In Artist: Awakening the Spirit Within, acting coach Jocelyn Jones offers a blend of memoir, spiritual teaching, exercises, and journal prompts to teach readers how to manifest the life of their dreams.
Jones is the daughter of a critically acclaimed actor from the golden age of film and TV, Henry Jones. Having acted and modelled professionally herself as a young woman, she decided her calling was to teach and worked with the revered acting coach Milton Katselas for years.
Jones later became a confidential creative consultant to A-list movie stars. She knows actors’ insecurities, fears, and tricks. She recognized that their attempt to create reality in their craft and opportunities in their careers, and the obstacles that keep those goals from being realized, bedevil everyone yearning to achieve a life of fulfillment. “Actors strive to be ‘interesting,’ she writes. “They’re thinking all the time about how to be more marvelous.”
Jones translates her methods of freeing the actor from self-doubt, procrastination, ego, and more into lessons on the Law of Attraction, objective observation, goal setting, and mindfulness. She offers useful exercises and journal prompts for anyone searching for purpose and the freedom to be oneself.
The author communicates concepts and techniques clearly with a refreshing simplicity. Her definition of meditation is succinct and vivid: “[T]he breath of my higher consciousness found a channel into my life.”
While the concepts she proposes will be familiar to anyone who has investigated New Age philosophy, she finds new ways to express them that make the reader experience them anew. Her stories of life with her father, especially magical summers in Topanga Beach in Malibu, are colorful and touching. Her memories of her relationship with her mother, much more difficult, provide a different, more powerful, lesson in self-awareness, patience, and non-judgment.
Honest and confident, Jones is a welcome guide on the road to a more joyful existence.
Also available in hardcover and ebook.
