LIVE LIFE ALIVE

A Truth & Freedom Practice

LIVE LIFE ALIVE

YOU ACT YOU!

!!!What!?! I. AM. ME. I AM MYSELF. Nobody ACTS. ME!!!

No need to SCREAM. I’m listening.

OK. OK. I started it. Sorry about that. Low blood sugar. Could use a milkshake.

Fresh start (softly): You act you. Better now?

We are creators and the created at the same time. Even when unaware of creating self we create self. You create a self you call “you.” And, of course, I create a self I call “me.” You and I create “us.”

In the interest of maintaining my kind and (mostly) calm disposition, and not wanting to scare you away, I will leave the unity of I/You/Us/Everything to future posts. Spoiler: We all create it all.

“All the world’s a stage.” ~William Shakespeare

Never hurts to drag Billy out at moments like this. 

When we create without awareness of, and clear involvement in the acting process we default to selves that are mindlessly made of reflexive behavior tied to common beliefs. 

We hold these ingrained beliefs so tightly that they change very slowly if at all. We live as if our lives were bought off the shelf. We live in a mass produced way. We identify as one or another of the agreed on and accepted packages of self in wide circulation. 

So, the paradox of creator/created selves seems weird, more than a little like nonsense. It flies in the face of how we’ve been taught to identify things, especially ourselves.

Popeye, the iconic spinach eating character with bulging arms and a sailor cap, speaks for us when he says “I y’am what I y’am and that’s all that I y’am.” Like Popeye, we see ourselves as singular, individual, and entirely given. Ready made. Spinach optional.

While we self in this way most of us feel like something is missing. We feel somehow incomplete and not entirely comfortable. We sense that somehow we’re not enough. A sense of scarcity shadows us in material and emotional terms. It matters not that we’ve accumulated abundant stuff, or that we’ve achieved enviable status.

Some of us think scarcity of some kind is the actual problem, only in time to get more stuff and status, then discover that it isn’t and never was the problem. Then we feel even more not enough-ness. Even more perplexing and painful dissatisfaction.

Conventional success offers, at best, only an occasional glimpse of what we seek.

We want peace of mind and a sense of ease about our lives. We want freedom from persistent dissatisfaction. Right?

We want to end the struggle with unexpected and unwanted change. We long for deeper values. Acceptance. Awareness. Wholeness.

We want genuine human connection, light, and love.

As the iconic mythologist, Joseph Campbell, said simply, “…what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.” 

Acting Human excites skillful use of whole self to actively create a life lived alive. Instead of trying to change things about our lives, getting more or less of this or that in hopes that altering those details will change the nature of our whole experience, Acting Human aims to change our perspective dramatically.

Sorry about that, I need a milkshake. 

When we fully engage in the process of acting in skillful ways we transform how we live and feel. We perceive and behave vibrantly.

We can see and act our way free.

We all act all the time, yet pay little attention to the creative process that drives us, as we haven’t been encouraged to create ourselves with intention and skill. Our creativity operates completely in the dark.

We have been conditioned to believe that acting is exclusively for actors. We believe that actors perform on stage and on screens of all sizes to entertain us. We believe that famous and infamous actors misbehave outrageously in real life. And because they are blessed with rare talent they have license to behave poorly in the extreme so we are gifted with titillating reading/viewing in the media, nowadays mostly social.

To act human, fully human, to live life alive, we must change our view of what it means to act. (Which we all do all the time - remember?) 

When we embrace the craft of acting, and raise it to the level of art for intentional use in our daily lives, we will develop deeply satisfying ways to play ourselves, to enjoy the experience of creative energy embodied. To live in dynamic flow. To bask in in the aha glow of surprise as our life stories emerge in full blast color. 

Acting is the way we tell our life story as we live it.  Our human lives are creative works in perpetual progress. Acting Human gives us a practice that invites us to practice in every moment of our daily lives.

How do we start our Acting Human practice?

First and foremost, we take out a giant eraser, the bigger the better, to deal with the single most pervasive and persistent misconception about the actor’s craft - that acting is a childish game of pretend.

We think that an actor pretends “to be” someone other than the person that wakes up, drinks coffee and goes about their everyday business with their everyday name.

Pretense suggests deception. Acting calls forth truth.

A quest for universal truth fuels our creativity as actors. Truths appears in awareness. To pay attention, moment to moment, with skill and purpose, is at the center of Acting Human practice.

We believe that a written character and the actor cast as that character meld into one. We think that through a process of repeated pretending - called rehearsal - that actors turn into a living person made of words. 

We believe that through rehearsal actors learn to exist as someone other than the person who slept in their bed, woke up yawning, and rushed to the toilet when nature called. (Is it only middle-aged male actors that rush? Asking for a friend.)

The nutty notion of BECOMING an entirely other person, is nothing short of, well, nuts. There are, I’m told, psychotic states where this may happen.

We are not here to induce psychosis. Not today.

We are here to discover practices in the spirit of eclectic wisdom traditions, and to feel a tidal pull toward mastery in creative expression. To learn the craft of acting.

To act human. 

To live life alive.

In a few days we’ll gather next to explore - what’s next? A vital question. We’ll come to see that our stories, our lives, bloom in the fertile ground of questions. Lived life moves. We’ll learn to welcome movement and change as a key to aliveness. 

Like in all good stories - no less our lives - questions propel us. None more then, “what’s next?” 

When next we meet, with your kind indulgence, I’ll let this guy tag along.

Till then, as always…

Lights Up!