Writings: Giving stage, playing small, or sharing your voice

I had an idea I wanted to share with you.  It’s one of those things that I wanted to see what you think. This draws from my experience as an actor onstage, a newspaper editor, and an admirer of this rather famous bit from Marianne Williamson:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’

Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
         ― Marianne Williamson,  A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of “A Course in Miracles”

I hope it’s okay if I admit to you, my friend, that part of the reason this speaks to me is a lifelong habit of shrinking, of playing small. I often have have tried to avoid conflict, avoid confrontation, by pulling back from a fight. Occasionally this means that I am able to make a gracious exit from a problem, or to keep peace by letting a face-off fade. There’s a place for that, but I think I’m more concerned about when I shrink from engaging, when I know I need to stand up.

When I was acting, one of the things you gotta learn is when to “give stage,” which pretty much means if something is happening on stage that is bigger than whatever I’m doing, I need to not be “bigger” or more obvious (or louder or more active, or whatever) than the main action. This was hard for me to explain sometimes to the excitable grade eights I used to direct, but it makes for a better show.

And that’s where I think I get a bit balled up in my rules to live by. I know there’s a difference between giving stage & playing small, but I sometimes act as if one is the other, and when I really think about it, one is sometimes an excuse for not doing the other.

Which brings us to the third bit here: Sharing your voice.

When I edited an online newspaper called the San Juan Update for fifteen years, it was an exercise is finding my voice. Should I print this? Should I post that?  Was it my place to impose what I thought on people? What was useful about this was the discovery how the writing & the decisions were easier once I knew “what I say.”

Not what I had to say, or what I thought I should say, or what I better be careful about. Instead, the easiest writing was when I was speaking to my values (community working together to share & heal) and knowing there were people in the readership (we had about 3000 daily readers). And that’s what I do, what I say. And the words come.

As a friend during that period says, “You find your voice when your heart comes to play.”

In theatre, “sharing your voice” is what a director asks a timid actor to do, so everyone can hear his or her lines.

I hope that for you, my friend. Speak out & make sure the people in the back row can hear you. You have so much to give, and the people in the world are poorer when you hold it in, or hold it down.

Play on!

Love & blessings,

Brother Ian