Here are two metaphors for resilience:

Metaphor 1:

Imagine a thin tree in winter with an inner core that is so alive, that when a heavy load of snow weighs it down, it bends to its fullest capacity, but never breaks.

It’s supple and pliant, not brittle and frayed. It can weather and wait out the cold days, preparing a path for thriving once Spring arrives.

This is a vision of resilience in which the world’s troubles are carried with robustness and dexterity.

Metaphor 2:

Jeff Bezos’ Yacht.

This idiotic Thing is so big that a historic bridge in Rotterdam had to be dismantled just to let it pass through.

This Thing is so big that every obstacle it encounters must yield or break to it, like most brick-and-mortar independent bookstores broken by Bezos’ monstrous company.

This Thing is so big that it plows through, increasing its staying power through acquisition, plundering, forcing out competition, and being too big to fail.

Very often, it feels like Bezos’ type of resilience is winning in our society.

Within the music industry, I often hear clients lamenting that Bezos-like figures prevail by snatching up a disproportionate amount of the industry resources, or by functioning as gatekeepers who aim to push out fresh and underrepresented voices. The everyday evidence can be so overwhelmingly skewed towards the Bezos paradigm, that it’s an act of mental and emotional discipline to adopt Martin Luther King’s long view of history:

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Resilience is a topic close to my heart. I wrote extensively about it in my thesis, which tracked musicians’ resilience during COVID.

Resilience is difficult to identify and define. What is it? You can only know if someone is resilient in hindsight. Resilience doesn’t exist unless there is some hardship that it can react to. This means that it’s really difficult for psychologists to pin down and identify, as opposed to other personality traits such as openness, extraversion, and conscientiousness.

The simplest definition of resilience is the extent to which a person bounces back from a challenge or hardship.

Rresilience can be activated by a person’s inner strengths, and it can be shaped by external supports. A study of New Orleans musicians severely impacted by Hurricane Katrina (Morris, 2013) found that so-called “Protective Factors” influenced how resilient these musicians felt.

These “Protective Factors” were:

the ability to experience absorption (flow) states,
an enjoyment of the social aspects of music-making,
a network of social support,
and a reliance on familial and social support systems.

A study of Norwegian freelance musicians (Vaag, Giaever & Bjerkeset, 2013) found that there were three aspects of resilience: mental/emotional strengths, family coherence and social resources.

Resilience looks different in different contexts. In the darkest moments of life, an act of resilience can be as modest as getting out of bed when one is experiencing a severely dark state of mind.

Leon Fleisher describes in his book, “My Nine Lives”, his despair following the onset of Focal Dystonia, a movement disorder that derailed his career as one of the most prominent pianists of his generation:

“It was hard to find words for the dark cloud that hovered over me: of anguish, of dejection, of rage…At my lowest point, I seriously considered killing myself. But I didn’t kill myself. I stayed alive. And, just as I was stuck with being alive, I was stuck with my love of music. Something about it was still sustaining, and still worthwhile. So I embarked on a quest to make a life in music, in any way I could.”

Leon Fleisher

In a lot of self-improvement and pop-psychology contexts, one gets the impression that a lack of resilience is a result of the failure to generate positive moods, effective mindsets, and beneficial conditions in one‘s life. This is often a double burden for people who are feeling like they’re at the end of their rope: they suffer from that sense of inner depletion, and they suffer from shame and self-recrimination for not having been able to avoid getting stuck in this muck, or from not being able to pull oneself out of it.

Before talking about ways of increasing resilience: I want to first state something:

Every single person experiences times (sometimes prolonged) of despair and fundamental crisis.

This should not be viewed as a pathology or personal weakness.

For many artists, these dark life moments may seem to come more frequently or last more persistently than for other members of society. This might be due to the exceptionally high demands and precariousness of artistic professions. It’s possibly influenced by a tendency for artists to be highly-sensitive and empathic individuals. The sensitivity that creates such touching and authentic artistic expression can be the very same sensitivity that creates a susceptibility to becoming chronically overwhelmed and depleted.

Ok, having said this, and also having said that one is more resilient when one has good external support structures (for example: enough money, supportive family and friends, beneficial professional structures, etc.), one does have a responsibility to tend to one’s health, and that includes mental health. Just as with physical health issues, one can make preventative efforts so that health impairments have less of a chance of becoming entrenched and chronic.

