Acting Business Boot Camp Peter Pamela Rose

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About Terry Knickerbocker:
Terry is a graduate of The Experimental Theatre Wing in the Drama Dept. at New York University. After graduating from NYU, Terry trained as an actor and a teacher with William Esper. 
He taught at The William Esper Studio for 25 years, and continues as part of the core faculty at the Experimental Theatre Wing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He has also taught directing at Playwrights Horizons Theatre School and Yale University. 
Other essential teacher/mentors include Maggie Flanigan, Rina Yerushalmi, Steve Wangh, Terry Hayden, Nikos Psacharopoulos, Jackie Brookes, Mary Overlie, Ryszard Cieslak, Jerzy Grotowski, Pierre Lefèvre, Moshe Feldenkrais, Dr. Louis Ormont, and Dr. Harry Fogarty.
He has coached actors on over 300 films, television and theater projects, both on and off-Broadway and regionally. He also consulted with playwrights and screenwriters on their scripts. 
Some of the actors he has worked with and trained include Sam Rockwell, Chris Messina, Boyd Holbrook, Natasha Lyonne, Leslie Bibb, Emmy Rossum, Yul Vasquez, Jordana Spiro, Gillian Alexy, Gretchen Mol and many others.
A past recipient of the Drama League of New York’s directing award/fellowship for emerging directors, Terry is also a former member of Circle Rep’s LAB. His directing credits include many new works as well as contemporary and classical plays such as Measure for Measure, Tartuffe, The Normal Heart, Candida, All My Sons, and David Rabe’s In the Boom Boom Room.

This week what I wanted to do was a breathing exercise for actors because I think in this incredible turbulent world that we live in, and yes, it's always turbulent, but it seems particularly turbulent right now.
It is so important that for us as artists, that before we are about to perform, that we get to the center of us. 
As a little girl, I called it, go back to the source. 
And I believe that is connecting to that part of us that is connected to the Universe. 
So what I'm going to do I'm not going to breathe with you, but what I am going to do is guide you through breathing exercises.
So what I ask of you is to breathe in through your nose
and let out a big sigh, ah, and again, breathe in through your nose, and let out a big sigh,and that can be as loud as you want it to be. 
Pause. Stay still. Breathe in through your nose.
And again, sigh out. You can even scream if you want. And pause.
And just allow your breath to be where it wants to be. Whether that's breathing in through your nose or your mouth.
As you do this, I can encourage you to do this for those of you who have subways on the subway, on the tube, or if you're on a bus, or you're riding in the back of a car, or you're at home, sitting on the couch, or maybe you're lying down.
And if possible, see if you can wear an eye mask or put a gentle scarf on your eyes, just to block out that little extra light.
As you breathe through this next set of breathing exercises, I want you to almost imagine your body expanding and contracting. 
Your entire body expanding and contracting. Expanding and contracting. Expanding and contracting.
Exhale all of your breath.
And take a deep breath in.
Hold it. Two, three, four, five. Exhale.
Pause, two, three, four, inhale.
Hold, two, three, four, five, exhale.
Pause, two, three, four, inhale.
Hold, two, three, four, five, exhale. 
Pause, 2, 3, 4. One more. Inhale.
Pause, 2, 3, 4, 5. Exhale.
Pause. 2, 3, 4. Good. 
Now just allow yourself to breathe.
So what you notice there is we did an inhale and I had you hold for five, then an exhale, and then I had you hold for four. 
I'm going to do one more set and this time we're going to go a little bit slower. Just allow yourself to breathe. 
This will probably be an exercise that you'll listen to several times.
Each time if you can, really see if you can match your breath to my voice. 
What that does is takes the control out of you and surrender it to something else. 
You're not surrendering to me, you're surrendering to the Universe.
Exhale all of your breath, and inhale.
Hold, three, four, five. Exhale.
Pause, two, three, four. Inhale.
Hold 2, 3, 4, 5, exhale.
Pause 2, 3, 4, inhale.
Hold 2, 3, 4, 5, exhale.
Pause 2, 3, 4, 5, Inhale.
Hold, two, three, four, five. Exhale.
Pause, two, three, four, five. Inhale one more time.
Hold, two, three, four, five 
Let it all out Haaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Rest. Just allow yourself to be okay. It's okay. It's safe.
You are secure
Love yourself in this moment It's okay to do that
Be in this moment. Just for this moment. It's okay. It's okay.
It's okay.
Now at this moment you can pause and just allow yourself to breathe and stay in stillness. 
Or you can gently open your eyes, let them flutter, remove your maskyour scarf and feel your body. 
Sometimes when I can't sleep, which doesn't happen all the time by any stretch of the imagination, but it does happen, I find this breathing exercise to be very helpful.
I hope it is helpful for you too, and I encourage you to practice it numerous times. 
It only takes a few minutes. 
And again, if you can. To the best of your ability, really see if you can listen to my voice and follow that. 
Obviously, I don't want you to strain, but work up to it. You can do it. You can do it.

