I like you but I don't like me; why the mind distorts existence to protect itself
A cosmic and ancient viewpoint to contrast the very real western plague of conditioned existence while communicating in the human arts
To know a thing fully is to know its inverse.
In the western world, we have been indoctrinated to assume music is a form of human communication. Our ancestors, the original bipedallers, assumed music was human existence, and not theater. Some small African tribes today still have no separate word for “music” and the word “song” could easily involve dance. Imagine that, a whole village of doers moving through life in harmony and song with nature and darkness alike; no machine feeding them propaganda on the daily. Wouldn’t that be something.
You, we, do not have stage fright. We have debilitating and oppressive conditions on our existence and it comes out in our performing art through the bigotry of western views on spoken communication, explicitly within the English language.
To combat stage fright in the arts is to know the rules of western communication while accepting the compassionate, humanistic rules patrons have for supporting your art when they buy the ticket. It’s quite magical why some folks pay to see you perform.
On the matter of stage fright in western communication, the undisputed killer of communication in a public setting is the artist (sender) not knowing the audience (receiver). Imagine a 5 yr-old learning about scabs then speaking in front of first-year med students.
It doesn’t end well for the 5 yr-old.
For performing musicians in the western hemisphere, society takes care of this pesky mental task by promoting the genre, or brain identifier, given to them by the artist, whether knowingly or not by said artist, in their production and delivery of music, flyers, or reputation. Genres. Stereotypes.
Ads. Bias. All limits (conditions) embedded into the byways of our mental processes; all noise in the mind of an over thinker.
Once the sender and receiver are acquainted by mutual consent to occupy the same space, the only thing left for eradication of stage fright is to know the damn material.
The only performance work-around to not knowing the audience fully in western communication is to know the material so intimately, it comes out in artistic and poetic concert with your performance. Any sort of improv is an expert display of this craft. The English word for this is confidence.
The audience calls it artistic expression through music and we (humans) are wired to believe; we find it oddly difficult to doubt, unless expressly told to do so by the visible and audible lack of preparation in a live performance (a prevailing reputation here in the Land of Entrapment).
Good speakers know their material.
Great speakers know their audience.
Leaders know both.
Dreamers know nothing. The body takes over at last; bliss state fully achieved. Anxiety dissolves into the ether. All life is accepted in nature; rigidity softens. World peace achieved. All expectations on written and performed music are abolished. The art of influencing others no longer the purpose of existence. Westerners assume it’s slacking; get a haircut and get a real job.
What I discovered in late 2023 is a majority of original performing artists don’t intimately know their own material.
Or they don’t trust it.
The former can be fixed manually, repeatedly until it becomes muscle memory.
The latter can be fixed with trusted loved ones and respected mentors to help identify intrinsic, yet undetected blind spots built into every single human brain. This one, I am afraid, is not so easy to accomplish and far too often the feedback is amplified from hollow venues and indifferent loved ones.
The greatest performers of all time, live speakers included, knew their audience so well, and their material long since welded into their muscle memory they could literally bullshit their audience into doing or believing anything through effective audience participation: the pinnacle of capitalized western communication. It’s why they have a Las Vegas residency. The dark world finance funneling to expansion and hostility.
Human truth is what we pay money to see outside of Vegas, not the dumb stuff you obsess over from high school music class, a douche of a father, if there ever was one; or an evil mess of a mother, as there are multitudes. Or a psychotic choir teacher, or anyone who bullied your early art in the nurturing years that is sadly normal life growing up in america.
How do you eliminate the fear of public performance?
By accepting your flaws, as obsessed by your own constructed and programmed lens of fear and shame, as the very human element most music junkies out there in the world gladly pay the door cover, plus some to experience. We don’t give a flying rat’s ass what they do in the Top 40, or what they did 30 years ago, nor do we care about the mole on your left pinkie, or the nerves, or how expensive your shoes….wait, ok, perhaps we draw the line at expensive shoes (the nicer the shoes the duller the band). We paid the damn door fee to support your brave ass and trusted you to be honest with us in the execution. The very definition of a professional musician and it merely culminates with knowing the material.
It begins perhaps, with the notion, a sudden flash of knowing that somehow, somewhere, your body carried you from survival mode, the 5-yr old seeker of light, to adult community shadow worker, and missed the code enforcement memo alerting the brain to brush away anything not relevant to the task (dumb shit). Zoom all the way into the grey matter, and imagine a world where song is existence and all children are accepted and nurtured unconditionally. Since we did not grow up in that world, we use the western skill and the art of communicating with others: we gotta zoom back out to accept ourselves before grabbing the mic.
Good feelings alert!
