The Deep Play Institute, in collaboration w/ The School of Making Thinking, is hosting an upcoming event - “Existential Playground”. We are looking for a handful of facilitators to host 1-hour workshops for the event. Facilitators will be compensated $100. Proposals are due by October 17th. Please read below for details.
Existential Playground is an ongoing virtual event dedicated to playfully experimenting with the essential questions of our existence. Each playground creates an immersive container meant to catalyze questions around a given theme. For roughly 2-3 hours, we will live questions, try on questions (like outfits), breath in the space around the questions, and watch as more and more questions percolate. Deep play is the fodder for our questions – the play of our senses, feelings, thoughts, bodies, hearts, brains, relationalities, interiorities, voices, memories, edges, and shadows.
Existential Playground #1 - Parts Saturday Nov 21, 3-6pm EST We are all made up of parts (i.e. different roles, selves, or inner voices). A critic, a lover, a despairer, a self-negater, a cheerleader, an aesthete, etc. Many relational practices (Internal Family Systems Therapy, Gestalt Therapy, Process Work, Psychodrama, etc) attempt to work with these parts, to illuminate them, to help them collaborate, to speak, to see what lies beneath them. Our first existential playground we will be devoted to playing with our parts. After a short parts mapping introductory exercise, a handful of facilitators will offer workshops for us to participate in – as our parts. As we play, some of the questions that will most likely frame our playground are: What are my parts? What are your parts? Do they get along? Should they get along? How should they get along? What does that getting along look like? Is “getting along” an authentic mode of relating? What if they don't want to get along? Do some of my parts deserve to be pushed down or silenced? Do all parts deserve a voice? What if a part is violent or hurtful? Is there another part beneath it that is non-violent or not-hurtful? Does the core of all our parts want peace and love? Or is there no “core” to our parts? Or are these “cores” more messy, uncertain, and a mix of good and bad? Is there a part that bridges all these parts? Is there a self that integrates the parts? Is that “integrator” also a part? Is it parts all the way down?
Proposals The event will begin with a guided meditation inspired by Internal Family Systems Therapy aimed to help all the participants (and all the facilitators) identify and map some of their internal parts/roles. After this guided meditation, we will hold two consecutive time-blocks for workshops (each lasting 1 hour, with a small break in-between). For each block of time, participants will divide into about 2-3 different groups, each group led by a facilitator. Each workshop will exist within/alongside the frame set by the initial meditation – i.e. a container whereby we are defined by roles, and where these roles have particular voices, actions, ways of being.
If you are interested in facilitating a workshop, please submit a proposal via this form, by October 17th. We are looking for proposals that are both experimental/innovative, but which also demonstrate that the facilitator can hold this somewhat vulnerable container. There is no need to stay within a Family Systems Therapy framework, or any other discipline that is explicitly dedicated to working with “parts.” Perhaps you are a poet and you want to play with how writing emerges from differing parts. Perhaps you are a theatre-maker, and want to play with how scenes, scripts, or scores intersect with our inner roles. Perhaps you are an activist, a performance artist, a filmmaker, actor, a philosopher, a therapist, a life coach, a social worker etc. Facilitators should expect to work with anywhere from 10-30 participants in their workshop. Pay will be $100 for a 60 minute workshop. The workshops will be held on Zoom.