Today I had one of those moments that reaffirmed my totally irrational love of trying to teach kids to play the violin. It only lasted a few minutes, but it didn’t matter. It happened after the last several days of my thinking about how I could expand the sound repertoire of my students’ musical environment, to expand their awareness of how sound can be big and expressive, or subtle and atmospheric. I was thinking about how much the piano had contributed to my overall knowledge of sound and musical style, since I was playing 20th century composers before the age of 10 (like a piece called “Pink” – as in, the color), and had experienced many different moods, tempos, textures, rhythms, and structures in my piano music at an early age. On violin, most of the early work is technical, because it requires both left and right hands to produce any given sound. Violin music is mainly melody, until the point where you reach enough technical mastery to actually express something more complex emotionally. (I was 9 years old and in a master class with Josef Gingold playing Saint-Saens Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso. Mr. Gingold asked me if I knew what the word melancolico meant, which was marked by the composer at the opening of the piece. I said, “Sad?” He said, “I hope you don’t really know how to play that way at your age.”) Violinists often rely on other instruments to provide texture, harmony, and depth. Many years and hours are spent perfecting the production of a focused pitch and tone. Only then can you begin to embark on the journey of layering tones and textures through fancy bowstrokes and acrobatic left hand maneuvers.

From the age of three, I always studied both piano and violin in parallel, taking for granted that so much of my childhood universe was spent in a state of deep listening to sound and music. Several weeks ago I began a year-long immersion course in the use of sound, voice, and music in healing. I can’t begin to describe it fully in words, but it has opened me up to the direct experience of sound through listening. I realize that so much of what we call “listening” is not that at all. It’s deciphering and decoding, labeling or waiting to talk, enduring, or filtering, or manipulating.

But listening is actually a process of going inward, to the deep place of silence within each of us. When we have truly listened, we have internalized something from what we have heard. If we have truly listened, then we will have felt the effect of sound throughout our entire being.

When we go to a concert, we are not “listening” any more than we “listen” to a movie at the theater. Concerts are a display of human competence, and if we’re lucky, we might walk out feeling some  emotional effect other than the ringing in our ears. But that effect depends on so much beyond the sound. We’re bombarded with images, lighting, rituals that are specific to the concert venue, and then the language of the musical style presented. Classical music is becoming so distant from our cultural mainstream that most people feel they need to learn how to listen to it. There’s some truth to this, which has led to a much-needed trend of classical performers’ addressing audiences using words, before or after their concerts. Not only does this lend a humanity to the people “doing” the music, but it provides the listeners with a bridge toward understanding what they are hearing.

As my experience of listening and sound evolves over the year, I will undoubtedly have more to share about what I learn.

But now back to that moment from teaching today. Sharing it will explain something quirky about what makes me happy, which may be more help to me than any of you reading this. I saw the human mind and body at work today. I saw memory developing right before my eyes today. I saw the power of concentration and deep listening in the development of true understanding of the self. I get to SEE that as part of my job!! I get to help it along. I won’t say that I “make it happen”, because I don’t. I facilitate it by cultivating the rituals and mindset that create the conditions for it to happen. But I can’t make it happen. Believe me, I’ve tried. And failed. I’ve seen parents try to make it happen too. Some think they have succeeded, by the external measures they’ve defined for themselves to measure success. But the only results I really care about are the ones earned the “old-fashioned way”…by putting your mind to it!

And today I saw that unfold right in my studio. I was teaching 7-year-old Audrey, whose journey has been defined by slow, quiet progress, always a few steps behind her twin brother who started studying six months before her. I knew she (and her parents) had the “right stuff” when she struggled and persisted through several months of practice before being able to clap the first rhythm, “Mississippi Hot Dog”. It took every ounce of her concentration – and her own sense of humor about making mistakes – to experience that first moment of triumph almost three years ago. And everything she has learned has pretty much been that same path of struggle coupled with good humor and steady determination, with nothing coming “naturally” to her.

I’m absolutely fascinated with students like Audrey, and I don’t know why. The only memory I can draw upon is my very consistent tendency, which started in childhood and continues to this day, to cry – literally bawl – whenever I watch the IronMan Triathlon on television. Not when the winners would cross the finish line, but when the last few guys – the ones wearing green glowsticks around their necks, barely hobbling on one leg, or pushing a son with cerebral palsy in a wheelchair, or crawling across on hands and knees at age eighty-five – would cross just before the midnight deadline. To them, it was obviously not about winning. It was about having the courage to START, and then the determination to FINISH. Their dignity was not in how they looked crossing the finish line – and some of them did NOT look pretty with various bodily fluids running down their legs – but that they had the resolve to finish. It was their own race, and no one else’s.

Audrey had one of those crossings of the finish line in her lesson today. The girl for whom every little thing was earned through effort from the start managed to play a two-line run of scale patterns in a Bach piece with command and confidence that took me by surprise. After doing several drills with her on one measure where she was struggling to hold her third finger down while she moved her second finger from the A to E string, I saw that she had a solid connection between her mind and her fingers. I said, “Do you think you have it memorized?” She said, “No I don’t think so.” I said, “Try it. Look at your fingers, not the music, and see if you can do it.” I knew from the way her fingers moved that she would be able to do it, and I just wanted her to see for herself. When she did it, that little smile that cracked her lips open just enough to see all of her front teeth, and the little sideways glance of her eyes to look at her dad, mirrored everything I was also experiencing in that moment: “I’m so happy! And, did you see that, Dad?” No bigger celebration than that was necessary.

