Feeling a little weary after a 6 hour session with one of my acting students. It was difficult enough dealing with such a long day, after only having had surgery last week but the session was also incredibly emotionally draining for us both.

We had to deal with an emotional block and for those of you who are actors you will be familiar with this term, not that I am suggesting that those of you who aren’t, won’t be but it is a very common occurrence in learning to act.

My job as a teacher is to recognise when a student has hit an emotional block, that in itself is relatively straight forward. The difficulty lies in how to address it, it is very important that I understand them very well, how they respond, react & process the comments given to them.

But this doesn’t only apply to actors, in fact, in a way we are the lucky ones because we get to release our emotions in a safe environment, or at least it should be, and then use them to our advantage – to entertain the rest of you! Sadly, emotional blocks happen to us all, admittedly in varying degrees but over time from a very young age we start to shut off our emotions – we are upsetting people, it isn’t appropriate, we are embarrassing, so we take these negative thoughts on board and begin to become conditioned – we must not re-offend!

The thing is, in my opinion, this is very dangerous, we lose complete control and connection with our emotions, we shelve them, block them, hide them, in fact anything we can do to display the fact that ‘we are fine’, we are not fine, it is unlikely that anyone reading this, let alone the rest of the planet, is really fine. Why should we pretend we are? I am not suggesting that everyone is having a terrible time but I am reasonably sure that we are all experiencing certain things that spark an emotion. Yet we do our utmost to disguise it, what the bloody hell is that all about? If we are sad we should be able to cry, if we are happy we should be able to giggle uncontrollably, and if we are angry we should be perfectly entitled to show it. But do we?

Like hell we do, we see it as a weakness for some reason, more so the sadness/crying aspect but to be frank, any emotion, particularly in Britain, that is anything more than well contained is seen as an interference with proceedings. Well, you know what I think, of course you don’t as this is my blog, I think we should allow emotions back into our conditioned world and I don’t mean spending your life crying hysterically – that is more likely to occur due to years of suppression.  I mean, that when you feel sad, angry, guilty, jealous, happy, sexy and any others, that you embrace it, see what happens, ok you might sob on the office, so what! You will feel better, who cares if they don’t, it isn’t their emotion, it’s yours and without it, you aren’t being true to your uniqueness as a human.

When someone is crying, hug them – do not tell them to stop. When someone is laughing, laugh with them – do not tell them to be quiet. When someone is angry, ask them why and can you help – do not tell them they shouldn’t be. And so it goes on, we were given the ability to feel, so for goodness sake – let’s feel – it is so empowering, so refreshingly real and so personal to us, it is ours and no one can take it away from us.

Thank you for taking the time to read my blog, please feel free to share your opinions, like, share, comment. In fact, why not tell me how you are feeling right now, I mean really feeling, not what you think you should tell me.

Best wishes, Liz