London Therapy Part Five

I have been doing guided meditations with my daughter since March 2018. Our thought defusion meditations involve a lot of nature imagery; green spaces, clouds in the sky, leaves on a stream, the sea and a waterfall. I thought it would be good to contemplate a waterfall in real life. A quick google search revealed that our nearest waterfall was in the Japanese Garden in Holland Park. We visited it on a warm Indian summer afternoon. Holland Park and the Japanese Garden were both highly therapeutic.

  

  

  

Twelve years a piano teacher

I taught piano quite intensively from 2008 to 2019 and in my life I have taught piano to about 30 people. From 2009 to 2018 I helped myself and my pupils gain fifteen certificates from practical grades 1 to 5, theory grades 5 and 6 and my dipABRSM in piano teaching. I feel pleased that I did make quite a success of teaching the piano and also feel pleased to be having a break from it.

Amy Stuff

These art pieces by Amy were part of her GCSE school exhibition in 2016. We got them home and put them on Instagram in 2017. More of Amy's artwork is on my Pinterest pages under Amy Stuff which can be found here.

Piano Lesson One

I have taught many 'Piano Lesson Ones' over the years. The first thing I explain to people is Middle C, which is the C in the middle of the piano.

I encourage people to think about fingering, starting with 'One is Thumb', so they can use all five fingers of both hands when playing the piano. I talk about notes as in pitch and time. The letter names of the notes of the octave, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and back to A again. I talk about the stave; the treble clef played with the right hand and the bass clef played with the left hand. As for timing I talk about time signatures: common time 4/4, waltz time 3/4 and march time 2/4. I also talk about semibreves, minims and crotchets. I don't usually get to talk about the rests at the bottom of the page.

Terminal Therapy

2018 was such a difficult year I started creating a whole range of therapeutic approaches and coping strategies in order to live the best life I could given my situation and circumstances. My collection of therapies are split into the three traditional academic terms; Spring Term (January to April), Summer Term (May to August), Autumn Term (September to December). Within that I have created therapy ideas for each day of the week, I will be sharing them with my blog over the next three years.