Sometimes that is all we need. Just a little moment of joy, of pride, of knowing what we can accomplish with our own two hands and our mind. And then a witness who’s there to share it with us.

It was a simple, beautiful moment. Almost too simple to describe to another. But it was a good reminder of how simple happiness can really be.

What’s your intention?

That’s what this brilliant ad from lululemon athletica asks us:

It shows a yoga class in session, with a room full of people facing us and seated with crossed legs on yoga mats, hands in front of their hearts in prayer position. Everyone is meticulously dressed in lululemon-brand yoga gear, and all their spines look straight. They are all young, fit, and active. The woman in the foreground has a perfect pose also, except only one of her hands is held in prayer position, while her other hand holds a Blackberry up to her left ear. Her gaze is downward and off to her right side and she is smiling.

Other details that are done artfully in this ad are the facial expressions of each person in the class. The people seated around this woman display an array of emotions. One woman, in the back row, has her head slightly askance and one eyebrow raised, as if to say, “Is she SERIOUS?”.  The woman next to her turns her head to look at the Blackberry holder with an intent gaze and pursed lips, displaying a mixture of pity and mild disbelief, as if she were trying to wish away the situation in front of her eyes. A man in the back of the class has furrowed brows, and another man on the opposite side of the “protagonist” wears the incredulous, raised-eyebrow look of the woman in the back row. The person on the phone is blissfully unaware of her effect on the people around her. In fact, she possesses all the outward accoutrements of a loyal devotee to yoga – after all, it’s printed on her eco-friendly water bottle: “I heart yoga”.

It’s thought provoking, isn’t it?

I asked three different groups of my violin students (ages 3 and up) to look at this picture today, and tell me what they saw. “They’re doing gymnastics,” said 4-year-old Jack. “I see a person talking on the phone,” said 4-year-old William. “The woman with the green top has the same color mat as her shirt,” observed 10-year-old Greer. “There is a water bottle that says, I love…something,” offered 5-year-old Ella. “Maybe it says ‘I love yogurt’,” added her father. “I see windows,” said 6-year-old Sarah.

As we shared what we saw, even if we didn’t know what “yoga” is, we could deduce that these people – all dressed similarly and assuming a similar posture – were gathered to do something together, in an enclosed space (indicated by the windows). All of the children agreed that this might be a class. One person guessed that the woman in front was the teacher. I said, “What if she is the teacher?” “No, she’s not the leader,” said 5-year-old Nina. “How do you know that?” I asked. “Because she is sitting with her back to the class,” said Ella. “That’s true, it’s hard to teach if you’re not facing the class. But what if she is the teacher? Are the students following her?”

“Who in this picture is learning?” I asked.

“Nobody,” said 8-year-old Isabela in a quiet voice.

“Great answer! Why is nobody learning?” I continued.

“Because they’re all looking at the woman talking on the phone,” she said with a smile, as if that should be obvious.

What a joy it was to see all the possibilities observed in this picture from the perspective of these fresh eyes and young minds!

To me, the picture asks us to consider the areas in our life where we think we are “showing up” and “doing all the right things”, but in reality, we are undermining our own intentions. What we look like, what we have, where spend our time, may serve as comforting symbols of our devotion to some professed higher purpose, but unless we commit to the actual practice of our intention, we aren’t living up to our promise to ourselves. And, the ad further reminds us, this lack of awareness has an effect on the people around us. They see what we are doing, even if we may remain, quite blissfully, unaware of it.

This is also an opportunity to ask, who suffers more? The person talking on the Blackberry or the people around her? And who do we identify more with – the “other” people in the class, or the person front and center? How do we feel toward each person in this photo?

I noticed another layer of meaning emerge as I looked for a longer period of time. By centering the portrait on the woman who is on the phone, the photographer places her at the center of our attention, forcing us to look at her and confront all the different ways we may relate to her. The picture also asks us to consider her with kindness and compassion. We may at first feel “superior” or “righteous” or “annoyed”, which may be reflected in the expressions of some of the others in the photo. But is it really true that we’ve never been that woman on the phone? Have we never tried to do two (or more) things at the same time, and ended up shortchanging both experiences? Have we never professed our love and devotion to something, and then given less than our full effort to it? Have we never bought all the right accessories, taken up a new hobby or sport, and found ourselves unable to engage?

It’s rare that advertising gets me thinking on all these levels. I’ve actually never been able to find anything I’d like to wear at lululemon, despite my devotion to yoga practice. The ad won’t change that. I love their manifesto, and the story of their company’s founder is inspiring.

But this ad reached the level of artwork for me. I hope it got you thinking too.

Last night I sat down at the piano in my studio for the first time in a long time. My mom likes to remind me that I studied piano for more years than I did violin, and it contributed as much if not more to my overall music appreciation. She’s right (grumble). But I never found that same connection to teaching piano or the community of playing piano as I did with violin.

I had two different piano teachers in my life. Both of them are now deceased. Mr. Leviton started me at age 3 and took me through age 13 or so. And then the last three years of high school I moved on to Dr. Isaak, at Northwestern University. He was the one who thought I was absolutely NUTS for not continuing to study music in college. He said I was already at the level of a typical Master’s Degree student at Northwestern! I simply ignored this, or dismissed it as the rantings of someone as lunatic as you must need to be in order to become a professor of piano.

