‘Live in the Himalayas’.

That was my reply to a rarely pensive friend on his 40th birthday when he asked me how I visualised my life when I turned 40.

Considering that’s actually where my ancestors come from, the retort might be considered fair, except this was no regular conversation. For one, I was a precocious twenty-something with layers of imposter syndrome about to backfire in the next few years, and my friend, who went on to be one of the most influential people in my life over the years that followed, was as ‘limited-edition’ as they came. The kind who walked up to me after a gig in red boxer shorts and a prime local Pils to ask what I was up to in summer, only to call me months later to let me know I’d been hired for what was going to be a five-figure gig. Well, 60+ back-to-back ones to be precise, each with four one-hour sets, the first of which opened with compositions by the venerable Frank Zappa.

“Oh, and you’ll probably have to quit college for a year, by the way,” to boot. Followed by, “I mean, what’s our professor really teaching you anymore anyways? I’m already hiring you.”

No pressure.

Signing that contract on the spot in his ground-floor bar and studio is the kind of thing I (ironically) recommend most of my younger peers run the f away from today.

But call it Himalayan Karma: in my case, I lucked out. That three-month stint changed my life. It was pretty much the foundation of the infrastructure I went on to build. My recording gear, the collaboration skills, the real-life experience of what it actually takes to not just survive but thrive after three months of living onstage straight after what was essentially one day of rehearsal for a four-hour repertoire. It was the kind of insanity today’s industry would raise eyebrows at, in ways that make the entire conversation a lot more complex than the bounds of this post can hold.

More importantly, it resulted in a brand of relationship building that I would cautiously say doesn’t really get handed down to twenty-something, fresh-off-the-boat immigrant music students the way it used to. I still don’t call before I knock on his door (though, full disclosure, between our travelling, it’s been a while).

People don’t take chances like that on fellow human beings anymore.

Of late, I’ve often sat with my cocky response to what was once a rare, vulnerable question from that friend.

As you’ve probably noticed by now, I haven’t quite moved to the Himalayas just yet. If anything, these past years have been me digging deeper than ever before into the why, what and how of things here and now. And part of the process has been taking regular dives into the rabbit hole of what seems to be missing so sorely in our world, within the arts ecosystem, society and beyond. Last week I babbled quite a bit about generic swill becoming an ever-increasingly accepted norm, which has started to break my heart a tad. But underneath it is the one word I keep coming back to, the one that feels like the puzzle standing between me and the mountains.

‘Why’.

I’m not going anywhere until I’ve made peace with a response to that.

One of the patterns I have recognised over the years through my own practice, coaching and research is this utopian pot of gold at the end of the horizon that so many of us can’t seem to stop chasing. Make no mistake, I have no illusions of being immune to the premise myself. But hanging out in rooms with some of the (literally) biggest names in my industry, working with and for them, has made me acutely conscious of the one thing that is missing in the midst of it all.

Peace.

Now this might sound trite, but when I started working on my coaching frameworks, the first hurdle that felt so difficult to overcome was coming to terms with the one brutal truth that did my head in.

I can’t really offer someone something through my work the way the business-jargon-spouting experts I have spent decades listening to in university classrooms, board meetings and webinars keep insisting I ought to. Nobody can.

And yet, I look back on my journey, the mentors and co-creators who’ve been a part of it (including Mr. Red Silk Boxer Shorts), and I cannot imagine coming as far as I have without them. And considering I was a morbidly obese, depressed teen in pre-internet India who had basically given up on life (and that’s more than just a metaphor), that cannot count for nothing, even on my most performatively ‘modest’ days, my toughest efforts notwithstanding.

To not make some attempt to give back felt, and will continue to feel, wrong.

And so, some 1,000 students and mentees, and close to as many stage performances, writing sessions, recording dates, podcast tapings and research projects later, I have come to the conclusion that there is, in fact, one thing every single one of us, artists or otherwise, is looking for, with or without our knowledge.

Yeah, you guessed it.

Peace.

