Every morning I awaken at 5:00 am to meditate while listening to my Kabbalah lectures and doing yoga. Yesterday’s lecture was all about how
being merely “present for your life” and “going through the motions” is never enough. Kabbalah teaches us that for every single moment of every day, there is a challenge and there is an opportunity to give 110% positive energy to that challenge and that moment.
This can be explained in terms of the physical world for a better understanding as well: Going to the gym, for example, is not about just entering the building. Being merely present and getting yourself there will not improve your body at all. It’s about what you do while you are there. How much are you challenging yourself? How much are you giving 110%?
However much you challenge and however much you give, that’s how much you’re going to grow.So early yesterday morning, I made a vow that I was going to live every moment of this particular day in constant search for what the challenge is, promising myself that I would give beyond my everything to it.
It was delightfully easier than I had imagined! Around Noon, your mind is already in that head space and begins to sort of drive itself on auto-pilot. I got so much accomplished and felt so much connection and felt high all day long!
But things started to change around 8:00 pm when I went to acting class. I have been studying with
Bobbie Chance since I was 19 years old. You may have seen her on
E!’s “Fight for Fame” or the
WB show, “The Starlet.” She’s a brilliant and very unconventional acting coach who has worked with everyone from Drew Barrymore and Anthony Hopkins to Jack Nicholson and Richard Dreyfuss. It is a very elite class with a very elite group of students and I take a lot of pride in the fact that I have always been the teacher’s pet. I’m the one she has taken under her wing and sometimes I think she believes in me almost as much as her own children. She usually gives me very similar roles; insane, off the wall characters in crazy comedies, and I know every time I step on that stage, she is going laugh her ass off, clutch her heart and call me the most brilliant actor in the class.
But tonight, Bobbie decided to go a completely different direction and gave me a dramatic scene in which I was to portray a boy who is being beaten daily by his father and is confiding in his brother about it for the first time. He can no longer take the abuse. He can’t forgive his father. He’s wading it insurmountable pain.
I couldn’t see the role to save my life.
I gave 110% to it, working so hard on the scene for hours, and no matter how much I tried, I just couldn’t get to that place of pain. Sure, I could “act” it and it would’ve been fine for any movie of the week, but that’s not nearly good enough for Bobbie’s standards or mine for that matter. I didn’t feel it. It wasn’t organic. I wasn’t able to completely lose myself in that pain and in that moment.
When I was 19 and began studying with Bobbie, it opened me up to an entirely new world of expression. Back then, there was plenty of pain and misery to pull from. Thanks to her classes, I was able to take down my walls, not just on stage but in my personal life too, saying whatever popped into my head, being a raw nerve and able to access the gamut of emotions that had all been lurking right there under the surface until then.
Since those days, however, I’ve worked through a lot of the darker emotions that were consuming my life. And when I say worked through, I mean really worked through. They’re not just hiding somewhere. There’s not a wall up. They’re just gone. I’m not sure how to find them. It had been so long since I’d felt the kind of pain that this poor boy must have been going through, I couldn’t remember how to access it because it was no longer right beneath the surface.
And it was at this moment that I suddenly realized: This is a whole new level for me in the study of the craft. I should be able to get to the emotion without it being right there on the surface. I should be able to be have the best day of my life and feel pain and misery when someone yells, “ACTION!” Acting is not just about being able to get to emotions that happen to be close to your heart. It’s about being able to get to any emotion at any time, even if it has nothing to do with your life at that moment. For instance, Anthony Hopkins and Kevin Spacey have given award-winning performances coming from a place of truth portraying the most vile of cannibals and mass murderers -- but I seriously doubt that those characters were already right there on the surface for them.
My job as an actor is to be open enough to all of my emotions that I can let the spirit of a character breathe life through them, so that for those few moments it becomes a living and breathing thing instead of words on a piece of paper and so that in those moments, it might affect the audience.
And I failed at that duty last night.
I didn’t meet the “challenge” for the first time all day. I went home, beating myself up in the car, incredibly jaded and disappointed in myself.
The next morning (this morning), I awakened at 5:00 am again for my usual studies and chose one of the 72 Names of God to meditate upon, scanning the Hebrew letters. The one I chose for today means No Fear. I opened up “The 72 Names of God: Technology for the Soul - Meditation Book,” and the opening lines of the meditation for this particular sequence of letters was: “I have been frozen and become enslaved by [enter your fears here].”
And I paused and asked myself, what have I been frozen by? How did I become enslaved in that moment yesterday? And as I was scanning the letters, the truth hit me like a rush of light. I picked up my notebook and began scribbling messages down as fast as they were popping into my head: I have been frozen and become enslaved by… the desire to be perfectly amazing at everything I do, all of the time. As well, as my own disappointment in myself when this is not achieved! But this is not growth.
Falling on your ass, failing, has to be the best part IF you know you’re going to grow from it. Last night, I could’ve done another perfectly amazing scene with Bobbie calling me a comic genius, but what good would that have done me? How would I have grown from that? Remember what the day was supposed to be about? How much I am “challenging” myself!
Even when we make mistakes, when we fail, even those moments are divine and full of inspiration and light. If we subscribe to the theory that there is a reason for everything, we must always remember that there is light to be found hiding in the darkest of corners. The “challenge” of these corners, of these moments, sometimes is not to be perfect, but to fail, learn the lesson and move on. To be able to say, “It’s for the good. I’ll deal with the details, I’ll learn the lesson. But I know that The Creator, The Light, God, Positive Energy, whatever you want to call it -- is in the business.”
It is when you harp on yourself that you fall into the darkness of that moment instead of lifting yourself out of it with light. Every failure, every rejection that we experience is just a gateway to that darkness. It’s all a test. It’s all a challenge to be able to say, “I will learn the lesson that is meant to be learned from this and grow from it, knowing with absolute certainty that better things are now on the way now because of I am growing.”
You have to learn to crawl before you can walk. You’ve got to lose to know how to win. And just as I jotted those words down in my notebook, I hear the new Madonna album I was playing in the background and she sings: “If it’s bitter at the start, then it’s sweeter in the end.”
It was a beautiful moment and an awesome revelation.
So please, when you’re in a state like I was last night, don’t fall into the darkness. Looking back, I see I should’ve been overwhelmed with joy and light, knowing that I was entering a new level in my acting studies! That’s so exciting! It’s been so long since that has happened! That’s an amazing gift and in order to get to that understanding of the new work I have to do, I had to fall on my ass.
This can relate to so many levels of my life though, not just acting.
I need to embrace all of my imperfections more and accept that they are the things that I can learn from and ultimately, from them, I will grow. P.S.: I find it fascinating that all of this came to me while meditating on the Hebrew letters. Kabbalists believe that since it was the original alphabet and language of the Bible, there is a great deal of energy in them, even if you don’t understand what you are reading. My boyfriend bought me the entire Zohar for Christmas and supposedly, when you scan the Hebrew letters and read the English translation, you create a shield so that no negative forces can possibly touch you during the moment that you’re scanning them. Honestly, I was still kind of skeptical on the whole thing until today. The fact that this revelation came to me at a moment when I was meditating on the letters makes perfect sense now in accordance with what they say. It’s like when I was scanning, something washed away the dirt and grime on the window pane and I was able to see through it with complete clarity. I was able to see the truth of what had happened yesterday instead of the illusion.
L,
J.
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