Mindfulness became yet another skill to practice while I was practicing. I decided that the next time I noticed my thoughts drifting to the past, I would leave the piano and pull out a box of old family photos. I hadn’t gone back to the piano to commune with the ancestors and explore my childhood. I wasn’t practicing four or five hours a day as a substitute for journaling. This was supposed to be about striving for excellence. Now, when I sat down, I tried to home in on the touch of my fingers on the keys, my sitting bones on the bench, my feet on the floor. I posted notes all over the music: “BREATHE!” The messages reminded me of a friend and her daughter, who bore the same tattooed word on their right wrists. Breathe! Why does it require a reminder? Every emotion alters the breath, one way or another. But when we’re scared, we seek to deny or ignore our fear, and holding our breath becomes a physical tool of that denial. Breathing—so autonomic, so much a function of the reptilian brain—is easy to forget. Sometimes, as I played, I realized that my chest wasn’t moving, my diaphragm was still, my throat stuck between an inhale and an exhale.
In the spring of 2012, I heard about a biofeedback program called BodyWave that was designed to measure brain waves during periods of concentration. The nuclear power industry, NASA, NASCAR racing teams, and the U.S. Women’s Bobsled National Team all used it to improve performance. In the case of the bobsledding team, a 3D simulation was designed to allow the athletes to strap on the BodyWave and practice-drive a bobsled down a twisting, turning course. “If they started to lose their attention, the sled would start to shimmy and tip over,” reported Peter Freer, founder and CEO of Freer Logic, the company that makes the device. “We immediately knew who the ‘green’ drivers were. They were the ones talking to themselves, thinking, Oh no! Watch out! The veteran drivers are able to pull themselves back. Even though some fear is always there, they are able to recover in a fraction of a second. And that’s because there’s an incredible amount of correlation between thought and fear. The more you speak to yourself, the more fear and less success you get.”
When I wondered if the device would be useful as a way of measuring my focus at the piano, the company sent me one to try out. It was the size of an iPhone. I strapped it to my ankle with a strip of Velcro and ran a cable to my laptop perched on top of the piano. The device would monitor my brain activity as the computer’s camera recorded me playing the Bach Prelude and Fugue in C Minor. Telling myself that this was a test, I immersed myself in the playing. I concentrated. I banished all other thoughts but Bach. So I was shocked when I stopped the program and looked at the results. The graph of my brain waves looked like an EEG (electroencephalogram) of someone who was having a heart attack. The lines jumped up and down without apparent pattern. During passages in which I was convinced I had been in deep concentration, the waves plummeted, revealing a sharp decline in focus.
The program also came with a computer game. To play, you were supposed to focus on a lotus flower and watch the petals open. As soon as you lost focus, the petals closed. It looked simple, but no matter how many times I tried, I couldn’t open the flower all the way. I would make it halfway before it closed up again. I stared it down, emptied my mind, breathed in and out, and willed the petals apart. I observed my breath. I felt my eyes widen with the effort. I decided the game was loaded. A friend who had practiced Tibetan Buddhism for many years offered to take a look. She strapped on the BodyWave and within a minute willed the lotus open.
Amy Beddoe was a nursing professor who had written her doctoral dissertation on the use of mindfulness and yoga to control pain, stress, and insomnia during pregnancy. She had studied with Jon Kabat-Zinn, the Boston molecular biologist who brought meditation and mindfulness training to mainstream medicine. Beddoe had offered many times to teach me how to meditate, and I’d always shrugged it off. This time, I took her up on it. As we settled ourselves on the floor of her living room, she told me that meditating was like taking a little vacation from thinking. I didn’t have to regulate my breath or do anything to control it. All I had to do was watch the breath. She set the timer for half an hour and we sat companionably, eyes closed, until the buzzer went off. Okay, I thought. Good. Kind of relaxing. I tried the next day, accompanied by my big smelly dog, Zella, who acted as if she were getting quality time. She plopped herself beside me, let out a long sigh, and breathed with an equanimity I tried to emulate. I reminded myself of Beddoe’s words: I was taking a vacation. But after maybe five minutes, it occurred to me that I really liked thinking and didn’t enjoy being on vacation so long. It looked easy, but it was hard. Every afternoon that first week, I sat on the floor thinking about all the things I might be doing instead. Practicing. Walking Zella. Picking weeds. Calling the bank to protest a fee. I was sure I could get it reversed. Breathe, I told myself. It was such an easy thing to forget. It wasn’t as if my body were going to forget to do it.