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Today, I'm going to do something to follow up from what I talked about last week, which was prayer and meditation for the actor. 
I got a lot of emails about how many people enjoyed that podcast. So what I wanted to do today was focusing on centering, and centering for the actor. So this is going to be a little different.
I don't recommend that you do this while you are driving a car or maybe even walking down the street. 
This would be a podcast episode that you want to be at home and in a comfortable place because I'm going to be going through different areas of your body and talk about centering them. 
So if you will, I have taken off my shoes. I am standing here in front of my mic and you can do this, I guess actually if you wanted to do this on a subway, you could or just somewhere you don't have to pay attention for a bit. 
Put yourself in a comfortable spot. That could be lying on the ground with your legs in the semi supine position, meaning they're bent at the knees and your feet are flat on the ground. Maybe put a book underneath your head or a small blanket and find a comfortable place for your arms, whether that be down by your side or stretched out.
And if you're seated, locate where your sit bones are. 
And allow your spine to get real tall. Place your hands in your lap.
If you're standing as I am right now, feel the ground beneath your feet and just take a deep breath in through your nose.
Let it go.
I want you to think of a cloud.
A light blue cloud just above your head.
Imagine how puffy it is.
In this cloud, there is clear, light blue liquid.
And imagine an angel coming with an arrow and pricking the bottom of that beautiful blue cloud.
Slowly, gently, the liquid hits the top of your head
and slowly goes down your forehead, the back of your scalp, to your ears, down the back of your head, to your eyebrows, to your eyes, down your nose and your cheekbones.
Into your cheeks, top of your lips, down the sides of your face, your lower lip, your chin, slowly down the back of your neck, down the front of your neck, relaxing those throat muscles.
As it does, breathe, and allow your face to relax. To be completely submerged by this magical blue liquid as it pauses right at your clavicle, your collarbone.
Breathe and allow your face, the back of your head, your scalp, the hair on your head to completely relax and just be.
Allow the liquid to continue down your collarbones, into your shoulders, down your arms, your biceps and your triceps, into your elbows, down your forearms, into your wrists.
Take a deep breath here.
Into your thumbs and that fleshy part of your thumbs. Into your palms down the front of your fingers and starting to drip gently off your fingertips. While the blue liquid goes from your wrists and down the front of your hands into those front knuckles of your hands, into your fingers, down the front of your fingertips, and meeting The back of your fingertips and dripping off.
Now your head, your shoulders, your arms, and your hands, and your fingers are completely relaxed.
Place your attention now back to the clavicle, and allow the blue liquid to rush down into your chest, your breasts, your shoulder blades, down your spine, down and around your torso, off your breasts, into your abdomen through your solar plexus, down into your buttocks and into your groin.
It is now as if you are wearing a full bathing suit, and you are completely relaxed and centered in this moment. Just being here with your breath, and my voice, again, and again.
Imagine that blue liquid being in your head, in your shoulders, down your arms, in your hands, in your fingertips, down your chest, in your breasts, in your solar plexus, in your abdomen, down your back, through the shoulder blades, down your back of your torso, the sides of your torso, and don't forget to let go of any tension.
In your armpits, allow that blue bathing suit to just rest gently on your skin and allow