In retrospect, I missed out on some great learning by not being open to him at the time. He was someone who was absolutely IN LOVE with all things piano. He was known for his undergraduate survey course, “Piano Repertoire”, in which he would cover the entirety of piano literature over the course of the school year. I sat in on one of his lectures when I visited Northwestern as a high school senior – the university’s overnight, “sell themselves” pitch weekend for prospective incoming freshmen. The class was held in a small room within the Victorian style building that housed the School of Music. It was designed for maybe 20 people maximum. There was a Steinway in the room, where he was seated. And there were about 40 to 50 people cramped in all corners of that room, sitting on the windowsill, on the floor, even standing. He had a stack of piano music on one side of the music stand and he just flipped through each of them, bringing them up in front of him as he talked, playing excerpts from certain pieces, telling stories, all at a rapid-fire pace. It was like watching a grandfather flip through photo albums of his family, filled with love, joy, memories, admiration, pride. And there we were, the students, wide-eyed, trying to take something in from all of this stream of consciousness and knowledge imbibed over a career of studying, teaching, playing. No one could take notes. It was just too fast! There was no textbook, it was just the entire oeuvre of piano literature. I don’t know what the exam for that class must have been like. I’m just glad I didn’t have to take it. But I am sorry I didn’t get to sit through the entire year of lectures.

Last night I sat down and took out my Dover edition of Volume One of the Beethoven Piano Sonatas (there are two volumes, each about 200 pages). I remember the dark black sky of the painting on the cover of the book. The oversized pages. Dover (the publisher) always chose beautiful, classical paintings that matched the era of whatever music was in each of its volumes. There’s an Impressionist painting on the cover of the Debussy Preludes, and a Romantic painting – one with a full moon over a landscape – on the cover of the Beethoven sonatas.

I turned to the piece I performed in its entirety as part of my senior recital – the Op. 2, No. 3, in C major. Allegro con brio is the tempo indication for the first movement. I tried the first phrase. To my astonishment my right hand could still do those thirds! I remember having such a hard time with them even when I performed the piece, never getting my 3rd and 4th finger to do quite what I wanted them to. But tonight they just did it. Was it the result of not thinking so much? I didn’t care why, I just kept playing it over and over again, incredulous, wanting to prove to myself that this apparent success-without-practice was just a fluke.

That first page is marked with Dr. Isaak’s characteristic narrow, tall cursive handwriting. “With vigor”, he translates above the tempo indication. “2 styles: 1. singing, 2. brillante” reads another corner. “Fun” he has in red colored pencil. He had a way of making me choose words to capture the mood or approach to a piece that really annoyed me at the time. I was an ornery 16-year-old high school senior who just wanted to move on to the “real” experience that was awaiting me in the free adult world. I clammed up at his attempts to get me to describe how I felt about the music, or what the words he chose meant to me. I had a terrible attitude toward learning. I must have been a nightmare for him to teach, especially during that last year. I remember my parents’ attempts to converse with me about my sullen moods and silent treatment of my teacher during the lessons. Those conversations didn’t go very far. I still don’t fully understand what was eating me at the time.

But as I played through every single page of that 30-page Sonata last night, I felt the gift of being in the presence of genius. Of being able to touch it. Of getting a little closer to it than the average person who never played a Beethoven piano sonata, much less studied it with a professor of piano who could work himself into a tearful soliloquy on just what a great, great man Beethoven was. This happened, actually, at one of my lessons, and my dad and I both felt very awkward at being present at such a personal, emotionally poignant moment for Dr. Isaak. We obviously did not know how great a man Beethoven really was. We would have to settle for just feeling the sense of loss for not being as close to Beethoven as Dr. Isaak felt himself to be.

The closest I got – which I now appreciate as being a lot closer than most people in the world ever get – to Beethoven’s greatness was studying those sonatas. Not just figuring out how to get through them once. But practicing, studying, memorizing, and then performing one in its entirety. It’s a different level of mastery, to live with something like that, for over a year, and then give it all you’ve got in front of an audience. The thing I didn’t realize even at the time of that performance – held in the small, low-ceilinged living room of Don and Bea Isaak’s South Barrington (Honey Lake) home – was that it would stay with me for this long.

I felt that I was visiting an old friend as I played that sonata last night. It wasn’t just Beethoven. It was my teacher, Dr. Isaak. Seeing his markings in the music while sitting at the keyboard brought me right back to his small studio on the second floor of the School of Music, with two Steinway grand pianos, side by side. On his wall, among many photos of himself with other musicians, was a sign that said, “Work smarter, not harder.” Sitting on the floor nearby was a large barbell with fifteen pound weights on each end. He would sit perched on a tall director’s chair to my right, or, when he wanted to demonstrate, at the bench of the second piano to my left. My dad, who usually drove me to those lessons, could be found lightly snoozing in the antique upholstered chair in the corner.

Things that I didn’t even know were still stored in my arms, fingers, and body just flowed. It’s not that I was able to actually play the piece at the level of the performance I gave so many years ago. But I felt pangs of memory at various points in my playing, things that had been embedded there from the struggle, the study, the repetition, the closeness you achieve when you have the urge to understand something. Those sixteenth note ascending arpeggios and broken octaves on the first page, punctuated by grand chords in the left hand, showed me two things: there is nothing like the grand sonority of a big chord played on the piano, especially a Beethoven chord; and, piano playing really is an athletic activity. My breath and pulse quickened as I played over that passage a few times, not only because of the excitement and “vigor” of the music but the sheer physicality of moving at that pace and for those distances across the keyboard. My hand, unaccustomed to the stretch of an octave, especially after years of computer mouse training, felt sore from the new demands I placed on it.

Not having anyone to please, I also listened with enjoyment to myself. I enveloped myself in the sounds – some of which may have inched toward what Beethoven intended, but most of which were crude approximations, approaching meaning in the way that a baby’s babbling speaks to us without our fully understanding its meaning. It was healing in a way that I imagine all acts of memory to be. When we relax into a memory, and allow our bodies to experience it, we can accept who we were and who we are more fully.

