A Simple Meditation I Learned From Method Acting, YMMV
Four Lines to Calm Your Soul In These Unsettling Times
It’s been nine months since I quit my job and while I have enjoyed this time of self-reflection and creativity, it also unsurprisingly has come with its share of anxieties.
While my family and I have been very fortunate to have had some savings to weather times like this (a rainy year so to speak?), I can’t help but feel a burden when I watch our bank accounts go in one direction.
All that said, I would not have changed a thing. Interestingly enough, it was something I learned during another sabbatical I took over a decade ago that has helped me get through these past nine months. I had just quit a job in investment banking and, following my instinct, took time to study the dramatic arts, in particular playwriting and acting.
I now look back on those months of study as one of the most valuable investments that I made during my time as a young adult. In particular, as I have gotten older, I have found that the incremental self-awareness I gained from writing and acting are a rare luxury in today’s regimented one-track world.
With no particular desire to pursue acting as a career (which made me feel like an exception in the Greater Los Angeles area), I took a leap of faith and became a student of Johnny Sarno’s acting class. And, in ways both large and small, my life has benefited ever since.
In addition to learning about method acting (which counts amongst its storied disciples the likes of Marlon Brando, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro), I was surprised to find that the tenets of method acting reached far beyond studio auditions and moreso offered a toolkit for living a centered life.
I am forever grateful to Johnny for offering his wisdom around acting as well as life. In particular, there is one exercise that we would start every class with that has stuck with me ever since.
It goes something like this:
Close your eyes.
Relax your body.
Take a deep breath.
And repeat these four lines:
I’m not my mind…
I’m not my body…
I’m not my emotions…
I’m not my desires…
And repeat in that order. After each statement imagine yourself sequentially acknowledging and releasing each area of focus. Release and acknowledge your mind and its thoughts, your body and its tensions, your emotions and its stress, your desires and their cravings. And when your done repeating a couple of times just… be.
Now Johnny was not one for subtlety, so when he claimed that this relaxation exercise was a fundamentally “perfect culmination” of ancient meditative learnings, it was sometimes hard not to take this as a hyperbole.
But, now in hindsight, I find myself consistently gravitating back towards his statement and this meditation. I ponder its meaning and its philosophical implications. If we are not our mind, our body, our emotions and our desires, then what are we?
If you release each of those, then what is left?
Even consideration of these unanswerable questions tends to put me in a zen-like trance.
Originally intended to calm your nerves and open your internal channels of creativity and imagination prior to performing, this particular meditation has proven invaluable in my every day life. I don’t know if its a “perfect” meditation per se, but it has certainly helped me recenter myself in times of need.
Any given moment, when I feel myself wandering or feel tensions building up or even when I feel perfectly calm and content, I let myself wander back to this phrase. Standing on the subway. Lying in bed. Taking a break from my phone or my computer.
So, it’s not much, but it’s something I wanted to share with all of you.
With what seems like a constant stream of troubling news these days, I thought this would be helpful and hope it gives you some of the same peace of mind that it has offered me these past ten years and beyond.
And Johnny, if you are still out there teaching, thank you.
