A Purposeful Paradigm Shift
In our third episode of the sub-series, we're joined by artist/hypnotherapist extraordinaire, Rachel Collignon -- in an episode hosted by Bluebird's Gracie Rittenberg!
Taking us through her actor-to-therapist pipeline, it turns out there’s a whole lot more that connects our neural and life pathways than meets the eye. When she’s not on a stage or on a set, Rachel Collignon is guiding her hypnotherapy clients to their full potential. Here’s the transcript of Rachel and Gracie’s conversation. If you’d prefer to listen to it, you can find the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
GRACIE: Today we have a very very special guest, Rachel Collignon. Rachel is an actress, director, multi-hyphenate, therapist from France which we're going to talk about today, who moved to New York and attended the Atlantic Acting School. We're going to talk to Rachel about her journey in the last few years.
RACHEL: Let's get it on!
GRACIE: So Rachel, you were telling me you just got back from a film festival, and what project was screening?
RACHEL: It was my baby, my first short film ever. It's called Leave Me Tender. It's about a young woman (who I play, myself) who leaves her situationship with two other people. So a throuple — I'm not a fan of the word throuple — but this is what it is. And the short film is set the night that she tells them that she's gonna leave, and there's a lot of memories, and you see what each of them will miss, or what the relationship represents mostly for each of the of the characters. It's about offering a different vision of love, first of all what happens if we change the geography of the relationship, if instead of being two points in space now we're in triangle. That changes the whole architecture, the whole dynamic. And my character is very depressed at the beginning, when she arrives, and she's kind of loved back to life by these people, but also by being in nature, the house; the food; and she just has an opportunity to return to herself. And then she needs- she wants to leave, because she's back to being alive and having an appetite for life, and so the relationship is successful and so it ends, and it's time to part ways, it's time to consciously un-throuple.
GRACIE: I love that term. So, it sounds like it's sort of a different view on what love and relationships can do for us. Because in mainstream culture we think of a romantic movie as two people who get together and then it's implied that they stay together forever, after the movie. But with this film you're saying, “this relationship served its purpose and gave the people the growth that they needed, and then they were able to move on and we hope that they thrive in other relationships.”
RACHEL: Absolutely, and I don't think the relationship ends there. I think it does last forever, but they don't have to tether to each other. There's a message there, a hypothesis there, that I wanted to explore about love and ownership and our expectations… I feel like we fall in love with a whole person, right? You meet someone at a party and they're here with their whole sexual being, like a whole person in the wild, and then we kind of expect them to reduce themselves, or to remove certain parts of themselves so that the domestic space can be the most important thing.
I think we sacrifice a lot of ourselves to stay in relationships, and that's beautiful — you know, I might be talking to you in 10 years and be like, “I’m married and have kids”, I'm not against that — it's just that I want to explore a paradigm where love actually sets us free, which is what so many great writers say about love. Rilke, Eckhardt: the other just becomes the temple at which you come and adore life, see life, worship beauty, and be in the realm of love: be in love, in terms of where you are in this life.
So if you take my character, she was very much not in love- I don't mean she wasn't infatuated, I mean she was in her head, in separation, and there she gets to experience connection and oneness, and that's love. And thanks to people that we meet and that make love to us and that we make love to in so many different ways, we experience unity, we experience love. That's what the human experience is about, so I wanted to bring the essence of that strip away some conventions, and shuffle the paradigm around to see what would happen.
I often write as experiments where I have questions about life, and I'll write characters that feel true and put them in situations that feel true, and then I'll just unravel that situation like an investigation, where I'm like, “What would happen if I make my brain be as true as it knows to be? Organic?” It ended up being like a little slice of life drama about people finding freedom and learning how to love each other while remaining free, and letting each other be free.
GRACIE: And will Leave Me Tender be at other film festivals in the future?
RACHEL: We have five selections so far and counting, which is a great honor for me as a first-time filmmaker. What I thought was a very low-hanging fruit film to just get myself started and do something ended up being received as a proof of concept by people and there might be a feature in the future. So it got the ball rolling where now I'm a filmmaker, I want to be a filmmaker, I'm super into it now.
