Welcome to the journey, Wild_flower. For what it’s worth, it seems to me that the deeper the valley / the darker the bottom we reach, the sweeter it is when we resolve our issues and are free.

And, I believe, the whole point of it all is that it’s much easier than we’re making it out to be. If we think about it, the whole point of it all is that we need to interact with the air column as little as possible–only enough to nudge it the way we need to (i.e. tighten the aperture to change pitch). Less is more, less air is required the higher we ascend, etc.

I’m still on the journey as well and catch myself doing stupid stuff (i.e. kicking with the air to reach even higher, etc.) but more an more with time I feel like I’m solidifying good sensations, good new understandings of what I should be doing with slight adjustments to my embouchre, etc.

I’m confident that you’ll get there in time and that I’ll continue progressing as well. It helped me reading the pointers at the bottom of the WIndWorks home page, watching the videos, doing the lessons and expirimenting with the concepts in my own way so I understood it for myself.

When I was in high school and junior high and into college, I took a lot of lessons from reputable teachers and practiced countless hours of Clarke, Arban, Schlossberg, Stamp, etc., etc. But I never progressed much above the staff.

At the end of the day, we can’t just show up and go through the motions and expect to get a result that we want. We must own what we’re doing, understand it for ourselves and do it in such a way that benefits us or we’re not going to get the results we want or need. We need to understand what each exercise is doing,

For me, the magic was in the ease of which harmonic slurs, especially octaves, began happening when I focused on what WindWorks suggests, tightening my embouchre / the aperture from the corners/sides and keeping the middle of my upper lip relaxed / trying not to clamp down in the middle and focusing on not kicking the air / staying relaxed in my throat, etc. It felt weird and didn’t seem to make sense and like it would never work, but I gave it a shot and was willing to fail / miss the note–no big deal, nothing bad would happen from that, I would just learn another way that didn’t work. But it did work and I got a glimpse into a different way of playing that now makes more sense and connects to what was described in many of the other method books–I understand what Clarke meant when he wrote that the lips should tighten towards the mouthpiece as you ascend. I think I misunderstood that before, that I should clamp down top to bottom. He really meant contract in a circle towards the center of the air column flowing through the mouthpiece like Maggio described and how WindWorks describes. All the methods seem now to be more alike than not, whereas before they seemed contradictory to each other in a lot of ways.

One thing I did that helped me personally too was focusing on my whistling. I always liked whistling and my playing the trumpet seemed to help me be a better whistler; I’m not sure how much of a correlation there is or if this will help others. But I noticed that when I wanted to whistle higher, I arch my tongue while tightening my lips towards the air column going through the aperture in my lips and that when I focused on clamping down from the top of my middle lip downward, the vibration stopped and the sound stopped. Also, the pitch stops when we’re whistling if we overblow. There are obviously differences between whistling and playing trumpet, but that helped me a bit mentally as I tried focusing on doing the right thing when playing, etc. FWIW

Good luck!