Defining and Playing Your physical Instrument

Your Instrument

 

Your physical body is the instrument you play as an actor.  You need to know how your instrument is designed to support your goal of being a successful actor.   Of course, you know your physical body is the instrument you play to create a character.  You also know that your instrument is controlled by your emotional and physical responses.  These emotional and physical responses are notes that can be played on the physical body similar to the notes of a musical instrument. 

Like the notes on a musical instrument, the emotional notes played on the actor’s instrument are objective. They are real and definable. The actor’s instrument is objective because the emotional notes are shared by the human species.  Therefore, you want to know how the emotional notes in your body allow a character to experience emotional differences in their reality of make believe. 

 

You want to understand:

your life energy

how to describe your life energy

how you support your life energy, and

how your life energy supports you. 

 

You also want to know what makes your life energy different from someone else’s energy.

When is your life energy working against you? 

When is your life energy working for you? 

What relationship does your life energy have on your conscious thoughts?

What relationship does your life energy have on your subconscious thoughts? 

What relationship does your life energy have on your physical body?

Your energy is an integral part in creating a talent for playing the emotional notes of the actor’s instrument. You want to know how these emotional notes can be identified in the body, and how these emotional notes can be practiced like the scales on a musical instrument. 

You want to know how to release the effects of the emotional notes in relationship to a scene.

You want to know how the French scenes affect the choice of the emotional note played.

You want to know how the rhythm of the French scene effects genre in relation to the emotional notes.

You want to know how the energy to maintain a character in make believe effects the emotional notes and the intensity of their play.

 

Energy and Talent

 

There is a direct relationship between energy and talent.  Talent is created by taking control of the life energy in your body.  There are things that you can do to keep your instrument in greater harmony with your energy, and how your life energy is maintained. You can be clear as to what effects your life energy.  You can know what keeps life energy connected to your vessel.  The duality of the human experience affects your life energy.

 

The duality of the human experience is the understanding of the physical you and the spiritual you.  One deals with the earth and the compounds that hold together while connected to the spiritual (life energy) side of you.  One is temporary (physical) and the other is eternal (life energy).  Learning how each functions,  both separately and collectively, is the journey of life.  Without this understanding duality narrows itself to the physical being good and evil.  By now you should be aware when your life energy sabotages your efforts.  You also should know by now how repetition is used to increase the power of your energy (focus).   It has a great deal to do with your personality connection.

The personality connection is your ability to use your personality, the way you present your views and relate in life based on your understanding of life energy: your part of all that is.  There is a connection between the uniqueness of your personality and the use of your life energy.  That is why you want to be aware of the connection between your life energy, your motivation, and your skills in order to get out of life what you truly desire.

 

Your personality connection is your social contract.

A social contract is an agreement you have made between those relationships in your life that allow for behavioral patterns good or bad.  It is the right of relationship even if the behavioral patterns are unacceptable.  Like in story telling if a social contract is breeched the relationship alters to a different social contract.  One should be aware of the liberties that are taken within a social contract and work to kept the social contract built on respect, honesty and trust. 

 

It is clear that the use of your life energy is the actor’s primary product.  It is important that you understand how life energy works and your responsibility to that life energy. Your basic responsibility is to understand how your life energy is used by you to create that place called Talent.  Uncontrolled energy happens when your life energy is sapped from you by fear and ignorance.  You don’t want to become a victim of this process.  It is how the audience feels about you that will dictate how they think about you.  This is achieved through the process of talent maintained by controlled energy.

Your Power to Heal

 

You use your controlled energy, through the process of talent, to radiate your life energy out of your body into the bodies of your audience.  That radiated energy is controlled by you through the physiological process of knowledge becoming muscle memory resulting in a place called Talent.   That physiological process forces your life energy out of its hiding place.  That hiding place is your muscle tissue.  Having been forced out and replaced by knowledge your energy then radiates out of you and blends with your audience’s energy giving them a sense of peace and comfort.  At that point for the actor the challenging part begins.  You must have the ability to sustain this talent position for the duration of the physical presentation of the character. 

The physical presentation is your make believe circumstance.  The make believe circumstance is when ever you and your character have blended.  And, the circumstance will last as long as this union of actor and character is needed to be in make believe. It is the use of your body/instrument to maintain emotional control of your social contract for the character. The more you practice the longer you can sustain the union of the actor and character.  The stronger your working talents, the longer you can sustain this energy transfer. 