I had been taking yoga classes for a couple of years at my gym, trying to concentrate over the whirr of treadmills and stationary bikes and a teacher who ended every class with a pseudo–New Age off-key chant that made me grit my teeth, though I was supposed to be in a deep and relaxed state of Shavasana, or Corpse Pose. I was ready to quit when Amy Beddoe told me about her yoga teacher. Kofi Busia had studied with B. K. S. Iyengar, founder of the most widely practiced form of hatha yoga in the world; Busia was one of the few teachers ever awarded a senior certificate by Iyengar. Though his classes were never advertised, they were packed, mostly with students who had been coming to him ever since he moved to California from England twenty-two years earlier. From the moment I walked in I felt a gravitational pull, enhanced by the calming sound of Busia’s voice as he circled the room, dressed (always) in a heavy cardigan sweater and sweatpants, stepping between the mats and limbs of thirty or more people, mostly but not all women.
It had been an improbable path that brought Busia to California. He was born in a small village in Ghana, the son of an Ashanti prince who was the first member of his tribe to read and write. His father, Kofi Abrefa Busia, was elected prime minister of Ghana in 1969. Three years later, his right-of-center government was driven out of power in a military coup. The family fled the country and went into political exile. Kofi, my teacher, was eight years old at the time. He spent the rest of his childhood in England, attending a public boarding school before winning a place at Oxford University. Trained as a classical pianist, he practiced seven to ten hours a day. At Oxford, he became interested in yoga. What started out as a whim became increasingly serious, until he stopped practicing the piano and traveled to Pune, India, where for the next six years he studied off and on with the master, his guru, “Mr. Iyengar.” During that same period of time, he studied for his doctorate in medical anthropology from Oxford.
Kofi Busia
An often enigmatic teacher, Busia communicates in metaphors, anecdotes, and stories. One of his favorite subjects is focus, but when he talks about it, it’s often filtered through the lens of philosophy, biology, music, poetry, or anatomy. It’s always a surprise, what Busia riffs on. I remember one class where he spoke about rivers for nearly two hours. He touched on the rivers of North America, Africa, and Asia, describing in detail how they wound through the land, complemented the topography, and linked up, one to the next. I gradually began to observe my body differently, how it flowed, where it clogged, and where the muscle linked to bone. Once in a great while, Busia chants from one of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, which he has translated from the Sanskrit. And while the class is often grueling, to the point that I sometimes ache for assistance, he rarely adjusts his students. According to him, each body will, given the opportunity, find its way. When he does offer an adjustment—tweaking a leg to improve balance, pulling back an arm to open the chest, pressing down on a back to extend the spine—it is with the understanding that something in the body has begun to shift. It is less a correction of something wrong than an affirmation of progress. We, his acolytes, see intention in almost everything he says and does. When,
during one of his forays around the room, he bumps against the ankle of a student in Reverse Triangle Pose, she assumes he is conveying something essential about her posture. When he makes a joke during Shoulder Stand, we conjecture that his attempt to make us laugh is intended as a way of forcing air through our diaphragms and that with this greater breath we will lift ourselves higher off the floor.
