Life on stage
Acting as the art of life
We are midway through the year…
Whatever that means… right?
And yet, yes, it does indeed mean something.
Time is a precious resource.
We will die.
And so, to live—to truly live—is to be both acutely aware of time, and utterly unaware of it, all at once.
I am currently in an intensive acting training with an incredible group of actors and coaches from around the world and I am absolutely loving it.
If music is the art of sound and dance is the art of movement, then acting is the art of… life?
Right?
But how does one imitate life?
Or learn the craft of such an art form?
What I’m beginning to understand — in this short time of being immersed in it — is that acting is the craft of tuning into the truth of what’s happening, moment to moment.
It’s about catching the invisible exchange between people, the undercurrents beneath words.
The stuff that makes life feel alive.
It is the art of impulse.
Of surrender.
Of pushing away and pulling towards.
Interestingly, when it comes to acting, we only see the last 1%. We witness the performance — which appears so effortless and oh so “natural” — but in truth, it is the product of the 99% we don’t see: the intellectual preparation, the memorisation, the inner work… the emotional liberation.
And that’s exactly what I’m currently immersing myself in.
It is quite honestly an incredibly challenging experience, and I do love a challenge.
Last year I travelled to places that would allow me to freedive to greater depths on one breath.
I am hungry for life - hungry for living, and so of course, I have now found myself immersed in a craft that asks me to study this very thing: this thing we call life.
The most beautiful part of this journey is realising how deeply the last ten years of my inner spiritual study have both supported — and, at times, hindered — this process.
Around ten years ago, when I was 22, I was totally and utterly lost (as most 22 year olds are). I had just finished my degree at the prestigious University of King’s College London. I got the First Class Honours — the kind that would allow my family, who had sent me over and paid all that money, to feel it was worth it.
I was proud too, it was a life-changing experience that I am eternally grateful for.
Beyond the lecture halls, it shaped me into the human I am today.
It showed me that when I set my mind to something, I one hundred percent can and will achieve it.
But achieving something doesn’t necessarily help you “find” yourself — in fact, it can sometimes support you in losing yourself even more. This is what I’ve come to understand as counterpoint in acting, something which I will expand on later in this essay.
I was not “lost” because I chose the wrong degree, or did not know what I wanted to “do” with my life. I was “lost” because I had quite literally separated myself from my body. I was, as one of the families I stayed with at the time said, living entirely in my head - almost like I was floating above my body.
During my final years of high school, I had the privilege of staying with an incredibly intelligent woman who had served as President and CEO of one of the world’s leading global software companies. Her family was both spiritually curious and very health-conscious, and it was during my time living with them that I was first introduced to the term Schizoid — also known as The Split Self. This concept comes from Reichian Character Structures, or Body Armoring Types, which describe how early life experiences shape both our psychological defense patterns and our physical posture.
The Schizoid is one who tends toward dissociation as a coping strategy, and can often be seen daydreaming or drifting off into no man’s land. I certainly had a great tendency toward daydreaming, little did I know I was in a state of “coping.”
The next ten years of my life, post-university and a deep fixation on the intellect, were about dropping down into my body.
Literally learning how to feel my body.
Be in my body.
Feed my body.
I was, in the most cliché sense of the phrase, on a journey of “finding” myself.
Loving myself back to life.
I travelled around the world doing countless courses, retreats, festivals, workshops, coaching programs, you name it.
I was fixated on fixing this schism, this split within me.
The more I dug, the more I found.
Unearthing childhood trauma, ancestral trauma, land trauma.
Trauma, trauma, trauma.
I was in the depths of some seriously muddy waters.
And I loved it.
I needed it.
I so appreciate all of it.
And - there does, though, come a time, when such a search can become its own obsession, its own identity - or personality - as our acting coach spoke of this weekend.
I had become the “spiritual” healer woman of service.
I was embedded in my body, and embedded in the work.
Embedded in the mud.
I only read self-help books.
I was - and sometimes still am - obsessed with better-ing my own understanding of self.
So self-aware I became, that I became self-obsessed.
Everything revolved around my little orbit of reality.
Every sign had a meaning.
Every person, a message.
I recently found a diary during this period of “awakening” and read how I would use spiritual terminology to totally gaslight my own experience.
At one point in London, I was living with someone who was very depressive, possibly bipolar, and who seemed to drain the literal life force out of me. Boundaries were constantly being crossed, and I found myself holding so much space for this person that I completely overlooked my own looming breakdown.
With my newfound language of projection and self-reflection, I kept writing in my diary about how I was being “judgmental,” and that maybe this energetic exhaustion was actually a lesson just for me — a divine invitation to build more capacity to be with the heaviness of this human, and the heaviness of life… blah blah blah.
In hindsight, I should have moved the fuck out of that place as soon as I clocked my instinct that was screaming - this is not safe. This is not healthy.
Instinct — another delicious skill I’m honing in the craft of acting.
The sharpening of one’s instinct.
Bringing the animal body forward.