Energy transfer is when your knowledge (for the script, your technique, your medium, your story responsibility, your interpretive skills, etc.) has been converted to muscle memory therefore allowing your life energy (which normally resides in your muscle tissue to defend the vessel irgo fight or flight) to radiate out of your body connecting to the life energies of your audience and giving them a feeling of peace.  This energy transfer (from protecting your body to moving to talent) is the gift the storyteller shares with his audience.  It is powerful, learnable and divine.  The longer you can sustain the transfer the more effectively you can fulfill the ultimate goal of the storyteller; to release your audience from their pain with your life energy and give them access to their own healing powers. 

This is the actor’s divine gift.  That gift is the ability to caress the audience’s life energy with the actor’s energy (through fact based talent) and give the audience a feeling of safety; a feeling of once again being part of All That Is.   That gift is diverting the individual audience member’s innate energy responsibility on the earthly plane from defense to comfort, from fight and run to calm.  The longer you can sustain the transfer (through repetition of knowledge) the more effectively you can fulfill the ultimate goal of the storyteller;  to release your audience from their pain with your life energy and give the audience access to their own healing powers.

 

By allowing the audience member to release their own healing powers you have given them their birthright to the promise of All That Is. That innate life energy responsibility of each audience member, as members of the human race, is to protect their individual vessel by keeping their life energy in that fight and run state.  It is the body’s primitive survival instinct that all members of the human species share.

When the individual audience member is in his normal fight and run position his senses are activated. This causes the audience member to constantly evaluate every second that passes as possible danger.  This results in his brain being under a constant barrage of thoughts (internal dialogue), often painful, and resulting actions.  Your ability, in talent, is to free your audience’s life energy from their overzealous defense system. While your life energy comforts their life energy you allow their brains to redirect its focus, not on their pain and suffering, but on their joy and excitement for life. 

 

It is during this magical and majestic state the actor has given his audience a respite from their pain. The actor, with the control of his life energy through talent, has put the audience’s life energy at a temporary state of peace.  In that state of peace the audience member will use their subconscious power to access the healing power of their life energy.  This redirection of their life energy can literally heal their physical body from the ravages of disease, real and imagined.

 

Then, and only then, the actor achieves the true power of story telling.  The actor has the power to use his gifts, talents and vulnerability to allow storytelling to continue to be the oldest form of healing known to man.  The actor then has the ability to give his audience the power and freedom to heal themselves. 

 

Energy and Purpose

Let’s explore your company’s product… energy. Let’s understand the actor’s instrument.  Let’s understand the emotional notes that must be played. This understanding must be in place so the craft of acting has an objective base by which art can find its path. We know that when your life energy no longer resides in the body it dies and the body can then return to the dust of the earth.  The circle of physical life is complete.

You may not think of that very often but it’s certainly indicates the importance of your life energy while you occupy time and space in the physical form.  Many believe that life energy is part of all the energy of the universe.  It is part of All That Is.  While in your present physical form your energy is literally separated from the whole.  Like the metaphor of storytelling, all life energies are searching for a feeling of going home. We are all searching for a feeling of that reconnection to All That Is.

Mythology is the basis of storytelling as we know it. Mythology is an allegorical or figurative narrative to explain the use of myth (legend) to support the power of metaphor.  The mythological idea of storytelling has an everyman on his journey to get home.  Home, metaphorically through mythology, is the concept of Heaven.   The Everyman must face obstacles.  In the purest form these obstacles are represented as the devil (a physical manifestation of everyman’s fear) and are based on selfishness rather than love.  These obstacles demand the everyman make choices that are difficult for his hope for the future: heaven.   The choices are difficult because choosing the correct one often requires everyman to be unselfish or to sacrifice.    Everyman’s battle is always between good and evil.  The challenge of the battle is always for heaven or hell.

In storytelling we metaphorically label this circumstance as the Devil tempting everyman with earthly pleasures.  Everyman’s sins could be his bad choices to life obstacles.  All solid storytelling puts Everyman against the obstacles of the earth (everyman’s fears) on his journey through life.  The battle is between good and evil, the immediate or the collective, the body and the soul. 

 

Storytelling traditionally begins by placing Everyman in his/her natural habitat. The  natural habitat is the life circumstance of an everyman character before he/she is set on a journey.  It constitutes the living style, the work ethic, the relationships (and rights of), the way of living.  It clarifies the everyman intellectually, socially, financially, physically, spiritually, and emotionally. It defines the uniqueness of personality in relation to their life energy.  It defines everyman as to character, conviction and responsibility.  The natural habitat allows the audience to understand the impact the journey of the story will have on the everyman’s choices. The choices will lead everyman to be confronted by a fear (metaphorically the Devil) thereby telling a story. 

