ABOUT SARAH
Sarah took her first improv class 5 years ago and hasn't stopped. She completed the training program at the Westside Comedy Theater in 2015 and has been on 4 Westside House Teams, including her current team, McCallister. While improv is her main love, she's also dabbled in standup comedy and clowning.
Sarah considers herself a philosopher, but could also be called a personal development junkie. She loves reading books about spirituality, psychology, and nutrition, and has been to countless healers of various kinds. She has a Masters in Spiritual Psychology from the University of Santa Monica, has been an avid consumer of the Abraham-Hicks teachers for over 7 years, and is currently studying the philosophy of the three principles with her life coach, Julie Chazotte.
But that's the boring stuff. Read on for the exciting and romantic story of how personal development junkie met improv comedy and the rest is fireworks.
In early 2014, I was three years into some intense spiritual and psychological study. I was learning a lot about myself, but I was burnt out. My life felt heavy and I wasn’t having any fun. Then a miracle happened. I had just turned 25, and as a gift to myself I went to see a clairvoyant healer. Somewhere in our 90-minute session, she mentioned improv as something that could help me lighten up. It stuck with me, and a week later I was in my first class, my life forever changed. (Dramatic, I know, but what’s theatre without a little drama?!)
Unbeknownst to me, improvisational comedy was the personal development tool I’d been waiting for. I have a passion for self-discovery and learning about how life works, and the moment I began playing improv games, I was met with the opportunity to do just that. While talking about and processing my issues in traditional personal-development settings, it was easy for me to talk around something, to push away or avoid the underlying issue. But in improv, you bypass your mind. Every time I went up to do a scene or play a game I was faced with pieces of my shadow: fear, doubt, self-judgment. I could clearly see my blocks to spontaneity, fun, and freedom, and improv gave me a way to practice overcoming them. In addition to being consistently pushed out of my comfort zone and into the unknown, I was also delighted by how well the tenets of improv seemed to translate to real life. I found myself saying over and over again, “that’s a good life lesson!” every time my teacher would tell us what we were trying to learn from a particular game or activity.
Yes, improvisational comedy is a performance art. But it's also a training ground--a virtual reality in which you can observe your mental and physiological reactions to life in a concentrated, immediate way. It’s a process and a journey, and when you overcome one obstacle, the next is there waiting for you, inviting you to unravel what’s blocking you so that you can live and play more authentically, with more fun and joy than ever before.
