hkc, Thanks, I really appreciate you sharing your experiences here. I have learned a great deal from reading your posts as well as those from several others. I can't stress how much it helps us to hear about other experiences from people who have been through this. There is nothing worse than being alone and not knowing whats going on.
What you say about the slow exercises kind of resonates with some basics I learned in some tai chi classes I attended some years ago. The instructor kept stressing the ability to make smooth circular motions in the exercises. I've tried to emulate that in some of my practice and it promotes sensory consciousness of the many steps required to perform the motion.
Recently while doing some of the exercises from the Farias DVD I noticed that I was unable to smoothly do the metacarpal flexing exercise. I kind of get halfway through the flex and then its like my finger's kind of move jerkily. I suspect thats related to the dystonic reaction but I'm not sure. I'm going to try working on that and see if I can make it very smooth. BTW I transferred that dvd to my portable music player which can play small videos. Its a great thing to have on my bus journey to work since I can practice those exercises! I hope my fellow passengers don't think I'm making rude gestures :-)
One of the harder things for me is to deal with the recovery vs the workarounds I have developed. I can play many things fairly well with modified technique so it takes great discipline for me to move back to a less efficient way of doing it. How did you deal with this yourself - did you make a conscious desicion to only play retraining exercises during this period? I have a recording to play on next month so I unfortunately have to make do with what I can do! I am encouraged with my progress over the last few years. I think its been at least a 75% improvement, though its hard to measure these things.
thanks,
Noel
