I recently came across the poem Sacred Ground, by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. She reminded me that everywhere is holy.
It’s easy for me to see aspects of my life as mundane. When I do, I gloss over the present moment, and the personal stories that surround it. Rosemerry prompts me not to:
‘And if, as I now know, the closet
is sacred and the bare room
is sacred and the sidewalk
and classroom and the ER
are sacred, then I trip
into the teaching
that everywhere is sacred—
not only the church, but
the alley. Not only the mosque,
but the bench…’
—The beginning of the poem Sacred Ground by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
At times, this feels so dificult. I distract myself from being present. I fret over why things are the way they are instead of accepting or changing them. And I get lost in the mundane.
Growing up, I was immersed in an environment that worshipped feats of mind, to the almost total exclusion of the body. Apart from compulsory school sports on Thursday after school, I spent 5½ days each week studying, studying, studying. Perhaps that’s why I eventually gravitated toward practicing mindfulness in my 50s. But recently, my mediation teachers have been suggesting a slightly different approach, one they call cultivating embodied awareness.
The author (standing, fourth from the left) at age 13 with his school rugby team
“Embodied awareness” evokes for me what meditation is about.
Here’s why.
Mindfulness and embodied awareness
The word mindfulness nudges us to focus on our mind’s experience. Being unattached to those pesky thoughts that come and go when we meditate.
In contrast, the description embodied awareness reframes meditation as encompassing both mind and body. It encourages us to extend our awareness to include moment-to-moment bodily sensations. Aware of a muscle ache, the tick of a clock, and a breeze on our skin without getting snagged by these impressions. Being aware that we are living embodied.
Yet we are not just our mind and our body. To me, meditation is experiencing the mystery of who we are and being this mystery. My meditation practice is to notice but avoid attachment to my thoughts and sensations.
Have your heart be where your feet are
For some time, I have been working on developing a daily practice for living more in gratitude. Accepting loving kindness and feeling gratitude are additional dimensions of my meditative and living experience, rooted in both my mind and my body. While cultivating embodied awareness, my teachers have prompted me to “have my heart where my feet are”, a teaching of Muhammad, the founder of Islam.
To me, this is a helpful suggestion that highlights another facet of meditation that connects my mind and body.
Meditation as embodied awareness
There is no universal definition of meditation. And that’s OK. But I now practice to experience embodied awareness when I meditate—and as I live my life.
Being present is tough! The other day, Celia and I were walking in Boston’s beautiful Arnold Arboretum when she asked me who’d responded to an email I’d sent. When I pulled out my phone to answer her question, she said she felt she was walking with a third person, a stranger.
Where are our minds?
Once, our minds were in our brains. Before tools, painting, language, and writing were invented, people had no way to represent knowledge outside their heads.
What if Celia had asked her question on a walk ten years ago? I would have either been able to remember the answer — or not.
Today, parts of our minds are outside our brains. More often or not, answers are available from devices in our pockets. Today we rely on machines for connection with information and others. Machines allow us to research what we want to know or explore.
We also have the routine ability to capture pertinent information in an appropriate secure store outside our brain — an in-basket, notepad, voice recorder, electronic device, etc. This frees us from the need to memorize data so we can work on other things. When we need information, we access it from the external data store, not our brain.
Ridding ourselves of the necessity for our brains to remember everything
Such access allows me to worry less about remembering information I may need. Like my upcoming appointments, background on a client before an initial call, or exploring places to visit on an upcoming trip. This is a core credo of David Allen’s Getting Things Done: “Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.”
This freedom makes me more productive. It gives me a way to capture fleeting creative ideas that, in the past, I would have forgotten before they could be explored. I especially appreciate these technological benefits as I grow older and my memory is not what it once was.
The downside
Celia’s response, however, illustrates a downside to extending our minds beyond our brains. When we perform a move to secure storage or retrieval from it, the associated technology invariably intrudes into the relationship of being with other people present.
Celia says, “When I walk alone with you, I don’t want to feel I’m also with your 200 closest friends.”