After four years of attending Busia’s classes, I have become a convert. Yoga has improved my life. My balance is better. A test for bone loss no longer indicates osteoporosis in my right hip. I am sleeping deeply for the first time in years. In the months leading up to my recital, I realize that my focus even seems to be improving at the piano. In yoga class, I have stopped stealing glances at the clock; sometimes, I forget to count the seconds (or minutes) that Busia has left us in Shoulder Stand. “Concentration is contentment,” he offers up, urging us, as always, to create more space inside our bodies and our minds. “Concentration moves through the body, creating quietness, balance, and poise,” he intones. When he defines focus—“the marshaling of all one’s faculties to accomplish a goal”—I try to bolt the words inside my mind. But sometimes I don’t listen at all. The sound of his voice and the mood he fosters are enough to create a focal point, one that allows me to home in on the endless details of a pose.
At the piano, my thoughts, posture, gestures, and music making all require a yoga mind. But my attention, so assiduously cultivated and hard-won in the yoga studio, doesn’t automatically transfer to the piano, where that union of mind, body, and instrument still proves elusive. Frederic Chiu, a pianist renowned for his piano transcriptions, addresses this problem in his workshops for advanced pianists. He often leads them at his manor house on a Connecticut estate dotted with shady old-growth trees and modern art installations. His workshops draw on ancient philosophy, meditation, and “aspects of music making usually left uncovered in traditional study.” But the issue of stage fright is always forefront. Chiu considers it a universal response to performing, whether the musician acknowledges it or not. For him, it comes down to shame and humiliation.
“The more interested and excited about something you are, the more intense your shame and humiliation will be when the passion gets stopped,” he explains. “And it will always be stopped by something, at least some of the time.” By a mistake. Or by a momentary loss of focus. To inculcate attentiveness, Chiu has created what he calls “stop exercises.” During a piece, an exercise, or even a scale, the musician must regularly stop playing and ask himself, “What am I experiencing emotionally right now?” Of course, the answer will always be different, depending on the moment and the music. “The more observant one is, the more one is watching, fully aware of what’s happening and of what might happen. The more you peel away these added layers of affect to get at the core, the more you see.”
It is a form of meditation at the piano, a way of stopping and paying attention to the press of the fingers, the resilience in the wrists, and maybe the ache in the shoulders.
Richard Davidson, a University of Wisconsin-Madison neuroscientist and lifelong meditator, preaches an almost evangelical belief in the plasticity of the human brain at every stage of life. He has come to this conclusion in part through his research on the transformative brain waves of lifelong meditators: Tibetan Buddhist monks. “The amazing fact is that through mental activity alone we can intentionally change our own brains,” he writes in The Emotional Life of Your Brain, coauthored with science writer Sharon Begley. “Mental activity, ranging from meditation to cognitive-behavior therapy, can alter brain function in specific circuits, with the result that you can develop a broader awareness of social signals, a deeper sensitivity to your own feelings and bodily sensations, and a more consistently positive outlook. In short, through mental training you can alter your patterns of brain activity and the very structure of your brain in a way that will change your Emotional Style and improve your life.”2
Meditation lowers anxiety by enhancing the circuitry between the left prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. It turns out that the prefrontal cortex, the logical, analytical part of the brain, the region most associated with executive function and higher thinking, is also associated—on the left side—with positive emotion. The more active the left prefrontal cortex, the more resilient—or, as Davidson puts it, Resilient—one is. This understanding has been confirmed by dozens of studies and MRIs that show the more activation there is between the left prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, the more emotionally resilient the person is. But the range of variation among individuals is staggering. The amount of activation in the left prefrontal region of a Resilient person can be thirty times that of someone who is not Resilient.
How resilient am I? Based on my history at the piano, it would appear that the answer is “not very.” Definitely a small r. In my worst moments, I worry that my hippocampus, that little seahorse in the brain, may be a bit shriveled. It is well-known that chronic stress can impair the function of the hippocampus, which plays a critical role in consolidating short-term memory into long-term memory. (After a fear memory is laid down in the amygdala, it gets consolidated in the hippocampus.) Research has shown that people whose post-traumatic stress disorder is caused by repeated trauma (soldiers exposed to severe and repeated carnage in combat, individuals repeatedly abused as children) have smaller hippocampi. But there is also intriguing evidence for a chicken-or-egg dilemma, that having a small hippocampus may actually precede the PTSD and thus predispose one to the disorder.
