US- Transforming Ourselves and the Relationships That Matter Most

by Lisa Oz

Learning to think this way was one of the acting exercises taught by Ivan (my teacher from chapter 2). It was called “looking for the extraordinary in the ordinary.” He would give us a simple scene-say, a cat on a windowsill. Then he would ask us to be very specific about the details. Is the cat a purebred or a stray? Well fed or neglected? Is it asleep or grooming or hunting insects? We would make the image as precise as possible. Once we had that down, we had to go deep. What was the cat’s relationship with the human in its life? How was this reflective of the archetypal bond between man and beast? What role has the domestication of the cat played in the history of mankind? How has it contributed to the very development of civilization?

When you develop the ability to use this sort of X-ray vision, you begin to see that no single image is as simple as it seems. Nothing is meaningless. Every moment is significant. The sacred lives in the mundane.

Pages 188-189

How you are in anything is how you are in everything. This is a concept that I learned in one of my first acting classes a million years ago. I was studying with a brilliant teacher who made Darth Vader look warm and fuzzy. Deep down he was a pussycat, but on the surface he was more Komodo dragon. On about the third week of classes I arrived late, having circled the studio for half an hour in the pouring rain, trying to conjure up a modicum of parking karma. I finally skulked through the door and found a chair at the back of the room. I had barely sat down when Ivan the Terrible (I kid you not, that his name; okay, not “the Terrible” part) stopped the scene he was working on and ordered me to the front of the room.

“You’re late.” Nothing like stating the obvious.

“I know. I’m sorry. There was no parking.”

“That’s irrelevant. Everyone else got here on time.”

I think I must have rolled by eyes-just a little. I was that kind of student. Apparently whatever I did gave the impression that I didn’t think being late to an acting lesson was a huge deal: the veins on the side of his neck started to bulge and he proclaimed, “How you are in anything is how you are in everything,” and sent me back to my seat to consider these words.

I admit I really didn’t get it at first. I thought he was idiotic. Was he saying that just because I was late to class I would be late to every other appointment in my life? That was ridiculous. I was on time to at least half of my engagements. But after studying with him for what felt like several lifetimes, I finally realized that the key to this concept was “how”. How did I approach acting class? Well, honestly, I was a bit disorganized, passionate but not committed, and unwilling to make huge sacrifices. Want to guess what my closet looked like? Think I was good about keeping in touch with my college friends?

Pages 38-39