I get it.
When I’m paying attention to my device, I am not present with her.
Some people seem OK with ignoring their partners or friends at the expense of their devices. I still marvel when I see a couple sitting together for dinner at a nice restaurant, both immersed in their phones for the whole meal. I wonder about their relationship, not that it’s ultimately any of my business.
Also, we don’t need machines to connect us when we’re alone. I recently returned from a five-day silent retreat in New Mexico where we did not interact with our fellow participants apart from the start and end and were miles away from cellular and Wi-Fi signals so our devices were off the grid. It was wonderful, and I learned a lot. [Here’s my post about a similar retreat held two years earlier.]
Luckily, compromise is possible between these two extremes while together with familiars: exclusion via total immersion in the digital world and shunning all machine connection while you’re with them.
A compromise
What I think works is explicit respectful negotiation when you want to move from direct presence to accessing devices. I could have said to Celia: “I don’t remember.” [Then I could pause to let her respond: she might have said, “Oh, don’t worry about it,” or “Can you look it up?”] … If she doesn’t respond I can ask: “Would you like me to look up the answer now, or can it wait?”
Sometimes I remember to negotiate to switch my presence in this way. It’s respectful and allows the other person(s) to choose what they want.
I know Celia appreciates it because it places our relationship first.
And that’s important to us.
Getting the best of both worlds
Being present with people you’re with is always important. Taking advantage of our modern abilities to expand our minds outside our brains can enrich our lives together. Negotiating the switch between these two forms of being allows us to get the best of both worlds.
I have learned so many lessons from improv. Here are more of my experiences and takeaways for event professionals from the wonderful five-day improv and mindfulness workshop Mindful Play, Playful Mind, held June 8-13 2016, at Mere Point on the beautiful Maine coast — followed by their relevance to event design (red). (Here’s Part 1.)
The YOU game
In the YOU game, participants stand in a circle and create — by saying YOU and pointing to someone — patterns of categories, such as people’s names or breeds of dogs, around the circle. (Detailed description & instructions can be found here.) When you have several different patterns going around simultaneously, things get hectic. When we add people moving to the next person’s place in the pattern while playing, things get…demanding! The game vividly drives home this golden rule: When communicating, ensure your message is received! When everyone successfully implements this rule, the YOU game flows despite its complexity. And when we slip up, the patterns mysteriously disappear…
Successful event professionals learn the importance of this golden rule early! Another way to think about and practice this rule is the ask, tell, ask formulation.
Status
I have written about status in both my books, as it’s an important aspect of event design—and improv. At the workshop, we played several improv games that explored status and allowed us to practice taking status roles and working to change our own or others’ status. One example was a two-person scene we played over and over again with the same dialog:
Player1: Hello.
Player2: Hello.
Player1: Been waiting long?
Player2: Ages.
Each player had the option to choose their original status and then work to raise or lower their own or the other player’s status. Qualities of body stance, control of space, speech, and interaction affect status, and it’s something that I would like to be more aware of in my life. As a facilitator, I typically work to equalize status with people with whom I’m working, but, programmed by my upbringing, I also have a tendency on meeting new people to default to lower status until I know them better. Improv status work helps me become more aware of such proclivities.
Ted also introduced us to Patsy Rotenburg’s Second Circle model of communication and connection, which maps in many ways onto improv status work. Worth checking out!
If you’ve read my books or this blog, you know that I am a proponent of replacing traditional preordained status at events with a peer model where individual status can and does change from moment to moment. Such participant-driven and participation-rich events provide a fluid-status environment that supports leaders and experts appearing and contributing when appropriate and needed.
Building things together
One of the most wonderful things about improv is the opportunities it gives us to experience what can happen when we build something together with others, something that is a true joint creation that would have been different if any one of its creators had not been present. Improv games provide an environment of mutual support, where players add to what’s currently been created. The addition can be of more detail or deeper focus on some aspect, but the whole glorious edifice only increases in size and complexity over time.
