Personal journey • Social media • Hand dystonia recovery ft. Michelle Lau

It prevents us from playing technically free. Poor practice habits, hello, everyone can relate. And technique and poor mindset. Yeah, and that's why I feel like I also relate to you because for me I discovered all the physical illnesses are coming from the situation when our emotions, our physical movements are not aligned with our mindset, which is not aligned with what is written in the score. So I would really like to touch on that. My teachers, peers, and doctors back you know because it was so shameful, it's even strange that in nowadays nothing is shameful I think, but just admit that you struggle, it's horrible. So I felt hopeless, alone, and devastated.

I guess we could start from the very beginning. Let's talk about the injury, about it being something that came from a combination of a lot of things. I think for a lot of musicians too, your injury comes from all combinations of things, it's not usually one. Western medicine, although it's gotten better and I'm not a doctor just pointing that out, but at least with my experience in the things that I've been told, there's a little bit of a segmentation between the mind and the body. Oftentimes we just treat the body and that's not going to work because your mind and body are connected. So for example, if you're feeling sad, you're going to feel a little bit slower, heavier with your body. And then if you're trying to power through learning while your body is not willing to do that, then you're just working against yourself. But anyway, I'm going to go backwards now. I had poor technique because my musical upbringing didn't set me up for the... For example, I remember when I went to my professor at university at conservatory, there was a moment when I wanted to figure out the right fingering, how to find the right fingering. And the response was, 'Well, your previous teacher should have taught you at school how to do that. That's a different level, we're not talking about fingering here, we're talking about higher material and realm.' So it's like someone putting the burden on someone else's shoulders but no one actually teaches. And then I think if you're a teacher, there is a certain responsibility to meet your student at the level that they are at. I want to do that, but in order for me to access that, to be there with you, I need to talk about this fingering. So let's spend two minutes literally on this fingering and we'll meet each other up there. But it's like, 'No, you figure that out,' and the student's like, 'Well, I don't know how, that's why I'm here.' Isn't it related to the main problem in teaching? Most of the time, in between student and teacher, there is a relationship where the teacher treats a student as 'you are here for me,' not 'I am a teacher for you to help.' You're here for me to bring my status higher. Not every student, not every teacher of course, but usually in very prestigious institutions, the attitude about teaching is to get the best students to let them win competitions so that could bring the teacher's status higher. And this is where this whole wrong mentality starts. It's like I'm not here to help you, you are here for me to use you and see how good you are as a student so you could raise my reputation. That happens a lot still, and it's really unfortunate that people get pulled into another person's ego trip. I'll leave it there, you guys can digest that. But going back to the whole technique thing, I didn't have the foundation for it. So the first two years, I was... weight and you know, you'll demonstrate and then you'll copy, but for me at least it wasn't enough. And to me, arm weight thing was a very abstract thing. And from there, I did not really have lessons. From my memory, this is a bit of a traumatic experience so it's a little bit of a blur, but I didn't really have lessons throughout the majority of my undergrad in the sense that yes, I had scheduled hours, but most of the time in that lesson we were talking about things that were unrelated to music. Or just from what I remember, that I wanted to achieve. I am a type of person that won't let things get in my way, so I was like, 'Okay, well if you're not going to really be what I need right now, at least I'm going to have lessons to perform or whatever. I'm going to go and take on that load on my own. I'm going to go in and find resources to help me figure out what this arm weight technique and stuff is.' And as a student, I didn't exactly have money to find another teacher, so books, other performers, other students, and stuff were my teachers, and a lot of personal self-discovery. So that was a majority of my undergrad. And then I also just didn't click with my teachers, and I'm sure my teachers did the best they could have with the tools that they had. Then as a pianist, you're quite isolated. You're in your practice room for x amount of hours drilling certain passages. And it was difficult for me to find people to relate to and to be able to speak about this, like, 'Hey, I'm having trouble with this passage, I don't know what to do,' because I had done so much self-analysis and self-exploration on all levels that when I went to a peer, they were just starting their journey with me, whereas I've already started at that point, I'm way beyond that. So the advice that they gave me I already tried and wrestled with, and either it... me, so that's weighing down the body. Technique is not where I want it to be, so that's also another thing that conflicts. So low self-esteem, all that stuff. Lovely stuff. And then you go and you practice and you're like, 'I gotta get these octave passages,' and so your body is not only trying to physically figure out its own mechanism, it's like, 'Oh, now I have this emotional barrier I gotta bust through too.' So you can see that the body and the mind are just fighting. And then at one point, I got the opportunity to study with a professor in France, so I had to get an entire program ready when I was already mildly injured by that point over the summer, because the program was during the summer. And I was overusing myself just to prepare for the summer, and then on top of that, I had that pressure of like, 'I've got three recitals coming up as well,' and there's no one out there at that time for me that could help me have the mindset of how to prepare for this workload. I was still stuck in that mindset of everything's on you, practice, practice, practice, you're not doing well enough, just practice more, because that's the advice we're given. 'Don't know how to do octaves? Your hands are too small? Too bad, just practice more.' And like, no, that doesn't help. Anyways, so I went to the summer camp thing or summer session. Worst session of my life. Just the whole environment was not a learning environment. The professor was not really that... know weight to it. Yeah, it's like I'm paying for my own torture. That's the other thing, because then you're like, 'Well, I'm self-inflicting this pain,' and you are very aware of that, but at the same time you feel stuck. And you know there's also that artist thing where like, 'Oh, you suffer for your art so you can make art.' So it's like, is this healthy suffering or not? But then I've also got this other stuff to deal with, so I might just not deal with this right now. I deal with other more manageable things that I think I can manage. So yeah, got injured. Went to that summer because of that experience, you got really pain in your hands. Yeah, I think I already had stuff creeping in the background, but that was the one that... I think he did open a new door for me about that mind-body connection and the facilities that were out there for musicians that are so needed. And so I opened a new door to my performance psychology and all that other stuff. And so then my healing journey started really then, and my insight and looking into and researching more about technique and the mind-body connection, the psychology behind learning and using your body and art and thinking like an athlete in that way, was something that got me out of my rut. I call it a rut, but it was like a really good six years. But yeah, that's my long story.