I was filled with such gratitude for so many gifts I had been given in my life – the opportunity to practice and study over a continuous period of time so that I gained skills; the opportunity to learn from a passionate piano scholar who tried to share his love of music with me; and the opportunity last night to sit at my own piano, in my own studio, and just play for fun. To make a visit to an old friend like Beethoven – to count him among the friends I now have the ability to revisit – is something I know is the result of many, many people investing many, many hours, over many, many years in me.

I am reminded of this quote, which my mom used to say as one of her stock “old Chinese sayings” when we were growing up, and which I recently saw on a walk through San Francisco:

“When you drink water, think of its source.”

To me, right now, it means, to remember and feel gratitude for the many generations who have led me to this moment in this life, when I get to sip the healing water of my own memories.

In northern California, they say there are two seasons – brown and green. Summer is brown and winter is green. This refers to the dryness of our summer months, when the foothills around the Bay turn wheat-colored and stay that way until the rain comes in January and February.

I visited Napa Valley earlier this month – one of the brown ones – inspired by the visit of my violin teacher who has known me since I was four years old. We went on the guided tour of Robert Mondavi Winery. As we stood in the 85-degree sun of the vineyard, my teacher asked our tour guide how often the irrigation pipes were used to water the plants. We all assumed that there was an elaborate watering system to maintain such lush green leaves on the vines surrounding us.

We were wrong.

The tour guide explained that the vines are deliberately stressed, and not given supplemental water during the dry season, because the growers have found that the more the vine struggles, the deeper its roots must go, and the more complex flavor is produced in the grapes, resulting in better wine. So prized are those roots that often the heartiest of the “rootstocks” (as they are called) are grafted onto newer fruit-bearing branches, to help enhance the hardiness of a harvest.

It surprised us all to hear this, especially as we strode into the dusty soil that supported the growth of endless rows of green-leafed grapevines. Who would have thought that good grape cultivation actually meant withholding water from the vines?

We were invited to taste some of the grapes. I braced myself to wince at the sourness. But they tasted amazingly good! I and the rest of the tour group each helped ourselves to a small handful of grapes before moving onto the fermentation room.

That story about the most resilient – and resourceful – vines producing the most complex and therefore valuable grapes stayed with me. I thought about it again today as I took a hike in the dry landscape of an open space preserve near my home, walking on dusty trails and surrounded by waist-high prairie grasses that were the color of straw. I noticed a tree, living there in the same parched landscape, somehow managing to have all of its branches teeming with blooms of bright green, shiny leaves. This was one thriving tree in the midst of a whole lot of dried out deadness.

Somehow, I thought, that tree must have dug deeper with its roots to find the water for all those leaves to grow out here. It must be like one of those resilient grapevines.

This got me thinking about the concept of bliss. I had always heard that famous phrase, coined by Joseph Campbell: “Follow your bliss.” I thought it was one of those woo-woo spiritual mantras spread by people who were promoting “the good life”, which I took to mean, do whatever pleases you in the moment, and most likely it won’t be work.

But I was wrong.

What I’ve discovered in reading Campbell’s actual words is that in saying, “Follow your bliss,” he meant to find and follow your deepest, truest self. This is your bliss. Said Campbell himself:

“If your bliss is just your fun and your excitement, you’re on the wrong track. I mean, you need instruction. Know where your bliss is. And that involves coming down to a deep place in yourself….by bliss I mean the deep sense of being in it, and doing what the push is out of your own existence – it may not be fun, but it’s your bliss and there’s bliss behind pain too.”

In other words, it is WORK to follow your bliss. Following your bliss is not always a walk in the park. And it certainly isn’t just about pleasure in the moment. Following your bliss is an investment you make in the discovery of your true self, and then sharing your true self in service to the world.

Incidentally, the yogic tradition also describes bliss (ananda) as “the innermost core of our being,… where our soul lives and where we can glimpse the universal oneness that embraces us all” (BKS Iyengar, Light on Life). How do we experience bliss? Many volumes have been written, and many lives have been devoted to the study of this question. But it seems that many of us have been forced to confront this question as we discover that the pursuits of pleasure, or power, or status, or material possessions no longer satisfy our longings.

One metaphor for following one’s bliss is the journey of the root of the grapevine. Somehow this vine “knows” it is destined to produce fruit. It will not be deterred by the dryness of the soil, or the heat of the sun, or the competition from other vines surrounding it. Its roots just simply keep going downward, struggling to bore deeper into the hardness of the earth until a drop of moisture is found. Not knowing when it will find water, the root just keeps twisting and turning, sending far-reaching branches outward in all directions but always headed toward the source. When the least bit of dampness is found, it is drawn up to the surface to nourish the fruit. The fruit then carries the essence of this journey – the determination, the struggle, the faith without knowing – in the complexity of its flavor. Without struggle, these experienced farmers tell us, the sweetness of the fruit is compromised. We don’t value it as much.

When we eat the fruit, do we taste all the wisdom that is encapsulated in that little round globe of juiciness? Do we appreciate all the hardship of the roots that produced this particular sweetness? When we drink a glass of wine, do we recognize that many vines each had to follow their bliss – to follow, against all odds, their deepest destiny to bring life to their own sweet fruit – in order for us to enjoy even one sip?

Follow your bliss. But just remember, it may take a whole lot of digging through dry, hard, tough ground before you get to the one drop of inspiration that will start to feed the very best fruit you were meant to produce. Embrace all that digging. It’s what makes your fruit – your bliss – unlike any other.