GRACIE: You went to Atlantic Acting School, like I did. And you came to the U.S for Atlantic, and a lot of the ethos of Atlantic was “make your own work” and be your own boss, and it feels like since you've graduated (which wasn't very long ago) you have made your own work and made yourself into a quote-unquote brand!
But if I can pivot a little bit, you went to a therapist training school, right?
RACHEL: Absolutely, yeah. I'm a therapist who practices with French clients at the moment, because I'm in the process of installing the legalities of an American practice.
GRACIE: Sow did you come to that? How did you decide to begin pursuing a career as an actor, and then how did you decide to marry that with a career as a therapist, and how do they speak to each other?
RACHEL: I'm gonna set the intention right now to be concise ( which can be challenging for me when I’m talking about my favorite subjects in the world!) So yes, it's that cliche where it just kind of happened. Not in terms of career, because that's not true of my experience. I was never picked out of a crowd like, “Who is this wonderful person, let's put you on a big screen!”, but what did happen, is that I was bad enough at everything else and absolutely fascinated by acting!
GRACIE: Oh my god, that's what I say about myself too! Because I wanted to be a musician, but I wasn't quite good enough. I wanted to be a dancer, but I wasn't quite good enough. So if I'm an actor, I can be any of those things but I just have to pretend!
RACHEL: And as we all know acting requires very little skill… I'm kidding! I'm joking, but you know… I wanted to be like, a business person. I wanted to prove that — I was very bad academically — I wanted to prove that I was smart and that I was a legitimate part of society.
Didn't make it into any of these schools that would make me a business person, so I went to philosophy school instead. But at night, I was doing some theater at the Cours Florent, where you can take after hours classes, and I just found my people! All the dorks were there, and I didn't have to like pretend to not be a dork there. I could be my weird theater kid self, and it was wonderful. I very quickly quit philosophy school because I was like, “Okay, cool, bye!” can't do it all.
Theater can be all-consuming when you're very interested, and then I thought I'm gonna just be a theater person my whole life. Theater at this point has been one of the only things that I've not lost interest in, along with therapy, and so as I was in my early 20s trying to understand my desire to be an artist, and “was I legitimate?” and “was it a good idea?” and trying to make a career happen for myself. There's a lot of self-work there that happens and you kind of show up to the artistic space, whether it's school, an audition, one of the paid projects, or even at drinks, meeting people— you show up as someone who needs a validation stamp from someone in the first place. You're in your early 20s, you have nothing to show for yourself, and you have these big dreams. And it changes the dynamic that you're in. Also, because financially, you need stuff to happen.
I'm a Cancer (although I'm not a huge astrology person) but I am a pretty textbook Cancer. I was having conversations with my mom at like 13 where she was like, “You don't need to talk to everyone about their deepest struggles”, you know? And I think I went into theater, and I've always been a writer, and I was writing because I was fascinated with trying to express the truth of the human experience and finding liberation through that truth.
So to come back to the topic of Atlantic, what you said, is so true and that's also why I came to Atlantic. I wanted to go to the USA, I love the writings of David Mamet on the theater, I already was very much in this dynamic of “I’m going to make my own work, I want to be like a producer of my own art as as long as I need to or want to”, and so Atlantic definitely gave me a lot of tools and information to do that in a freer way.
During COVID I was already in New York, and my family asked me to come back home because they were scared. I obliged, I had already been studying psychology here and there for years, reading a lot, and kind of studying unofficially. And I just decided to go for a certification in hypnotherapy, and since then Ive been certified in breath work and in EFT tapping. So I have a whole approach now where I integrate my tools, but basically what it was in the beginning was that I wanted to make room for other parts of myself that have different contributions to offer, so that then my artist self could just show up as an artist who's ready to play, who's just hungry, who doesn't need to survive — who doesn't need you to cut her a check so that she can pay her rent! Just someone who has dedicated her life to make room for art and play, and being a therapist allowed me to do that, because when I show up in the audition room or in the studio, I'm already a person that feels like I'm contributing to society. That feels like I exist here.