This was university, so... like tendinitis and not toxic, thoracic outlet syndrome.

Thoracic syndrome. So your thoracic, so your chest area, your outlet is basically... you know how your collarbone here, right? And in your collarbone, it's where your whole arm attaches and all the nerves from your spine actually feed under that collarbone into your arm. So if your shoulders are always tight or they're always depressed and your collarbone and your muscles are depressing on the nerves, that's why you might get what you think is pain here, it's actually in your neck or your back, interesting, because of the nerve connections here. So basically, I'm not saying that my medical professionals were untrained, but when it becomes something so general and they don't know what it... I would say like 90% mental, and it was my body telling me, 'Hey, what you're doing is not working, and if you're not listening to me, I'm going to stop you from playing.' So yeah, what's wrong? So when I started figuring out the emotional, the mental stuff, then all that went away.

My way out of that, or getting out of the tendonitis feelings and inflammation and all that stuff, over the six years. But I guess if I was to put down a breakthrough moment, I would say when I met that doctor for musicians and he talked about the mind-body connection, and I was like, 'Okay, I should probably look into that a little bit more.' And that would probably be the day that I was like, 'Okay, we should probably not just treat the physical ailments but also the mental ones.'

I would invite them to explore, whenever they're practicing or in their daily life, or... talk, happiness, just note what thoughts, how they affect your body and also vice versa. If you are tense, is there a thought that comes up? Because they feed back and forth to each other, they do talk to each other in that way. So for example, let's say I'm practicing a passage with octaves, and I know that I'm not good at this octave passage. It stresses me out, I feel shame, I feel anxiety, I feel low self-esteem. How is that physically expressing itself as I'm doing this before I even enter that passage? Because it'll start to creep in the moment you get that thought. And you might notice, 'Oh, when I'm feeling anxious or I'm feeling stressed, me personally, sometimes I hold stress in my...' exactly. Like if the shoulders lock, then I can see why a doctor might diagnose me with TOS because the shoulders are impinging on those nerves, and that's probably part of it too. But yeah, I would advise them to really think about what the thoughts are going on in your head, how that affects the body, and record or set a mirror up. That's what really helped me, because it's one thing to really see at least as a pianist what your hands look like, but it's another thing to go and look back at your video and listen not only to your sound but listen to your body and listen to the emotions. Like you might not know when you do octaves that you do a funny thing with your elbow. Know you just set it up easy, yes, amazing. Exactly. So that would be my invitation for people who are going through any injuries to also check out your mind-body connection and your thoughts.

I would say that the way I found, you know, watching performers was, or found information from watching performers, was that I learned that in the same way you were talking about, like, 'Oh, just do rotation like this and make sure things were relaxed,' was not enough for me. Especially when I started finding about the mind-body connection. And I'm also a very analytical person, and I'm the type of person that likes to get down to the root of issues. Like, if you change your thoughts, it has the most profound effect across the board that you could never do on a very surface level micromanaging way. You have to change the... mind. Yeah. And then I thought, 'Okay, I have to, when I see a professional play, there is one level to say, 'Ah, they use the fingering 3-4-5 because it's better for this passage,' or 'They are using their wrist here and I notice that the sound decays a little bit better.' That's kind of like saying, 'I have a headache, here's some Advil.' You're not really treating the issue, which might be distress or whatever, and you need to go deal with that. So I thought, 'Okay, it's great I know the physical stuff, but why are they doing that? How are they doing that? What makes them think that 3-4-5 was a better idea than what? What makes them think that they're doing this?' Because I'm pretty sure they're not necessarily aware that they're doing... to express that physically, whatever reason doesn't matter, as long as you try to figure out why are they thinking the way that they're thinking. And so the only way that I could figure that out without having the chance of actually asking them, because partly they might not even know why they're doing that, I ended up really observing everything. When I watch someone play, I really try to figure out what the thought and the energy and the emotions and what's going on in the piece, how are they all connected. And I can't really explain it clearly enough without it sounding like some esoteric voodoo magic, but it comes through your intuition. Intuition is a big part of research. I just watch and I just open up my brain and I let everything connect the way it... I had the same experience. The way I found about internal singing, and of course we all heard about Rubinstein saying, 'Sing, sing, sing,' and every teacher, you watch master classes long and it's basically... and so you understand they are singing, Glenn Gould, right? But again, why? What's behind that? And how exactly? That's another big question, because just saying 'singing' is very abstract. And so in my class, there was this girl and we met at home and she played Rachmaninoff... and what was she doing? Like this, like... and I asked her, 'Why are you doing this?' And she said, 'I don't know how to stop it, I wish I don't.' So she wasn't aware why, but I wanted to know why. And that's a little example, right? Like what you're saying. And sometimes, in many cases, my students sometimes they go and they listen to good performances, it's what you're about to say and what you were saying, and they say, 'Yeah, I saw that this pianist was doing this movement with this...' See, it's not exactly what's inside, you know? Like in the world, just the same, there's a lot of delusional things you think, 'Oh, that person is doing this,' but actually they're doing the opposite things. So yeah, that's another reason why just imitating physical motions and lines and movements is the wrong way to go. You need to go to why, you need to go to where does it come from.

