Emotional Muscle Memory in Acting

Emotional Muscle Memory is a real visceral component of acting. Studying acting with awareness of muscle memory can help you expand your own talent. Finding and releasing emotions is part of muscle memory in acting.

Emotional Muscle memory will help you find your depth in your emotions.

Copyright 2018 Simon Blake

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Comprehending Emotional Muscle Memory

Habits form through habitual behaviors and are stored in our Muscle Memory. Emotional Life habits also form similarly to physical ones. The intent of the human body to constantly be in an achievement of muscle memory is for the purpose of helping us to adapt to be able to survive within environments unfamiliar or to quicken our response time to familiar environments or movements. We can create habits by repetition, and we can dismantle habits by opposite repetition or opposite actions.

Emotional Muscle Memory is the emotional muscle memory of emotion. Emotional Muscle Memory both spiritual and material work together to create the personal emotional magnetics of your emotional life. Emotional Magnetics are the push and pull you feel when you are attracted to something or / and repulsed by something. Often attraction and repulsion can occur at the same time in different areas of ourselves or in different ways such as physical attraction but emotional repulsion.

These muscle memory stimulations are very interesting to the watching audience. This is another reason why it if the Actors gift to the audience to be receptive of the other Actor and not try to force their own muscle memory movement. The natural reactions of the Actors to each other are often unconscious doings that occur within the communication between each other. This is vital to understanding the reason why it is so important to learn to submit in a way over to the other rather than having focus on yourself when you are the Actor.

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The study of muscle memory is vital to being able to release emotions in acting.
Stimulation of muscle points to entice emotional responses is a preparation technique that I recommend just knowing about but not rehearsing at this time. Allowing yourself to understand that this is the area where habits will naturally form and the reason why some incredible actors would mumble their lines and not rehearse them with overt audible efforts. Habits are always forming as we evolve as artists.

Many spiritual, religious and sacred texts speak about the tongue and the tongue having a memory of its own speech. It is neither religious or spiritual to watch what you say with your own tongue. The reality is that the habits will form speech dialects and form patterns of similarity because we are habitual creators and repeat success of survival as well as success of creation inherently.

Being human means that we are partakers of the truths of emotional muscle memory, actual physical muscle memory and all forms of habitual repetitious forms of habits. Which by the way is the reason why the best teachers on this planet earth have always used repetition as a way of teaching their crafts. Sanford Meisner and the craft of acting. Gandi and the meditations. Tibet, etc., etc., etc., etc., . … we all use habits and yet have very little discussion about their formations.

It is usually only the teachers who understand that once you learn to the point of increasing your habit then you can grow past the habit to further your skills or abilities. Natural growth occurs after success is added to success and then added to success repeatedly.

Restrictions are not needed when natural law is in effect or creative projects are in place because the laws of nature have their own way of teaching us by use of repetitive cycles that allow us to see progressions. When we can see that we are growing from a progressive effort we can then accept that we are on the right track, or we are growing/learning.

Undoing is just doing the opposite of what works. We know something is working because we will see, feel, and sense the growth of it. Creative beings have a need to create, and we as human race can continue to figure out how to further the limitations of creative differences and understand the similarities.

Muscle memory is the dependability of self that always come through for us as human beings unless in states of disease. The Actor must understand that the formation of healthy acting habits is the approach of the working of the Actor to discover and uncovered damaged habitualization that occur.

The congruency of self and the muscle memory of the actor is the friend and Allie. Adding muscle memory to your acting studies can help you to express your reactions.

Question: Can you prepare on Emotional Muscle Memory?
The answer is interesting because in fact you can, but I don’t suggest it for a Emotional Preparation purposes. It’s issue in using it is its reliability and its physicality. You would need to keep your physically so consistent in order to achieve results where the reliability of Emotional Muscle Memory could be reliable. Understanding both the differences and the similarities between Physical Emotional Memory and Emotional Muscle Memory is the key.
Some Therapists and ‘professionals’ do still experiment with their patients using Emotional Muscle Memory to both stimulate emotional expressions and to also overcome emotional results in life. The timing of an emotional ideal or a physical touch is part of the work that the therapist or neurotherapies’ may do in order to achieve results of health for a patient with PSTD or other disorders within their emotional state. The reason why it is mentioned here is so clearly as an Actor we want to be aware of any patterns that may form especially within our speech patterns so we cannot have them effect our work in a way that restricts us from being present within the scene. Relying on a prior Emotional Memory sequence is a similar approach to an athlete going through a regime that works for them to prepare for an athletic game. Depending upon a muscle memory sequence to trigger an emotional result within the Actor before acting is a clumsily method that will vary in result rather than certainty.
Understanding that if you use every single technique you know as both for Emotional Preparation and Emotional Depilation process it may be confusing at first or consistently confusing. I suggest keeping back a couple techniques like this on for the releasing of emotional life only and not for the preparation of emotional circumstances. However, that the reality of using these techniques to understand how to let go of emotional life as a far better approach than using it to get or become emotionally activated is not to deter anyone from understanding the entire topic.

Therapists sometimes have experimented with the consistencies of touching pressure points on the human body to be able to insight past recollection of memory. Reflexologists often use pressure points to release tensions or correct imbalances. So have Palmer and Rolfing practitioners. Some religions use both Physical Muscle Memory and Emotional Muscle Memory as do Psychologists.
Remember all types of therapy is used in healing practices all over the world. Creators and Creatives need to be able to utilize all of their abilities as the very act of creatively doing is in many cases helping healing.

Example One –
Tony is a track runner, has been running track since the 3rd grade. His muscles know the track’s course, the materials that it runs over and the feelings sensations that running on a track feels like. In the 9th grade he is asked if he wants to join the football team. He decides that he will.
The result of joining the team puts Tony on a grass field with cleated bottoms to his shoes. Not only does his memory of running need to change to adapt to his new environment the slickness of grip is different with his shoes from the track to the grass. This difference his muscles don’t adjust to at first. It takes till the end of the first season for him to learn how to run on the grass with cleats with any grace that he may have run on the track with grace.
Tony didn’t understand muscles memory at first and thought it was just his preconceptions about football. What occurs is his realization that something in his body had to adjust, which after a lot of time it did. When he changed over, he couldn’t run as fast or with confidence and fell a few times before his muscle memory could adjust to the differences.

Example Two –
Suzanna is an aspiring Olympic diver. She has won one competition on a 3ft high springboard. When she gets some attention from some coaches after winning the event it leads to her witching to a 10 ft. High platform dive board with no spring.
Although Suzanna is an athlete even at the young age of 16, what she can do on a springboard she is unable to do on a flat platform dive board. She is at first really upset with her own efforts. She complains to this new coach that offered to teach her.
The coach explains to her that her muscles are not used to landing in the water with such speed and the different that the spring makes changes her rhythms. The coach talks to her about muscle memory and how her muscles in her body are affected by the differences. Her muscles are actually not built up in the areas yet that she will develop with time and experience on the flat platform dive board.

Copyright 2018, Simon Blake

About Simon Blake

Simon Blake has studied OVER 30000 – 40000 acting exercises and studied over 8-10 thousand acting students work in acting. Studying their Emotional Preparation to their Spoon River Work. Studying every area of Meisner training work with well over 30 Teachers including himself.

“Meisner In and Out Exercise, which was later known as Doors and Activities give a basic building blocks to modern day acting”

Simon Blake runs and operates the website EmotionalPreparation.com which teaches Actors how to add Emotion to their acting using improved acting techniques.

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