So today I actually, I've been just so intensely busy with so many different things and I was in New York City today and one of the things I used to do when I was in New York more than I am now is I would go into churches and I just happened to pass by an old church that I usually would go into and I just walked in.
And it was quiet, quiet. 
And I have been noticing this past, I don't know, week, that my mind has been racing a lot. 
Just tons and tons of talk and nothing negative. Just very busy. 
And it's disrupted my sleep and it's been so unpleasant. 
And then I went into that church and I noticed that in this church when I closed the doors and I sat in one of the pews and I've done this, you know, with other spiritual places of worship. 
So I sat in the pew and I just closed my eyes.
and it was so wonderful. Because it was so quiet and almost instantaneously it was like my soul was soothed. 
My soul was soothed with silence. 
And so today, I wanted to do a podcast about prayer and meditation.
Now I need to stress that I am not a religious person.
My relationship is with the universe. And sometimes I do call the universe God, but for me, it is really a spiritual entity. 
I think of it as my higher self. Because I so strongly believe that the universe is a part of me and I am a part of the universe. 
So as usual, as per the usual, I am going to be doing a reading out of The Language of Letting Go.
I'm gonna alter it slightly for our purposes. 
So the first thing that she says is she gives a quote by Emmett Fox The Sermon on the Mount.
And it says, “as a matter of fact, prayer is the only real action in the full sense of the word, because prayer is the only thing that changes one's character. A change in character or a change in soul is a real change.”
And although I felt that today while I was sitting in silence, because I felt a change in me.
And it's a change that I've kept with me for the rest of the day. 
And I said to myself, well, why don't you do this more often?

But I don't even have to go into a church to do it. I just need to be quiet, which is something that I do. Not for as long as I was in that church. I probably was only there, I don't know, ten minutes.
But again, it was very soothing to my soul. 
Melody Beattie goes on to say, “Erika Young has said that we are spiritual beings who are human. Prayer or praying and meditating are ways that we can take care of our spirit. Prayer and meditation are disciples suggested by the 11th step of 12 step recovery programs.”
And a prayer that I love, that I believe I, I shared with you recently, is I pray for the knowledge of your will for me and the power to carry that out. 
I pray for the knowledge of your will for me and the power to carry that out. 
And I can say that for my acting career, I can say it for anything, but you can also say it for your acting career, because sometimes we feel so lost and I want that word, I've told you before, it's my favorite word, wisdom to guide us.
Prayer and meditation are not necessarily connected to organized religion, prayer and meditation are ways to improve our personal relationship with higher power or the universe to benefit ourselves, our life, our growth. 
And again, the, the, the phrases that come up for me are take care of yourself first and the rest will follow. 
Take care of yourself first and the rest will follow.
 And that means mentally, physically and spiritually. Praying is how we connect with our higher power, our universe. 
We don't pray because we have to.
We pray because we want to. 
It is how we link our soul to our source. 
I remember when I was a very young girl, I wrote down on a piece of paper: go back to the source.
And at the time, I did not know what that meant. But yet I felt it. I understood it. And it's one of those pieces of paper in your life that you cherish.
Because at some young age, I knew there was something bigger than me. 
T

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Today, I'm going to talk about the subject of Wisdom. 
Wisdom is my favorite word in the American language. 
God, do I love Wisdom. The reason why I love Wisdom is because Wisdom gives me power.
And sometimes it isn't even the power of knowledge, but the power of knowing what to do. 
And I don't have any script for this podcast or guidance for this podcast. I'm just talking to you about this subject because it is truly just the thing that I crave more of. 
This past week I turned another year older.
I help people to adjust their thoughts and their lives to work for them instead of against them.
And, that's a really crucial thing because it's certainly something that I did a lot when I was younger. 
I constantly worked against myself because I also was like, “Yeah I'm, I have so much energy and I'm so tough, I don't always have to be working for me.”
Oh, would I like to go back and talk to that 20 year old.
Becoming emotionally intelligent. 
And how do I teach them to do that?
 By teaching them to be emotionally self-sufficient. In order to be emotionally self-sufficient, I need to be very wise.
So I'm going to talk a bit today about a couple of prayers that I like that help me to become more wise. 
And the first one is very obvious. It is the serenity prayer. 
So if you're listening to this, I'm going to ask you to write the serenity prayer down. 
I'm going to give it to you as I'm writing. If you need to push pause, that's fine.
So here's the serenity prayer. 
“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. So write that down and then skip a couple of lines.
Then I want you to write down the next line, which is “courage to change the things I can.”
And then skip a couple of lines. 
And wisdom to know the difference. 
And wisdom to know the difference. And I always, when I'm writing down the serenity prayer, I always circle the word wisdom.
Again, because it's something I want more of. 
So let's go back to that first line, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. 
Underneath that, I want you to write this: I cannot change or control other people, places, things, or situations. 
So grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. 
I cannot change other people, places, things, or situations. 
I cannot change or control other people, places, things, or situations. 
Let's go to the second part. 
Courage to change the things I can. 
I can only handle or manage, handle/ manage myself, my attitudes, my thoughts, and my actions.
I can only handle/ manage myself, my thoughts, my attitudes, my actions. That's the second part. 
And the third part is, wisdom to know the difference. 
Wisdom underneath that, right? 
Wisdom to know the difference between what I cannot control, which is other people, places, things, and situations, and what I can handle, which is myself, my attitudes, my thoughts, and my actions. 
So I am looking for the wisdom to be able to determine what I can do something about and what I cannot, because all anxiety, all unrest in me. It comes from my wanting to control something. 
But here's the thing, that may not be my job.
That may not be my job. My job is to handle or manage myself, my attitudes, my thoughts, and my actions. 
And here's the thing, when you really focus on that, your life is busy. 
You don't have time to control other things. You are not, you don't have time to control outcomes and other things like that.
You gotta focus on your own life. You gotta focus on your own life. 
The Universe is the pilot. I am the co pilot. 
And every morning I wake up and I say, good morning universe, Peter Pamela Rose reporting for duty. 
And I invite the Universe into my day. And I ask the Universe. 
This, and this is what comes from the 12 step programs. I pray for the knowledge of your will for me today and