The Devil is also known as the antagonist or the dragon. Regardless of the name, they are all a physical manifestation of everyman’s fear.  A physical manifestation is when a physical being is used to represent an emotional reality for a character in story telling.  There are three kinds of physical manifestations in a story.  There is the everyman who is the physical manifestation for the metaphor of the story.  There is the antagonist who is the physical manifestation of everyman’s fear defining the metaphor of the story and there is the bird who is a physical manifestation defining the metaphor for everyman’s hope for the future.  These characters (physical manifestations) allow for the metaphor of a story to become universal as well as individual.

A metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them.  Storytelling uses metaphor to excite the imagination and personalize the power of a story.  When everyman sets out on his journey to fight that fear, metaphorically represented through the telling of the story, he comes to that critical point where all his abilities and strengths have been depleted and his fate seems unavoidable.  

At this point the universe, metaphorically known as All That Is, sends a character known as the Bird.  The Bird is a physical manifestation of everyman’s hope for the future. 

 

In storytelling the Everyman, flawed as he may be, is in truth, pure of heart for he comes from All That Is.  She is entitled to the power and grace of the universal flow of energy and all the rights that come with it.  When Everyman confronts and conquers his fear, with the help of his bird, he will grow spiritually while in the physical form.  Like the characters you will play, your life energy is your part of the energy of the universe and your vessel, your body, is the means by which the life energy will be challenged and will evolve.  In life you will experience being the everyman of your life.  You will experience being the bird in the lives of selected others.  And, you will unfortunately find yourself being the devil (dragon, antagonist) to others.  It is life.  And, like storytelling, we are all part of it.

 

Your Energy

 

One could describe your life energy as a soul created by All That Is.  One could be bound by religious doctrines that give a literal meaning for heaven and hell.  Perhaps you do.  Life energy is what separates the living from the dead.  Life energy, unlike the body, is eternal.  It is what we do with it while it is incased in the human vessel that defines its position with All That Is. 

 

All people have the capacity to be decent caring human beings. Regardless of philosophy or religious conviction all actors share the desire to be successful storytellers.  The actor wants to be a part of the profession that has the power to give peace and physical comfort to anyone regardless of religion, personal beliefs or doctrines of limitation.  Tthe fact that you are pursuing an acting career indicates that there is a drive within you that makes your life energy and your need to control it a necessary responsibility. 

 

Energy exists.  It is real.  It is what we recreate through storytelling.  The power of this life energy and its relationship to your god-self and your physical-being self are going to be the center of all your obstacles and diversions.  It is your life energy and the battle between your spiritual self and your physical self that will be the focus of your journey and the determination of your destiny.   Support your life energy and your life energy will support you.  You support your life energy by accepting its dual responsibility.  You must reach an agreement with yourself to take care of the vessel (body) for its housing of your current life energy.  If not, your life energy cannot support your desire to rise above the primitive needs of the animal.  It can not explore the experiences, safety and exhilaration of the universal flow of energy and your ability to connect to it. 

 

Your life energy is different in its sameness from anyone else’s.  The difference of sameness is the understanding that each human being who has ever lived or who will ever live will always be different.  They will be different because of the impact the French Scenes of their lives have made them different.  The combination of life energies and the impact of each will result in no two individuals every being the same.  The internal dialogue of their minds will always impact them differently as to the beliefs that they accept resulting in fear and/or acceptance. 

 

It is the sameness of the human species that make the differences so unique and miraculous.  This is also what makes one story different from another. 

 

According to George Polti, the 19^th century French scholar, there are only 36 dramatic situations from which all stories can be constructed.  The reason there are infinite stories is the same reason you are different from anyone else.  The sequence of events or the French Scenes of the character’s life make the story different.  Even if the dramatic situation is the same, the story will be different. 

 

If your life energy has been defocused and directed toward unnecessary defense systems you may find your ability to harness your life energy for optimistic efforts difficult.  Even if taking control of your life energy, in your quest to be a successful actor, is difficult it is far from impossible.  The effort you are now making is a clear indicator that you desire change. Your determination for knowledge is being supported by a conscious dedication and, the time structured discipline, to make it happen. 

 

Energy Against You

 

Life apathy is when your life energy is working against you and you can not get motivated.  It happens when you have found yourself being bombarded with “What’s the use” or any other thought that has kept your life energy away from your efforts. In order to activate the life apathy reversal process you want to recall what was going on with you when your life energy was working for you.  Very often you may find that you do not give gratitude and open appreciation to your life energy when you’re getting things done and your motivation seems undisturbed.  That might indicate that you are not letting yourself be aware when your energy is working for you. 

