EPISODE 2: MARY ELIZABETH ELLIS — Acting Real with Kat Foster

MARY ELIZABETH ELLIS

On smacking, vibrating, shamanic journeying, letting go of fear, and much, much more!

You likely know Mary Elizabeth as The Waitress on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. She also recently starred on The Grinder and lately, she’s been appearing on the Netflix series, Santa Clarita Diet. She starred in, co-wrote and executive produced the film Mother, May I Dance with Mary Jane's Fist?: A Lifetone Original Movie for Adult Swim. She co-starred in the film, Mastermind and you’ll be able to check her out in the upcoming film, El Tonto.

Mary Elizabeth Ellis on IMDB
Mary Elizabeth Ellis on Wikipedia

QUOTES FROM THIS EPISODE

28:18 ~ “I feel like people in my circle - I have a lot of people... who have been really releasing relationships in their lives that don’t serve them anymore, and I feel like a lot of it has to do with these things happening in the world... We’re just seeing so much shit come up that we’re like, “okay, this shit that is right in front of me that I have the opportunity to let go of, lemme let go of that. The fear that I personally hold onto? Lemme let go of that…”

35:15 ~ “I [take care of myself] because my fear manifests as anger, and anger comes out at other people, and also at myself, and it’s ugly and painful to the people around me… It’s something that I feel like I’ve been working on forever... So I feel like a lot of the work that I do is about releasing the fear by shining a light of empathy on it and... learning to love even that part of myself… so I can personally become a love beacon, a lighthouse just shining from my heart... Then you… raise the vibrations in yourself and when people see you at that place, it changes them… And so, not only do I have the opportunity to use my instagram platform to [say] ‘hey, look at this charity… and donate to this thing’... but also, hopefully, in my life, in actuality, on a day to day basis, I’m making it a little bit easier for my son, for my husband, for my friends…”

37:40 ~ “The idea being that if you can love yourself, then you can truly love another, and if you can love another, then you and that other can love the world… What’s really important here is that self love is actually not, you know… a self-indulgent practice… it’s actually a really important practice for the world… it actually does (and you can call it ‘it raises your vibrations’ (that’s how we say it in California), but anywhere [you are], you might say, ‘look, if you’re in a great mood, probably people around you will get in better moods.’” - KF

39:55 ~ “You have to feel the anger… you have to feel the self loathing, you have to feel the fear, you have to feel these… very difficult feelings, but you have to feel them in order to get to the place where you love yourself, and therefore, can love others…” - KF

47:22 ~ “Look, I was raised very Christian in Mississippi, in the bible belt, evangelical, and so I’ve always felt a deep connection to God, and so I feel, when I do this, less alone, like I’m not alone in this... My life has a purpose, I’m an expression of God as human on this plane, having a human experience, I’m here to learn, and I feel really grateful to have these tools and also really grateful to be an actor and to have the opportunity to create, because I do think that creative people have a conduit, a direct connection to whatever is on the other side - the universe, the unknown - and that if we step back, we see these themes that are playing out… and we get to be a tool for those themes to be able to work themselves out…”

57:42 ~ “I do think that imagination is a really important tool that we’re shamed out of using after childhood… I mean even in childhood sometimes, like, ‘ugh, this one and their imagination’... But as we get older… then we’re like a crazy person or something or we have to channel it into something professional like storytelling or being a painter, so I think when I first started shamanic journeying, the reason I started shamanic journeying is because I grew up in a very small town in Mississippi and you didn’t go to therapy unless there was something really wrong with you… And so I never had the tools to explore myself internally and then after I had my son, I had crazy postpartum and I had no idea what it was… so I went and I saw Sarah… and I would feel not as scared… and a lot of it was… self-love and forgiveness and learning how to be kind to myself… And then, as I did it over the years, I was kind of like, ‘okay, maybe this is real, maybe it’s not real,’ and then, finally, what happened is that I was like, ‘it doesn’t matter if it’s real or not… what it is is me practicing imagination in a way that ends up making me feel better.”

1:03:37 ~ “If imagination is God, then when we close our eyes and connect to imagination, are we just connecting to God… Is imagination the voice of God speaking to us?”

1:17:22 ~ “What I’ve learned is that if I just feel the feeling, like really just feel it, as painful as it is, just feel feel feel, just let the disappointment sit there, it does become something else… Then the disappointment becomes, maybe first it becomes anger, and then maybe that anger becomes anxiety… and then at some point it changes and changes and changes… you go from the acuteness of the disappointment into another acute feeling and another acute feeling, but as it changes and morphs, as you continue to accept the feeling, it softens and it can… and sometimes this is a decades-long process... depending on what happened, but eventually, you can find acceptance and then even eventually, you can find gratitude.” - KF

1:31:45 ~ “That’s… also another important lesson that I’ve been working on that’s applicable to life. If you have an idea, if you have a goal, don’t talk about it so much that that’s where the energy goes - into the talking about it and not into the doing of it.”