There must be some­thing in the air.

Sev­er­al times this week I’ve paused in the mid­dle of teach­ing to inter­rupt a stu­den­t’s spi­ral of self-dep­re­ca­tion and frus­tra­tion.  The spi­ral is easy to rec­og­nize, either by the words that accom­pa­ny it— “This does­n’t sound right.” … “That note is so high!” … “Why can’t I get this?” —or, once you know what to look for, by the slow-blink­ing, eyes-down­cast head shake and shoul­der slump.  It’s unmis­take­able body lan­guage: “I’m not good enough.”

There’s a run­ning joke in my field that music lessons tend to be 10% tech­nique and 90% ther­a­py.  And while it is a joke—I’m a vocal sup­port­er of the men­tal health indus­try and believe every­one can ben­e­fit from work­ing peri­od­i­cal­ly with an excel­lent pro­fes­sion­al talk therapist—I know that among the lessons I’ve learned from my own ther­a­pist are sev­er­al that I share often with my stu­dents:

• that every artist healthy human being strug­gles with self-doubt,
• that find­ing (and trust­ing) voic­es that rec­og­nize and appre­ci­ate our inher­ent worth is one of the most impor­tant (and most dif­fi­cult) things we can do as artists humans, and
• that I, in my role as an author­i­ty fig­ure in their artis­tic lives, am (I hope!) one of those sup­port­ive voic­es.

So pianist Her­bie Han­cock­’s anec­dote about a botched chord in a gig with trum­peter Miles Davis has been on my mind a lot this week.  If you’ve hit a wrong note or two in your own life recent­ly, maybe you’ll find this sto­ry mov­ing too.  Click “play” on the video below to hear Han­cock tell it for him­self.  It’s worth the 90 sec­onds.

In the mean­time, namas­té, my friends.  The Divine in me acknowl­edges the Divine in you.  Can you see it too?