Yeah, yeah. To the quantity, to the metrics and analytics that are given can be a very slippery slope. Why? Because humans are not numbers. Your worth is not something that can be quantitated. But I think, especially for the younger generation where they're literally been growing up in an environment where the number of likes, the number of views, the number of comments you get is a social badge. 'Oh, I have 20,000 followers,' and then everyone in your circle's like, 'Wow, you got 20,000 followers, you must be basically famous in their world.' So there's a... know with the way that we are trained, our worth is sometimes equated to our art and how good of a quality it is. And what better metric of seeing how good your music is by the number of views you get? 'Yeah, I managed to reach out to these people, I get so many of these likes and stuff.' And it can be a very slippery slope to go down. Or you put your whole self into your art and you already become one, but you kind of need a division between that for health's sake. And you put all this work on the internet and you get zero views or very limited views, where someone else does something very silly and they get like a million views, and you're like, 'What am I doing wrong? What are they doing right?' When at the end of the day, longer, that's really it. It's like a sweatshop essentially. You have to be really careful about detaching yourself from those metrics and know what it is that you want when you're using social media. What do you want? What do I want for social media? What's your reason? Why do you use this film? There's a bunch of reasons. First reason is it's my playground to explore who I am as quickly as I can, and to be able to find my community or my tribe so to speak with who I am, and to explore that and just to meet like-minded individuals. The other thing is just to kind of... that's social. Going to manifest itself and the knowledge that I have to connect with people who have also or have been in a similar place with me or are going through that similar place. I want to try to provide them with at least the knowledge that I've been able to gather so that they don't have to go through what I went through, because I didn't have this and boy did it suck. So if I can help someone else not go through that, that's great. So yes, I do hope to have a lot of followers and to reach a lot of people, but it's not because I want to add some nice seasoning to my ego or any of that sort. It's just I know that if I can have 20,000 followers or 50,000 followers or whatever, it means that I'm able to reach a wider crowd and I can spread whatever... experience.

Yeah, I mean we are human and we have limits. Social media is both a blessing and a curse. It does not have limits in the sense of how many people you can connect with in a way. You can connect with anyone all over the world, and if you happen to go viral, your phone's going to heat up with all that stuff. And we're human. At some point, I love how you mentioned the idea of you're going to reach a certain number where it doesn't mean anything anymore because the mind just literally cannot fathom 20 years of abusing my video. It's just... and I'm not coming from a place of ego where it's like, 'I got 20,000 views or whatever,' but it's just too much and the brain just turns... with happiness and just start with where you're at. And if that's your phone on your piano, that's great. That's where you want to start. That's where you start exploring, like, 'Oh, this is actually going to work out for me.' And this whole journey is, to me anyways, and how I use social media is really just self-exploration. It'll come a time where you're like, 'Oh, I'm starting to get more views and I do want to make my video quality a little better. Maybe I'll get a tripod.' Think of a tripod. And it's this slow growth that I think also helps people prepare themselves for that bigger boom that happens if they start to grow and want to go in that direction, because you need to build up that skin of resilience and also knowing what you want out of social media and all that stuff has to come very slowly. Because if you start one day... but then after that, you have not been equipped enough to handle that, and it can go down a very slippery slope. So for anyone starting with social media, just start with where you're at with what you have and just have fun. Because at the end of the day, even if you're trying to change yourself a little bit to be the next real or to be the next person, you're going to wind up at that place where you get a hundred thousand likes, a hundred thousand views or whatever, where they won't mean anything. And then you're going to realize, 'Oh wow, I just made an image of myself that isn't myself, that can't live up to this, and I want to go back to who I was.' But now you've got a hundred thousand people who didn't know who you were... easier said than done, I totally know. But it's the ego.

