(Re)Gaining Your Own Trust

About a month ago, I woke up in the middle of the night to discover that I'd knocked one of my pillows onto the floor in my sleep. It had fallen under my nightstand, so I had to contort myself into a rather awkward angle to reach for it, and as I tilted my upper body to the side and stretched out my arm, something in my head shifted and the room started spinning wildly. Before I could even register what was happening, I sat bolt upright and my arms thrust themselves down, clutching the mattress. After just a few seconds, I remembered I was resting safely on a stationary bed, anchored by gravity, and I relaxed. It was just vertigo—an annoying consequence of water stuck in my ear for weeks after a swim.

To be sure, it was a destabilizing experience, but a pretty trivial one. And yet as I watched my heart rate and breathing return to normal and tried to settle back to sleep, I reflected on how quickly the brain and body mobilize when they sense we're off balance. The survival instinct, no matter how primitive or crude, will always override our higher-level analysis and intentions, and trying to ignore its demands its almost always a losing proposition.

Befriending the Survival Brain

I know a thing or two about ignoring what author Elizabeth Stanley calls “the survival brain”'s needs for security. For most of my life, I used various techniques to push past fear and anxiety to do things I felt I had to do, motivated by a mixture of necessity and ambition.

“You're never going to feel ready,” proclaimed the enterprising, can-do gurus of the self-help books I was reading. “Just go out there and do it anyway.”

“Everyone gets nervous. You're just too hard on yourself,” friends and teachers insisted.

“Fear is a sign you really care,” I used to reassure myself before going onstage. “It's a measure of the value of what you're hoping to offer.”

The thing is, all of these statements are at least partly true, depending on the context. But the problem was my survival brain wasn't having any of it. And as my little bout of vertigo reminded me, the survival brain will do anything it thinks is necessary to keep you safe, no matter how inconvenient or unhelpful its instincts are in, say, an orchestra audition or a solo recital. And the more we ignore its message, the harder it tries to get our attention.

Finding the Core of Identity

It took enduring a three-year battle with focal dystonia, and the accompanying recovery process, for me to accept that my survival brain had real reasons to feel unsafe, no matter how much I tried to rationalize my way out of them.

First of all, in spite of all my meditating and inner work, I still derived much of my sense of self from my accomplishments. And our abilities or successes, no matter how meaningful or deserved, are a pretty shaky foundation to build an entire identity on.

The idea that “you are not what you do”—among the most often-shared tidbits of feel-good insight--used to make me roll my eyes. I resented the obviousness of it. But the truth is that I just didn't, couldn't, get it. What do you mean how well I do things isn't the measure of my humanness? Of course it is. Fundamentally, haven't we all agreed that's true? I mean, look around...

There's an apocryphal quote from Albert Einstein that says you can't solve a problem with the same mind that created it. And in my experience, there's a corollary to that: there are certain insights that can't be grasped cognitively, they just have to be known directly. And once you experience them, the immediacy of their meaning is so palpable that you try to articulate it...and find yourself using the exact same trite, worn-out language that used to drive you up the wall. Because those very same words turn out to be true.

So when I say your identity is not what you do or don't do in this life, what your skills are capacities are, that's literally what I mean. The world keeps turning if you wake up one day and discover you can't play the viola anymore and have to quit all of your gigs. You can say out loud, “I haven't worked in three years, I can barely play a Suzuki song without my fingers curling beyond all control,” and the shame will feel excruciating, but your heart will go on beating. And, shockingly, the person you say it to might not even lose any respect for you, and continue to value your existence just the same!

I'm joking a little, but this fairly mundane and obvious realization had profound implications for my survival brain. Oh wow. I won't literally die from feeling this, from things not going my way. The world—and my place in it—will continue if I never play another note. So that was step one on my path to helping my survival brain feel more at ease around my instrument. And it's still a work in progress.

Creating a Solid Foundation

Step two, which was actually much less painful, was realizing that, at least when it came to my left hand, I had basically no idea what I was doing with the viola. And the reason it was less painful than step one was that—deep down—I'd known it for a long time. Or, at least my survival brain had. For over two decades, I'd entered every pressure-filled situation with the sinking certainty that my body needed to produce some sort of exquisite magic in order to get the music to come out, and I didn't really know how to do it. It was like walking into a kitchen to cook a royal banquet with no ingredients or idea of how to use them. Abracadabra—chocolate mousse! Good luck with that.

It took a couple of years, but the way I recovered from focal dystonia and returned to professional playing was by meeting this anxiety-provoking ignorance with intensive study of something called the Till Approach (message me if you want to know more!). It's a method of string playing that breaks down technique into intuitive, functional elements, and because it works within the laws of the body and the instrument instead of against them, it's fundamentally dependable under pressure—just like tying your shoes, brushing your teeth, or driving. The common-sense nature of the approach is also familiar, predictable, and soothing for the brain.

One Step at a Time

But I wouldn't know how well the technique—and my grasp of it—would hold up under pressure without testing it.

So over Thanksgiving weekend my husband Nick and I performed an hourlong Zoom recital of challenging works for viola duo, pieces that had never truly felt comfortable or reliable. In some ways it wasn't a big deal—just a casual concert for loved ones. And yet just months before I wouldn't have been able to play “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” without discomfort. It was an important step, and in the days leading up to it, I was nervous.

So I checked in with my survival brain. Hey, just wanted to see how you're doing. Are you ok with this? And, unlike so many times before, I actually waited for an answer instead of just steamrolling over it with my ego. In the meantime, I examined my attitude—am I holding myself to an unreasonable standard? Yes. Could I let that go? Yes. Could I accept that people were coming because they loved me, not because they expected a perfect performance? Could I allow this to be the next logical step in my return to playing? Yes and yes.

Hearing all of that, my survival brain calmed down. And when we fired up the computer, turned on Zoom, and began to play, I quickly realized that because my technique made so much more sense, I didn't have to do anything special or superhuman to play the viola pretty darn well.

So for me, healing from focal dystonia has meant more than recovering my ability to perform. It's also helped me begin to recover relationships with parts of myself that long ago lost their trust in me, and for good reason. My work is much easier—and more meaningful—with all of them back on the team. Yours can be, too.