we have enough critics

on gentleness, and why we’re not crazy to go for product

In her book The Wisdom of No Escape, which I’ve referenced before, my favorite American Buddhist nun Pema Chödron talks about this sort of three-legged stool that supports our practice: gentleness, precision, and letting go. We do the technique precisely - but not too tightly; we do it with gentleness - but not too loosely; and in so doing these two things we find we are able to let go. Gentleness, Precision, Letting Go.

So over the next few weeks I’m going to explore these three foundations as they relate to our particular Show People lives. Starting with gentleness - because I think most of us know well enough how to be hard on ourselves.

Over these last weeks I’ve mentioned a few times this tendency we all have to go for the result. In myself I can feel it almost like the factory settings of the car: I have to go in there and tinker around to be able to override it and do anything else. In this day and age, with The Business the way it is, each of us becoming an entrepreneur and marketing ourselves on social media in a way that previous generations of actors never had to do, here in late-stage capitalism and a commercial theater landscape that is searching for its own viability and sustainability… I think we are all hardwired to go for product.

Here are the sides, you have one day, please send us a tape of your performance. I know you’d love to play that other part but we really need the sassy best friend, can you do that? Congrats! You got the job, we open in two weeks. I mean, what else are we possibly going to do besides go for product?

And I name this because it’s easy for me to sit here on my Buddhist cushion and talk about process and authentic presence and abandoning all hope of fruition, experiencing everything totally, when the realities of the business are what they are and we’re all just trying to get through, get a job, accrue enough weeks for health insurance, stay in it.

We are not crazy to go for the result.

And then on top of that, we have the critics.

Inner and outer.

We all have the nasty voice inside, shaming us, telling us we’re not good enough, we’ll never “make it,” why even try, whatever particular flavor and words your particular inner critic loves to use - usually mimicking a voice (or voices) we heard long ago.

We have the casting director, gatekeeping whether we even get a shot at meeting with the artistic team. We get the job and we have notes from the director that may or may not match our own vision, our ideas for the character, our artistic process. God forbid we have other actors telling us what they think.

And then, as if that weren’t enough, we invite - invite! - actual people with an actual job title of Critic, to come watch us! And write about it! Not many other professions are like this, folks. We have enough critics.

The worst part about it is that, I don’t know about you, but when I’ve gone for the result (with good reason, as we established above) and then the critics come, no matter what they say, I’m left thinking, But it wasn’t even what I really wanted to do. Here they are criticizing my work, I made it this far, maybe they even said something nice but it wasn’t the work I would want someone to write about.

There’s a teaching in Buddhism called the Eight Worldly Winds. These eight are four pairs of opposites - Pleasure and Pain, Praise and Blame, Success and Failure, Fame and Disgrace - that are said to be always blowing through our lives. When we attach to any one of them - either grasping for the “good” ones or pushing away the “bad” ones - we are caught. The teaching, the way to peace, is to meet them all with equanimity, to hold our seat through whatever comes, knowing they are all impermanent. [I highly recommend my teacher Ethan Nichtern’s book Confidence to explore this in more depth.]

I think, at a subtle level, many of us go for product for all the reasons above, but also because it’s a known quantity. We know we can produce a result, and it’ll be plenty good enough. Truly living in the moment - who knows what might happen? It’s an unknown, and when we’re tasked with creating the same performance night after night, it’s a risk. Particularly if we haven’t developed the muscle of working that way, we don’t trust that we’ll still hit all the notes we need to hit, that the “scene” will happen the way it’s “supposed to.” There is a wisdom here, but it’s a protective wisdom, the kind that ends up entrapping us. We’re trying to prevent Pain, Failure, Disgrace - but we wind up being blown around by them anyway.

So, there’s gentleness.

Instead of letting the inner critic run the show, we can learn to view it like any other thought arising and passing through the mind. And the way we view that voice, the way we view all thoughts and sensations that arise, is without judgment, with gentleness. We don’t sit down with ourselves and yell at ourselves for messing up. We don’t (as I have done so many times) swat the thoughts away like we have a fly swatter in our hand. We turn the lights on, we take a look at what’s going on, with kindness. We sit down to become our own best friend.

We also don’t take the voice of the critic to be the truth. When someone writes a review and mentions us, it’s one voice, one opinion. We can choose to believe it, or not. We can even choose to read it, or not. The same is true for the inner critic: we don’t have to buy into it. We learn to recognize it for what it is, and maybe we start to see the suffering it causes us. If we’ve had a rough day, maybe an audition didn’t go that well, we can be gentle with ourselves. It didn’t go the way we wanted. Ouch. We can feel the ouch, and let it go. Actually feeling the ouch - it might seem to hurt more in the moment, but it actually lets the pain pass more quickly. It becomes an experience of impermanence, the pain of life. Hanging onto the voice of the critic, however, is suffering.

So we can go easy, be gentle with ourselves, like I talked about last time, even as we’re clear with ourselves about what’s going on. [Next time I’ll talk about precision.] We can know the realities of the business, and still fight to have our own process, to whatever extent possible.

Maybe we can even be gentle with the critic. After all, it’s been trying to protect us, too.