That again. I want that scoop of ice cream again and again, and then you get sick of it. And now you can wind up in that mental space where it's like, 'Sick of ice cream? Why am I sick of ice cream? This can't be happening.' Well, okay, go try some popsicles, go try a dumpling, go try something else. And it's also going to be your next, 'Oh wow, this dumpling's amazing, I want to have 20 of these.' And to me, that's healthy because you get tired of something and your creativity, whatever, is just getting bored. Okay, find something else. And that's how you start to grow as a person and you learn about yourself and you learn about your skills, or just be at the edge of your personality and you come out a little more. You just need to expand. You follow, you will go find those vegetables. There's going to be people who are like, 'I don't want vegetables.' Fine, you can leave, go find someone else. Stay with your steak. And when I'm in vegetable land, I'm going to find more vegetable people and we're going to have a happy place. Exactly. And if you approach life and your social media with that abundance mindset and just growth and your personal growth, unless you wind yourself up in a mental toxic hellhole, you're going to be a happy person. Oh gosh, yes, yes, yes. But yeah, it can be very dangerous though, so it's good that you have the correct mindset from the beginning. But again, sometimes maybe you should go through all this pain to actually... I think there's this thing about maybe in the way that language forms or the cultural mindsets that we're in, where we have positive and negative emotions. It's positive to be happy, it's negative to be sad. But realistically, there's nothing bad or good about these emotions. They're just emotions, and they're there to be your compass to navigate. So make friends with those negative emotions because they're going to tell you something. Let's say you're having that ice cream and you start to feel sad, and then you're like, 'Why am I feeling sad? This really sucks.' No, it's telling you that it's not working here. It's your friend and say, 'Hey, this ain't working. Okay, let's go and see what will be...' know your limit and how much, know when enough is enough.

