Ever since I was child, I loved to be the center of attention. I would go to great lengths to be noticed, good and bad, by anyone. Many people can relate to this, especially people in the entertainment world. There has to be some desire of attention, whether it be through your art or yourself, to be able to stand out amongst the crowd. The entertainment world can be filled with thousands of people just like this, all wanting their “big break.” Yet, how much of ourselves do we limit with this mentality? This narrow-mindedness?
My interviewee is someone extraordinary. His name is Leorising Rajan, and he is a medium and spiritual healer. He was a world-renowned yoga instructor, an actor, as well as a screenwriter, and an intimacy coordinator, which all of his jobs were discussed in great length. He is a mutli-faceted individual, whose presence brings a feeling of welcome. Getting to speak with him, I got to witness first-hand how he communicates. Many times during our interview, after I would ask a question, he would sit with it, and then answer. He wasn’t just soaking in what I was asking, my questions were pretty surface-level, he was communicating with someone(s) outside himself. There were many times he would look to the side like he was talking with another physical individual. It was truly an experience in it of itself. However what was more impressive was his insightfulness on life, and how we can live it.
Q1. What do you do?
“I was shooting as an intimacy coordinator.” Leorising then says, “How can I offer this to him so that it’s easy? Ok. Thank you.” This was one of the many times, like mentioned above, where Leorising would communicate with someone other than me. He took a few seconds and then continued, “I am the type of person, not just acting, who likes to understand how everything works. I like to be useful in an environment, as a human. Sometimes, as an actor, if you don’t get the part you think that there is nothing else for you to do in the industry. You may spend decades of your life focusing on that one thing, and that’s ok, for single pointedness. With my core competencies, my dualities, my history, and because I am such a solution based viewer, as in I see things and go ‘Oh, that could be a little cleaner, or this person could be more supported in this moment.’ There is a career that opened up called intimacy coordination, which is like an intimacy coach. An intimacy coach usually deals with couples, or they have a codependent paradigm or have trouble in close relationships because of trauma. An intimacy coordinator on set, protects the talent, as the talent embodies complex humans, complex humanity and complex emotions, while keeping the integrity with the crew so that these stories are not detrimental to their psyche. When you are doing something that is really far out, how can we get that shot of intamicy, sexual contact, even soemtimes sexual abuse narratives, and still repect the sanity and keep the person whole as they break off for a lesson. I believe all acting is a lesson. All performance is a lesson. It’s channeling. I found that that was something, and I was really grateful. Earlier days on stage I was really busy, I’d have a lead part, I’d have a supporting part and I’d still be doing too much for everyone else. I am also a screenwriter and it’s important for me to generate my own content as a queer, easy to say self-indentifying black person, my family is usper mixed, and I’m super mixed, but I feel more comfortable saying black. I have to generate my own stories, because there are rocks that would rather stay still, so I have to. Nobody is writing queer stories, not truly. People are more than just one thing, I think that many actors don’t think they can go into real estate, or do something other than acting. Yet, the world needs more people who understand what they outsiders are doing, and can bring it to the community.”
Q2. Do you ever find it hard to balance your career with your queerness?
“Honestly, not in anymore. Not in 2020. Not since 2016, it stopped being hard. For seven years I got to teach yoga, on a global level. The farthest I’ve gone is Nyrobi and I’ve got to speak at many wonderful conventions. Even there, there is little bit a prejudice for being different, queer. There is an appropriation of queerness in showing spirituality, but spirit is tricky. Spirit gets things done, and makes people listen. Cultivating the confidence I didn't know I needed to develop in that arena, helped me show up as the person I am. In the art world, because of my “look” and because of my aesthetic and because of my type, it was easier for directors to want me to shave my head, masc up, and perform a particular way. Which is a great feat, being versatile is great, but also being able to show that there is nuance is what you already are, is greater. There is a horrible trope, that says that someone like you or I is the nerdy queer best friend. But the nerdy queer bestfriend has nuance, and can still be the hero, and can still be the villain, there is nuance to humans, depth. The water on the river doesn’t run smoothly everywhere, sometimes it’s shallow, sometimes it’s fast, you just have to follow the trial. And you can’t just trope anyone. Everyone has a leading arch. In 2020 I am very clear about that. I have a coach, a wonderful coach, John who sees me, and he sees depth in me. I believe that we don’t just act from our limits, we act from our ancestral and genetic lineage. Who we know, and who we don’t know.”
Q3. Similar question, but with your blackness?
