Musicians with Dystonia Bulletin Board

Thanks again for your posts. It will be interesting to see if there's a fine detail in interpreting "never try to control the dystonic movement", which I wholeheartedly agree with.
MOST importantly I think we might have a concensus that *fighting* the dystonic movements with hours of trying to pull one direction when the finger is unwittingly going the other, is a recipe for disaster, yes?

FWIW, an interesting part of my recovery did come (late in the process) from playing through some "symptoms" while just letting the weirdness happen and trying to feel as loose as possible. ("Playing" is a euphemism; there were often more splats and twangs than notes). The danger is, there's a huge difference between *wanting* it to be free and loose and really experiencing it; the former can mean a major relapse. I kept these adventures to under 4 minutes or so, with lots of relaxing time in between. I jokingly thought of it as Daring the Darkness, like running through the graveyard at midnight.
Frankly I never expected to share that with anyone because doing it from a distressed state of mind would be so dangerous.

In my prior post, I tried to emphasize *awareness* as the key. Knowing that parts of my hand were essentially having spasms that I wasn't even aware of (because "bigger" things were keeping notes from happening) was a real eye-opener for me.

But MOSTLY, I'd like to underline that we tend to mention "dystonic movements" in reference to the unwanted other things that happen (the finger that curls or straightens or leans sideways). For me, all of that is AFTER the fact; the dystonic *event* is the thought or attempted movement that triggers the extra stuff. Finding a way to feel that earliest moment in a way that stays loose was very important.

I'd be very interested to know if your process included the idea of "avoiding", not controlling, the dystonic movement by finding a ridiculously slow movement that has no (or as little as possible) weirdness, and growing it from there, staying "beneath the threshold" of when things go wrong. If I expressed it right, I think that's a technique that has helped many people. But I don't consider it controlling. To what degree did your process use ultra slow movement vs. "up to speed"?