Find Your MoJo.

Unlock your magic, your potential.

Music has always run in my family. Both my grandmothers and my mom played. I can recall several times during my childhood, where the sounds of old familiar songs would permeate the air in the house from my mom’s playing. She had a delightful style that was delicate to the touch and serene to the ear. It was a treat to listen to her play because her appearances on the piano became more rare, especially as I got older. She battled with Scleroderma (a rare auto-immune disease which affected her lungs, skin and fingers) and it prevented her from continuing to do one of the things she loved doing the most.

When the musical baton got passed to me at age 8, I no choice when my parents enrolled in private lessons with a classical piano teacher named Mrs. Pavia who had taught numerous students for decades. I already had an appreciation for Classical music, but playing and listening are two completely separate things. Songs from my favorite composers take weeks, months even years to master. In an eight-year-old’s mind, songs are magically learned almost from the moment you pick up the sheet music and start playing. Playing like Beethoven required staying at Square One for an indefinite about of time in order to build a foundation. Patience was something that I lacked and my eight-year-old self wasn’t interested in sacrificing time to hang out with my friends after school to dedicate an hour each day to practice. NOPE. Not today. My adult self is wishing that I stuck with it. So after eleven months and learning how to play Für Elise (mission accomplished with learning a Beethoven song), I threw in the towel and closed that chapter on piano lessons.

Fast forward by a couple decades to 2020. There I was in a stare down contest with the piano trying to pick up where I last left off. In the stillness of everything, quieting my thoughts as I concentrated on the sheet music in front of me, I thought, I can do this. Mind over matter. I come from a lineage of strong, powerful women who didn’t just throw in the towel and run away the second something seemed near impossible. An hour a day seemed like minutes at a time being at home in the Ronademic. Left hand, right hand, combine the two together. Repeat. Practice chord progressions, scales, arpeggios, daily. The more I did, the easier it became.

Humans have more than 6,000 thoughts swirling in their head a day. When I’m at the piano, I have to try and silence my thoughts to only a handful in order to focus and concentrate on what I’m playing. One ADD day, I kept thinking to myself how did my mom discover Mrs. Pavia? How did their paths cross? How long did I take lessons for? When did I start? Stop? How often did I take lessons? You get the gist. Since my Mom’s passing in 2014 from Scleroderma, I’ve received several signs along the way and have been guided by the unexplainable. I’ll save that blog for another day.

The pandemic caused many of us to re-organize, renovate and Marie Kondo our space. I was in the midst of cleaning up when I stumbled across an unopened and unmarked storage box. Upon opening it, I found my mom’s old sheet music from when she was a teenager and a red Mead 5 subject notebook. When I opened it, my jaw dropped. This was THE NOTEBOOK that included ALL of the answers I was searching for. I never recalled seeing it before but my mom brought with her to all my lessons with Mrs. Pavia. Everything was written in her handwriting as though she wrote it yesterday and has been guiding my steps this entire time to find it.

From February 15th, 1994 to January 3rd, 1995 with one lesson a week after school on Tuesdays from 4-5p, I spent those eleven months learning scales, notes, proper fingering, chords, sharps, flats and of course Beethoven’s Für Elise. Mrs. Pavia was extremely strict when it came to posture, curved fingers and piano etiquette and because of that, I learned from the best.

I unlocked my past from 1994 and rediscovered my MoJo when I found that red Mead notebook. My lessons from my past were just enough to help me pave the way towards a new transformation.

Thanks to Mrs. Pavia’s strict teaching methods and constant drill sergeant exercises, I retained a wealth of invaluable information that has shaped me to become the pianist I am today. This magic, this MoJo was in me the whole time and I needed something that would trigger it to come out of its shell.

I Googled Mrs. Pavia and was floored to learn that she had just passed away last year on January 14th, 2021 at the age of 109. A life well lived and a true inspiration to the others she touched.

Until next time! Love.