Reactions

Practicing mindfulness won’t prevent bad things from happening to you. Sorry, but dealing with bad situations is part of life. What mindfulness can offer is a way to strengthen your resilience when dealing with life’s ups and downs.

It is important to remember that we all face setbacks and failures from time to time. It is easy to feel isolated when faced with these situations, but even the most successful person you can bring to mind has dealt with problems.

As musicians we deal with rejection and failure on a consistent basis, so it is easy to imagine how important a strong sense of resilience can be. If you have ever taken a professional audition of any kind, you have an intimate understanding of the benefits of resilience. Without it, we would give up at the first rejection from an orchestra, festival, or college job. You might think building resilience is a difficult task, but mindfulness training can help.

A common instruction in mindfulness meditation is to offer space for the sensations and emotion you feel while meditating, without labeling them as good or bad. We need room to observe an emotion before dealing with it, or as the meditation teacher George Mumford describes it, allowing space between the “stimulus and the response.” This approach is exactly what we need to be resilient in the face of life’s struggles.

When we allows thoughts and emotions to arise during a mediation without forcing them away, we are increasing our ability for resilience. A common experience in meditation is seeing a thought or emotion arise in the mind, and if allowed to, dissipate just as quickly. This only happens if the mind state is one of spaciousness and curiosity. If you observe your reactions to a bad situation in a similar way, you can choose the most helpful response for that moment. But this ability will not be available if the skill has not been developed in “the laboratory” of mindful meditation practices.

In her article on resilience for Mindful, Linda Graham describes the outcome when we have access to this kind of response.

“When the self-regulating capacity of your brain is functioning well, you can inhabit or quickly recover a felt sense of centeredness, ease, and well-being after an upsetting event. You regain your equilibrium. From there you can perceive clearly what’s triggering your emotions and discern what a wise response to those triggers would be.”

This kind of intentional, thoughtful response to life’s stresses is available to all of us. Honing the ability to allow space for our everyday emotional reactions gives us the ability to better deal with the big stuff when it comes along.

There are lots of great guided meditations out there about dealing with difficult or intense emotions. One of my favorite teachers on this topic is Sharon Salzberg, and she has a free meditation on difficult emotions you can find here. Give this a try this week and see if you can start to change your relationship to the emotions you feel.

Works Cited

Graham, Linda. “Train Your Brain to Build Resilience.” Mindful, September 15, 2009. https://www.mindful.org/train-your-brain-to-build-resilience/

Some types of suffering are unavoidable in life: Physical pain or illness, rejection, loss of loved ones. But often times the suffering we experience comes from our reactions to situations, adding a second round of suffering. There is a Buddhist teaching that discusses the pain of two darts. The first dart is the unavoidable physical or emotional pain that we feel at certain points in our life. The second dart, the one that is avoidable, comes from the mental reaction to that pain which adds to our suffering.

In his book, “Buddha’s Brain” Rick Hanson describes this concept of the first and second darts, and the physiological processes that accompany them.

“First darts are unpleasant to be sure. But then we add our reactions to them. These reactions are ‘second darts’—the ones we throw ourselves. Most of our suffering comes from second darts” (Hanson, pg. 50).

What Dr. Hanson is describing is something that happens throughout our day, often without us noticing. Someone might not say hi to us in the hallway, and suddenly we are imagining all of the possible ways we could have upset them. “Maybe I said something in the meeting that upset them, or maybe they are mad at me for not including them at last week’s party?” These reactions or ruminations are completely fabricated and usually are not helpful for navigating the present moment.

This kind of internal disquiet is very common in the world of music, especially when considering the unavoidability of occasional mistakes. To make great music you have to take risks, and along with those risks can come mistakes. We have all felt that sinking feeling immediately following a mistake: an instinctual physical reaction that is generated from the disappointment of not playing or singing something in the way that we had intended. The second dart comes in from the mental reactions to that brief second. From that one mistake, completely fabricated outcomes begin to creep into our imagination, such as “This group is never going to hire me again,” or “Great, now everyone here knows I am a fraud—They think I’m completely worthless,” or “I am never going to make it as a musician.”

If you take a step back and look at these ruminations, you can see how blown out of proportion they are, but in the moment it is more difficult to notice. This kind of thinking can become so prevalent that sometimes even the first dart can be fabricated without our realizing it.

When you are living the life of a freelance musician, there are times when someone else will get a call for a job that you where hoping to get. This is part of life for all musicians in some way or another. Usually, the person in charge of hiring had no ill intent when they chose another musician over you, but a common reaction is to follow another mental path. We instead fabricate a scenario where we are the victim of an attack, that the personnel manager has something against us, or that they don’t think that we can hack it.

Reactions like these are not helpful. It can be difficult to catch the second dart before it hits home, but a good first step is to simply notice when you have created an unhelpful reaction to a situation. You will start to see how much of an impact our mental reactions to things can have on us and those around us. Be kind and patient with yourself, and trust that by starting to notice these reactions you are working toward preventing them all together.

Works Cited

Hanson, Rick. Buddha’s Brain: the practical neuroscience of happiness, love & wisdom. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, 2009.