Energy - Emotions - Purpose
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Curiosity and The Shoulds
I live with a lot of shoulds. Maybe you do too. I should practice more. I should have a better website. I should make more money. I should stay in touch with all the people I know, all the time. I should eat healthy food every day, all day. I should exercise more.
All of these have good intentions at the root of them. Eating healthy and exercising make me feel good in my body. Practicing more leads to more satisfying performances. Being connected to people is one of my core values.
Planning ahead for your nerves
A teacher in grad school used to say to us during studio classes “you need to work through your performance emotions in advance of the performance.”
I always wondered, how the heck does one do that? How do you process through and deal with nerves in advance of feeling nervous? It just didn’t make sense to me at the time.
My teachers wasn’t able to explain how to do this either, but now I see the wisdom of her words and here's how I interpret her advice.
Stand your sacred ground
A number of years ago I worked as an apprentice at a summer vocal program. One of my duties was playing for voice lessons every day. One of the teachers was intense and mean, to say the least. She would regularly scream at her students, all kind of profanities, and call them stupid, or fat, or anything else nasty. Sometimes she got really physical with them, yanking on their face or jaw or pushing with all her might on their abdomen.
Course Corrections
As a chronic ‘metaphor-maker’ of all things, I thought this was a great metaphor about course correcting in life:
We set out on a path with certain goals or dreams in mind, and many times, little nudges will do the trick to keep us on track. Smooth and easy. Other times we need a bigger jigjag to stay on course. And then there are times in life when something happens to make us take a new course or find a new direction or a new goal.
When FEAR strikes - a heart centered antidote
I remember performing Gershwin's Three Preludes shortly after graduating college. I love those pieces! But all I could think about during that performance was that I wore the wrong dress because my right leg was shaking so badly and surely everyone could see it and clearly that was ruining my performance.
I don't remember the dress I was wearing, but I have a visceral memory of trying my darndest to stop my leg from shaking, with no success whatsoever. It simply kept jittering away, stealing my focus from the actual music.
What you resist persists
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, her conclusion about fear, after living a very fearful childhood? Fear is boring: “because it was the same thing every day. Around the age of fifteen, I somehow figured out that my fear had no variety to it, no depth, no substance, no texture. I noticed that my fear never changed, never delighted, never offered a surprise twist or an unexpected ending. My fear was a song with only one note—only one word, actually—and that word was ‘STOP!’”