Most of growing older seems to consist of finding out that the world is the exact opposite of how I thought it would be. You’d think that this phenomenon would start to slow down as I age but if anything I get my mind blown on an increasingly regular basis.

The latest revelation that’s been in mental embryo for the last few years has been on the subject of “centering” or “being centered†”. I teach yoga to actors at Second Avenue Studios as an adjunct to their scene study classes, as another way of cementing their connection to their medium and [let's face it] encouraging them to relax since acting is probably one of the most psychically stressful things you can do [it's like going out for 5 job interviews a day and getting rejected for all of them, and that's a GOOD day; I have no idea how they manage it, really]. Almost everyone has a pet centering exercise that they can use to prepare before a performance or audition, usually including some combination of the following:

• a visualization or meditation

• breathwork of some sort

• stretches or yoga postures

• a physical release, like fluttering an exhale through the lips, shaking out the limbs, rounding up the spine from a forward bend

[Aside: I think it's pretty groovy that these exercises, although I'm sure they were influenced by yoga if not outright cribbed from it, whether the actors know it or not, include the aspects of a hatha yoga practice: breath, mind, body...it's like a little mini-practice right there on the spot]

The underlying belief behind these is that normal life is filling you up with bodily tension and undesirable mental stress, and that in order to return to Centre™ one must “clear out” somehow: hence the limb-jiggling, primal scream therapy, long sighs and exhalations.

+ four year old + golden Labrador = a challenge to equanimity

And with all due respect and big ups to the actors in question, this is the misapprehension I’m talking about. When the advertising collective consciousness shows us what being centered looks like, we see: blank modern spaces, Zen gardens, esoteric air fresheners. Hollow bamboo. Women with glazed eyes in long drapy minimalist fashions and tiny secret smiles emerging from an essential oil bath. It’s an aesthetic, precarious, perfect, incredibly easily undermined vision. It’s a clearing out, an emptiness. It’s beautiful, fragile, and utterly unsustainable. [Those women in the ads must do NOTHING but Swiffering and laundry. How relaxing can that be?]

I’ve had my share of being behind the scenes getting ready to perform or play and trying these little O-magazine techniques. Ah, a long breath in, and long exhale, and

WHERE IS THE SECOND PATCH CORD FOR THE DI BOX?

Right. Okay. Let’s try this again. Calm blue ocean, calm blue ocean. Inhale, and a loooooong….

DAMMIT I CAN’T REMEMBER THE LYRICS TO THE SECOND VERSE OF LUSH LIFE; CURSE YOU FEEBLE BRAIN

&c. Spirituo-mental mayhem ensues. It’s the psychic equivalent of a child putting poster paint on a white wall, and it includes the initial judgement, savagery and then subsequent guilt at that savagery [“Why am I getting so angry?”] What I am coming to understand is that clearing out and emptying, while absolutely essential to the centering process, is only half of the story. Once you’ve shaken the tension out, once the body/mind is a blank canvas: what will you fill up with? What part of you will you consciously feed? Centering is drawing back together, coalescing around a vision that you wish to make manifest. Nothing can upset that strength. You’ve shifted the inner white wall, the blank aesthetically gorgeous heavily marketted canvas, to a lush primal collage, and your inner child can put as many red handprints on it and thumbtacks in it as she likes. So when you feel like you need to find your centre, FEED your centre. Shake out, stick your tongue out, roll around on the floor, do what you gotta do, prepare yourself to create AND THEN draw in…get solid and strong. Then bring beauty to the world.

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