To Thine Own Self be True

By freddielaraThoughts

To Thine Own Self be True

There is a beautiful saying in Buddhism, “Buddhism is not the study of Buddhism,
it is the study of oneself”. I wish I could tell you where that came from, but
I’m not sure. What I do know is that for me, acting has become the same thing.

Acting has very gently, and sometimes not so very gently helped me to look at
places in myself that perhaps were not pleasant to look at. It has given me
permission to sit with some of my behavior and feelings and reactivity that I
would perhaps not had had the courage to look at we’re it not clothed in the
guise of a character.

But look at those things I have. I have had to sit with the fact that some of
the more devastating and destructive behaviors live in me in the same way that
they live in everyone.

Some people shy away from going through the discomfort of realizing that we are
all capable of being dishonest, manipulative, angry, fearful etc.. But that is
not our path as actors. We must realize that we are just as capable of every
human emotion and behavior as anyone else. And it is only when we come to terms
with this fact and take responsibility for it that we can allow ourselves to “go
there”.

Sometimes (over and over again) we have to give ourselves permission to feel and
behave in ways that wouldn’t serve us in everyday life. But to have access to
our instrument we may have to again and again practice stretching ourselves to
places that may seem painful and destructive. I can’t imagine it was a walk in
the park for Tracy Letts to win the Tony award this past season for “who’s
afraid of Virginia Wolf”. But win it he did for having the courage to take a
look at these things in himself and then to put them on display for the whole
world to see.

Because it does take courage to look at these things in ourselves over and over
again. It does take courage to walk through them onstage in front of everyone.
It does take huge amounts of strength not implode or explode into a million
little pieces of self destructive glass.

But we do do it, and why? We do it because our craft dictates we live
truthfully under imaginary circumstances so that we can illuminate humanity. So
that others can see the human condition on display and perhaps allow a healing
of their own wounds to take place, or perhaps they will have a shift in
perception from their own past and get an ah ha moment that will awaken them in
some small way. We do it to engage and tell a story that perhaps may evolve us
to a higher and better way of seeing and behaving, or maybe just to warn us. We
do it to mirror back to the audience how ridiculous and harmful and loving and
strong we can be in the face of huge adversity, and perhaps give them a little
bit of hope in the face of their own adversity.

I like to say in my class that we are like Columbus. We step out of the small
box of human experience which is called normal, we step out into the nether
regions of human behavior and we come back to share our discovered America’s,
and by doing this we expand the consciousness of the entire. We get healing and
so do they because we are one with them.

And as long as we don’t identify as our wound, as long as we can step in and out
without harming ourselves in the process we can be a useful tool for the
universe to do this very thing over and over again through many different
lives. We become like the Greeks, the bringers of a whole new way of
understanding ourselves and others, and a whole new expanded way of being and
relating.

So as scary as it may be to step out on that limb, as frightening as it seems to
get on that ship and sail to new lands, as horrifying as it may seem to look at
the darkest, deepest places in your self, fear not, on the other side is a
whole new world.