Many improv games provide this experience. One that we enjoyed a lot was three-words-at-a-time poems. We wrote group poems, our only instruction being to read what we received and add to it in a way that seemed true to what had already been written. Sitting in a circle, each of us wrote the first three words of a poem. We then passed our paper to the next person, who wrote three more words and passed the paper on again. Our papers circulated twice around the circle, with the starter of each poem contributing the last three words.
Here’s one we created together:
The Dinner
The cold lasagna sat on the white stool.
Uneaten, unloved.
Unlovable.
No cheese?
What, no noodles?
No meat?
No because too much.
VEGETABLES!
The guests departed, deflated, never to return to my sugarless, soulless party.
My hungry friends
Even hungrier for the lost moment
Of Italian goodness lingered beside
White plates and glasses.
Never host again.
I think the most satisfactory experiences I have designing, producing, and facilitating events occur when every person involved contributes creatively to making the event what it becomes. It feels darn good to be part of something wonderful that a group of people built through their work.
Conclusions
I learned so many important lessons from improv at this workshop. Our five days together passed swiftly. Throughout our time together we had moments of play, joy, seriousness, sadness, intimacy, fun, learning, and much laughter. I love workshops like this because they offer and support a unique experience for each participant—prescribed learning objectives are refreshingly absent, though I am sure that each person (including Ted and Lisa) took away something personally meaningful, valuable, and probably important. I’ve only covered some of what I experienced and enjoyed. I recommend Ted and Lisa’s skillful, supportive, and empathetic workshops to anyone who wants to explore the wonders of improv and mindfulness in a community of not-long-to-be-strangers.
I plan to be back next year; please join me!
P.S.
Ted & Lisa’s excellent Monster Baby Podcast just published David Treadwell’s interview with Ted & Lisa, which was recorded during the workshop. They explain “why they offer these retreats, what the weekend usually covers, and how improv skills can lead to a better life.” They also consider what keeps people from such ways of being in their normal lives and when they can get into the “no” mode. David asks how the retreat can help teachers, business professionals, and those in personal relationships before getting into the rewards and challenges of leading such retreats. Ted and Lisa offer a few specific examples of the kinds of exercises they offer. The podcast closes with a few short testimonials from this year’s participants. And if you keep listening past the apparent end, there’s a hidden bonus track improvised performance from Ted and Lisa!”
Here are some improv and mindfulness lessons from a five-day improv and mindfulness workshop I attended in Maine in 2016.
You had to be there. In this case, “there” was a wonderful five-day improv and mindfulness workshop Mindful Play, Playful Mind, held June 8-13 2016, at Mere Point on the beautiful Maine coast. In this two-part article, I’ll share a little of my experience and takeaways, followed by their relevance to event design (red).
How I got there
Many people think of improv as a form of entertainment. I am fascinated by my experiences of improv as a tool for better living. As Patricia Ryan Madson, a teacher of both workshop leaders, says: “Life is an improvisation.” In addition, I’ve been working for over 40 years (with erratic focus and success) on practicing mindfulness in my daily life. So, when I heard in 2015 that Ted DesMaisons and Lisa Rowland, with whom I’d spent three days at a 2012 beginner’s improv workshop in San Francisco, were offering a workshop on improv and mindfulness, I badly wanted to go. Although that opportunity had to be passed up—PCMA made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: facilitating the 2015 PCMA Education Conference—I made it to the 2016 workshop.
I’m glad I did.
Where I came from
I became interested in improv after short experiences in various workshops during the last 15 years. After a three-day introductory workshop at BATS, I attended two four-day Applied Improvisation Network World Conferences (San Francisco 2012 and Montreal 2015). In Lessons From Improv and other posts I’ve shared how improv shines a powerful light on core practices that improve events. Saying Yes to offers can allow amazing things to happen at conferences, Being Average improves our creativity by focusing on the possibilities inside the box, and Waking Up to the Gifts makes the importance of public and specific appreciations at events obvious.
Looking back, I’ve only one post about mindfulness. Not because it’s less important, but because I find mindfulness hard to write about.