‘What if peace was part of the plan?’

I wrote that line on the revised sales page of my self-study system a few years back. It felt cute at the time, courtesy of the now stale ‘free-webinar’ bollocks disguised as pitch overdose. But it turns out that even amidst the noise of my somewhat desperate attempts at figuring out what I was doing, an inkling of truth had made its way up to the surface.

A reward for having suffered sufficiently

It took me the better part of three decades to admit why that line stuck. Most of us treat peace as a destination, something that happens to us once the album is out, the rent is sorted, the right person finally calls back, or (in my case) once I’ve packed a bag and headed for the mountains.

A reward for having suffered sufficiently.

And because we’ve filed it under the abstractions, somewhere between happiness, success and a decent night’s sleep on tour, it rarely occurs to us to actually put it on the schedule.

Yet anyone who has spent real time in a practice room knows that nothing worthwhile arrives that way. Nobody wakes up able to play a Zappa chart at tempo because they’ve earned it. You get there through repetition, attention and a fair amount of failing in private, and I’ve come to believe peace might work in much the same way.

Which is rather curious, considering the extraordinary amount of time musicians spend developing a sophisticated relationship with tension and resolution. We learn how a single note can change the emotional meaning of an entire chord, how a fraction of a second can transform the intention behind a phrase, and how silence, when placed with care, can communicate things an entire orchestra might struggle to articulate.

And yet, step outside the practice room, and many of us seem to lose access to precisely those faculties when it comes to our own lives. We recognise when a musical phrase is being forced, but spend years forcing ourselves through professional relationships that have long stopped making sense. We understand the importance of rest in a composition, but frequently regard rest in our own lives as something that needs to be earned.

There’s a rather painful irony in being professionally trained to recognise harmony while struggling to cultivate it within ourselves.

The yogis seem to have understood something about this long before any of us were discussing nervous system regulation. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras introduce the principle of yogaś citta vṛtti nirodhaḥ, commonly translated as the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind, and a little further along we encounter two complementary principles, abhyasa and vairagya.

Practice and non-attachment.

Consider what a fascinating pairing that is for an artist. We devote ourselves to developing a skill, sometimes over decades, while simultaneously learning to loosen our attachment to the outcomes through which we have come to measure the value of that devotion.

I can spend years working towards a record, bring every ounce of my experience and attention to its creation, and still allow its commercial reception to remain something I cannot fully control. I can prepare thoroughly for a performance without making the applause responsible for my sense of worth. I can care deeply about my work without demanding that it provide a permanent answer to the question of whether I am enough. And perhaps most importantly, I can keep practising even when none of these ideas feels particularly accessible.

The pacifist A.J. Muste put it rather simply.

There is no way to peace, peace is the way.

A.J. Muste

For years I heard that as a lovely sentiment.

These days I hear it as a practice instruction.

What the nervous system already knows

For a long time I assumed much of this was spiritual language that wouldn’t survive contact with deadlines, label meetings and Berlin winters. Then I started digging more seriously into the research, partly through my coaching education and partly out of sheer curiosity, and found some interesting parallels.

Neuroscience has established that stress can interfere with the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, affecting our capacity for attention, flexible thinking and decision-making. When we perceive a threat, our responses can become more reactive, and accessing the kind of nuance that complex creative work demands may become considerably more difficult. Stephen Porges’ work on the vagus nerve adds another layer, describing a nervous system that is constantly scanning, well below conscious awareness, for cues of safety or danger, and that is far more willing to let us be open, playful and connected once it has concluded we are safe. [1]

Now, this doesn’t mean that creativity becomes biologically impossible under pressure. History is full of extraordinary art made under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. But it does raise questions about why we have become so comfortable romanticising the conditions that make creative work unnecessarily difficult.

