I'm not really sure what this page is about, but after a good day's practice, the other day, I felt tempted to dump some thoughts here.

I think a good day's practice of continuous music is a little different to what you might consider good, normally. You don't find yourself playing warm-up scales, that's for sure. The practice was good if you loved the sound, and could sit and listen to it as it was generated. But not only then. You might be a mite dissatisfied with your play, or (less emotionally) just conscious of what it lacked. It was a good day's practice if the time completely slipped away. You perhaps felt like waking up from a dream, resurfacing; it does not have to be this way, as the highest levels (which I have not attained!) of this music require extreme concentration and mental activity, but it is fine to be this way, and almost ideal for someone stuck, as I am, at the tip of Lubomyr's iceberg. If you could give an active attention to the sound as it unfurled, allowing yourself to be surprised by new emerging tones and rhythms without losing sight of the main, prescribed ones, then it was good.

You do not have to push yourself to play something extraordinarily fancy in each practice session. If you can aspire to sit down and make some peace with the keyboard, being gentle to, and aware of, your body, then it was good. But a good day's practice could mean something fancy. You might have naturally played something far more easefully than you ever have before, or finally overcome some kind of obstruction in the hand. You could have given your best performance ever, and have it unrecorded, a moment passed ("many moments will fall to the ground, as unpicked fruit. Let them return to the soil. Play on. Do not bother too much to change the shape and colours of your flower to try to dazzle those who are walking by"). Or, you could have played something old, and not much better, but appreciated your contact with the piano more, or found some new awareness in it, or a stronger hand.

A good day's practice can mean playing a song that's familiar, and now that it can be confidently done you have your consciousness resting above the notes, with eyes closed; you might close your eyes a second time, and focus on the darkness, keeping only half a mind's eye on what you are playing, preferring to experience the sound and rolling physical sensations; and then colours will emerge. If you have had your vision swirling and fading, pockets of light dancing around, visions either fuzzy or clear (recall what it's like when you wake up suddenly somewhere with bright light, like sleeping and waking at a beach, and then shutting your eyes again) then it was a good day's practice. It took me a long time to access this, but now it occurs whenever I play a more challenging piece. If your eyes feel heavy and gummed, as if very, very tired, it was a good day's practice.

A good day's practice could mean maintaining the same two-bar flux for two hours, and doing little more than that. And you would enjoy it, if you did it earnestly. I have done this more than once, and it feels glorious. This passage of time is not really two hours; even with active concentration, my internal and external clocks differ. Again, it is as lucid dreaming. And as the external time ticks on, if you are doing it right, you will notice your touch and attention thickening, your fingers changing in thickness and strength, not tiring out the more you play but becoming revitalised, drawing some kind of energy from the sound they generate; this will leave some kind of after-feel. This feeling may last for hours after you have played. In this time, your hands will feel as rocks, in some sense, two stones sliding off one another. You may (I did not, for a long time) notice a springboard sensation in the hand, with fingers unconsciously snapping back to the central, closed hand position. If you are very lucky, you may find yourself struggling to pick up objects (this happened to me only once, so far, but happened to Lubomyr for a year). Then, unless you are extremely lucky, this feeling will fade, and your hands will feel empty and unthickened again.

But it was also a good day's practice if the hand felt as a cloud enveloping the music, but, somehow, not really there. It was good if you forgot that you were playing, and you were only listening (this is insufficient for the full play or performance play, but just fine to find in the practice room). It was good if you became (briefly) aware of feeling your motion only in the sense of pressure at the fingertips, and not via any presence in the palm or knuckles etc. That's me, anyway - Lubomyr says this:

• "The hand must die to the player. It shall be as dead matter through which living desire must pass through five channels to contact with tone. The dead hand becomes soft and pliant. The dead hand has no awareness of distance, shape or horizontal space... For these are static intrusions to thought... But has its own lump-like indefinable mass, with living energy bulging from it.... Only the hand which is not present will be able to touch the music"

Similarly, it could also mean struggling and finding tension in a shoulder or a wrist or a thumb, and giving this some mindfulness and attention, carefully adjusting yourself until the tension dissipated. You could let yourself sink entirely into the weight of one thumb note, focus on some one particular physical sensation and ignore all else (good for practice, not performance). 

• "The technique manifests itself as a pressure-tension in the back... the act of overcoming this tension revitalises everything."

It was a good day's practice if you could struggle, take a brief break and come back to it. It is important to acknowledge your own mental resistance, if it exists on a particular day; to acknowledge that you weren't in the right mindset, and peacefully withdraw. I've sometimes struggled with something, switched to some other, more tame practice piece, then switched back 20 minutes (or something even ONE minute later) and become suddenly able to play again. Even if you are an old hand, you can still experience tension in the hand. It's good to remember that it can be strong and weightless (the feeling in the hand), if you have worked for long enough at this music, and give yourself some space to find that again. Really, it might feel laughable when Lubomyr talks about playing with no hands, or with a disappearing hand, or words to this effect, but it does and can feel that way. And you first discover this only after maintaining practice, of something reasonably but not extremely intense, for hours.

It was good practice if you slowed yourself down to an icy trickle, and did not run "like wild horses" (Lubomyr said this once to me, admonishing). Synchrony is very important for most of this music, and it's extremely easy to lose it, or lose it but deceive yourself and pretend that you have it. The action of slowing down a repeating pattern and paying keen attention to the synchrony is an important one, and developing the muscles of attention is important. Adjusting touch until the fingers gently but confidently fall together. If you could find that feeling, even for a few minutes, it was a good day's practice. And you might find that the faster play has become easier, once you have understood how the hands can fit together at the slower rate. This may seem like an obvious point, but it's very easy to override it. Even in Lubomyr's more difficult pieces, individually straightforward-seeming patterns can occur for one 'bar' (typically to be repeated for several units) and it's tempting to run swiftly over these, because, well, it's straightforward! But very often the slower pace, but with better attention and synchrony, is more difficult and more important to try to attain. The wild horses can be deceptively easy to let loose. It's good to feel that, too, of course, but not if you are straining for the speed - only if you are letting it happen (perhaps at the cost of some musicality). It is more difficult still to have the continuous speed and fluidity and weightlessness and touch-synchrony control all at once, and it cannot be found by focusing on it.