It may seem frivolous and even presumptuous to compare a case of performance anxiety with PTSD, but in fact a 2012 study of orchestra musicians in Australia did just that. The study found that 33 percent of the musicians met the criteria for a diagnosis of social phobia, while 22 percent identified themselves in a questionnaire as positive for post-traumatic stress disorder. The author of the study, psychologist Dianna Kenny, concluded that detailed memories of mangled concerts were recalled with “a clarity and emotional ‘present-ness’ that resemble, in some instances, the flashbacks experienced by those who suffer post-traumatic stress disorder.”3
Damage to the hippocampus interferes with a person’s sensitivity to context. The soldier who patrols the streets of war-torn Tikrit on high alert is doing his job. When he brings that same hypervigilance home to the States, he is undone; the sound of a car backfiring puts him over the edge. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a disorder of disrupted context. A damaged hippocampus—unable to form memories of the context in which a trauma occurs—inhibits the ability to distinguish the screech of an incoming bomb from the siren of a fire truck. Luckily, the brain’s plasticity can help compensate. In his book, which reads like part science, part self-help, Davidson writes that “thought alone can increase or decrease activity in specific brain circuits that underlie psychological illness.” The extent of such neuroplasticity is evident from MRI studies of people who were born deaf. Their auditory cortex, the part of the brain ordinarily reserved for hearing function, is appropriated for peripheral vision. “It is as if,” Davidson writes, “the auditory cortex, tired of enforced inactivity as a result of receiving no signals from the ears, took upon itself a regimen of job retraining, so that it now processes visual signals.”4
Correspondingly, people who are blind from birth and who learn to read Braille show a measurable increase in the size and activity of those parts of the brain ordinarily reserved for visual function. “Their visual cortex—which is supposedly hardwired to process signals from the eye and turn them into visual images—undertakes a radical career change and takes on the job of processing sensations from the fingers rather than input from the eyes.”5 It’s not such a great leap, then, to assert (as Davidson does) that a person can modify his or her brain through meditation. The practice of mindfulness trains one to redirect thoughts and feelings—“the manifestation of which is nothing but electrical impulses racing down the brain’s neurons.” Mindfulness practice strengthens the left prefrontal cortex at
the expense of the right, a nifty exchange given that the right prefrontal cortex is usually predominant in depressed people. Fifty years ago, Timothy Leary counseled a generation to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” Davidson’s message goes like this: “Breathe deeply, stay focused, change your brain.”
Meditation is a way to take stock, observe, and create distance from the obsessive internal chatter. A psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley is exploring another tool to calm the mind, with a simple experiment that engages the kind of self-talk more typically associated with preschoolers. Ozlem Ayduk asks university students to recount a personal experience by using the third-person voice, shifting from “I” to “he” or “she.” The shift from first person to third appears to dilute the emotion that is otherwise inflamed by the recollection of a distressful experience. It alters perception and allows the mind to create some distance from the experience. The meaning of that memory may then be reinterpreted and its negative association resolved. Not unlike meditation, it allows the individual to adopt a more compassionate response to his or her own failings.
It’s the difference between this: What an asshole I am. I can’t do anything right. I never play the piano the way I want to play. I should just give up and quit.
And this: Poor Sara! Why is she so scared? When she made a mistake during the Brahms rhapsody, how did she feel? Why does she get so upset when she makes a little mistake? Why does she think she has to be perfect?
The UC Berkeley students in Ayduk’s 2014 study were ordered to deliver an impromptu speech and perform a series of math tests, counting backward by threes and sevens—all in front of a panel of evaluators instructed to correct their every mistake and judge their intelligence. “It basically makes people completely freak out,” Ayduk says, grinning. Physiological measurements confirmed it: The students’ stress levels soared through the roof. But the students who reflected on their feelings in the third person showed less stress, reported less shame, and scored higher in the math drills.
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