In 2008, neuroscientists Charles Limb and Allen Braun examined the brain activity of six professional jazz pianists during improvisation. They observed that as the musicians moved from playing learned material into spontaneous improvisation, activity decreased in certain regions associated with deliberate self-monitoring, alongside changes in regions associated with internally generated behaviour. [2]

It’s a small study, and one worth interpreting with care, but anyone who’s experienced the peculiar sensation of finishing an improvised performance and wondering where on earth some of those ideas came from might recognise something familiar in those findings.

Kenny Werner had been exploring this territory for decades without an MRI scanner. In Effortless Mastery, his work invites musicians to approach their instruments from a place of greater awareness and less judgement, beginning with something as seemingly insignificant as playing a single note from what he calls “the space” and allowing it to be enough. It sounds deceptively simple. And yet, learning to play without constantly evaluating what the music says about us can be one of the most demanding aspects of developing as an artist.

Which brings me to a question I’ve increasingly brought into my own practice.

What if the quality of our attention deserves as much consideration as the quality of our output?

And what if some of the conditions we’re hoping our success will eventually provide are conditions we could begin cultivating while we’re working towards it?

The mountains we project

This is where I find Jung particularly interesting. In a letter written in 1916, he put it like this.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

C.G. Jung, letter, 1916

I’ve often wondered how much of what we pursue is genuinely connected to what matters to us, and how much is an attempt to resolve something about ourselves that we’ve yet to recognise. How many professional ambitions are shaped by an unexamined fear of irrelevance? How many collaborations are sustained by a fear of rejection? How often does our need to be understood turn into an exhausting attempt to control how other people perceive us? And how often do we reach for our instruments because something inside us genuinely wants to explore, rather than because we’ve become frightened of falling behind?

The pot of gold on the horizon can become a rather convenient place to deposit all the feelings we hope our future achievements might finally resolve.

My Himalayas may well have been precisely that.

A beautiful image of peace I could hold at arm’s length, safely far away from a twenty-something who still felt like a fraud in practically every room he walked into. And while I have no intention of diagnosing every aspiration as a psychological projection, I do wonder what might become possible if we got a little more curious about the needs hiding underneath our ambitions.

There’s another Eastern reference I’ve found increasingly meaningful. Many Vedic chants close with Om shanti shanti shanti, peace spoken three times. One traditional interpretation associates the repetitions with three sources of disturbance: those arising within ourselves, those coming from the world and other beings around us, and those originating in circumstances beyond our control.

I’ve always found that a remarkably useful distinction, because these are three rather different relationships to navigate. There are things we can practise changing within ourselves. There are circumstances and relationships we can influence through our choices, communication and boundaries. And there are aspects of life that will remain uncertain regardless of how much effort we invest in attempting to control them. Recognising which is which can save us an extraordinary amount of energy.

Which, if you think about it, is another form of musicianship: the ability to listen before responding. The composer Pauline Oliveros devoted much of her life to what she called Deep Listening, a practice of attention that reaches far beyond the simple act of hearing. Listening that deeply also means becoming willing to notice things that challenge our preferred interpretations.

Including our interpretations of ourselves.

What a plan might look like

So what might peace as a plan look like in an ordinary week?

Nothing particularly glamorous, I promise.

It might mean spending a few minutes breathing slowly before picking up your instrument, becoming familiar with the sensations of your body rather than immediately demanding something from it. Research into slow breathing has found measurable short-term effects on cardiovascular regulation, and there is growing evidence for its usefulness in managing stress, although the results vary and the longer-term picture remains more complicated. [3]

It might mean changing what counts as a successful practice session, so that instead of simply getting through the chart, you allow yourself the experience of playing a phrase without immediately judging it. It might mean recognising when the nervous anticipation before a performance has become entangled with the belief that your entire worth as a musician is about to be assessed, or noticing when the prospect of disappointing someone has already begun determining an answer you haven’t consciously considered.

A pianist doesn’t develop touch by reading an inspirational paragraph about the beauty of sound. We sit down, we listen, we experiment, and we notice what happens when we change the weight of an arm, the timing of a gesture or the quality of our attention. Then we return the following day. Why should our relationship with peace operate according to an entirely different set of principles?