All photos: Lisa Chu, at Robert Mondavi Winery, August 2009.

I have to share this incredibly insightful post from Pam Slim, entitled “Valuable Coaching Advice Straight From The Horse’s Mouth (And Nose)”. In it, she talks about how her experience at a horse whisperer workshop taught her valuable lessons about her own parenting behaviors.

I started my violin school five years ago, knowing that I would have to start by recruiting the right parents – get their commitment, spend time educating them, and then hope for their long-term buy-in to a philosophy that extends well beyond the boundaries of violin training. What I couldn’t fully articulate back then but am realizing now is that I’m really teaching a way of being. It’s an awareness of the self as the gateway to deep, long-lasting learning. And mainly I’ve been focusing on developing this within each child. After all, that’s why we’re all gathered together – for the sake of the children.

But what I’m beginning to learn is that, in order for the child to learn optimally in this environment, there is an element of openness and awareness of themselves that the parents have to develop as well. This has been the harder problem to address. I’ve never told parents upfront that they are required to be coachable. Once I’ve screened and accepted the parents, it’s easy for me to become totally absorbed in my direct work with the child that I forget to specifically address the parent’s relationship to the child. I’ve used the excuse that it’s “not my place” to comment on parenting style, just to try to work with what is there, and do my best to “work around it” by ignoring the parent’s behaviors when they’re not helping the process. It’s been my habit to avoid the difficult situation of calling out a self-defeating behavior in a parent when it comes up, because I feel ill-equipped to do the necessary work of changing an adult’s patterns of instinctual behavior – especially something as primal as parenting.

The situation Pam describes with both the horse and her toddler son is all too familiar to me. Many times, at just the “threshold moment” when a child needs a strong leader to tell them to keep going, keep trying, and not give up on themselves, a parent’s instinctual response is to rush to their rescue, coddle them, and get all lovey-dovey. I haven’t had the authority and composure of the horse-whisperer (Koelle in Pam’s story) to say, “Getting affectionate right now is not helping the learning. The child needs you to be strong and to be a capable leader.”

Can you imagine saying that to a parent in front of their child? Maybe I need to find that voice within me.

The escalation that Pam describes with her son – where she tries being “lovey”, then tries bribing him with treats, and then negotiates some more, before finally losing her temper – is also such a common occurrence. This “dance” is so common that I wonder if it’s being recommended in some best-selling parenting book I’m not aware of. What is it that drives this behavior?

Pam offers us a framework for examining the emotions behind self-defeating habits, and what holds us back from making necessary changes. I so admire and respect Pam’s sharing of this part of herself, and inspiring us all to become more aware of our own resistance to change.

But my question is, are we really sure that we want to change? And do we know how we want to change?

I think it’s brave of Pam to include an analogy between a horse and a child in her story. The awareness I gained from Pam’s article is that fundamentally, training is training. Whether it’s a horse, a child, or an adult, there are certain common behaviors, emotions, and ways of confronting them effectively or not.

We could all learn a thing or two from a horse whisperer.

I wrote a blog post in 2006 entitled “Dr. Chu’s Shoes”. I hadn’t read the post recently, but I thought about it this past week when I put on high heels for the first time since May. My teacher was visiting, and out of habit I felt the need to dress up a little extra nicely in her presence. She was the same as always – meticulous hair, makeup, suits, and high-heeled shoes every time she emerged from her hotel room. By now she has had at least three foot surgeries as a result of her high-heeled shoe habit, and she can physically no longer wear flats. But she looks amazing!

Well, much to my surprise, I found that I was almost unable to walk after about three hours of wearing high heels one day this week. I limped my way to the car at lunchtime, and took my foot out of my shoe at every opportunity I had for the rest of the day. My right foot was crying out to me, refusing to comply with the shoe that I had worn many times before in the past, with no apparent problems.

“YOU stopped wearing high heels??” my teacher asked, in disbelief. “You ALWAYS wear high heels!”

I explained that I had stopped wearing them starting in June, and never started again until that day this week.

“Why do you think it hurts now?” she asked.

“Well, I don’t know, but maybe it’s just shows how well the body adapts to pain. You get used to it after awhile, and then you think that’s normal, or the way it should be.”

“Yup,” she said. “I’ve just gotten used to it, three surgeries later. They keep cutting off the bone, and it just keeps growing back. And I go to the foot doctor every few months to get more treatments, and she just says to me, ‘Keep wearing your high heels!’”

So what did my high-heeled shoes really symbolize? And what shoes will I wear now that I can barely walk in those same high-heeled shoes I used to wear faithfully every day? I still have a deep commitment to dressing neatly and respectfully when I get in front of a group to teach. I’m very aware of the effect of the visual image I project when standing in front of a child. But maybe now, having journeyed through adapting to pain, to numbness, and back into feeling again, I have gained the wisdom to respect my own well-being at the same time.

NOTE: I’m sharing this letter, originally addressed to the parents in The Music Within Us program, publicly here, because it represents my deepest commitment to the service I hope to offer in this life. May you all find the courage to ask life’s most important questions: WHO are you? And HOW do you choose to be?

Dear Parents:

I’m writing as I begin to invite each of you to join me for the sixth year of our co-creation of The Music Within Us program. I have known some of you for all of the past five years, when you were just several “important strangers” who have now become something like family to me – people I feel a certain responsibility towards, people I long to do right by. Others I have just begun to know, through your first steps on this path of discovery with your children. Each of you – through your expression of who you are and how you interact with your children – has a creative role in the emergence of The Music Within Us.