But here’s the interesting layer I learned this weekend: instinct — at least for an actor inhabiting a character in a scene — only truly emerges from a deep intellectual understanding of the story (the script) and an emotional understanding and connection to the character.
In order to drop into that final 1% of performance — that “flow state,” as our coach calls it, when you’re no longer acting — you have to do the other 99% of the work.
This weekend, we spent hours breaking down our scenes into their three-act structures, which then reveal the arc of the scene — in other words, who “wins” and who “loses.” What’s so fascinating about script analysis is how clearly it mirrors life. It reveals how we, too, as “characters” in our own story, move through constant arcs of winning or losing our objectives.
I put “winning” and “losing” in quotation marks because winning a scene doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good for you. In fact, one of the most interesting things I am beginning to understand — both in storytelling and in life — is that getting what you want (your objective) isn’t always in your best interest.
By contrast, losing your objective can sometimes be the very thing that grants you your greatest freedom. Take classic romantic films like Good Will Hunting — one character’s objective might be to push away the person they love, out of fear of intimacy or the potential of rejection. When they succeed in sabotaging the relationship, yes, they technically “win” the scene — but in truth, they lose something far more meaningful.
This brings me back to the term I mentioned earlier — counterpoint.
Counterpoint refers to the opposing emotional or objective energy that exists between two characters in a scene. It creates dramatic tension and depth — it’s what makes scenes dynamic, not flat.
It is literally what we are experiencing day in and day out - in life - in relationships.
For example, my point (objective) is that I want to commit to a partner, build a home and a family and stay in South Africa, but my counterpoint (which for me is conscious due to all those years of internal self-analysis, but is often actually unconscious) is that I am afraid of that level of committment and stabillity because it exposes me to abandonment and a fear of entrapment.
The delicious thing about acting — which so closely mirrors life — is that we constantly attract people whose points and counterpoints oppose our own. Whether chosen or imposed, they reflect back to us the very tensions we’re wrestling with inside.
To me, this reveals a deeper and more compelling layer than the usual ‘opposites attract.’ It touches the subconscious (or pushed down) desires hidden beneath our surface wants — the parts of us we don’t fully see until someone enters with a directly opposing way of holding the very same thing we ache for, exposing what we’ve masked or avoided.
Why am I sharing all of this with you?
Well, because I am so freaking fascinated by human beings.
I always have been.
Being in the room with my fellow actors this weekend allowed me to understand that this is what brings us all into the studio.
I felt at home with my fellow curious kin.
A shared awe of the human condition.
A deep ache to tell stories.
A need to own everything that has ever happened to us and turn those experiences into our greatest gifts.
There was a moment in the room when I had to dig really deep into the emotions of my character, who had just witnessed the love of her life murder another human.
And whilst I cannot connect to the depth of what that feels like in reality, I know my own horrors of heartbreak and seeing something you wish you could unsee.
Tapping into that emotion was powerful and brought a ripple of truth into the scene.
It allowed the character to fully embody itself within me — to actually feel real.
There’s a huge difference between watching someone who is “acting” and witnessing someone in flow, fully aligned with the truth of their own emotions, beautifully intertwined with the emotional life of the character they’re embodying.
It was fucking challenging.
But also fucking liberating.
It was a lightbulb moment — realizing what the last ten years had given me: all that nervous system understanding, all that strengthening of resilience. All that somatic re-connection to my body, to my senses — to be able to feel something so alive and so electrifying, and still be able to titrate it enough to keep it present for the full scene — and then to release it once the scene was done, without storing it as trauma.
That, I tell you, is something truly profound.
An alchemy of turning the burdens of lead into gifts of gold.
And do you want to know the quiet beauty of it all?
It is over in a flash.
And sometimes — most times — that moment is never seen by anyone.
It might be cut by the director, edited out by a producer, quietly dissolving into the sea of countless beautiful moments that never make it onto the screen. Because in the end, it’s not about the final product — it’s about the process you moved through, as an actor, to get there.
This craft is teaching me such a level of humility and surrender.
It lays bare the beautiful journey of life through the art of exploring what it means to dwell in the messiness of being human.
What it means to be in this complex, paradoxical state of surrendering self — and finding self once more.
I understand now why I have been so hungry.
A hunger that is satiated by the simple act of play.
Playing for the sake of playing.
Not to fix myself or another.
Not to achieve some great success.
But to simply play with other humans in a game of life that really is just a mini theatre for the greater theatre we wake up to — day in and day out.
May this essay be a little spark of light in your own daily routine, to pull yourself out of the monotony of your story or your cemented personality, and realise that you too are in a movie.
The movie of your life.
And that sometimes you “win,” and sometimes you “lose,” but really, it can all be over in a flash.
So let’s keep our eyes open — and our hearts wider still.
For there is so much to be grateful for.
So much to feel. So much to experience.
The big, heavy lead and the lightest, brightest gold — all of it — so fucking delicious.
{Images from A Knowing Shortfilm by Jazzara Jaslyn with my fellow wild witches}