Screening yourself

I haven't met many people who enjoy hearing themselves on a digital or tape recorder, and even fewer who enjoy seeing themselves on a television screen. Yet, if you work as a television reporter or television host, you have to get used to seeing yourself "perform" on screen. You get used to seeing yourself in slow motion, or seeing the jerky Keystone Cops gestures when your tape is fastforwarded; you hear your voice sped up to sound like Minnie Mouse, or slowed down like Darth Vader's. When you stop the pictures to find an edit point, there's a good chance you have your mouth hanging open and your eyes closed.

The point is this. After a while, you get used to seeing yourself in an objective light. You make corrections in your subsequent performances. You lower your voice if it is too high. With a dab of powder, you get rid of the shine on your forehead. You stop slouching or licking your lips. You don't sit in the screening room and berate yourself for sounding or looking like a jerk. No, you take an objective look and you work on doing a better job next time. I imagine it is the same thing for an actor.

Too bad we don't often observe the contents of our minds--the images, the words, the feelings, the memories--with the same objectivity a television reporter or an actor views footage of herself. Instead, we often beat ourselves up, or we stay locked in the internal drama, unable to step back and take an objective look.

With practice, we can learn to do this. Imagine that your mind is a television set or a monitor in an edit suite. You see images, sound, action. You see the emotional content of what you are screening. But, instead of getting caught up in the "movie", step back. Remember that you are in a darkened room viewing this on a screen. It's hard to do. It takes practice. It takes developing a discipline of doing it regularly.

Here's how you start. Find a quiet and comfortable spot where you will be free from interruptions. Set a kitchen timer for 15 minutes. Or tell yourself that you will go by the clock to sit for that length of time.

Close your eyes. Anchor yourself in your body, in the present moment, as if you were maintaining awareness of yourself in an edit suite watching raw footage of yourself with an eye to being objective. Listen to the sounds around you, become aware of your breathing, of the outlines of your physical self sitting in the chair. Whenever you find yourself drifting into daydreams and loosing your awareness of yourself sitting in the chair, in the room, gently nudge yourself back into the present. As you sit, aware of yourself in the present, observe your thoughts, feelings, mental images without making an emotional judgement about what you see. Don't leap to condemn yourself, or hate yourself. If you find that you are doing it compulsively, observe that. Don't beat yourself up for beating yourself up, just observe that you are doing it. You are the observer watching this, screening the material, not the actor anymore trying to control the drama. Stay in the room, in the present. It's not easy to do and takes practice.

When you finish your fifteen minutes, write down what you observed. What thoughts kept running through your head? What feelings? Did you feel anxious? Were you able to step back from your anxiety and watch it?

When I started doing an exercise similar to this, I was so out of touch with my feelings that I would often not become aware of how angry I was at someone until three or four days after the event that angered me. I was so caught up in an idea that I "should not" be angry that I repressed awareness of how I was really reacting. Other people could see how I felt, but I didn't. Consequently, I was easily manipulated. When I started to "screen" my thoughts and feelings, I became aware of how angry and resentful I really was. But it was only through becoming aware that I was able to find freedom from these feelings and learn how to react differently.

The other thing that I learned when I stepped back to "screen" was how negative my thinking was. Not only was I thinking negatively about myself all the time, but I was constantly critical of others. I blamed other people for how I felt. Most spiritual traditions tell us not to judge other people. I was constantly judging, and that judgement was accompanied by feelings of resentment or contempt. When I learned to screen my mind and feelings, I learned to give up the booby prize of self-righteousness and moral superiority that comes with resenting someone.

Only when I made a practice of stopping this constant judgement was I able to discern more clearly what was really going on, especially within myself. I learned that blame and resentment fueled the excuses I was making about my life, even though I was not conscious of that blame and resentment since I was so invested in thinking of myself as a nice person.

In my spiritual tradition, Jesus said, "Ye shall know the Truth and the Truth shall set you free."

Years ago, in psychology class, I found that the writings of the founder of humanistic psychology, Carl Rogers, echoed this same principle....that only upon acknowledging and admitting ones flaws does one begin to change.