Treat meditation as a form of self-care, like putting on your own oxygen mask first, because being more sane and effective yourself allows you to be more useful and contribute positively to the world.
When the systems and tools you grew up with no longer support you in adult life, acquire new tools like mindfulness to navigate increased pressures and anxieties.
Use meditation to identify areas where you can course-correct your behavior and to accept inherent anxieties or conditions that cannot be changed, learning to be with them without making them worse.
Be aware of the ‘second arrow’ – the optional suffering you add to inherent pain through rumination or self-blame – and use mindfulness to manage and reduce this additional suffering.
Recognize that while you may not be responsible for your initial, automatic thoughts, you are responsible for your second thoughts and how you choose to respond to them.
Do not always assume your gut instincts are right, as they can be rooted in pre-conscious experiences or primitive brain responses that may not always be helpful.
Apply mindfulness as a filter to your spontaneous ideas and emotional impulses, allowing you to catch and prevent acting on terrible ideas or rage-fueled reactions.
Learn how your mind and body can help you achieve and express your core values in the world, while also diminishing the ways in which they encourage conflicting values.
Practice meditation to achieve a cleaner ‘signal to noise ratio’ in your mind, enabling you to better discern and act on beneficial instincts while rejecting unhelpful impulses.
By understanding your own mental complexities and ‘insanity’ through practices like meditation, you naturally develop empathy for others, recognizing that everyone struggles, which makes you a better citizen.
When strong emotions arise, observe them as ‘a feeling being known’ or ’there’s a feeling,’ rather than identifying with them as your feeling or something you generated, to create distance.
When meditating, understand that your mind will drift many times; your practice is simply to gently bring your attention back to your breath each time it wanders.
Give yourself a break and acknowledge that the act of trying to be mindful and present through meditation is inherently a generous, loving, and civically responsible endeavor.
When facing persistent anxiety, accept the possibility that you can handle it, even if it lasts your whole life, rather than resisting the feeling.
For situations involving public performance or high pressure, consider discussing beta blockers with a doctor, as they can prevent the physiological symptoms of panic attacks, making psychological management easier.
After managing an anxiety-inducing situation, take the opportunity to observe what brought you to that moment in the first place to better understand the workings of your mind.
When you lose your lines or experience a mental block during a performance, take a breath, step back, and look at another person to help regain composure and recall.
If you experience a panic attack during a challenging situation, take a brief break and then try to confront the situation again to prevent intimidation from taking hold.
If you experience significant anxiety or panic attacks, do not try to ‘muscle through’ it for long; instead, seek professional help and new ways to cope.
Use your gut or intuition for creative choices, as it can help you identify what is singular about you without intellectualizing, allowing you to get out of your own way and surprise others.
To empathize with different kinds of people, especially as an actor, cultivate an open mind and be receptive to new ways of thinking.
Use mindfulness and other practices when they are useful to you, understanding that not every instinct needs to be overridden (e.g., eating when hungry) but some behaviors (e.g., road rage) are not useful.
If you are lucky, pursue career paths or activities where people consistently encourage you, as this can lead to finding what you want to do.
When pursuing a craft or profession, take the work and the craft seriously to be most useful at your job.
As an actor, try to fly below the radar and blend into the storytelling to be most useful at telling somebody else’s story, rather than inventing your own.
As an actor, try to keep an opaque version of yourself public to avoid putting obstacles in the way of creating the illusion of being somebody else, which is your job.
If you are successful, keep your nose down, keep trying harder, and never take yourself too seriously, but never stop working hard to manage the burden of responsibility that comes with privilege.
When experiencing a lull in inspiring work, consider creating your own projects, such as writing something, to stay engaged.
As an actor, be thin-skinned and emotionally available when working to create immediacy in your performance, but thick-skinned to handle criticism and rejection when the work is released.
Introduce children to meditation by encouraging them to focus on a word or their breath, as this simple technique can help them manage a busy mind.
When exploring consciousness through deep meditation, embrace the ‘useful confusion’ that arises from questioning ‘who is this anyway?’ as this can lead to a sense of calm and detachment over time.
Use meditation to cultivate the wisdom and emotional agility typically associated with aging gracefully, bringing these qualities into the earlier parts of your life.
When starting meditation, avoid approaching it with ‘rabid, competitive antagonism’ or the desire to ‘be great at it,’ as this mindset can detract from the actual purpose of the practice.