“So, I worked more when I worked with black people. The early start of my career, well before yoga, I was in two off-broadways plays, they were very similar to Tyler Perry’s touring troupe. It was not him, but it was in that same circle. I was the lead in both, and I got to sing at the Apollo, and not get caned off. Which is a really big deal because, the voice is the thing that is the most shaky over here, and the fact that I got to sing at the Apollo and not deal with being ejected was like, ‘Yes! I made it as a black actor!’ I have an ancestor who ran away to Vaudeville. A black woman who ran away to Vaudeville. Vaudeville is historically tough for balck people. But, she did it In my career, being in black spaces and experiencing artistic pedagogy was my greatest challenge. Having to learn my own, and I’m talking black-american culture, having to learn that there were things that I didn’t even know about the culture. Either from my conservatory or teacher teaching me trying to help me present what acting was, while my household was trying to protect me from the world. In the early stages of me acting as a black person was tough, because if I took the roles that were a little more hardened by society, hardened by systemic oppression, it wasn’t pleasing to my mom. It wouldn’t have her blessing, and that would be in my mind. If I took the things that were really soft, they were really small parts. Everyone wants to be seen, but also trying to navigate this one line. As a black actor I love and have always idealized horror movies. I said when I was in 5th grade that my first feature film was going to be a zombie movie, and it was. The Lore of Them was filmed in Pittsburgh, which was huge. It’s the closest thing you can do to be in Day of the Dead or something without actually being in it. I died. The way they edited the film, I ended up dying first. It was fine though, art is interesting for being a black person, because what some folks are tired of seeing is the viewpoint of how we are seen. But it’s not to say that it’s not true but it’s this person’s viewpoint on it. It doesn’t make it all the way true, but it makes it somebody’s truth. I’m blessed to be incarnated to be a bit of a world shaker, so people’s truths of me are more and more, even in my three decades here, they are becoming less important. It’s really about if I can integrate or merge with the person, collaborate with the person, project, and if I can’t I just walk. I learned to walk away from projects when I was about 20. I would just be like, no. I didn’t work as much as my friends but I also didn’t have stress. The deepest healing I have ever had has been, in my thirty years here, was after my teacher died, my mentor. But I was invited and welcomed the presnewce of a queer black man to work energy with me. That not being enough, I’m going to do another one before I leave, because if you want to feel enough, look at a mirror that you are afraid to look at. For me, I channel when I look around, but I was like “No! I can’t look!” Because they were a black queer male who was sending me the energy that I was enough and to see myself as that. A podcast that I contributed to, hired me this summer, brought me in to have them audit themselves. Predominantly that had so much white representation, there were some challenges for when black bodies showed up and I was not with it. So that’s really the only step a conscious gay white male can take, is hire someone to audit you. Not to coach you to not be racist, but to audit it. You might have grown up in a structured way, where it’s really hard to know your blind spots, so you need the opposite view to show you the blind spots. That also goes for POC, Black POC, Black queer POC, Black Trans POC, we have our own blindspots. Me receving healing from that partcular black queer person, was wonderful because I know the struggles I had as a community healer, for my community, was unreceprtive because their trauma levels are so high. Everything scares them. Everything is traumatic and makes them think of bastardized harmful christianty or something worse. They are scared. Then it’s a matter of the nervous system, the body and the way it holds trauma. That’s another reason I never left the arts, man I thought yoga, I was gonna turn into some guru archetype, I thought I guess that’s what I have to do, I have to erase everything. When I told all the stories, and helped tell the stories, and discovered other ancestors and other histories to surface. I feel like I’ve helped, I’m really generous, I feel called in, whose story needs to be amplified? Our stories, and they’re different stories, I come from a family of activists. My grandfather was a bodyguard, maybe for like a day, for Martin Luther King Jr. But it's a big deal, he’s in the I Have A Dream speech. All these stories deserve to be told.”
Q4. When you play a part, is there a level of disconnection needed so that character doesn’t go too far into your own life?
