Listening Mindfully to Yourself

Yesterday my flute teacher warned me that when I start working on the duets by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (an older contemporary of Hayden and Mozart, but not exactly a classical composer, like his younger brother, Carl Philipp Emanuel), I have to be careful not to make concentration on the difficult notes distract me from the quality of my sound and musicality in general.
WFB's duets are full of unexpected rhythms and note choices (a direction beyond baroque toward rococo), making it interesting and challenging to play, but I see what my teacher means about focusing on overcoming the technical difficulties of mastering the pieces and trying to play them at the speed they're meant to be played at. I'm working on the first of the six duets now, and I've decided to play it slowly enough that I can hear every note that I play. Not that I don't try to hear what I'm playing whenever I play. But minds wander.
I'm consciously trying to turn my flute practice into a meditative exercise, listening to the notes the way I learned to pay attention to my breathing while meditating. Obviously the aim of playing this way is to have every note be full and focused, in time, in tune, and at the right level of dynamics. But, as an experiment, I'm not going to try to correct my playing, just to notice it. You can't improve something unless you are fully aware of what it is.
When you're taught mindfulness meditation, you're told to focus on your breath without trying to change it in any way by breathing more deeply or more slowly, or better in any way. You aren't preparing for a test in breathing. I think the same idea works when you play an instrument or sing. Which doesn't mean that one doesn't aspire to sound more beautiful. However, I have faith that it will happen as a result of non-judgmental awareness. Yes, my sound on the high 'e' as I played that arpeggio leading up to it didn't emerge at all, or it was too loud. I heard it. I will play that arpeggio again and listen to the high 'e,' and if it comes out better, I will notice that. I will also notice each of the notes leading up to the 'e.' But I won't scold myself if they don't sound the way I'd like them to sound. I'll play them a few more times, listening carefully to see if there's any improvement. If there is, fine. If note, I'll try again tomorrow.

finding the right thing to play

In my flute lessons I have been playing duets with my teacher. It's valuable to me to hear his sound and musicality, and it's enjoyable.
We played pretty much everything in a well-known collection of duets edited by Louis Moyse. Then I started printing out duets from a huge archive of flute music that I purchased from the Clarinet Institute of Los Angeles. I had found myself playing a fair amount of baroque music and wanted to move forward at least to the nineteenth century.
After poking around among the files in the archive, I discovered a Danish composer from the first half of the 19th century named Niels Peter Jensen (1802-1846), whose duets were fun to play and almost easy enough for me to sightread. After going through a set of six of those, I decided against playing more of his stuff and found a set of duets by the French composer, Benoit Tranquille Berbiguier (1782-1835, what a great name!), who is best known for a set of flute exercises that he composed. The Berbiguier music isn't much more challenging than the Jensen. When I first started playing it, I thought it was pedestrian, but it grew on me as I worked on it, and some of it, when I played it with my teacher, was quite lovely.
Amusingly, my teacher was unfamiliar with both the Jensen and Berbiguier duets, though he had no trouble at all reading his part when we played them, and I hope that was fun for him. He's about the age of my older children, and most of his students are kids, so it must be a welcome change for him to be working with a mature person.
At my next lesson I plan to finish with the Berbiguier duets and move on to something much harder (and more interesting), the duets by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (1710-1784), which are bringing me back toward the baroque, but WFB was an idiosyncratic composer, and his duets are quirky and challenging, full of unexpected notes and rhythmic figures.
The problem for me (my teacher doesn't assign music) is to find a level that's easy enough for me to play satisfactorily (though I don't aspire to get up to performance level) but still challenging, and not frustrating.