Whatever you're willing to go to to reenact. Yeah, you know what is very interesting is that I try to share sometimes in certain forums, but again forums are very toxic in my opinion, and no one believed me. They were like, 'There's no way you're playing this way if you had focal dystonia for seven years.' And I was like, 'What can I do? I have two certificates to show you that I took from playing right now and did best clinics.' Yeah, exactly. I mean, and also like people talk about focal dystonia... did you feel when you got cancer? And she was like, 'Well, you know, I've been working in that restaurant all my life, and then the day I actually finally quit and I always decided to retire and have my horse and have a good time, I realized I have cancer.' And my attitude was like, 'This is so annoying, it's going to take some time before I can get to my horse again.' So that attitude, and then she was just lying down and she didn't really take any medicine. She was just imagining this light going through her body again, working mentally through it. And so it's the same thing. Focal dystonia, you know, no, it's just a little bump. And so for me, obviously I realized it was 100% connected mentally. But of course there was a physical motion, but again physical comes from mental, so let's say it's 100%. But it was definitely... so for those who struggle with focal dystonia, for me the answer was to stop playing classical music, because association with tension. Remove myself from a stressful, dangerous, anxious situation. It could be education, it could be your partnership, anything. It could be a career as well that could give you some pressure. And... good, you know. And he healed my hands. I prayed a lot. I prayed with a Bible study group for maybe one year. It was the first time I actually could open up. What you were saying, it was so shameful to talk about this, and here I am in a Bible study group where no one is a classical pianist and everyone is there to pray for you. And I'm like, 'What do you... what would you like us to pray for?' Just bursting in tears, I was like, 'I cannot play.' And so we're holding hands in the circle and they're all praying for me. There's so much gratitude in this, there's so much love in that, there is so much power in this. And then I was going to church and I was singing and I was going to this African-American church and I was... so like everything was just beautiful. So that made me, and every time I would come to the piano, I would open up, I would thank God for letting me play maybe five minutes, and I would start playing. And I started playing Disney songs, 'I Can Show You the World,' I started playing Christian songs, very beautiful stuff, like anime. There's so much beautiful music to play rather than apart from classical. And then I started playing more and more and more, and then I was able to start my YouTube channel. And the first thing that I uploaded was freshly learned First Etude by Chopin. The next one was Number Four. And so the faith and prayer and knowing that I will heal plays probably the biggest part in the healing process, apart from removing yourself from a bad environment and putting yourself in a relaxed environment as you can. Obviously, my stuff is happening, but there's so much beautiful stuff happening as well in the world. And the third thing was, and that came to me in my dream, that I was holding too much tension still when I was playing. And I learned how to play the piano with passive hands. So like... nothing. There will be pressure, it's just the question of where does it come from. Does it come from holding to the keyboard, from your anxiety like you said, or from clinging fingertips? Passive hand, aligning your body to what is written in the music and what you imagine in your mind, and playing with the weight of your body. I always say you don't play with your fingers, you play with your body, you play with the free energy in your body. So that last component of, 'Oh, that's how it feels like to play with passive hands, I never knew that,' and it all kind of came together. And so I still cannot write by hand, so if I... together, you know. But I just didn't go because I couldn't write and I couldn't type. Now I can type, it's fine, I can type. But again, I had to learn