The content and process of Mindful Play, Playful Mind was so rich that I’ll cover only a fraction of what one might learn from participating: the fraction that especially resonated for me at this time in my life. Here goes…
Practice
One of the key gifts I received from the workshop was the gift of practice of improv and mindfulness.
The principles of improv, though easy to grasp, require practice to master. I’m far from mastery. The first time I worked with a fellow participant in a simple game, Ted and Lisa gently pointed out that I blocked her first two offers. (Essentially, I said “no, not that” to what she had suggested about my character and motivations). I noticed that I sometimes say “no” to perfectly appropriate ideas. Improv doesn’t mean accepting anything anyone says to you; rather it is a way to expand a world of possibilities that one might otherwise reject. Practicing saying “yes” over our five days together helped me be more open to saying it in my life.
Each morning, Ted led us through an hour of movement and meditation. During the last ten years, I have had a rather, well let’s just say, sporadic mindfulness practice. On the fourth morning of the workshop, I was so aware of the benefits of daily practice, I determined to start each day henceforth with yoga and meditation. This decision was a surprise to me. It may well turn out to be the most significant change in my life from this workshop. We’ll see.
After we have grasped the basics of event design, mindful practice is how we improve. We become better at noticing what happens and learning from it, more focused on the present, and less distracted by our ego. Improv practice increases our creativity in dealing with the unexpected (turning broken eggs into omelets), makes accepting offers (of assistance and opportunities) easier, and helps us to work better with and support collaborators.
Being appreciated
It was a surprise to me to find during the workshop that I still short-change appreciations from others. I was taught at an early age to feel embarrassed by compliments, applause, or thanks. Though I’m better able to accept these things nowadays, I still feel a certain reticence at accepting these positive affirmations.
Providing private and public appreciations to those who make our events possible is incredibly important. Accepting such appreciations as offers of love, connection, and support is equally important.
Workshop participants with Ted DesMaisons (beard) and Lisa Rowland (scarf)
Creating connection with others
Although I had previously spent time with workshop leaders Ted & Lisa, I had never met my fellow participants before. All nine of us spent five days living, playing, and working together. We stayed in an old family home overlooking a stunning Maine estuary and ate meals together. One afternoon we hiked together over Morse Mountain to Seawall Beach. Our workshop was held either outside or in the Mere Point Yacht Club next door 😀.
By the end of our time together, I got to know Ellen, Nancy, Nahin, Ellena, Wendy, and Everlyn better in some ways than our Vermont neighbors (and friends), with whom we’ve shared a driveway for over thirty years. The improv and mindfulness exercises we experienced together allowed us to help each other learn and grow.
Well-designed events can change peoples’ lives through the connections we make during them and the learning and changes that result. What an amazing responsibility and opportunity we have!
There are more improv and mindfulness lessons in Part 2!
I spent the first twenty-five years of my life obtaining a Ph.D. What was more important, the achievement or the work and learning involved?
More recently, for about ten years I had a piece of paper thumbtacked at eye level on my office wall. It said:
Process not product.
I needed that piece of paper in plain view to remind me as I worked on projects that, ultimately, the process I use to achieve my goals is more important than the end result.
No, I’m not saying that the products of my work aren’t important; far from it. Rather, if I concentrate on my end goals to the extent that my awareness of the process I am using to obtain them suffers, then:
My end results will be inferior to what I could have achieved; and
I’ll be living a miserable life.
It took me ten years before I removed that piece of paper. Ten years to reliably remember not to plunge into achievement at the expense of mindful action.
Sometimes, old habits take a long time to change.
There’s a silver lining, though. By implementing change in small ways in our daily lives, we can better facilitate the change we seek.
Which is more important for you? Process or product?
Image attribution: Flickr user sixmilliondollardan
I recently came across the poem Sacred Ground, by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. She reminded me that everywhere is holy.
More often or not, answers are available from devices in our pockets. Today we rely on machines for connection with information and others. Machines allow us to research what we want to know or explore.