These are small things. But small things, repeated consistently, are precisely how we develop technique.

And the work extends well beyond the practice room. It might mean becoming more deliberate about the professional environments we participate in, the collaborations we pursue and the standards we’re prepared to establish around our time, energy and relationships. It might mean learning to recognise the difference between a genuinely demanding opportunity and one that requires us to repeatedly compromise our dignity, or measuring a collaboration not only by its professional potential but by what it feels like to be in the room with the people involved. Whether we can disagree, whether we feel heard, whether we can make mistakes without our belonging suddenly being called into question.

Some relationships need difficult conversations, others need clearer boundaries, and a few may need to end.

Because peace has acquired something of a public relations problem. It’s frequently confused with passivity, conflict avoidance or a permanently agreeable disposition that makes everyone around us feel comfortable. And considering some of my experiences over the past few years, I have very little interest in subscribing to any definition that requires me to abandon my capacity for anger, disagreement or resistance. Some things deserve to be challenged, some conversations deserve to become uncomfortable, and some of the most meaningful changes in our lives begin with decisions that feel profoundly unsettling.

As Rabindranath Tagore wrote in Fruit-Gathering:

Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless in facing them.

Rabindranath Tagore, Fruit-Gathering

There is something in that distinction that moves me. Nina Simone, asked what freedom meant to her, answered with two words.

No fear.

Nina Simone

Neither of them was describing an escape.

They were describing the possibility of developing a greater sense of steadiness while remaining fully available to the difficulties of being alive.

Back to the red boxer shorts

I’ve often wondered why people don’t seem to take chances on one another the way my friend took a chance on me, and I suspect part of the answer has something to do with the amount of trust, security and emotional capacity available to us. When we’re constantly anticipating the next threat, rejection or setback, it can become considerably harder to remain curious about the possibilities another human being might represent.

My friend took a chance on a young musician. I took a chance on him. Neither of us could have known what that decision would eventually make possible.

Beyond the money, experience and professional infrastructure, something else emerged from those three months: a relationship built on trust, shared experience and a willingness to encounter another human being beyond the narrow boundaries of what they could immediately offer. It gave me a sense of belonging, a sense that there was room for me to grow into something I hadn’t yet become.

Which makes me wonder whether the peace we are looking for has a great deal to do with the quality of our relationships, including the one we have with ourselves.

And perhaps this is one of the more important things we can offer each other through mentorship, coaching, friendship and collaboration: the conditions in which we feel sufficiently safe to explore, make mistakes, disagree, question our assumptions and gradually recognise capacities we may not yet know we possess. None of us can promise another human being an uninterrupted experience of peace, any more than we can guarantee the success of an album, a business or a relationship.

But we can become more intentional about the conditions we create. About how we treat ourselves when things don’t go according to plan, the environments we choose to participate in, the amount of our lives we’re prepared to spend pursuing approval from people whose judgement we’ve never seriously examined, and whether the work we’re doing is bringing us into a more honest relationship with ourselves or gradually moving us further away.

I suppose that’s what I’m beginning to understand about peace as a plan. It asks us to become as curious about the conditions that allow us to feel at home in ourselves as we are about the conditions that allow us to perform at our best. It invites us to consider that some of the things we’re desperately hoping to receive from our achievements might already be available for us to begin cultivating, however imperfectly, right where we are.

Perhaps peace deserves considerably more than a place at the end of our plans.

Perhaps it deserves a place at the beginning.

As for that why I keep circling, Rilke once advised a young poet to be patient with what remained unresolved in his heart, and to try to

love the questions themselves.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

I’m learning to.

Maybe the answer was never going to arrive as a sentence I could finally write down and pack for the mountains. Maybe it arrives gradually, through the ordinary decisions we make about how to spend our days, the people we share them with and the relationships we cultivate with the work that gives our lives meaning.

The Himalayas will still be standing when I’m ready.

I suspect I’ll recognise them better for having found a little of what I was looking for here first.