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Showing posts from September, 2024

Improvising With the Buddha - Leading with your chakra

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In a previous Improvising With the Buddha post, I wrote about shoshin, “beginner’s mind.” In this post I’m writing about energy work. If you’ve studied or read about improvisation, you know the rule about making strong choices. One of the strong choices we make in scene work is choosing an emotion. In class I’ve used the Emotion or Feeling Wheel to help students understand the depth and range of emotions. In the center of wheel are six to ten core emotions depending on which wheel you use. The most common has seven core emotions. Those emotions fan out to four to eight secondary emotions that then fan out to four or more tertiary emotions. Through the wheel you can see that a feeling of numbness stems from a feeling of distance with comes from the primary emotion of anger.  In a scene knowing where our emotions come from helps with sub-text and in real life it helps us better understand our motivations and relationships. In scene work just knowing where an emotion comes from may not

Talent! Who me?

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  "Ya either got it, or ya ain't" The other day an artist friend held a gallery opening of their work. As I was gazing at the amazing work, I bemoaned a little and said to my friend, “I wish I could paint but I just don’t have any talent.” My friend lovingly chastised me and said, “you’ve got lots of talent!” I replied, “I know I have talent in some areas, just not in the visual arts.” We then went on to have a brief discussion on what it means to have talent. I came to realize that part of our disconnect was the use of the word talent. When most people think of talent, they think it’s something special that only a few people are born with. In fact, the Cambridge Dictionary defines talent as, “a natural skill or ability to be good at something, especially without being taught.” As Mama Rose sings in Gypsy, “Ya either got it, or ya ain't. And, boys, I got it!” It’s no wonder most people don’t think they have any talent. Talent implies something special that comes n