So how did that feel?

Feeling is an integral part of acting. We actors not only portray the emotional journey of our characters, but their physical journey as well. This physical journey includes those external movements, like our blocking or gestures, as well as our own internal sensations, such as our heart rate or muscular tension.

That awareness of our internal physical sensations is called interoception. We build interoception in actor training just as much as emotional awareness and spacial body awareness. Are we holding tension that the character wouldn’t? How fast or slow is our heart rate? How deep or shallow is our breath support? How does this story feel in our bodies?

In my experience, actors have high interoception. Partly because we’re always making physical adjustments, but also cause acting feels good! It is so satisfying to drop deeply and quickly into a character. It can be a deep cathartic release. In fact, we actors often measure success by gauging how connected we feel emotionally and physically.

Where my own work started to shift though, was when I learned to distinguish the difference between satisfying and effective.

I was trained to always go for that cathartic release, no matter what. Diving deep into a character’s inner world is so fun, yet if we go too deep, we run the risk of losing the bigger story. How it feels for us internally is different than how we are interpreted externally. If I, the actor, got too lost in the feeling, then I stopped being an effective storyteller.

The same is true with interoception. If we dive too deeply into our own internal sensations, like how fast our heart is beating, how rewarding holding out that note is, how much our calves are cramping, that can side track us from doing our jobs effectively.

This is especially true in high stress situations like auditions! My rapid heart rate or racing thoughts used to feel like a wall was put up between me and my character. My internal sensations would distract me from being present in the story.

And I would really beat myself up about it! I’d jump on that shame and blame spiral with “that was a terrible performance cause I didn’t feel anything,” or “I must be a bad actor because I couldn’t drop in.”

What working with stress has taught me is to go for what is effective over what is satisfying. In those moments of high arousal and high stress, instead of chasing that cathartic release, I now focus on small, effective tools. In order to do this though, I had to learn to value those small shifts, just as much as the big drops. Pretty counterintuitive to my actor training!

Through the Resilience Toolkit framework, I learned small, short effective practices. In high stress situations, my self awareness grew, even around those teensy, tiny shifts. How my breath support deepened, how my muscles released, how my feet grounded me. Noticing and then valuing those shifts enabled me to trust them, to feel more control and agency. And funny enough, those small, effective shifts now help me to reconnect and ground in my work faster.

Ideally, we actors want to always perform from a grounded and centered place, where acting feels good and we can easily access the internal and emotional life of a character. Unfortunately, we don’t live in an ideal world! Sometimes we will have to perform stressed out, distracted, exhausted, sick…

And in those moments, following what is effective (rather than satisfying) is such a gift! It takes the pressure off of ourselves to always have to “feel it.” Cause there are some days when we won’t feel it, and that doesn’t mean that our performance was lackluster.

So the next time someone asks us, “How did that feel?” let’s see if we can clock any effective shifts, even the teeny, tiny ones. And if you’re curious about how to build that awareness, check out one of my offerings here.