Riding the Wave of Emotion in Life and in Acting + Water Mediation

Our emotions come with these human bodies. No matter how self-aware you are, you will still feel the waves of fear, anger, anxiety...it is inevitable. I'm sure even the Dali Lama feels these emotions, he has just done so much work on himself he can manage his emotions in an enlightened way. We are all capable of learning these skills.

I believe true inner strength comes from knowing when you are having an intense emotion, being able to express/experience it in a healthy way and then let it go. I've found that often times when I feel a strong pang of anger or stress if I can manage to allow it to exist within me and breathe through it for a few minutes...it dissipates. It usually only lasts for a few minutes if I allow it to be there and keep breathing.

If I struggle with it, try to fight it off...I can find myself caught up in anxiety for hours....or unconsciously reaching for something outside of me to NUMB the uncomfortable experience of FEELING. If you start to pay more attention to your emotional states and the things that you do in response to them...you may start to realize...oh when I reach for the cookies it's really because I'm feeling lonely, or when I end up drinking too much it's really because I'm feeling insecure.

Just start asking yourself more often...what am I feeling right now? Am I truly aware of what I'm doing right now and why I'm doing it? Is this really what I want to be doing?

The first step to changing these patterns is introducing more awareness into the emotions that inspire these actions which may be unhealthy and not supporting your highest evolution. It is an essential part of knowing yourself.

Honing my skills as an actor has helped me to practice sitting with uncomfortable emotions. I have experienced myself hit an imaginary internal wall in a scene where the love of my life has just died or I am suppose to feel a lot of anger towards someone. It is a wall between the sane part of me and the part of me that is wild and free and fearless and completely capable of anything. It is a wall that is trying to protect me FROM feeling. I get to a place where I am asking myself...is it OK to feel so intensely? I don't want to feel these emotions! They are uncomfortable!

This wall has felt insurmountable at times...but I can't imagine not living a life where I am constantly challenging my ideas of what I've thought I was capable of. I have already surprised myself and its one of the most EXCITING feelings.

Thanks to my awesome acting teacher, Kristina, I have been able to surmount said wall and SURRENDER to the experience of feeling.

Practicing this skill has helped me develop a heightened awareness of my emotional state. I am learning to harness my emotions and use them to my advantage...to make people feel things through my performance as an actor. The ultimate goal is to be able to portray characters that inspire the viewer to become more self-empowered and conquer their fears!

WATER MEDITATION

I believe the goal with one's emotions is to get to a place where you can let them flow like water in a river. Water does not get attached to one rock along it's journey...it flows effortlessly over all rocks, twisting and turning and following the path laid out for it downstream. Whenever I am in nature and encounter a stream or waterfall I like to stand in front of it and mediate on this. I will often think about something in my life I want to let go of and imagine dropping it in the running water and allowing it to flow away. Letting go can be like that. You just drop it, and let it go. You don't grab it, try to hold onto it, run after it...you let it float away.

Next time you are out in nature and encounter running water, give this exercise a try! There may be parts of you that resist letting go. Thats ok. It's normal to not want to let go of things, even if they are not serving you because our brains like to attach to things that are familiar. It is OK to let go. It is actually an essential skill to learn in life if you want to be happy and grow into your fullest self. You must learn to let go of things that are no longer serving your highest growth to allow space for new things to come in. It is hard but you were built for hard and you wouldn't be challenged with this unless you already possessed the capacity to overcome it.

#acting #relax #personalevolution #meditation