“The Dream”
You’re standing on the elevator platform 1 floor below the gargantuan stage at Radio City Music Hall. The elevator operator is waiting for the cue while the orchestra plays as your name is being announced. Then he presses the button and the elevator begins to rise up for your grand entrance for your one man / one woman show. As the elevator completes its ascent the follow spots beam in your direction as you begin your opening number to an audience of thousands. As you sing, the audience can’t help but rise to their feet in excitement! You sing song after song and with each one the excitement builds. After pouring your heart out for hours… you sing the last number and the audience yells… Encore! Encore!
You receive at least 5 curtain calls.
The adoring fans fall at your feet.
After the show you sign autographs and are whisked away in your stretch limousine.
Then… you wake up!
Can you relate to this dream? It’s a pretty cool dream isn’t it?
I know that no Healing Singer has ever had such a grandiose fantasy but haven’t you ever imagined yourself as one of the singers that you so much admire?
It is so easy to imagine ourselves in the shoes of the people that we admire especially when we are witnessing a great performance.
Who wouldn’t love to sound like the singer they admire the most?
I must confess I do. I’ve always had a “thing” about Barbara Cook and now I’ve transferred that same thing to Josh Groban. The “child within me” would love to be in his shoes for just ten minutes, just to know what it would feel like to have such an open and relaxed throat while singing!
Ah yes… The Dream!
The Dream of being someone else and somewhere else! It can have an enormous and intoxicating effect as we waste precious moments of our lives wondering… what if?
In spite of all my dreams when I woke up this morning I was still myself, living the life that both I and the Universe chose for me to live.
And although I’ve been singing for about 30 years I still sound like myself in spite of all the desire to morph my voice to sound like the people I so much admire. So much for that effort.
I guess it is true. I will never be anyone else but me. And no matter how hard I try I can’t change that. I’ll only be able to experience my own successes and my own failures, no one else’s.
As a society we spend an enormous amount of time celebrating the lives of others, rather than celebrating our own lives! The life that we were given to celebrate is our own and the only important moment in that life is the present moment.
Singing is difficult enough, but when we give ourselves the added responsibility of living up to a standard that is based on what someone else has achieved; we get ourselves into trouble.
We can tell if we’ve abdicated to the dream when we put pressure on ourselves to meet an expectation that has nothing to do with our present ability. The dream is what we think “should be” based on what we’ve witnessed our hero’s do. We will never be able reconcile the reality of the present moment with the fantasy of what we think should be. It will never work. That is why releasing the pressure of all the “outside influence” is so important.
Living your own life to the fullest is far more rewarding than any grandiose second hand experience. That implies accepting “what is” rather than “what should be” as the launching platform to being the you that you were meant to be.
The following is a chapter from a book entitled Beyond Success and Failure by the Adlerian psychologist Willard Beecher.
(Written 38 years ago and now out of print)
His words cut like a two edge sword and really eviscerate all the fantasy! The ideas can help to release the self imposed pressure from “The Dream”. Over the years I have found Willard’s concepts enormously helpful. Let me know what your thoughts are on the subject.
Your feedback is always welcome!
Many blessings,
Rob
BEYOND SUCCESS AND FAILURE
By Willard and Marguerite Beecher
Alienation from the here -and-now
Our life has been described as a spark of light between two towering walls of darkness. There is no past and no tomorrow; they are figments of the imagination. It is always and eternally now. But the mind is subject to the dangerous illusion that we can project ourselves outside the present reality, outside the eternal now, and thus escape any present pain by fleeing into some ideal expectation.
All flight into the ideal, the should be, the ought-to-be, is illusion. All illusion is alienation from the here and now. An alien is a person living in a country not his own without rights of citizenship. The person who rejects and thus is alienated from the now has abdicated his native, inherited abilities to flee into another country, one of wishes, dreams and ideals, which exists somewhere over the rainbow of wishful thinking.