We need to be relating to society in some way and the more close to our heart that relationship to society — to the community — is, probably the more useful we are. I actually have a whole podcast about that.
So it allowed me to feel useful, and that checks a box of like, “do I even deserve to…” you know, all this very fundamental stuff of self-worth. It checked that box. Not forever and indefinitely! I have crazy imposter syndrome like everybody else. But artistically, it changed my dynamic a lot.
GRACIE: I think in our 20s, everyone sort of struggles with what to do for a day job. I've often thought that I didn't want to work a day job in theater, like, in a theater, because I'd love my brain to have a bit of a break. But I also personally don't like working from home, because I like getting out and seeing people, and looking at the world, right? I feel like that's what you're saying as well, that when you can step outside of yourself and be supporting your clients, you tap into the humanity and the connection that we're rehearsing for six weeks at a time to foster just that one moment when we're on stage! But during your sessions you get to be connected to that type of power.
RACHEL: The part of my brain that recognizes patterns, that has an understanding of the human psyche, of human behavior, gets an outlet and gets to come in and play before the industry decides— because you know, that's the whole thing, us as actors, we're sitting in that room and in our apartment and we're like, “I have so much art in me, I have so much truth that I want to be participating in”, and short of either: me producing my whole work (which is a huge output of energy, it's so much time, and it's so vulnerable) or a miraculous phone call of like, “You've been seen and chosen”, which is wonderful, you want to be available for that, but you don't want to be dependent on that.
I've been talking about my film a little bit this week since I was at this festival, and I was interviewed by a couple of people, and I just finally articulated that there's something similar in the triangle of love that I depict, the message about love that I submit in my film, and the triangulation in my career where I love my art so much, it did save my life — all the cliches I could say right now, it's what gets me up in the morning — but out of that love instead of putting a proverbial gun to that art’s proverbial temple, and being like, “Now you’ve got to provide for me and make me a valid individual in society, make me seen”, it allowed me to say, “I’m going to take care of you, you fragile desire to make art, you beautiful thing that I have in me, that I was gifted, that I'm hungry for. I'm going to set up infrastructure so that I'll have time and I'll already have a life.” I’m not either that or nothing.
If we're comparing it to a love relationship, the metaphor even goes to like, “I get to show up as a whole person, I don't need the thing that I love to change and fill all my needs, and I also show up with so much life that comes from outside”. That has tremendously enriched my art.
And, I really don't want this to sound like, “Oh I hear stuff in my therapy sessions that is great and now I'm gonna put it in”— that doesn't happen, that's not how it goes in my brain. I'm not out there fishing for story lines because that's not really what happens in therapy, mostly. You just get to work with someone, especially as a hypnotherapist, we don't spill the tea that much. It's just about the inner workings of the psyche and how we can harmonize the conscious the subconscious’ desire and this belief, and you're there with people, walking them to “I feel free now, I feel at one now, I feel welcome in this world now”. This process is very similar to storytelling, that's what we're trying to do when we're putting up a play or shooting a film. We're trying to say, “Hey, look at this truth!” and liberate by just truth-telling. There's liberation and unity that happens.
GRACIE: Yeah, absolutely. I have a comedian-friend and he was telling me that sometimes, he feels when he auditions for a little part or a commercial, sometimes he does a little better than the people who identify as actors because he's a comedian, he's supposed to observe, and it's not like his whole identity getting this role in a commercial, you know?
But I wanted to ask, as a type of therapy how did you come to your certificate in hypnotherapy, and how does it differ from talk therapy? Or is it very similar? What is your process with your clients?
RACHEL: Hypnotherapy is a process for accessing and communicating with a subconscious mind so that you can both find that information, and integrate new information organically. In other words, hypnotherapy allows the identification of limiting beliefs and allows you to replace those beliefs with more relevant life-affirming ones. It is therapy, but it can also be seen as a tool for mental and spiritual hygiene, because we all have parts in ourselves that hold information and energy, and things do get stagnant without paying attention to it or having a relationship to the self. So that's what hypnotherapy is, in a nutshell. We could talk about it for a lot of time.