“It depends on the character and the answer ultimately is no. Each character is a different consciousness. Consciousness runs through all of us equally but we filtered through our skin, our ancestors, our habitat, what we know and what we don’t know. Years ago I would have said yes, there are probably actors that are working that have accolades that would say, “I completely shut this off, to be this way, and…” As a mystic, as an actual one who works, I think compassion is above empathy. I think everyone has empathy, I think our nervous systems make us empaths. As a teacher that’s where I teach from, everyone is an empath, you're not special, it’s what you do with it that makes you special. Because of that I don’t believe, when I say creative consciousness I am not sperparting it from the all, the all knowing. Creative conscious wants to filter through what it wants to filter through, it'll come through a dream, like what do they relate to? The more receptive we are, the more honest we are, it'll come through the transposes. There were actors that were British, they were great shapeshifters, but if you watch enough of their stuff in a row, you notice that they didn’t shape shift that much. What you now notice is that they fit the ensemble. The camera teams on their side, the cinematics, the directors on their side. It’s not so much about the actors responsibility to just change, or forget who they are, it’s everyone involved. If someone were to cast you or I and only see us as queer people, and we are in something where we are not supposed to be seen as queer people, they are not allowing that come through consciousness, the lens that they give the audience is how they see it. Taking a step back, in being a teacher, educator, facilitator, healer, and then doing production, learning how to generate my own content, and also using all of COVID to deepen my pedagogy when it comes to performance. I don’t think you have to lose all of yourself, you do have to be an open vessel. You can’t “lose” you, because you can only pull from what you’ve known. Especially when you study methods, people that just study method acting, if you actually haven't had your heart broken at a bar and drank yourself to oblivion, the closest thing you can do is maybe eat a shit ton of oreos and drink milk knowing you're lactose intolerant. Like, if you don’t actually know what toxin feels like in your body, you can’t fake it. If you don’t remember it as a past life, you can’t bring it into this life. It’s always going to be filtered through the experiences the person has, or they comprehend, or the experiences their ancestors had, or their parents had. There are really great kid actors, whose parents are in recovery and the kid may not know it, but the DNA knows it.”
Q5. What is the hardest part you’ve had to play?
“In living life, the hardest part I had to walk into was, forgiving son, to allow true forgiveness into my heart. To show up as a caretaker for my mother, who had stage four lung cancer, when I thought I was going to have a career break. The day she was diagnosed, was the day I booked my last national commercial. It wasn’t even that big of a commercial but I booked it and it was the balance of to accept and do paperwork, while she was in the hospital. That was in 2017. The hardest part, I wouldn’t say it was necessarily hard, but how much it meant to me. Which I didn’t realize until I got older and now I can’t wait to play it again. It was a musical and I played Colehouse Walker Jr. in Ragtime in community college. I booked that right before I went to the proper conservatory, and when I did it they only agreed to do that show, if I agreed to sing in Pagliacci, which is an opera. I was like, “I can’t sing like that!” They said they would, and this was the first time the music department had enough money to do a production. It was horrible. We had NO budget. The concept of Ragtime is why the civil rights exist, it’s about immigration, and it’s about America just coming out of slavery, and laws, real voting laws, and Broker T. Washington. Ragtime is a big deal and it’s a big show. Whether you sing it or read it, it’s powerful. It was hard because I was so young, I had the heart, but now with my years of studies it’s like, come back to it as just a necessary story that needed to be told, that is not traumatic. Harry Houdini, and Henry Ford are in this and it was just talked about, this is the state of the world, and because all these characters, these people, the day that I was on stage, is the reason I was able to, because these people existed. They had their own thing about the risen consciousness of America. Colhouse is trying to move from state to state trying to raise his soon to be black son during the state of the world at the time. Harry Houdini is doing his Houdini thing, and it shows that while people were doing other things not pretaining to slavery, black people were suffering. It even talks about women’s rights, the second lead of the play, is a white woman who leaves her kind of liberal husband for a Jewish immigrant and then they raise a black baby. That’s what America’s promise is, that you can look across the room, at your ancestors, and someone who could’ve been your enemy is now your blood. We keep getting reincarnated for inclusion. That would be the hardest part I’ve had to play and stories like that.”
Q6. What do you feel right now is the biggest issue plaguing our society?
“News to individual homes and how everyone wants to be right. Everyone needs to be right so that the highest outcome of safety, health, and economy to come about. Everyone wants their guy to be right, to have their choice be right, but no one is willing to look across the table. How we would put that in a graph is racism exists because white people are scared or they are aware that the government doesn’t reward them enough. Because how dare somebody else have an opportunity to be rewarded for the mediocrity that they are being rewarded at. They think their lives are exceptional, it’s not exceptional, the faultiest thing is the need to be right and no one is hearing each other. It’s hard for a black person, because you think, ‘Oh he’s skipping over racism!’ I am not skipping over racism, I am heavily affected by racism, I am no longer affected by queer-phobias, it’s just not in my aura people are no longer concerned. I’ve been hugged by people with confederate flags and I find out later, and I’m like how did we get here? They say, ‘Oh, I don’t see it.” What they don’t see is the hate that existed in them, and people are not listening to each other, that’s the greatest plague. I want to go on record to say that I take all the medical stats and facts about COVID very seriously. I’m not an anti-vaxxer, I’m not a pro-vaxxer, I am pro-figure-this-shit-out. I am like that, but also listen to people. There were number that went up because people died of COVID, the numbers went up because some people had difficult medical histories, if we take it to a spiritual level, they were tired, and they had never struggled that way ever in their life and their body just opted out and that’s a will thing. It’s because we are not listening to each other, and for the last four years we inherited a guy who liked to talk at people. There are people that are on the “right” side in my spiritual world that are just like him. They have amazing instagram posts, they are doing Ted Talks, and Tik Tok, etc. But get them on something that they are not telling the truth on, and they are just like Donald Trump. It’s because we don’t listen. The greatest plague, like when the Bible said that The Tower of Babel fell and human’s stopped understanding each other, it’s really that. Listening to each other doesn’t mean us being under one religion or one cultural mindset, it’s understanding the context of where your household is and my household is, and where we are exactly the same and overall we are just not listening to each other. Take it to history, why didn’t the British, and the Spanish, and the Portguese, when they came over here and got away with what they got away with, was because they didn’t speak the language. So they were able to attribute apathy, this whole country is founded on apathy, murdered, and not listening.”