This is a personal responsibility that we bear for ourselves and for those around us.

And, just as with physical illnesses, sometimes our best efforts are not powerful enough to prevent an illness, especially if there are extraordinary hardships and genetic predispositions in play.

In these cases, dear readers, where, despite all preventative measures, a deep despair or sense of overwhelm emerges and stays, please seek out skilled and compassionate people to help you out of your dark places.

What can one do to increase resilience?

There is one area in which we truly hold a strong influence. That is our own actions, emotions, and thought patterns.

So, that’s where we’ll engage now.

We often speak in psychology circles of Inner Strengths. These might be innate personality traits, or things that one has cultivated through hard-earned practice.

Following are some traits and skills that contribute to the ability to be resilient in the face of hardships, together with some quotes of people interviewed in my study on resilience (all names are changed to protect identity):

Emotional awareness and regulation: the ability to absorb and regulate difficult emotions

“I try to accept [difficult emotions], I try to acknowledge that they're there, sometimes I just sort of feel them and then I might lash out at everyone around me, or get very upset. And then I talk to someone about it, and then I get a little bit more perspective on it, but when I am feeling sad or anxious or angry, I usually am able to step back from the emotion a little bit and observe it and name it and kind of sit with it a little bit and accept it.” Sophie, cellist

“… because in my childhood, like many children of immigrant parents, we're not taught to feel our feelings, you know we are just taught to achieve. We’re taught to listen to our parents. That [feeling and experiencing difficult emotions] was not something I had any experience doing, so I had to learn how to do all of that as an adult. I had to learn how to name my depression, I had to learn how to be vulnerable and accept that that was an important step in progressing to a place of courage.” Charlotte, violinist

Flexibility: the ability to adapt to changes and bounce back after adversities, not engaging in black-or-white or rigid thought patterns

“I had to adjust my expectations of how I defined success. Throughout my studies, success was a very narrow and concrete concept:

This is Success.

When I got out into the real world, I had to come up with other definitions [of success], otherwise, I’d go insane.” John, pianist

Grit: perseverance, getting up and doing it again, making long-term efforts

“I can’t tell you how many rejections I’ve received. I’ve gotten good at compartmentalizing these rejections and just storing them somewhere in the back of my brain, and then accepting them as part of the life of a musician, part of the practice, and moving on to the next thing. “ Igor, singer

Cognitive focus and discipline: the ability to create and abide by structures

“I have a warm-up routine. I try to wake up around the same time, I walk the dog, drink morning tea and then I have a very strict warm-up routine, and it's a routine that I've developed as a professional. Before I start practicing, I have to warm up properly. Otherwise, I feel like I can't find my sound for the rest of the day.” Charlotte, violinist

Gratitude: the ability to experience a sense of appreciation for what one has

“I’ve never been more grateful to have the students I have than in the first couple of months when we were in the [COVID] lockdown …it was really good for me just to have that contact with them, and to be able to really work on stuff, and it was good for them, it was good for their parents. I was really grateful for it, it helped, it was much better than if we had just not had anything [any employment], and you know I actually earned a little bit of money through that, which was very appreciated.” Mia, flutist

Optimism: the ability to find humor and lightness in difficult situations, to not be discouraged by failure, and to possess a belief in a benevolent world and future

“Don't give up, keep hope. I do trust that time can solve a lot of problems so I really also profit from this. I try to have a long view and most of the time I think it helps … also, it turns out all right in the end.” Yenay, pianist

Some of the personality aspects mentioned here may have been inborn. Others were acquired. In acquiring new mental strengths, two key components of the process are necessary: opening oneself to new (sometimes destabilizing) experiences, and

letting * those * experiences * sink * in.

It’s courageous to let these new mental states in, and it requires patience to sit with these potential sources of strength, allowing them to seep in and to create changes in our habitual patterns.

One process that I’ve found helpful in developing new mental strengths and letting them sink into the nervous system is by the psychologist and Buddhist teacher Tara Brach.

She outlines a four-stage process for absorbing experiences: good, bad, or in between:

RAIN:

Recognize

Allow

Investigate

Nurture

I hope you find this as helpful and supportive as I have.

8. Music-Mind: Resilience: Bendy Trees vs. Mega Yachts