I literally came across this school on the internet, and it allowed me to suddenly imagine a whole new world for myself where I could have a remote practice. I've been nomadic now in my life, intrinsic to what I'm trying to set up for myself (an international career) and just having a remote practice, that's part of my activity that allows me to be in that relationship to people, but also have my own artistic possibility. That just blew my mind, and I immediately started talking about it to people around me, and people didn't understand it at first. The response that I got at first was, “I think you're afraid that you're not going to make it as an actor, you're you're feeling vulnerable, it's COVID, we're all in existential crises”, which I was, and ,”You're just looking for a plan B, but it's going to make you scatter yourself”, and I was like, “That's fair!” I really studied that in myself. Is this out of fear? But sometimes, fear, you know, it's not all bad. It's like ego, it's not just all bad, it shouldn't be the boss of you, but it's here to tell you, “Hey there's parts of you that are scared that they're going to be unseen and silenced and that want to come out and play, want to come out and be useful, and connect to people.” And that's a very intellectual part that I have, I'm sure you can hear it when I'm talking… I live in theory. There's a lot of thoughts in there!
Being an actor was a lot about dropping down and grounding, which was a wonderful learning curve for me, but then also… what am I going to do with all this theory? Because sometimes there's good stuff in there! It was a year’s study that I did, I went very deep, and then I continued after getting my certification, like I said, I got other certifications.
I'm a year and a half/two years into my practice now, so I've been lucky enough to have a consistent stream of clients come to me and come back, and it's just been so fulfilling.
GRACIE: I was wondering what your process with your clients is, but it must be different with each client just like how each actor is different.
RACHEL: Well yes and no, I do have a finite grid of tools and of just my POV, because also I'm not a clinical doctor, I do have just my set of tools that I have to offer. So my process is usually that we'll have a first session and I'll try to find out a lot about why specifically they're coming, and if we're doing hypnotherapy, I'm going to try to find out specifically what are we treating. Is it fear driving, is it public speaking, is it relationship to sex, relationship to parents? A specific thing that doesn't have to be your only issue, but there's an eye of the storm.
When the person is in hypnosis, if you speak to the subconscious about this specific thing, the subconscious will know exactly what we're talking about. What happens most of the time is that even despite the person being reluctant, or scared, or not understanding, or having a lot of conscious thoughts that happen, sometimes there's something in the first hypnosis where that can be helped in the first session. The subconscious has its own agenda, and knows what's happening, and knows that this is going to be its opportunity to finally be heard and be seen. Usually, the subconscious collaborates way quicker than the conscious mind does, which is why hypnotherapy is wonderful.
Once I have an angle, we go into some regressions (it's not past life regressions, although sometimes that happens but that's not my main thing at all) we try to go back to memories of “where does this take root for you?”, “what experience does this?”, and “what experience gave what narrative?” and when you find a narrative, you find that it's a story, it's a limiting belief. “When I was little, I heard my mom say about my sister that she was beautiful.” And you know the child doesn't even say, “Oh, now I'm going to choose to identify as intelligent”. It's just that rerouting happens, the paradigm changes between zero and eight. There's something that happens, you draw conclusions, and now that's what's going to shape your paradigm.
The definition of a paradigm is that you don't know it's there. It's the shape in which you see the world. So, now you're a grown-up trying to do this and that, so we identify those the main tenants of that paradigm, the tenants that no longer work, like “I am not pretty, I'm smart”, that's a really simple example that I have, but of course it's always more complex than that.
Very often, if not most often it ends up being about “I am not enough”, and/or “I am unworthy of love”, and/or “whatever I want is not accessible to me”, “I am helpless” — those are things that are learned in childhood, by experience. Parents don't mean to pass those on, they just do. We don't mean to learn these things or conclude these things, we just do. So what I'm able to do with hypnotherapy, is to identify and replace those beliefs.
