You Don’t Need All The Answers

As you may know, before I started my business, I was an actor. I would regularly take acting classes as a way to improve my craft and become a better artist.

Because business got, well, busy, I no longer had a real desire to keep honing my craft, so I stopped taking acting class.

However, a few months ago, I started hearing a gentle knock on my soul’s door. It said, “Maybe you should go back to acting class.”

I quickly brushed it off, because that just didn’t make any sense.

I’m not looking to be cast in a Broadway show or do another film, and I certainly don’t have TWO days a week for almost FOUR hours at a time to be in a class!

But when something knocks on your soul’s door, you must listen…

…or else it just continues to knock louder and louder.

As my knock got louder, I began to tune into WHY it was suggesting that I go back to acting class. Slowly, it became clear.

You see, in this world of wellness, where all these wonderfully uplifting blogs exist, inspiring hashtags are shared and self betterment programs live, there is often little space allowed for the real truth of life.

And not just the real truth of life, but the real truth of life that is meant to be experienced with another human being in real time, in front of you.

I’m not suggesting that anyone (including me) is falsely representing the power of positivity, but sometimes there’s a sense that if you have “messy” feelings, opinions or thoughts, they must be fixed.

And if they are not fixed, there is a sense that perhaps they should be hidden.

I started to realize that the knocking on my soul’s door was not about longing to be a performer again, but it was actually about longing to tell the truth to myself about some of my messier feelings.

Because this thing that we are all living, LIFE, is not always pretty. We (I’m including myself here) get angry, frustrated, jealous, insecure, afraid and pissed off. And that’s just the tip of the feelings iceberg.

Our opinions about the world, others and even ourselves don’t always fit into these inspiring hashtags or uplifting blog posts. Nor should they. But because they don’t always fit so well…

It becomes easy to push these important, messy feelings aside.

We brush them off, don’t look at them, don’t address them, don’t tell the truth about them, because they may not be in alignment with what we think an inspirational, positive person is supposed to look like.

But when you don’t allow yourself to experience ALL the colors of what it is to be human, it catches up to you.

If you close the door on these true and real (yet messy) feelings, that’s usually when something else starts to bubble up.

As Pema Chodren says, “Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”  TWEET IT.

It may start as a low-grade irritation, but over time, still unaddressed, that irritation will turn into anything from a feverish anxiety, to burnout, or even depression.

My sense is that the only real solution to this bubbling up is to open the door completely and let some of these thoughts and feelings get some air.

Gorgeous, you can try to ignore these things and you can even try to transform them.

But what if instead of TRYING to transform them, you simply EXPLORED them?

And I don’t mean just explore them on your instagram account in order to get the approval from others that your ‘messy’ feelings are valid.

I mean what if you examined them? In your real life. Today. In this moment.

How do you really feel?

What if you let some of these thoughts and feelings have a voice without being afraid that they would swallow you whole?

Perhaps this exploration is actually where the real joy exists. Not the manufactured hallmark, happiest person you know JOY, as my acting teacher, Matt Corozine would say.