I feel it necessary to share some thoughts with you before the start of the new school year in just a few weeks. I also want to give you the opportunity to reflect on my words, and the meaning behind my words, before we enter into this mutual commitment together again.

When I first started The Music Within Us in 2004, I hoped to share the parts of myself that had been cultivated through the unique experience of my time with Mrs. Betty Haag-Kuhnke, in the suburbs of Chicago. I began a process of revisiting and rediscovering, through the practice of teaching, the art form that had been so central to my early childhood development. I relished the process of remembering all the details of how music is made, step by step, on the violin. Then I watched the magic of bringing just two young violinists together, making the sounds of a song in unison. I’ve witnessed the expansion of the numbers of students and of their combined sound. I’ve marveled at the tenderness of the fingers and hands that can draw out these sounds from such a foreign, unwieldy instrument as this wooden curved box with a long neck, and a horsehair bow.

What I didn’t expect was the feeling of community among parents and the friendships that you have all developed with one another. I honestly feel that I have been a wide-eyed observer of these relationships among you, and I am pleasantly surprised by what you have created for yourselves. To feel supported and accompanied as adults on this journey is as important as the camaraderie that must develop among the musicians.

What you don’t see, from your places in this community, is the private interaction during each lesson I have with a student and their parent. You can only know your own experience, and the intricacies of your own child’s development. You face your own struggles, and overcome them or not, but your frame of reference can and should be only your own. I may do what I can to illuminate the shared lessons of our process together, but ultimately the conclusions we draw are ours alone. There is little value to comparison or competition in a real learning environment such as the one I aim to support. What we can do for each other is to be aware of ourselves, to improve ourselves constantly, and in this way serve as examples from wherever we stand in the room. It is up to each of us to make the conscious choice of how we show up each time we enter the room, and if we will learn anything on a given day.

I now have enough experience to see some of the effects of these different choices, made by adults, on the “outcomes” of the children. I put “outcomes” in quotes because we set up so many false finish lines and milestones and goalposts up in our lives, when in reality we should just be focusing on our full presence in each moment. When we become preoccupied with outcomes, by asking, “Where is this all going?” or “When are we going to get there?” or “Why is this happening to me?” or “Can you just tell me the answer?”, we unknowingly put up barricades to our children’s learning. The same doors close when we immediately defend ourselves, instead of first being open to the feedback, feeling it, examining its origin, and asking how it might serve us or our child. When we deny the validity of someone else’s observations, without question, we deny an opportunity to grow stronger or wiser. We can err on the side of being too harsh and too critical, or on the side of being too timid and too afraid. Neither of these extremes serves us or our children. It’s in the constant search for balance that we ultimately find it. We discover that it’s not a static state, it’s not something to be “achieved” and put behind us as another thing “accomplished.” But it is found in a constant state of awareness, and a commitment to finding the balance within each moment.

My job, I used to believe, was to nurture this community, and to do everything in my power to keep it going and intact. But I now know that my job is to remain true to myself, to keep discovering what is true, and to continue sharing the best of myself with you and with the world. I cannot compromise what I hold to be true for me, in this moment, for the sake of an imaginary expectation that I can make everything all right. Everything is all right, everything will be all right, and I believe most of us are just a few deep breaths away from knowing what is real and true for us, if we would allow it to be.

My deepest, truest intention at this moment is to serve you only to the extent that your time with me wakes you up to the kind of parent you want to be. You will have the great gift of seeing your child learn something, and participating in that learning with them. Maybe you will even see your child fall in love, or get angry, or become stressed, or be praised, or suffer humiliation. You have the responsibility of being the guide, the witness, the observer, and the source of unwavering support throughout all of this. I hope that you ask deep, perhaps dark, questions of yourselves, as you encounter the inevitable challenges of this path. But as you look at those challenges, I remind you to keep the bigger picture of your life, and your child’s life, in mind too. What are the lessons you wish to teach, and how will you teach those lessons? What kind of parent will you choose to be? I cannot, and it is not my intention to, provide answers to these questions for you. However, I will have served a great purpose with my work and my time if I have stimulated any of you to ask this of yourselves. I am unattached to what your answer may be. I will feel the same lightness of heart whether your answer includes an affirmation of violin or not, with me or not, if your answer is true for you. I can imagine no greater joy than to know that I have been part of awakening another person’s heart, in their lifetime, to the most important questions there are: Who do you choose to be? And how do you choose to be?

I am excited to offer you this package of information describing a significantly redesigned calendar for 2009-2010. I will be hosting two question-and-answer sessions at my studio for any parents interested in learning more before the start of the fall trimester.

While there are many structural changes outlined in the pages attached, I look forward to speaking with you in person to further convey the meaning and intention behind these changes, and what I commit to offering you in the coming year.

With gratitude,

Lisa S. Chu, M.D.

Founder & Executive Director

Here are some excerpts from Seth Godin’s recent book called Tribes (pp. 66-69, emphasis added):

Imagine two classrooms with similar teachers. One has fifteen students, the other, thirty-two. Which group gets a better education?

All other things being equal, the smaller class will always do better. The teacher has more time to spend customizing the lesson to each student. She has fewer students, hence fewer disruptions as well.

Now, flip the experiment around. What if the fifteen students are begrudgingly taking the course as a requirement for graduation, while the thirty-two had to apply to be admitted and are excited to be there.

No contest.

Tribes are increasingly voluntary. No one is forced to work for your firm or attend your services. People have a choice of which music to listen to and which movies to watch.

So great leaders don’t try to please everyone. Great leaders don’t water down their message in order to make the tribe a bit bigger….

