A Note From Aja: The One to Listen to Before You Walk on Stage

Let me tell you about the track I made for the moments when your heart starts to beat a little faster than it should.

The presentation at work, the audition, the concert, the meeting where you have to say the thing out loud in front of people who matter.

I know that feeling very well.

I have stood in the wings of concert halls with cold hands and a racing pulse more times than I can count, and I built this meditation because I wished someone had handed it to me back then.

Scarborough Fair, first

It opens with Scarborough Fair, an old folk tune that most of us know without quite remembering how we learned it. There is something about that melody that immediately slows the room down. It is ancient and simple and a little melancholic, and it asks nothing of you except to listen.

I chose it deliberately to set the tone, because when you are nervous the first thing you need is not advice. It is a sound that tells your body it is allowed to soften. From there I take you into a fourteen-minute meditation that gently lowers your brain frequencies, out of that sharp, watchful state where anxiety lives, and into a calmer, more spacious place where you can actually think, breathe, and remember who you are and why you are doing this at all.

A bonus, once the meditation is finished

Once the meditation itself is finished, there is a bonus. I recorded John Dowland's Lachrimae Antiquae Novae with all the voices on my violin, and put a big, meditative church acoustic on top of it, right at the end, as a gift for you.

If you decide to drift off to sleep once the hypnotherapy is done, this part is made for exactly that. Dowland wrote music about tears and sorrow that somehow makes you feel more whole rather than more sad, and in this space we have together, I hope it feels like being held. That is the intention. You can let it play as you sit with your eyes still closed, or let it carry you back into the world at whatever pace you choose.

Not a track you listen to once

Here is what I really want you to know about this one. It is not a track you listen to once and file away.

It is meant to be repeated, again and again, until it becomes a place your nervous system recognises.

Wherever your stage is

Put it on when you commute to work in the morning. Put it on with your headphones in the tram on the way to your presentation, or backstage in the dressing room before a concert, or in the car park outside the office before the big meeting. It fits just as naturally in a corner of an open-plan office as it does in a concert hall or a rehearsal room, because performance anxiety does not care what your stage looks like, and neither does this meditation.

Why repetition works

The reason repetition matters is the same reason a musician practices a passage until the fingers and the mind know it on their own. Every time you listen, your body learns a little more quickly how to drop into that calm, and the melodies begin to act like a signal.

After a while, just hearing the first few notes of Scarborough Fair will start to bring your shoulders down, and by the time you reach the moment you were nervous about, you arrive there with a mind that is clear and a breath that is steady.

It is my index fund principle again. Small deposits, made regularly, that grow into something you can lean on when it counts.

Before you go on

So this is my suggestion. Store the audio file somewhere easy to access, listen to it once tonight when there is nothing at stake, and then make it your companion for every day when there is something at stake.

Let me do the work with you. Let the church acoustic hold you for a few minutes. And walk into that room, or onto that stage, knowing you have done tons of practising (part of the prep, but necessary too), and knowing that the calm you needed was inside you the whole time. You simply gave it a way to wake up.

Break a leg. I mean it. Not literally, of course!

Aja