A key part of acting is emotional intelligence; are you socially aware? Perceptive? Observant of your surroundings? Have you experienced a vast range of emotions? Are you able to pick up on subtle cues that let you know how people are feeling? All of these ideas play a crucial role in your ability to authentically portray human emotion as an actor, but where do these abilities stem from?

Mindfulness is a word that has often come up for psychologists and teachers – and it goes a little deeper than “pretending”.

Annie Levy, a director, scholar, teacher, asked one of her classes “What is Acting?”

The answers, from a classroom of undergraduate students with varying levels of experience were: “being”, “doing,” “pretending,” and “behaving truthfully”.  While these are all extremely thoughtful responses, the truth is that none of these can possibly be completely true.

From an article in Psychology Today dissecting the bridge between acting and mindfulness:

Practicing mindful meditation has been tied to more emotional stability, quality of life, ease, and other positive outcomes. Yet actors are popularly assumed to hold the opposite of those qualities. An empirical question, then, could be whether individuals who are experts in mindfulness, indviduals who have meditated extensively, control and regulate their emotions in similar ways to actors.  Is the approach to emotions in the actual performance of acting similar to the approach to emotions in mindfulness?

I think we can safely assume techniques of emotion regulation in rehearsal, with ideas of sense memory, or the physical manifestation of an emotion leading to its hormonal and physiological correlates (see: power posing) are not similar to mindful meditation in nature. Yet the actual moment of performance, particularly for performers who repeat a characters night after night, might be a type of mindful meditation, and one in need of more empirical exploration.

What are the things, ideas, and experiences that motivate YOU? What special perspective are you bringing to the table? Don’t be afraid to feel things fully. Don’t be afraid of really diving into the human experience, watching a ton of movies, taking a psychology class or two… really exploring the human condition. Anything that helps your level of authenticity ends up helping your skill as an actor.