What do you want?

In order to have a more genuine authenticity, I would need to understand my character’s motivation. During my second monologue, he stopped me abruptly and said, “What do you want?” My response about what my character wanted was elaborate and complicated. “No” he said, and then boiled it down to one sentence. A single simple human desire. I learned that desire was at the core of all my character’s motivation. He would say, “Acting is fighting, your fighting for what you want!” We also did 2 person scene study and performance. “What do you want?” was the simple question I asked myself whenever I studied a script for a scene. I started to understand the human condition as well as access greater authenticity in my acting work. I had been stripped of my habits and a vulnerability emerged that made for raw, unexpected and at times surprising results. Doing a scene became an adventure and a discovery….
Years later, after diving into spiritual teachings and applying them to greater self awareness, it occurred to me that the process of self understanding would sometimes involve this same question. The stakes were a lot higher because it wasn’t a “character” or a “scene”. It was life and relationships which get pretty complicated. It seems to me that we human beings get really elaborate with our desires and more importantly our reasoning and hyper sophistication that we tend to invest in them. However, what I noticed when I was in “2 person scenes” in real life was whatever I wanted or didn’t want for that matter was rarely clear in the moment of interaction. Sometimes it was just like getting thrown about in a crashing wave. My karmic propensities and conditioning would play out like a script that was already written, either an absurd comedy, Greek tragedy or something in between like one of those Dadaism plays. Um…fortunate to never have a Greek tragedy ending. :) I started to reflect on my interactions and thought a lot about interrelatedness and what constitutes true communication. I thought that all I wanted was to be free of the entanglement of relating because it was so messy and confusing. But that wasn’t what I really wanted. I wanted freedom on all fronts and I wanted to not feel bound in relationship to anyone. I realized that I was bound by my own desires, aversions and expectations. And they were not simple by any means. Ngeton, my Guru, always used to say that karma shows up in relationship. Through her demonstration and skill in discerning karma, Ngeton helped me take a much deeper dive into my mind and motivations. I found that in day to day interrelating with others, what I often wanted was connection, openness, and a fluidity of presence. I used to think if there was agreement of concepts and ideas that there was a “connection”. And in instances where there wasn’t agreement there was no “connection”. I have discovered that the source of the feeling of disconnection is a labyrinth of self created separation wrought with beliefs, ideals and expectations of “self” and “other” And is a complexity and often confusing basis of interrelating. What do you want? Is a simple question to ask yourself in any life scenario, weather it be the monologue that runs in your own mind or your relationships with others. Sometimes, after wading through elaborate complexity, it can be whittled down to a simple answer. Then comes the big question that we used to make jokes about in acting class. “WHAT”S MY MOTIVATION??”