You’re not going to be able to grow your career or your business or feed the tribe by going after most people. Most people are really good at ignoring new trends or great employees or big ideas.

You can worry about most people all day, but I promise you that they’re not worried about you. They can’t hear you, regardless of how hard you yell.

Almost all the growth that’s available to you exists when you aren’t like most people and when you work hard to appeal to folks who aren’t most people.

Godin presents a vivid new vision for leadership in the current age of global connection, and asks us to think – really think – about the need for people who are passionate about something to mobilize groups of others who share that passion. “Leadership is not management,” says Godin. “Leaders have followers. Managers have employees. Managers make widgets. Leaders make change. Change? Change is frightening, and to many people who would be leaders, it seems more of a threat than a promise. That’s too bad, because the future belongs to our leaders, regardless of where they work or what they do.“

So, if you’re a leader of a tribe, are you focused on the power of your message, or flailing around trying to tailor that message so that “everyone” gets it?

And, if you’re in a tribe that just doesn’t fit your passion, are you fighting it? Or are you freeing yourself to either lead your own tribe or find a leader that you can genuinely follow?

Godin also gave a TED talk on this subject:

A friend of mine, who I’ll call Steven, lives in Shanghai. He may or may not be able to read this blog, depending on whether or not it’s a day when the Chinese government decides to block access to all blogs, YouTube, and foreign news media. I wonder what it must be like to get up each morning, and, as many of us casually look out the window to see what the weather might be, have to check how small the government has decided to make you that day.

Thankfully, we have skype. Steven and I chat at least once a week, using text. Neither of us has wondered whether those messages are being reviewed for future censorship by the Chinese government. Maybe we should.

Steven is an entrepreneur. He is tackling the daunting task of trying to identify a business idea, secure funding, and launch it in a country where every single interaction he has is brand new. He is so clearly a foreigner. He is learning the language, studying it each day, taking lessons with a private tutor, going to a speaking practice group of foreign-born students. It is frustrating! He says it has made him feel so humble and inadequate at times to be struggling with the kinds of words that any five-year-old in China is fluent in. It has whittled him down to the core to have to learn the basic building blocks of how to “get by” in a new language and culture.

He grew up with me in Libertyville, and frankly, he was someone I thought of as a “pretty boy” – he played tennis, had blond hair, wore pink Polo shirts, drove an Audi in high school, and just seemed to me to be on the other side of that invisible social line. He was one of the “cool” people. We really only became friends as adults, after I saw him at our tenth high school reunion and heard that he was living in San Francisco. I remember thinking, “Wow, that’s cool! He MADE it out there!” I wanted to know how he did it, what brought him there. It was that part of me longing for examples and stories of how people broke out of the known and followed a dream. All I remember him telling me that night in 2003 was that after college, he was working in Tennessee, hearing about all the cool stuff happening in Silicon Valley, and decided to pick up and move there to get in on the action. He got into a dot com, which was acquired, and rode the crest of the wave all the way to the bottom. And he looked happy, relaxed, still loving life.

One year after that conversation, I found myself living in California, having picked up and moved here to follow a dream.

A few months after I moved here, Steven left for business school in the Midwest – admittedly a move that he made because he wasn’t sure what his next step would be. B school was a way to buy time, do some networking, and hopefully figure some things out. A post-business school trip led him to China, where he met and fell in love with his now wife.

He spent a few months in San Francisco between getting engaged and getting married. It was a bit of a last hurrah for him to soak in the beauty of California before his big emigration to China. He’s an adventurer of a certain kind – he scuba dives, rock climbs, sea kayaks, mountain bikes, and flies airplanes. I do none of the above. But in the course of those few months that he was here, I found myself at Mission Cliffs rock climbing gym, at Stinson Beach in a rented wetsuit paddling into the ocean on a kayak alongside harbor seals, and at the Palo Alto Municipal airport watching planes come in at night.

In short, he reminded me to play. Get a guide, and do some things you’ve never done before and would never do alone for the first time. Feel how it feels. Learn about yourself. Then choose from your newly opened heart.

So it saddened me a little bit to read his latest skype. It was bittersweet, actually. He was giddy with excitement to tell me that he is pursuing a totally new opportunity, because of a “very excited investor” that surfaced. Steven thinks he’s found a way to double the speed of internet access in China, wants to test it, and this investor is all in. He tells me they hope to “make enough money off it before it gets shut down by the government”. Steven was feeling good because this excited investor is someone respected in the community, has lived there a long time, has a lot of money, and is still willing to pay attention enough to put “small beans” in this new test concept.

I’m happy for him, really I am. He’s been wanting to get some traction with something – anything – for quite some time. But being a foreigner, and being new to the business scene there, have made it slow and challenging.  I know this. But the Steven I know, and have gotten to know over the past several years, is the kind of romantic who does things that bring him alive. The kind of guy who really throws himself wholeheartedly into things, takes the pain, does the work, and acts with integrity. Not the kind of guy who hopes to milk something marginally legal for what he can get, until he gets caught.

But there is definitely a type of entrepreneur who would do that. A “capitalist” I suppose that would be called. Opportunistic, externally focused, chasing the windows of market demand.

This doesn’t feel like the kind of entrepreneur I’d like to be. Nor frankly does it seem to match my friend’s essence as a person. Sometimes circumstances can beat us down into thinking we have to take any validation we can get, even if it doesn’t synergize with who we really are. People who have constructed their entire lives based on this premise that “you have no choice” but to do certain things, chatter quite loudly about this way of living. They warn us, in words cloaked as wisdom, that “it’s just the way it is”. We may even feel strangely obligated to “respect” them for what they appear to have achieved in social status.