What I do in the first session prior to the hypnotherapy is that I'll get the client to really speak about the experience of life that they want to have, beyond that issue. What is it going to feel like when you're able to speak publicly with so much ease? Oh, it’s gonna feel like this, and like that, and maybe I'll get those opportunities… and I go into the nitty-gritty of the silly details so that at the end of the two-hour session — that first hypnosis is pretty intense, it's a journey down the subconscious and people usually wake up a bit dazed at the end of it — once we've really unrooted, we just found the root and pulled, there's a space in the earth, or in this in the psyche. That's where I pour in all the beautiful alternate universe imagination that the person has. It's just visualization that's has been proven again and again, you just create worlds that then just have to come to you. It is manifestation, but it's it's more scientific than that.
There's a neuro-linguistic programming element of what I do, I record the transformation (the very positive part) and the person goes away with the recording and listens to it for 21 days, and we continue to see each other in sessions and I use breath work and EFT tapping (Emotional Freedom Technique which comes from Chinese medicine, about tapping on a certain circuit of acupressure points while saying affirmations), so things are are integrated in the nervous system.
Something I believe a lot of therapy doesn't do, in my experience as a client is that and my experience as a student (I might be wrong because I'm I'm young, you know) but my experience of it is that, take psychoanalysis for example, because they're related — hypnotherapy and psychoanalysis are about the subconscious — psychoanalysisis about understanding, it's about just getting an understanding, so once you get your “Aha!” moment: “That's how I've been relating to my mother the whole time and that's how it's been informing my self-worth and how I show up in relationships… Aha!” But then, what do we do? Where do we go now? So what ends up happening a lot, in my opinion, is that we just go to therapy and rehearse our narratives, and we have a collection of things that make us, us.
So we enter a relationship and you're like, “So, if you want to know me, you have to know that this is how it went for me, and I have this issue, and I have that limitation”, and it doesn't help, it makes more baggage. And we rehearse the baggage, we specify the baggage, we identify the baggage.
What I offer instead, is that once you've taken away the beliefs made a new paradigm for the person, there's a a little bit of time that needs to go that you're reinforcing those habits, those neural pathways, because otherwise it's just going to revert, or anything else can come in. But if I take out something and I'm very intentional on what I replace it with, there's great opportunity there to just fill the gap with whatever is convenient to you — I’m gonna say “love and light” and sound like Jesus Christ, for some people it is “I am worthy, I do have a lot to offer” or, “I’m a whole person, I exist beyond my relationships”. All these things that then become a new paradigm, and from there you're so free!
People ask me, what's a successful experience with a client? It's that they get clarity, and from that clarity they get a new energy and they get to be more free. They're in the present moment, there's just more space to be here now and enjoy life. This is why we go to therapy. Why would we do all this freaking work, if it's just to not feel even a little better after?
GRACIE: Thinking about the neural pathways that you discussed, I feel like there was a lot of our training at Atlantic that also discussed that, like the habits that we formed as actors, and we remove all the habits then we like feel so bad and so confused and so adrift… and then we replace them with better habits and we get to step more into ourselves as performers. How did you draw from your acting training, Atlantic or otherwise, as you were learning this hypnotherapy practice?
RACHEL: That's an awesome question. I feel like in the first year, all the teachings about the present moment, that was such a life-changing experience for me. Because, I already knew about the present moment, I was already in my acting work, doing some work to be in the present moment, but the way that Atlantic (and in my case Carl Howell) presented it to us and just put us in those situations with Moment Lab, which was coined by Jacqueline Landgraf, it just allowed me to be so much freer, and by free, I mean myself. There was something so true and powerful that wasn't the doing of my ego, that wasn't me being like, “Oh, look how how easily I cry, or look how I'm able to portray a grieving mother so well…”
GRACIE: —And if I can interrupt briefly to explain Moment Lab, it was this class where it was a quote-unquote acting class, but the very first exercise we did (or one of the first) was, we stood in front of all of our classmates and just stood there, and looked at everyone, and didn't move. There was so little pressure to perform in Moment Lab that it was overwhelming!