Here’s the brilliant part of live music in any world: through the rules of unconditional love in human existence, the artist can close their own feedback loop of “message received” themselves. It’s never been on the artist to make sure the audience “got it.” The western world just programmed us to place blame on others for profit.
Off stage, it reverts to spoken communication with others and English rules apply of course. You can see where this is going: great artists can do both, but only one rule of existence is authentically unmasked and unconditionally effective.
Most of us who pay the fee to take the ride are not the least bit worried about a missed note or an off-key kinda night, as long as the improv, rolling with life, is captured in the music, we are down to party! Those who are fascist in their consumption of music aren’t going to leave the comforts of their false sense of gated security, find parking not affiliated with corrupt business owners, pay the door fee, and stand through four or five other bands to get to yours. Relax. Unless fueled by cowardice or stupidity in critical writing to exploit their own interests, those super judgy people are not there. Those who did show up are under that consent banner we talked about earlier and really, really wanna party to your art.
The human brain association is called connection and it sends all the feel good adrenaline to all the right places and is the link between a successful performance and an average performance. If the material is known, and the audience well understood to be a fluid trail of energy on a spectrum of consenting and compassionate art appreciators, the only remaining enemy on the battlefield is of the fabricated sort.
What thoughts are you feeding in your own mind?
Hard pill to swallow alert.
Sadly, most of us struggle with some deep-rooted, often ancient family trauma, built into the genomes of existence; it is not our own. Inability to communicate in spoken language has absolutely nothing to do with efficiency and economy of original music, performed publicly for the world to consume. We walk the earth undiagnosed and unheard, yet compassionate and full of excitement to bear witness to one’s existence through music.
Know the material, capture your audience.
Capture your audience, ascend into the sustainable flow state (performance high), with shareable human energy.
Sustain the flow state, triple the door fee and slash two thirds of your annual shows. We are masochists for originality and cherish the torture of being forced to wait for our favorite bands.
Go on tour, see how other people live. Travel the world. Come home. Write a song or an album about it. Rinse and repeat for as long as the heart says move. There is no stage fright in embraced human truth.
Bonus round:
In the meantime, we have a few mechanical options if you suffer stage fright. You have a brain and a pulse and good common sense with a message to deliver in song and music.
WITHOUT DELAY, cease and desist ALL negative words to yourself or about yourself. This will take time. Don’t worry about the negative thoughts, we’ll get to those in a moment. As far as spoken word or singing, no more negative words spoken out loud to self. Maddening at first, but it gets easier. Even at work or school with others. No verbalized doubting. Ever. Took me about 18 months to get good at this one, and still slip up. (While you’re at it, stop judging others out loud, too.)
While practicing not speaking negative words to or about self, find a quiet place to meditate and listen to music or sounds of nature; something calming. Something NEW. Never before heard. *Avoid your own material for this exercise.* Shut off all brain activity and simply be present with deep, controlled breathing. Don’t judge the music; don’t THINK about the music or sounds of nature. Just be still. Allow yourself to simply exist in harmony with your environment. (Or actually do this in nature for even more powerful and sustainable results.)
If you’re patient, and honest, the thoughts will cease and body takes over. It’s usually in this moment the body will move toward an instrument; a tool. Something to draw or create. Or go for a mindless walk. IF you turn on the TV next or grab your phone, you didn’t quite fully make it into the “set and setting” of this process, but more importantly, once the mind (doubt) is removed, the body moves where it needs to go.
Pick up the tool, pen, instrument, or microphone and do whatever the body wants to do. No thinking allowed. Only doing. But do it out loud; play it out loud; draw it live; write it now. Record it even or do it in front of the mirror until you can actually stand to look at yourself as human.
What I just described is an actual public performance free of EGO: debilitating attachments to your thoughts. The inverse of what you suffer on stage. Show your body what a live performance feels like and become acquainted with the notion that you belong here unconditionally. I do. Let’s party.
It’s not the thoughts that drive your nervous system crazy; it’s the belief, the attachment to them that spikes anxiety and stage fright. The body has no clue what stage fright is other than it responds to the adrenaline sent by the glands, in whatever order and magnitude your mind prescribes.
Thoughts are not ego. Attachment; rigidity (identity) to them and forced body actions are the culprit.
To know a thing is to know its inverse. If you know what stage fright feels like, engineer a performance without it. Learn the material and know your audience and if you are still worried about what the audience is thinking during your immaculate expression of human existence, you don’t fully know the artist.
Stringer
Dedicated to all those who suffer. Prompted by the Albuquerque music scene: #mtvzach and #vanripper on insta; both professional musicians; both community shadow workers who inspired this piece some weeks back in the summer. Zach with The Minnow and vanRipper with Marble Brewing, community hosts for live music and human arts.