Course update & new writing
deathclown rules! part 11
click the picture to read more & apply
https://www.animistarts.art/deathclowndemogroup
I’ve decided to start the 3 month online intensive in September, which means I will be finalizing applications and participant commitments in July and August. This may be the only time I’ll run this training, so if you really have wanted to experience it, perhaps decide if this is something you can hold in your ultra busy fragmented life. Hopefully i will survive until then.
If you are ready, I also offer private sessions for more established artist-facilitators and practitioners who can’t fit the course commitment into their lives because of kids, etc.
Getting more people into these sessions is also how I’m going to survive my medical expenses, so there’s a bit of urgency on my end too.
What are we preparing FOR?
Practicing = getting to the point(s)
Practice, real meditation or any meditative practice, is a celebration of reality and our experience of it. Play and discovery are linked to our intrinsic nature and provide refuge, relief and ever-changing opportunities to play and discover. Play and discovery are not actions to solve or win. Like music, the point is to play and enjoy the process.
In doing so, we FEEL things. Impossible, indescribable things. And the practice(s) can help us to embody, communicate, share and apply those felt things to our relationships, our challenges, our cultural systems and oppressions.
Water is wet, I know, I know. It’s painfully obvious, yet, like trying to catch a greased pig, humans default into dissociation and abstraction time and time again — to try and own the pig, rather than actually get dirty trying to catch it. Practice is the art and the play of this difficult and enriching process.
The point is to get to the point as fast as possible because that is when real practice begins. If we are constantly preparing or “self-developing’ or “healing” we have to ask, what are we doing it FOR?
This is NOT an existential rhetorical question. I literally mean what actions and activities are we actually preparing for?
For me, the big one is Death itself, and along the way we must have containers, shared imaginal spaces, where we can test our skills and apply our practices in real time.
For our ancestors these shared imaginal spaces were rituals, ceremonies, that blended art and medicine, spirituality and science, storytelling and improvisation, music and craft, all in the context of a place-based community of relations.
I believe we are not as far away from them as we have been forced to think we are.
Theater, music and all the many forms of theatrical play are direct pathways to this POINT. The point where we can really experience the effects of our practices. When we add nondual animistic structures to theatrical structures, we are able to more quickly get under the noise of conceptualism, individualism and narcissistic-addictive trauma patterns and into the felt sense of the continuity and commonality that is the base of who and what we are, who and what reality is.
The other day in a reflective conversation about this deathclown artform i was asked a question, and in the process of answering it, one of the conversants said “To meet people where they are?” and I said “No, not for me to meet people where they are or for people to meet me where I am, but for people, for us together, to meet reality where reality is.”
To me, this is the point.