RACHEL: Exactly! At that moment I remember being so raw, like I have nothing that I can be doing to prove my worth. I’m just here, and that opened so many gates for me. There was this exercise where Carl had us go off and get a coffee with a partner, but the goal was that we were only allowed to speak about things that were true in the moment. No like, “Oh, you know about yesterday, or you know next week”, or whatever, and I so happened to be paired up with someone who is a very close friend of mine, Hannah Teal, and I had had a major life event just the night before. The person I was in love with had broken up with me, and I didn't want to break up. So the next day of that, you can just imagine, just getting up and going to school had been absolutely heroic in my body at that time. So you're getting coffee on a rainy day with one of your best friends, and you're only allowed to talk about the present moment. Whereas all I wanted to do was cry about him and what he had done! But then we were talking about how good the tea tasted and the color of the walls, and it sounds futile, but my heart, in that moment, got what it really needed — which was the presence of someone, and my grief ended up being one of the components of these moments.
There was the tea, there were the green walls, and my grief.
GRACIE: That's a learning experience, that even tea can taste nice if you're grieving.
RACHEL: By taking away some of the narrative and just being present, even through tremendous discomfort, there's grace and love that happens, that immediately paradoxically brings the relief that you were looking for. That's the paradigm about therapy that I'm trying to flip— or I mean, add to, not flip. That speaking through your issues is absolutely paramount, and that's a lot of what I do, but then building a tolerance for discomfort and for presence and listening through discomfort is how you free a human being.
This is why Thoreau, for example, speaks so much about throwing yourself against the elements and being in nature when you're depressed. To be outside of yourself and be in the moment, and then everything that you carry within you which seems so unbearable will belong in the great family of things like Mary Oliver says in Wild Geese.
GRACIE: You must know the Rilke quote, “let everything happen to you…”
“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”― Rainer Maria Rilke
RACHEL: Yes, yes. Terror and everything, happen to you… nothing is final. I'm actually reading Rilke right now, and reading his stuff about love, and how he says like, to love someone is the hardest thing a human being can do, and we spend our lives preparing for it and that's the ultimate work and young people get it wrong all the time because we want to be in fusion, we want to make one. And that's my learning curve right now, with my film, that's what I'm talking about, about love. Also becoming a therapist has allowed me to “unfuse” the like, diffusion with my artistic career and actually allowed me to be so much more authentic through it paradoxically.
GRACIE: Another question was, how has therapy changed you as a performer/writer/director, but it does sound like your film is a film that only a therapist could make, you know? In a good way! I feel even though maybe you didn't feel like you were showing up to it as a therapist, it feels like where you are brought you to make this film.
RACHEL: You know, even before becoming a therapist, my first play was about family dynamics and what we inherit of when the elders pass (of course I'm not talking about material stuff) and so that is also a very therapist thing. But I mean, is it? Or is it just, you know, the thing that brings me to storytelling is the same thing that brings me to therapy, which is “What is the essence of being a human in the world, and how can we show up and exist in love and presence which are always available?”, and “What are the prisons that we invent for ourselves that make us separate from these things that are available at any time?” and that's the link.
GRACIE: How do you feel like your therapy training has changed you as a performer or an artist?
RACHEL: Well, I think it's indirect. It hasn't informed me in that I'm like, “Oh my god, here's some human behavior that I can emulate or inspire myself from”, that hasn't been happening. But it has allowed me to show up as someone who chooses to be here ,who desires to be here, who is here because she's curious… that completely freed where I was white knuckling with both my hands. Now I was able to let go and just find my whole range of action, and I'm still finding it, I mean I haven't found my whole range of action, but I have found freedom, agency, and less constant questioning about my own worth. I found a thing that I can do that I get a response from, and I'm in this dynamic where I give and receive, and give and receive, and it's happening.
So I come to art in that way, outside of survival mode. That's the biggest thing it's done for me, really.
GRACIE: On Instagram, an agent I follow who does lots of Q and A's about acting, wrote a quote that's really stuck with me, and she said that your art will suffocate under the need to financially support yourself from it. And it's sad because we all want to believe that our art will help us make a living, and that we'll be able to live comfortable lives, but when you're putting so much pressure on it to make it so you can live the life that you want by only doing your art, it suppresses your ability to be creative.
