For me, security and beauty are not compatible. When you seek beauty, you have to forget security, and you have to go to the rim of catastrophe. There you find the beauty. If a musician makes a mistake, a crack, because he risks everything to get the most beautiful thing and he fails, then I thank him for this failure because it is only with this risk you can get the beauty, the real beauty.
—Nikolaus Harnoncourt
The inner critic is a perfectionist. Its voice, with its origins in early childhood, can have many tones. It can be loud, quiet, harsh, or even sugary sweet. It can disapprove, seduce, moralise and bargain, and can take the form of anyone from dictator, executive, parent, teacher, helper, judge, or priest. It can be formless, appearing as mummified, fleshless, faceless, elemental or animal. We can feel it as pressure, dullness, tension, ungroundedness, heat, cold, butterflies or gripping. The Inner critic lives in us as individuals, but also in communities and cultures, creating a dualistic universe in which we swing relentlessly between right and wrong, good and bad, self-aggrandisement and self-hatred, and, most poignantly, perfection and shame.
Marie’s critic was an unwelcome guest at every performance. She described her critic as an amorphous blob, neither human nor animal. In its shrivelled black shroud, it appeared as the grim reaper hacking down anything and anyone she cared about. Its repeated advice to her while she was performing was simply to ‘leave the stage’. When Marie did manage to get to the end of a piece, so in thrall was she to its darkness that she could not receive the appreciative comments offered to her from colleagues or audience members.
After several years of mindfulness and compassion practice, Marie was able to meet and start a dialogue with her inner critic. Once they had become more friendly, some humour crept into their relationship, and she said to him: ‘I know what you’re after. It’s perfection, isn’t it? And you know what? I don’t do perfection anymore. I’ve moved out of the P-zone.’
One day a few weeks after this, Marie found herself in what could be said to be the ultimate P-zone’—the recording studio. During take after take of late Beethoven string quartets, she could hold uncertainty with spaciousness and embrace imperfection. Choosing not to react to her critic’s insistence on constant control, she returned repeatedly to trust in her body and, when contraction occurred, softly uttered her new mantra: ‘Dissolve’. With this invitation, Marie put a stop to the critic’s measuring up and putting down and came to rest in the gentle lap of acceptance.
Over dinner shortly afterwards, Marie (the least flaky person you could meet) described the experience to me: ‘Whatever happened when the red light was on, it felt like there was a golden hue at the centre of my being.’ The irony was that her playing was probably as close to perfection as it had ever been.
When you consider the damage inner critics inflict on people’s physical, mental and emotional wellbeing, their relationships and their livelihoods, it’s no exaggeration to describe these internal bullies as abusive and violent. What makes us think it’s okay to give our inner critics free rein to beat us up on a regular basis? I’d argue that it is the dualistic concept of good and evil, deeply embedded in so many cultures, including the one in which I was raised, and passed seamlessly from one generation to the next, that is the prime agent of such inner warfare. I don’t want to suggest that predominantly Buddhist-based cultures are entirely peaceful. After all, wars have been fought in the name of almost every religion, philosophy and belief system, including the teachings commonly referred to as Buddhism. However, to understand how so many of us see perfectionism and the self-abuse it engenders as ‘normal’, I think we must look at its roots in the dualism that is central to many cultural traditions.
In the Abrahamic religions, in which so many Western classical musicians have their roots, the dualistic concept of good and evil is everywhere, which is why one might not, for example, bat an eyelid at such a comment as this one made by a renowned violinist during a masterclass: ‘Why you play bad? Play good!’ The Christian view of original sin is one in which man is born bad, and only God’s forgiveness can offer redemption. In Judaism, the concepts of yetzer tov (good inclination) and yetzer ra (evil inclination) exist, and the purpose of life is to overcome the inclination towards evil. The Islamic assertion that, although we are born in a state of intrinsic goodness (fitrah), we must continually resist the pull of evil Satan is embodied in this warning: ‘Beware of Shaytan, he is desperate to divert you from the worship of Allah.’
While being and staying ‘good’ is a near impossible task—with evil everywhere waiting to corrupt us—the Abrahamic religions also share the belief that we will all be judged at the end of our lives by God. It can, at times, feel like we just can’t win, and it is worth reflecting: How does that powerlessness feel in our bodies?
Buddha, however, did not teach of good and evil. He taught that our essential nature is loving, and though that nature can get clouded by ignorance, clinging or aversion, nothing can change that. Jack Kornfield puts it this way: ‘Buddhism teaches that we suffer not because we have sinned but because we are blind. Compassion is the natural response to this blindness.’
Sometimes where we are ‘from’ spiritually is not so black and white. I, for example, grew up in an atheist family during the sixties in London, an atmosphere in which Art, rather than a bearded man in the sky, was God. Because so much great Art had been created in the name of religion, I was encouraged to open to all spiritual traditions, from Tantra to Christianity. My dad, a well-known painter (and a bearded man on earth), found beauty in the everyday, from the sounds of the Scratch Orchestra in which he played, to an interestingly shaped crack in a paving stone. His portrait of the back of the playwright Samuel Beckett’s head, sporting the famous quote ‘Try Again, Fail Again, Fail Better’, hung on my wall for three decades. In our home, the Creator was the Painter or the Composer (Dad) but never the humble interpreter (me). ‘Surely’, I sometimes ventured, ‘the Artist painting a lemon is interpreting the lemon just as a cellist might interpret a sonata?’ No was the firm answer.
Meanwhile, my mother, desperate to find freedom from the cruelty and tyrannical judgement of her very un-Christian ‘Christian’ parents, threw herself into astrology, reiki, numerology and Hinduism, often escaping to India to ‘find herself’.
Perfectionism was lurking everywhere in hidden and not-so-hidden pockets of my rich and open-minded childhood. Embedded in a patriarchal system, reactive against a dogmatic religious culture and disembodied, it was hardly surprising that when I sat on stage, I was numb and terrified of failure.
Perfectionism is never about our own aspirations, but always about striving for approval from an Other (whether internal or external), which is why monotheistic religions provide such rich soil for it. Daniel Leech Wilkinson, of Challenging Performance, describes the culture of Western classical music as one infused with the hierarchy, judgement, patriarchy and shame of a religion in which there is One God who is without flaw, and who judges everything we do:
The composer is as a God, the critic is a prophet (judging how the word of God is to be applied), the performer a priest, and listeners the humble and obedient congregation… As in religion, we worship the composers, we obey their laws, we strive to enact their wishes, and in return they reward us (when, and only when we achieve these aims most faithfully) with intense experiences of deep quasi-spiritual feeling.
The orchestral conductor adds yet another tier to the hierarchy, interpreting the word of ‘God’ (the composer) through the ‘instrument’ of the orchestra, often leaving the players as minions toiling away beneath his baton. But it does not have to be this way, not even in an orchestra. I experienced this when playing under the great conductor, Nikolaus Harnoncourt. He described the musicians in his orchestra as ‘partners’ and all of us could feel this. I will never forget the meditative silence he invited at the beginning of each performance. It was only seconds long, but that moment of gathering provided an atmosphere in which every being in the space and beyond—from the second horn to the fourth cello (me), through Haydn himself, and Harnoncourt, to the child in the first, the musicologist in the fifth and the grandad in the last row of the audience—were invited to join together to co-create the experience. It inspires me still to remember that humble feeling of connection, and I believe it is one of the memories that has kept me going through some of the tougher moments of my career.
Ruth’s book Beauty at the Edge of Catastrophe is available to buy here.