Q7. When did you realize you wanted to be an actor?
“Girl I was like two. I came here ready for that shit. I believe that every family has a shaman. I knew that this was my place. By the time I got here all the elders dropped, so I knew it was me. But to be an actor, to tell stories, gosh. I knew I was an actor by the time I was three, four, or five. I spoke it into existence when I was in fifth grade and they had us write down what we wanted to do. I have done everything except kiss a particular actress that I thought I was in love with, I was just in love with her, and I haven’t acted in a Hallmark movie yet. I knew as a child, I knew that sharing humanity and empathy, and being non-judgemental to the whole human process was important for me as a child, accepting people. I grew up in an environment where people called it, “going away to college” and they would get sent to jail and they would come out better people, or stopped doing the thing that landed them in jail, so they were receiving of the same love and care, and they were protective of me, and they were teaching me, so I didn’t, I don’t know how to not love and accept people. The only other art of that is a doctor or to be a surgeon with your words and actions. I know I am an actor, a storyteller, because I want to educate the audience to listen, and not just to the screen but in their everyday lives. I feel that I was listened to on a spiritual and emotional level, so the only thing that really mattered was acting. I could only be a facilitator of my experiences and my experiences was that I was always free to be myself and however that channeled through. There were tons of photos of me, when I was a white ninja (for Halloween) and you couldn’t tell me I wasn’t a white ninja. I didn’t even care about trick-or-treating, I think I came home with the least amount of candy. It’s that. What I find can occur and then what people can learn from it.”
Q8. Is there anything you want to add?
Leorising once again pauses and looks to the side, he then says “Thank you,” and begins, “I put acting on pause and tried to focus on educating. Like I said before, you can be an actor and have other careers. You actually should. You shouldn’t be waiting, because all strings of revenue equal abundance, so you shouldn’t just keep waiting for the next part over and over. When I learned that my thing was taking care of everybody in the industry, actros, writers, singers, and even their coaches, I could make it so the art could thrive and have a sense of community. That no matter what happens outside the dome, we can still take care of each other, and that’s really important to me. With my mindset coaching, mindset, breathwork, etc. The real tea is that the industry is mystic as fuck. Those stories in the 60’s and 70’s and those weird blood sacrifices, they were trying anything. So much of what needs to be dismantled is the evil brujeria. So much stuff needs to be cleaned up and the cleaners have to show up. If you are in a scene and it’s intense or it’s a coming out scene and the scene requires a girl on top of you, and you’re like, “Ughudsbfrebibs” you need an intimacy coordinator to be able to provide that she can respect him and he can respect her. If anything happens and it can be collected and all his investment with his acting can stay. I don’t mind that because I would do it for my children. So, it was like my world is now blending and I don’t have to choose is really big. Writing, training as an intimacy coordinator, being able to maintain being an actor AND a spiritualist in my life and that they are now blending and not causing conflicts anymore is huge.”
After conversing with Leorising Rajan about just ¼ of his amazing journey in life, I felt uplifted. I know that sounds cheesy, but his energy was beyond. I have interviewed a few people, but Leorising felt as though I was sitting right in front of him. He made me feel comfortable, something that can be difficult through a screen. After talking, listening, re-listening, and writing Leorising’s words, I came to a realization. In these trying times, the world can feel against us, but we must remember that we are not alone in this fight. Some of us, would rather turn a blind eye to the mirror, not truly face ourselves. Yet, to be able to look at the world around you to the fullest, to be able to truly listen to others, we must first listen and look at ourselves. Not saying it will be easy, but sometimes we just need a good long stare out ourselves. My discussion with Leorising taught me that we, no matter how different, are all the same.
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Rajan is one of my loves!! Thank you for sharing his story on here. I really loved experiencing him through this article.