how to gently touch the keyboard. You know, you watch those ASMR videos when they gently touch the keyboard and you do the same. ASMR channel, yeah, ASMR about how to touch the key with love, and whisper. So that was it. But of course, the biggest part was, and that's already, you know, it was happening but I was already halfway through my teaching of how to play piano well when I found that everything comes from the mind and from free energy of your... concert exam. I never told it to my teacher Pablo Norsian. If you watch this, please know that when we were playing the Second Concerto by Rachmaninoff, and I didn't tell him I had focal dystonia here, so he was considering me to be a lazy student. And sometimes I was coming once, maybe twice in a month, maybe even once in two months, and he'll be like, 'Well, if you don't want to study with me, out.' And I still couldn't tell him I didn't come because I couldn't play. It was so shameful, painful as well, and it shouldn't be shameful and playful. You... with him, the answer would be, 'Well, we need to learn how to play better. It comes because you cannot play well, it's because you didn't practice well.' And that would be the answer. And it's like, 'Don't blame me enough for blaming me, please.' Anyways, so what happened is that I had to take a gap year in which I didn't practice, didn't touch piano at all. And then I knew that the Second Concerto by Rachmaninoff was coming, but I also needed to prepare Bach and a classical sonata, which I've done right before. And I thought, 'Okay, now concerto and my focal dystonia crept in, so I couldn't even type. I type with the phone with the... forest, lots of nature. There's 300 people in the village, there's nice traditional music outside the church, and there's a dog that I love, a partner that I love, people who treat me with love. And there are only very few students that I have. I had to let go of students that would give me any anxiety. I only have students who appreciate so much what I give, who are giving me as much as I give them. And it's a very little amount of students. And I play only the music I want to play, only when I want to play. Peace and love. That's another thing that you should cultivate if you have focal dystonia. You're not just anything in life really, I mean with focal dystonia too. But yeah, I can only wish to everybody in this world that you'll be able to find that safe, secure place full of love and light, because that's where you're really going to bloom. But again, like we talked about this last session, it comes to you when you want it, because maybe you don't want it. Maybe part of you doesn't want it. But again, you have to just surrender that. 'Okay, that's this is the way.' Yeah, yeah. There will always be an emotion usually... and it's hard to do, but I promise you it gets easier the more you do it.

Yes, very recently. Maybe I would say like last year was probably the most recent thing. I'm still choosing, I'm still working the muscle of choosing love over fear every day as I heal from what happened last year. I would say my piano journey is the same way too. Part of the healing, I didn't say I just get like a huge rundown of it, but there's more. But part of it in the piano journey was the fight of if I'm going to hear or if I'm going to find something on the other end, I'm going to have to let go of piano and classical music for a little bit, and I have to leave this world. And it's the surrendering of this love for it. And then it almost seems crazy because I love this so much, I'm working so hard for it, and there's that gripping of holding on that causes all this stuff. It's like, 'Why would I want to let go of something that I love so much and surrender to that?' Because I don't know if I'm ever going to come back to it, or if I'm going to come back to loving it the same way if at all. And it's very scary. In my case, it came back, so very good chance it came back to you. But it's that surrender conversation of, 'What do you want? If I want to come back to it, the path will be there.' Really nothing to fear.

No, you're doing right. Well done, well done. Thank you, thank you. I mean, it's a painful process, but it'll be brighter on the other side. Have faith, have faith, pray to Jesus. It's a good day to do it.