RACHEL: Absolutely, it's the death of art because now you're surviving, now you're demanding, and you're consuming, actually. You're being like, “I need you to make me survive in this society, in this industry”, whereas art only wants to exist outside of capitalism — and I'm not saying like, I am in an absolutely capitalist dynamic with my career, I'm trying to find financing for my firm, I'm trying to find managers, agents, deals with money, right? — but I think I'm suffocating it far less. Part of the epiphany was reading Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert where /
GRACIE: I've actually been reading that as well, it's really something.
RACHEL: / she talks about the ceremony that she had to marry her writing, she took her writing in marriage and said some vows which were, “I vow to provide for you instead of demanding that you provide for me” and that was such a paradigm shift for me, because it's not just the money thing, it’s like if my whole self-worth, my whole plan for being a part of the society is to be validated by an industry that is so arbitrary and that might go very wrong, it's okay to have several and I actually advise that. For example, I have a lot of artists that come to me as a therapist (which is another way to answer your question, I guess)
GRACIE: Yeah, I was actually going to wonder if you see a lot of performers, as well.
RACHEL: Yeah, because hypnotherapy is awesome to deal with stage fright, to deal with certain blockages artistically or writing blocks and stuff like that, and finding your own voice, that's kind of my niche. There are people that come to me that aren't artists, that are entrepreneurs. Being an artist myself, having been in that active conversation since very young of like, “I am this and society is this, and I want to show up like this in society. How am I going to make that work, being authentically myself, but also being kind of legible and understandable in the communal grid?” That's a whole enigma for a lot of young people, and even for a lot of midlife people or older people, because who we are also constantly changes. So I feel like it's allowed me to bring an angle to people where, also just being in acting school you go through this process yourself and you're surrounded with people going through the process of what you described like, “I’m gonna strip my vocal instrument from what distorts my voice, I'm going to try to find alignment”, it's a different dynamic, different discipline, but it's the same process. It's the same phenomenon, really.
GRACIE: Definitely. I think what's so difficult about being a performer and putting your work out there is that it it really begins to feel as you get rejection after rejection, that you're like, “Is it me that they're rejecting?” And it really never is. So it's almost like that having the other day job is not just — I say day job, but the other calling — is not just a stream of income, it's also a reminder that you are so much more than what you're showing up to that two-minute meeting with that casting director that they won't see, and that’s okay that they don't see it, because it's for you.
RACHEL: I had that epiphany in my very private life very recently, of the fact that through my life there's going to be people that see me, people that don't see me, and how about I just give myself permission to stop focusing on the people that don't and changing their minds, and just give my energy to the people that do? And there's going to be more people that do the more I give myself and focus myself. There was this person on the internet the other day that was saying, a lot of time we think we have to change our who, change who you are because you're not fitting in. You’ve got to change your where. And I don't mean that necessarily geographically (although that's what I did! And that's what my character did in in my short), but you can change where you are within yourself, and that's changing your paradigm. And that's what you're talking about, like being in the room and accepting that the people you show up to might not see you, is a different where, it's a different place from which to show up. It's a tremendous shift, actually.
GRACIE: I mean that's so enlightening, just thinking of shifting where you are also means are you not in the right artistic community? Do you need to maybe find a different network that wants to make the same type of thing that you do?
RACHEL: Absolutely.
GRACIE: And there's no need to be desperately auditioning for this one improv team that you think will change your life, or you know, find a different one!
RACHEL: It's like acting, I always say that about how learning to be a good actor has so many good precepts about life itself, that's one of the main things that Atlantic has us unlearn I'm on stage: I have a strong expectation of how it's supposed to go down, and what am I supposed to do is supposed to be very clear, but it’s how it's supposed to go down that makes you so actually utterly unavailable, opposite of being in the moment. Because I have my expectation, I have my narrative, and that's what I'm being true to, and that expectation, that narrative existed before, during, and after the moment, which is such a missed opportunity just be here. When you shed those expectations, it usually just happens. Also your people just gravitate to you. The universe will pull you, take you by the hair, and put you where you belong, once you surrender a little bit. As long as you're not trying to find and force yourself into something you don't fit into, yeah, just show up as yourself.