 

You may think that the efforts you are making and the accomplishments triggered by motivation are not note worthy.

 

Allow yourself pride of these seemingly effortless achievements. If not, it could effect your ability to re-create those feelinhgs when the pendulum swings the other way.  Know how it feels when your life energy is working for you so you know the difference when your energy is working against you. 

 

Note: Change will always come from physical placement and therefore internal dialogue disruption.

 

Thought Process

 

Debilitating thoughts are the negative thoughts that run through your head (internal dialogue).  These thoughts are not the reason that your energy is not under your control.  No matter what the debilitating thoughts might be, instantly your focus could be shifted to something else that appears more urgent or important.  You have the power to make that change.  You only need to learn how to activate it effectively. 

 

Disempowering debilitating thoughts must come from the knowledge you acquire about your body.  Acknowledge how your body uses your life energy to protect itself and then be willing to practice the physical changes you make as you take control of your energy for the purpose of talent. 

 

You want to understand your life energy and its relationship to your subconscious thoughts. 

 

Acknowledge how the communication between the two takes place.  

 

Accept the all knowing information that is stored in the subconscious mind.

 

Use that information so it effects your conscious decisions and focus. 

 

Take control of your understanding of your right to ask, believe and receive. 

 

Look at the amount of time you spend with your conscious mind.  Almost every waking moment is spent with some kind of dialogue going on in your head.  If you take the time to listen to thi internal dialogue rather than act on it emotionally you would realize that most of it is valueless and judgmentally based.  As a result you are evaluating any and everything based on the world according to you.  This may be coming from your unconscious mind.  Your unconscious mind, not your subconcious mind, could be overriding your conscious thoughts.  As a result you are evaluating any and everything based on the world according to that frightened little you that that we all carry inside. 

 

These uncontrolled thoughts do not reflect what you would like to think of as your true beliefs.  Often these thoughts may are laced with criticisms, prejudice, and bigotry. You do not want these thoughts to be part of your life or your thinking process. 

 

To become aware of our unconscious mind is to become aware of the thoughts underneath our conscious thoughts will empower your focus.  This awareness begins by understanding that the world is often not based on language and logic.  It is often based on feelings and fear.  Your thoughts can then become instinct based.  Your thoughts may then expose beliefs in relation to physical or emotional defense by creating illogical thoughts.  This allows the body to take control of your energy and use it against you.

 

It is the analyzing of these illogical thoughts (internal dialogue) that will tell you what beliefs your defense system uses to commandeer your energy to protect the vessel. 

 

These beliefs reverse the process talent uses in relation to your muscle tissue.  Talent takes knowledge and turns it into electrical energy through repetition.  Therefore, your brain is bypassed when the body is taken to the talent position.  It is done with the feeling of basemax™ (discussed later.).  When the unconscious mind (not controlled) dictates responses it by-passes the logical thought process of the mind and creates illogical responses supported only by fear and doubt.  The life energy is locked inside the muscle tissue and used for physical and emotional justification of bad behavior.  These are known as muscle based beliefs (buttons).  Muscle based beliefs are beliefs that can bypass the brain because they have become so accepted by the frightened you that they are not allowed to be processed for approval by the brain.  These muscle based beliefs can be recognized by acknowledging the repetition of bad behavior or unhappy thoughts.

 

Muscle Based Beliefs

 

These muscle based beliefs were instilled in you from the earliest of childhood.  They may need to be reprogrammed and redirected.  There are some who believe that many defensive and negative beliefs can actually be genetically coded into us from our parents.  Recognize the thoughts and beliefs you do not claim. Erase them from your unconcious mind.  You need to know where these memories live.  They can be changed with physical actions with positive efforts and results. Understand the relationship your life energy has to your physical body.  It will help you make sure you are not being manipulated by your body. 

 

To recap: your body uses your life energy to protect the vessel.  It wants to have the power to fight or run based on the circumstances for survival.   When this instinctive based decision is activated the responses are fast and furious.  Logic is bypassed, as is the mind’s effort to feed the brain the information that will give it control. 

 

Without your total understanding of how the life energy is used by the body, you will find yourself at the mercy of physical responses to justify themselves with emotional belief based thoughts.  Once this process has taken place it is very difficult to alter its course.  That is, unless you use the process for creating talent.  This talent process is done by putting the knowledge into repetition so that the awareness of the state becomes a switch that allows you to turn off these negative responses as quickly as they come.

 

I hope all is well in your life,

Have a joyous holiday season and, remember,

I wish you well.

Russ