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Now I wouldn't say that I would sometimes call myself Peter Pamela Perfectionism Rose, but sometimes I've called myself Peter Pamela Perfectionism Rose.
The biggest thing about perfectionism that I want to talk about today is that perfectionism leads to procrastination, leads to paralysis. 
The other thing that I think is so important about the lesson of perfectionism is to make your ears grow bigger, cunning, baffling, and powerful.
I look at all the ways, in fact even this too, recording today's podcast, I was looking for the right time to do it. 
But do you know what the right time to do it was? Right now. Right now was the right time to do it. 
See, my wanting to, and this is just me but maybe you can relate, my waiting to just feel like it is perfectionism in a very cunning, baffling, and powerful way, trying to get me to not do what I most need to do to move my career forward, which is because for the past, I think over two years now, I have put out a podcast every week, even when my house flooded, even when my house flooded and that If you can start to override that perfectionism and let it go for just a moment so that you do that action now, bingo, we got some serious success about to happen.
Now, I'm also going to lean into the fabulous Melody Beattie.
The Language of Letting Go
She talks about how perfectionism is an individual process that necessitates making mistakes. So recovering from perfectionism necessitates making mistakes, struggling through problems and facing tough issues. 
And it's especially when I have to do things I most don't want to do that my perfectionism kicks up. 
Again, waiting for the right time, waiting till I feel like it, waiting until somebody else tells me I should do it.
Again, cunning, baffling, and powerful, how I get in there, how perfectionism gets in there or my perfectionism gets in there to prevent me from doing the things that I most need to do in order to achieve what I most want to do. 
“Expecting ourselves to be perfect slows down the process to our getting to the level of success that we want to get to in whatever area of our life. It puts us in a guilty or anxious state. Expecting others to be perfect is equally destructive. It makes others feel ashamed and may interfere with their growth. Keep the focus on yourself.”
It was one of the craziest things I've learned in core work. Is that once I finally got the focus on me and off of everybody else, I was like, how the heck did I even have time to focus on other people and try and control them and try and manipulate them?
How did I even have the time? 
I'm so damn busy with me. I'm a freaking full time job. That's when the good stuff begins, when you start to really focus on you, that's when the good stuff starts. 
“People are human and vulnerable. We can accept and cherish that idea. Expecting others to be perfect puts us in a codependent state of moral superiority.” 
And sometimes I find I do that with myself. I put myself in “Peter, you're just gonna have to do it better than everybody else.” 
What the fuck is that? Oh, that's so much arrogance. That's so much moral superiority that I think I know what perfect is.
IIt's really all about process and life being a process. 
“Expecting ourselves to be perfect makes us feel rigid and inferior.”
And also as an actor, I find it makes us rigid. We have to do the scene the way we planned it. No, you don't. In fact, mistakes are the best things that can happen.
Mess ups are the best things that can happen. 
I was talking with my producing partner who told me about these mistakes that happened on the set and the actor was like no, I have to redo it. And the director, he was like, ah, no, you don't. Because that was comedic genius. Remember, there is that in imperfection, some of the greatest creativity can happen as an actor. 
“We do not need to go to the other extreme, tolerating anything that people throw our