do the do
or, abandon all hope of fruition
Hey friends, here in these difficult days I thought I’d cheer us up with a slogan like “abandon all hope of fruition.” Ha!
It’s not nearly as bad as it sounds, I promise. In fact, it’s freeing. But we’ll get there.
So building off of last week’s post… “do the do” is a phrase coined by my wonderful voice teacher Ruth Hennessy. As she likes to say, most of us are doing a pretty great impression of our own voice. And by that she means that most singers are going for a sound they want to make, and then sort of reverse-engineering their singing in order to make that sound. But in so doing, they end up creating and using a lot of extraneous tension that has the effect of strangling their own resonance.
If we can strip ourselves of the need to go for product - to make a certain sound - and instead just do the do - create our singing instrument from the ground up with optimal technique and posture, and let go of the result - then what will result is our own unique, glorious, vibrant voice that sounds like only us and that can connect with our audience on a cellular, visceral level. And isn’t that actually the product we want?
The same is true for actors. If we go for the result, build up emotion before the scene based on how we think it should go, and say the lines the way we rehearsed, we’ll probably get a decent performance that makes sense and gets the story told. But we’re still kind of strangling our own resonance, our humanity. If, on the other hand, we do the do - live in our imaginary world, as someone else, allowing ourselves to be surprised - we may find depths and nuances of the character, the relationships, the story that speak to what it means to be human in a way we could never have predicted beforehand.
And - here’s the connection - the same thing is true on the cushion. We come to meditation with a desire to be more resilient, to find some calm in the chaos. We want a quiet mind that’s not addicted to the dopamine hits of likes. And the wellness industry has sold us a beautiful minimalist picture of meditating in a room with nothing in it but a fern, where we can escape our crazy lives and be peaceful. So we sit down and we try to rid our mind of thoughts. We close our eyes and put on the trickling water background noise app and see if we can retreat to some blissful place.
But, we don’t get very far. The nature of the mind is to think. The thoughts just keep coming, despite our best efforts. So then we figure we’re not cut out for meditation. Maybe it’s just not for us, our particular minds are just too scattered to be able to do something like that, meditation is great for other people and wow it’s a great idea but I just can’t.
The thing is, though, our particular minds are actually not all that different from anyone else’s, nor have human minds changed much for the last few thousand years. And we, actors, we know this! We can still do Medea, Shakespeare, we’re still singing Bach, humans have really not evolved… at all. So the Buddha may not have had social media to contend with, but he did still have monkey mind.
And so: abandon all hope of fruition. Don’t sit down to meditate and look for a calm mind. Don’t go for the result. Instead, do the do: take your seat, place your mind on the breath, and when it wanders, bring it back gently. Be with what is, instead of looking for some perfect state. And in so doing - in simply practicing, training your mind bit by bit to stay focused, doing it gently, with compassion for yourself - perhaps, a calmer mind will find you.