Training in music is a full-body skill—it brings body, heart, and mind together.

By training, I mean rigor—daily drills, tiny corrections, high stakes. Conservatory felt like becoming an athlete while learning a language. And once the skills take root, they stay. Your brain changes. You hear differently; you move differently.

It’s not like disciplines that live mostly in the head—read, test, repeat. Music uses body, heart, and mind at once: mind for the technical demands of memory and music theory, heart for how it makes us feel, body because make music with our breath, our fingers, our movement.

Music school has its downsides. The intensity can breed neuroses—perfectionism, overthinking. Sometimes we miss the point: so focused on the correctness of every note that we forget we’re playing music, not working music.

Even so, I’m grateful I went. Even if I never touched those skills again, rigorous training taught me how to train—how to learn, how to practice, how to perform. Those are transferable anywhere.

Mostly, it reminded me what an integrated life feels like: using all parts of yourself—mind, body, spirit—at once. That’s worth practicing in any domain.