Andy Roth - On Becoming

Andy Roth

Many people know me at Beacon as a singer. I sing in the choir and lead songs with my guitar at our annual Beacon Passover Seder. (Hopefully, next year at this season we'll be able to do it again.) Two years ago, I had the happy opportunity to also dance and act in the Services Auction show, Broadway on Waldron.

Very recently, I had another happy opportunity -- to reconnect with my old friend Billy, the man who was my main inspiration to study those three performing skills, major in Performing Arts in college, and go on to my first career as a musical comedy performer. Billy stayed in the field as a university professor of dance and theater, but he has made a fundamental change in the way he himself dances and the way he teaches.

When we both learned to dance, we would look at ourselves in the mirror that spanned the front wall of the dance studio, and try to create the same positions and movements with our bodies that the teacher was demonstrating. That approach to learning dance goes unquestioned. But it has some drawbacks. It makes musical comedy performers among the most self-conscious people in the world. In fact, I have a psychotherapy patient now (my second career) who has a similar background to mine: acting and modern dance. Now that therapy is being done via Zoom, I saw that his gaze kept going back and forth between my image on the screen and his. I pointed this out to him and asked him to utilize the Hide Your Self-View feature so that it would be more like a regular in-person therapy session. I did the same. In fact, I like that so much -- eliminating the tendency to "check out how I look" -- that I do that in all my zoom calls now. It's more like a real-life conversation, where you don't see yourself, and I feel noticeably more relaxed.

My friend Billy's evolution as a dancer and teacher is to focus way more on how the position or movement feels in your body than how it looks in the mirror. A recent private moment in my life emerged out of my discussions with Billy. Coincident with these discussions, I have continued my personal spiritual practice, which includes continuing to strive more and more to go through my day not just from ideas 'in my head,' but utilizing belly-breathing/mindfulness meditation to also tap 'into my gut' and intuition (scientists have discovered that we have neuro-transmitters in our gut that affect our mood).

One morning, I was feeling quite centered and as a result quietly joyous as I was standing at the bathroom sink. I next noticed myself about to look in the mirror (a habitual tendency, I think to see 'what this feeling looked like'). I stopped myself with the comment in my mind, "Just let it be a feeling from inside." Even as I recall this tiny moment, a smile comes to my face and a feeling of relaxation spreads through me.

We become more authentically ourselves by dropping the self-consciousness as much as possible and feeling it from within -- being connected to, and true to, as much of ourselves, especially the deepest parts of ourselves, as we can, moment by moment.