s one of the simplest guitar lines ever, and very easy to figure out in a week or two. The thing is, we never finished learning the song, or any song after that really. We’d pick a song, work on it for a few weeks, and then decide what the next song would be. The point wasn’t to learn the song, but to learn how to play the guitar.
  • Lesson – my goals are probably too small and too limited.

I’ve moved from Deep Purple to Black Sabbath, to Johnny Cash, to Green Day, to Journey, to Tom Petty, to Led Zeppelin. I’m learning and having fun. If I get frustrated with a song or riff, I just play. Play is practice, joy is the goal. I haven’t done any living-room concerts, but I have gotten a new effects pedal that can make all kinds of amazing and crazy sounds come out of my amp. I’m getting looser, failing forward, and keeping my goals realistic and focused.

I think too that I could have only made this progress, and had this much enjoyment, with a teacher. A video couldn’t tell me why my hand hurt, or that I was holding my guitar wrong. I needed someone who could – and has – pick my finger up and press it on a the right string. It turned out that I also needed someone who could swap stories with me about musicians and bands, as well as his own stories of learning and performing. We all need teachers at times.

Find your joy and your spirit will be filled.