Wisdom from The Inner Game Of Music

I’ve been reading Barry Green & W. Timothy Gallwey’s book The Inner Game Of Music to learn how to calm my nerves onstage for my future career as a comedian/musician. There’s a lot of wisdom in the book about dealing with anxiety and staying present under pressure, and I thought this paragraph was particularly pertinent to recovery from CFS:

When we realise that what at first looks like a stressful or negative experience can be understood as a ‘dissonance’ that can lead to resolution, we can begin to accept the stressful moments and flow with them instead of resisting them. The times that we look back on with the greatest pleasure are often those when we experienced a full measure of obstacles and stresses and were able to bring them to a harmonious resolution. Our goal is to be able to ‘experience our experience’ fully, without classifying it as either bad or good.

Well I don’t know about looking back “with the greatest of pleasure”, but apart from that I think he’s onto something.