The perfectionist, the idealist and the reformer are examples of those who have cut ties with the living now and aimlessly wander, like the Flying Dutchman, going nowhere adrift at sea.
Life is being. And all being is now. Life cannot be postponed nor transposed. Alienation from reality, in its extreme degree, is psychosis -a flight from reality ''into dreams and fancy."
Our degree of alienation-or distance from the living now is in direct ratio to our habit of wishful thinking. Wishes are the fool's gold that tempt us into alienating ourselves from the now. They send us in search of the illusion of greatness, the illusion of progress and success and the desire to make a big impression!
Curiously enough, alienation from the now is similar to a defective clutch that slips in a car. Instead of meshing gears, as a clutch is designed to do, it slips out and idles. While it is in neutral, the car and driver are not related to the confronting traffic situation. Nothing happens. Similarly, if we lose our hold on the now, we slip into idling dreams and are not related to the confronting life situation.
Life is an emerging thing, much like on-coming traffic. The function of the human psyche is to meet such situations and be an active part of them, just as a driver must thread his way through on-coming traffic. Life has no place for victims who ignore this changing pattern of on-coming traffic, because they are driving with blinders in search of greatness.
Physical and emotional self-reliance is possible only as long as we are fully planted in the present. The problems of life demand response and activity. Any evasion of now is a way of trying to postpone activity. If we abdicate our initiative, we become passive-receptive victims of on-coming circumstances. This effort to escape the now by a flight into ideals, dreams, expectations or hopes can be called living on the deferred payment plan: that is we promise ourselves rewards tomorrow.
We say to ourselves that we will begin to have courage and to live tomorrow we dare not live today! But this is a world of the eternal nows there is no tomorrow. The result is that we are alienated from life entirely.
Dreams or illusions avoid, postpone and abort action. That which destroys action destroys life. Each of us must consciously choose between two ways of facing life: we must (1) live in direct, spontaneous contact with the emerging now or (2) live fearfully on deferred-payment plan as an alien world of wishful thinking, ideal expectancy and endless searching. There is no middle ground; there are no shades of gray between. The choice is uncompromising.
The Biblical story of the creation and the fall of man points to the same two choices. Alienation is based on the-illusion of becoming. The Devil is known as the father of lies and illusions. "If ye eat of this fruit," he promised Eve, "ye too shall become as gods, knowing good from evil." In other words, you can stop being a producer and sit above others, finding fault with them. That is, instead of performing deeds, you can occupy yourself with the appearance of things.
Daydreams are one of the costliest disaster areas known to man. Extreme fantasy is schizophrenia; most of the beds in mental hospitals are filled with unfortunates who abdicated the now for dreams of grandeur. What we call insanity begins when we are no longer willing to distinguish clearly between the world of what happens and what-we-wish-were-true! The majority of us, unfortunately, run a zig-zag course between the two worlds.
We mistakenly seek false-compensation solutions to our problems. We want to be free of them. We desire to escape from confronting situations without bothering to understand them, the way a chicken flies a coop. But we cannot fly above the bars put up against reality by our wishful thinking. It is our vain ambition for recognition, not reality, that traps and enslaves us.
We want to escape and to live like a worm in an apple, without effort or pain. Our aversion to pain is in fact the basic source of our pain. Psychological pain does not arise from the level of What Is. Pain lies in our effort to resist pain. Pain-pleasure are but two inseparable ends of the same stick. We can’t pick up one end of the stick without the other coming along. Our effort to grasp one end without the other leads to our resistance. It is a case of wanting to know good without evil. But the now is neither good nor bad. It is all that there is.
THE TWO WORLDS OF BEING AND BECOMING
Being Becoming
This is it! Reality The illusion of progress! Wishes
q Nothing to achieve Ambition- desire for personal recognition
q Nothing to get The begging attitude- please love me
q Nothing to seek Degrading dependence on approval of others
q Nothing to prove Feeling of emptiness-emotional poverty
q Nowhere to go Treadmill of endless search for rewards
q No big brother Dancing for pay outside approval
checking on us