GRACIE: I don't want to take too much of your time, but I think that's a lovely note to end on, just reminding us to always show up as ourselves.
RACHEL: You know, I had a client in therapy the other day that was like, “I’m a singer, but I want to…”, she has a real estate job, and she was saying like, “I feel like I'm not a real artist as long as I stay in this job”. And she likes the job, she enjoys it and she lives in New York City, she needs the money. Walking down that mental path and unraveling things, we realize that if you take out the story about working in a real estate office nine-to-five, five days a week, it's actually empowering for her! It allows her to pay her rent, and there's power in that, you know, when you're a woman and you’ve got your own money, and as a woman you know exactly what I'm talking about. Because as an artist you're also sometimes being like, “Who's gonna be my financier…?” but then you're dependent on stuff, and so I think that's an important conversation also, in terms of feminism, because men also need to be free, and out of survival mode, and authentic — we need them to be authentic, but currently in this economy, being a woman who can either be a very successful artist financially or depend on someone else financially, that's a prison, and we need women in full possessions of their means, so that they can have the agency to make their choices and put their own voice forth without needing to please someone or something to eat food and pay rent.
GRACIE: Yeah, oh my god, that's so beautiful and true. I do feel like even the Hollywood actresses I see, they have so many things they care about, you know? The really good ones, they have foundations, and they have charities. And many of the very successful Oscar-winning actresses are often because when they were younger they did such successful films, it's almost like their past selves are supporting their future selves, right? Because you get residuals and stuff like that, which I think is kind of beautiful.
RACHEL: That's so true, and they told us that the whole time, you need to show up as an actor, you need to show up as a whole person to your craft, otherwise if you're just an actor talking about acting with life experiences that are only about acting, there's a thing there… there's a life force there that's just missing. No one relates.
GRACIE: You know, I work in an office in the publishing industry, so you know I just talk about books all day! And I'm like, well, that's great because I love books!
RACHEL: You have to find what you actually love to talk about, and then that will give you time to put it into your art. Let yourself be a human in the world and, you know, Chekhov talks about the ripples — there's the main thing, and then the theater is supposed to not really be about the moon itself but the the reflection of the moon on the little pieces of broken glass — and if you don't create the strength at the eye of the storm, then what are your ripples going to be? As an actor, you can't manufacture all that life. You have to live the life, and then show up in the present moment, free and fierce, and then let life come through you and come back out of you. That's the most useful you can be as an actor.
GRACIE: I feel like what you talked about in hypnotherapy also relates in that you have to be able to cultivate a trust in yourself, that you are living your purpose, and that you are an artist, and that you will find you the vessel that you need when it comes to you.
RACHEL: Absolutely. That is so beautiful that you talk about trust, I often say like, you know people are like, “I lack self-confidence”. In French it's the same, we use confiance en soi, which is “trust in myself”, and you know the way that we often forget to look at it is if I haven't given myself reasons to trust myself, I will not be self-confident if I haven't shown up for myself, taken myself out of situations that weren't good for me. That's also a feminist thing, the amount of times that women will choose to be polite over being safe!
GRACIE: Yeah, and to think I remember the first time that I said no to an audition, and I was so scared. I was like 22 or something, and I said I don't want to audition for this play, it's not the right time, it doesn't feel good. And then I found out that like three successive women had to be cast in the play, because they kept quitting from the role, and I was like wow.
RACHEL: See, there is an inner child in you, there is a little person, a little Gracie in you that is vulnerable, that is pure life force, and that needs you to navigate, and that saw you say no to this. “I got don't worry, I got you Gracie. No thank you.” And that’s self trust, self-confidence, right there. Now the two parts of you (there's actually many more than two) but these parts of you know that they can, they will collaborate for the benefit of each other. That is self-care. You know self-care is not sheet masks and foot baths, I mean it can be, but this whole human terminal that I arrived in and that is mine now to kind-of parent and take care, of I'm going to commit to doing a good job of caring for it.
GRACIE: That's so beautiful.
RACHEL: Well thank you so much for this, this was such a joy for me!
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