experience everything totally

just keep going no feeling is final

The other day I picked up one of my favorite dharma books and opened it randomly for some inspiration. When I lead meditation at Tibet House, I usually close with a contemplation, so I’m always on the lookout for fresh passages and poetry to illuminate the mind.

This is what jumped out at me:

Since all things are naked, clear from obscurations, there is nothing to attain or realize.

The everyday practice is simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions and all people. A complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions and to all people, experiencing everything totally without reservations or blockages, so that one never withdraws or centralizes into oneself.

— Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

A complete acceptance and openness to all situations, emotions, and people. Experiencing everything totally.

As we contemplated it, I began to wonder.

What does that even mean,

and, what if we could live this way onstage?

Years ago I wrote a blog post called How do you solve a problem like Rebecca? in which I grappled with playing a character who embodied a part of me I wanted to forget. A part I had worked hard to deny, to purge from my system, and now I didn’t want to have to open all those doors again, to admit that any part of me could be weak and needy. I closed the post with this paragraph:

But this is what we sign up for as actors, isn't it? Not just to be the star of the show, the grand dame, the leading debonair gentleman; but to breathe pathos into the underdog, the misrepresented, the poor bastard stepchildren and overly needy wives, the Edmunds of the world. To put ourselves into shoes we wish didn't fit us so well. To leave untouched just enough of all the things we don't like about ourselves, because you never know when you might need them again.

Without reservations or blockages.

We all have blockages. We all have parts of ourselves that we don’t want to look at. We all have well-worn synaptic pathways, emotions that are easier to feel and those that we don’t allow ourselves. Many men cannot even access higher ranges of their voice because feeling their voice behind their eyes is far too vulnerable for the culture of toxic masculinity. I probably don’t even need to write about how many women avoid getting angry in public for fear of being seen as strident and hysterical. Our social conditioning, our personal history, all the ways we’ve developed an armor of personality to get through life, mean that we each show up in the world with a certain vibe, a certain energy.

It’s one of the reasons “type” is a thing, much to many actors’ chagrin.

The thing is, we all contain multitudes.

But who could actually say they are completely open to all situations and emotions? Experiencing everything without reservation or blockages? The truth is that some of our multitudes terrify us. Most of us, if we’re honest, don’t really want to have a complete openness to all situations. We’re not withdrawing, repressing parts of ourselves just for fun; there is, or at least there was originally, some wisdom to our habitual blockages and reservations.

But if we cannot be open to all the parts of ourselves… how can we hope to be open to, much less fully embody, another living, breathing human being?

It’s so easy to fall into the trap of creating a character who is centralized into themself. “He’s this type of character,” we might think, or “I don’t think my character would do that/feel that.”

We don’t really have the time in rehearsal to actually find out just what they might think and feel, and what’s more, it’s fairly uncomfortable and maybe even scary to grope around in the dark not knowing.

So we sit at the table and get right down to the bones of the scene, we can figure these people out, figure out what’s happening, get some answers. And we’re smart! We’ve done this before! We can get right down to the bones of the scene, we can find the structure and put up some tent poles. We had to do that just to get the job.

But what if, rather than deciding at the table what the character thinks and feels, and closing ourselves off to so many possibilities of behavior, what if we had a complete openness to all emotions, to all situations? Allowing ourselves to “make choices” on a hunch, just to see what happens? Listening to the little voice, the whisper from the subconscious, that knows so much more than our thinking mind does about what’s really going on with people?

Sometimes when this kind of idea is thrown out there it gets a response that swings totally in the other direction. OK, let’s just do anything! Throw it at the wall and see what sticks! Who cares, I’m completely open! But this is not suggesting that our behavior isn’t grounded in anything. To the contrary, we are dreaming all the time, creating the imaginary world of the play for ourselves, beginning to give shape and breath and life to the words on the page.

One of my acting teacher’s maxims is: Bad actors have a lot of answers. Good actors have a lot of questions.

Of course we may, over the course of rehearsal, find some answers. We come to realize that certain options tell the story we want to tell more effectively than others. But for me, the first day of rehearsal, or good grief, in the audition room, is not the time to throw possibilities out the window. To centralize into oneself.

But it happens all the time.

And so we’ve ended up with an industry where casting directors teach acting classes, so that actors hone the skill of fitting into the box of “type,” and then the productions that result are full of characters playing out a script instead of real, breathing human beings.

I remember once taking such an acting class, at one of the pay-to-play houses that populate our industry even as they profess to be simply “for educational purposes.” An actress read her sides and she was on it. It was a Law & Order-type scene, she was giving DA vibes and she hit every. one. of. the. notes. in the script. Finger snaps. Whew! I would not want to be cross-examined by her! The casting director-teacher loved it, of course, and everyone else in the room had lots of smiles and nods for her as she sat down.

But I had never seen an actual person behave like that.

I knew it was “successful” in the way it was supposed to be - but for me, it was missing something central. A riskiness, a reality, an element of not knowing, a humanity. I learned something in that class, but I don’t think it was what the CD intended.

For me, for art and performance to hit me in that visceral way, to leave the theater moved and not just saying “yeah, it was interesting!” - it has to be alive. It has to have that riskiness, that sense of freshness, of things happening now, for the first time. I want to hear people actually talk to each other, with their real voices. Actually ask a question. Let the answer surprise them.

And of course, this is the art I want to make. I fall short all the time. So I practice.

Rinpoche (which is an honorific title for an important teacher in the Tibetan tradition) sets a high bar in the contemplation, but he throws us a bone - he says it is the everyday practice to develop this complete acceptance and openness, to be able to experience everything totally.

So we practice. We can practice being open to all emotions every day, on the cushion or off, with all the parts of ourselves that we like and all the parts we don’t.

The Tibetan word for meditation is gom, which means “to become familiar.” So we are becoming familiar with our minds, with ourselves. We are becoming our own friend, so that when it’s uncomfortable and scary (in rehearsal, onstage) we are not alone.

Or, as one of my other favorites, Rilke, says it:

Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final

― Rainer Maria Rilke