But we do have a choice.

Slowly I’m beginning to discern the difference between work that comes from following my internal guide, versus activities that are the result of reacting to the external validation we seek from others. It actually feels different to operate from each place. It is a totally different kind of “productivity”. There is a flow, versus a grind. There is effortless focus, versus constant fighting against distraction.

But to get to that place is a discipline. It is a system of actions that enables me to find that state in which I can hear my internal guide. Some small things I’m implementing in my system? I no longer read my Blackberry first thing in the morning. It sits by my bedside as my alarm, and it was my habit to turn off my alarm, and “glance” at emails before getting out of bed. Immediately I would enter the state of reactivity. But I’d been doing that habitually – without thinking – for over five years. Every day. Every few minutes, actually. I didn’t know what else to think, so I’d look at my Blackberry to see if it had any ideas for me. So many years went by this way! And now I’m a few months into this new practice. It has to be conscious. I have to tell myself, “No, don’t look at it. Just get out of bed.” And sometimes my body rebels. It wants to stay in bed, as if it doesn’t know what to do without reading email first. So I give it something else to do. I stretch, I get on my yoga mat, I write. I just allow my own thoughts to surface.

And that’s how I got to this blog post today. I’m hoping it’s a good day in China and all websites are open. Because this one’s for you, Steven. Keep listening to your internal guide.

I think I finally understand why my parents never wanted me to try to make a living as a musician.

You know what it feels like to fall in love – head-over-heels, ga-ga, out-of-your-mind in love? And then, you know what it feels like when you’re hurt by that person you love? Or when you lose that person? Or when the person doesn’t love you back?

Well, sharing your art with someone is a lot like falling in love. To actually do it well – meaning that you’re actually passing on those best parts of yourself to someone else – requires opening yourself so wide that you invite everything in. That means you can’t choose to “block out” the bad stuff, or give only just enough that you don’t get hurt. It means you invite in the heartbreak. You invite in the disappointment. You invite in the frustration. You invite in the agreement that despite all of that, you’ll keep showing up and trying again.

You do it because you embrace the beauty of seeing someone else grow in your presence. You do it because you know what the human spirit is capable of. You do it because sharing your appreciation of life with even one other person makes your experience richer. You invite all of that pain in because you think love requires it of you.

But in some relationships, your love isn’t received in the same way you’ve given it. It’s met with resistance. It could be because of circumstances. It could be timing. It could be that other choices have already been made. It could be unhealed pain. Or it could just be that the story of your time together has come to an end.

Unrequited love hurts. No matter how reasonable the explanation, it hurts the same way. Nothing can heal the pain except the grieving and acknowledgment required to move on in your journey, and clearing the space for new love to arrive.

I’m about to say goodbye to some people and some practices in my life that no longer serve me. I’m finally ready now, but only after it hit me, lying in supported, Supta Baddha Konasana (“reclined bound angle”) pose last night in yoga class. It’s the ultimate pose of surrender. I was lying with my back and head supported by two yoga blocks, knees open, bottom of my feet together, and my whole heart open. And it hit me. I’ve been in deep pain for the past year. I’ve been giving all of my love, my truth, my beauty, and receiving pain in return. And the cycle of pain has continued – the same conversations, the same patterns of behavior, with the same people – for the entire year. Several years, in some cases.

It’s time for me to ask, “What new sources of love will arrive once I make space for them?”

I have been avoiding these goodbyes, because I denied that they were causing me pain. I wanted to “solve” my pain by doing something, fixing something about myself. What I now know is that I need to be in my truth, and to act from my truth, in order to let go of the pain, and invite in new energy.

So why did my parents try to steer me away from a life dependent on music for income? Like any parents, they would have done anything to protect me from heartbreak and pain. They were witness to the depth of love that music could invoke, and while they were moved by it, they were also frightened. As one example, they saw my violin teacher – so open, honest, and generous with her soul – get crushed by parent after parent who came banging down her door, begging her to share her gifts with them. Because she knows no other way to be than fully present and loving, she opens herself to heartbreak. My parents could not bear to guide their daughter toward a life so seemingly vulnerable. I used to think their advice was because musicians don’t make “enough” money. But now I realize that the “hard” life of a musician, or any artist, or anyone who chooses to care deeply about the professional work they get paid to do, is just the life of love. It was hard for my parents – unimaginably scary for them – to encourage me to make a living with what I love. They felt responsible for giving me an instruction manual first. They wanted me to think rationally and soundly about decisions, and to be practical. This grounding I am deeply grateful for. They loved me and shared with me the best of what they knew. And now I love and understand this part of them, even as I continue to step boldly in directions they could never have imagined for me.

Love feels hard sometimes. Love keeps pushing us to be exactly who we are. Sometimes our love is met with confusion, or misunderstanding, or coldness. If this happens to us enough times in our life, we might come up with a story that convinces us that we are not worthy of love, or that our love should be locked away in a secret hiding place, saved for only certain occasions.

But don’t believe those stories. Hear the stories of people who have done the work of listening deeply to the core of themselves, who found a way to break wide open and share the truth of what they found. Be in their presence. They are a joy to be around.

I choose love. Love is what brought life to The Music Within Us. What I’ve been doing for the past five years has been opening myself to both the pain and the joy of love, over and over again, risking all of myself with each new promise and each new family I enroll. This love is what I have to offer. This love has been the expression of the music within me. And this love, when shared and received with people who love me, will bring new life, as I now rush to greet it with everything I have to give.