ABOUT YOUR HIGHER POWER

I believe it is of the utmost importance that artists have some understanding of a higher power in their life.

In my opinion, it’s very simple:

Higher power = God = Love

Your higher power is what some people call “God”, and as they say, “God is love.”

Your higher power is the power of love in your life. It is the energy and lightness you feel when you are actively involved in what you love. It is the source of creation, the muse of inspiration, the ONE knowledge we all can access if we desire to.

In my opinion, it is this loving feeling and well of knowledge that people are talking about when they use the term “God”.

Imagine yourself as a lamp, and your higher power is the electricity. Your higher power is always present, just waiting for you to plug yourself in.

If you allow it, your higher power will lovingly guide you through your art.

We are so lucky that as actors, we need only do our craft in order to creatively commune with our higher power. Other, less creative people have to scale a mountain, or run a marathon to achieve a feeling that they have touched something bigger than themselves. We have the opportunity to do it every time we perform.

It is a mistake to think that only the priest can communicate with a higher power, and that it must be done in a church.

We are all able to communicate with our higher power. It is communicating with you now, if you choose to listen.

I grew up, as many of us do, thinking that God was an old man that lived in the sky. That he had a white beard and looked like Ariel’s father in LITTLE MERMAID. The only time we would talk about him was at temple, in long, boring services that tested my childhood attention span beyond its limits. And when we went home he wasn’t mentioned again.

The whole thing seemed so ludicrous, that as a discerning teenager I tossed the whole concept of “God” away, along with the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.

And it remained that way for a long time. But in my 20’s, as I began to read self-help books, I started to understand that there was an order of things; a power larger than me at work in my life. The books talked of ways of thinking and behaving that could lead to happiness and abundance. And when I put these theories into practice, I found that they affected positive changes in my life.

There need be no debate in your mind as to whether there is a God or not. It simply is a fact that there is love in the world. Love has power. Your love of acting caused you to read what I’ve written. And, hopefully, my words will make you feel better or enlighten you in some way. Therefore “love” brought something into your life that affected you in a positive way. THAT’S your higher power working. It needn’t get any more “religious” than that!