A piano player had stiff fingers. All his effort in performing went towards trying to relax them. I encouraged him to keep them stiff. The result was that he felt more in control, expended less mental effort and played more right notes.

I was working with an oboist once who had a wobble in her sound. However hard she tried she couldn’t make the wobble go away. I asked her to accept it, but nothing changed. So I asked if she could do it more.
I asked her to put the wobble into her whole body. What was it like to be the whole wobble. We tried this playing and not playing. She really put herself into it, shaking her whole body. It was fun, releasing.
Then she stopped and played a note on the oboe.
Guess what? It was perfectly straight. Controlled, easy, a good sound.
The wobble was the thing that needed to happen. She needed to loosen up, to shake. It was no good resisting it - that just made the need for it all the more. Something in her knew it was the right thing, and it was going to get the message across somehow. Her head thought it knew better of course. “My note must not wobble”. And that thought was the thing stopping the transformation that was trying to happen.

You can try this with bodily tension. Notice a tension that is happening when you play. It might be something you are familiar with, or a new one for today.
Now, what does it mean to do it more?
You will feel yourself  what fits this instruction.
​Don’t worry if it is something that you’ve always been told not to do, or if it feels weird or uncomfortable. Just try it. Play.
What happens? Is there anything good about it?

There is a theoretical basis to this. It comes from Process-oriented Psychology, developed by Arnold Mindell. This is a post-Jungian paradigm. Jung conceived that night-time dreams are the expression of unconscious contents that, when assimilated into consciousness, make us more complete (Jung 1959). Mindell (1998) widened this idea to include not only dreams but everything unconscious or unintended, including physical symptoms, sudden thoughts or fantasies, conflicts, mistakes, posture, and even serendipitous events. His method of uncovering the emerging process, of which these are signals, is amplification of these signals. There are various techniques of amplification, but in its simplest form it consists of increasing the strength of the signal. That means, if the signal is some sort of symptom, to consciously make it worse. POP has as an axiom that unintended events are processes that 'want' to come into being and are part of the 'dreaming' of an individual that wishes for their 'individuation'. Jung describes this individuation process as
 
a long-drawn-out process of inner transformation and rebirth into another being. This “other being” is the other person in ourselves – that larger and greater personality maturing within us, whom we have already met as the inner friend of the soul […] into whom Nature herself would like to change us – that other person who we also are and yet can never attain to completely. (Jung, 1959, p.130-131)
 
One of the characteristics of my coaching practice is welcoming those aspects of their performance that a client does not like. I treat as allies the problems that they wish to eliminate and that they therefore bring to me to solve. I ask the question "what wisdom is your mind and body showing in giving you these particular issues?". There is a flavour of seeing beauty in the unwanted. My technique is to allow and even to increase a problem rather than suppress it.