Ten Things I Wish I Could Have Understood about Taubman Technique from the Very Beginning
10. Your beliefs about yourself (as a musician and in general) make a huge difference.
Could there be a powerful component of belief about yourself to getting this technique to work for you, richly and fully the way anyone would want? I think so. Evidence, from the science of quantum mechanics on down, is rolling in to prove what metaphysics has taught for thousands of years: that what you believe to be true of yourself and your world affects every aspect of your life.
Personal health provides a perfect example. Research into placebo and “nocebo” effects is confirming the incredible role of a person’s belief in healing with medications (or lack of medication, as the case might be). The US government’s budget for studying alternative healing modalities, including energy modalities and others involving the interactions of mind, body, and spirit, rose from $2 million in 1993 to $121.6 million in 2012, and if medical doctors aren’t exactly embracing such approaches just yet, that would probably be because of the influence on them of the pharmaceutical industry. In other words, healing modalities that were once derided as quackery and unscientific are being treated seriously in many corners, though perhaps not by the AMA. There is always someone with a vested interest in not catching up with what evidence strongly suggests.
As one metaphysical author wrote, “if you don’t run your own subconscious mind, someone else will run it for you.”
When mainstream medical researchers create studies that bear out the efficacy of energy healing and prayer for healing purposes; when a growing percentage of business people are embracing “woo woo” approaches and Columbia Business School hires Deepak Chopra to teach a course about possible roles for spirituality in business, the boundary between science and “spiritual belief” erodes. Piano study is only insulated from scientific and spiritual conceptions of how things work if we insist that it remain so.
The Alexander School talks about the important concept of body “mismapping.” According to this concept, what you believe to be true of your body and how it works (regardless of accuracy) has a huge influence on how you use it, both in everyday life and with your musical instrument. Body mismapping is a more obvious example of belief affecting musical ability, but we might consider that it is only the tip of the iceberg as far as the influence of beliefs go. In his remarkable Music, Talent, and Performance: A Conservatory Cultural System, anthropologist and conservatory-trained pianist Henry Kingsbury makes the point that, in the power structure of classically trained musicians, the designation of “talent” for one performer necessitates that a number of others be deemed untalented. These designations form identities, often in childhood, establishing cultural roles that people skillfully play without any conscious awareness of “playing a role” at all.
In the early years of the twentieth century, physicists began to form a new, "quantum-mechanical" understanding of the universe that began to account for a number of surprising research findings, among them that an observer actually influences the course of his experiment. Bruce Lipton, formerly a professor of medicine at Stanford Medical School and author of the groundbreaking Biology of Belief, notes in a brilliant YouTube lecture that the sciences, hard and soft, are built upon a foundation of physics, and that sciences that had been mired in a Newtonian paradigm (including his own field of cellular biology) are finally acknowledging and wrestling with the implications of quantum mechanics. Psychology sits near the top of Lipton’s pyramid atop physics, electrochemistry, biology. We might imagine a place for music study above that. Lipton also maintains that the beliefs formed in childhood create the template for your life experiences (unless you use some method of extricating yourself from them). This recalls Kingsbury’s work.
It is worth asking yourself what beliefs about your body, as well as about your place in the world generally, influence what you are able to accomplish. Perhaps some of the work of acquiring the skill you desire will involve working to change your beliefs. Fortunately, there are many scientifically validated ways to address problems posed by the negative influence of beliefs, at the piano and with life in general. These methods are not talk therapy, providing relief from bad beliefs much more quickly than you might think possible. Please look for a post on this site addressing these in the future.