A space for the questions, reflections and inquiries that unfold from our deep play programming. Field Notes is where we document our explorations—both the resolved and the unresolved—as we navigate the edges of practice.
THE PARASITES WITHIN - TO PURGE OR TO PET [FEB 9, 2026]
PLAYGRND
We all have parasites in our lives…parasitic behaviors, relationships, habits that are draining our energy. In this session we had the distinct honor to step into our play power and decide: to integrate, or to purge?
Before diving into the sticky work of confronting our inner parasites, we warmed our collective guts up with some grounding in the physical reality of our digestive systems. As those of us who engage in parts work know, we are so much more than an individual being. We have millions of microorganisms play-fighting, arguing and orgying in our bodies - transforming the world around us into our flesh. The gut is often referred to as the second mind because of the amount of information that gets processed through it, and translated into intuition. Rather than villainizing parasites on the whole, we offered a more holistic framing of their role within a whole digestive ecosystem - recognizing that some parasites co-evolved with us to help us digest things that would otherwise be allergens for our simple bodies.
With this framing, we opened up with a collective appreciation for our gut biodiversity, inviting the group to collectively populate a whiteboard image of a GI tract with digestive enzymes (i.e. practices, relationships, places, perspectives - with a latinified name) that help us digest the crumbling reality around us. Folks introduced us to microbes like "Dancereleasius" and "Surfthewaveus", and we got to appreciate each other's enzymes by renaming ourselves and embodying those beings. Together we transformed into the belly of a whale - with a fully off mute soundscape of helpful microbe noises.
Nourished by gratitude practice, we dove into a guided meditation to get squirmy with the more parasitic energies embodying our guts - through journaling, movement, sound exploration, and reflection. We then divided into breakout rooms where we introduced our cast of parasites, and had a playful talkshow to get to know a handful of parasites on a deeper level - learning about their origins stories, moments they show up in, needs that they are trying to meet with their presence, and different forms they've taken throughout their host's life. The live studio audience was raucous - interacting with emojis, questions, and eventually some invitations to either "PURGE" or "INTEGRATE"! Obviously the host made the ultimate decision on whether to purge or integrate the parasite - but it was useful to hear other people's perceptions and instincts when it came to these stickily extractive gut partners.
We closed out our session with a probiotic gut replenishment - inviting folks to ask for what they needed from the collective. Folks suggested things like "self hug", "visualize cleansing white light from your mouth to your anus", "stretch up to the sky", and other lovely practices that nourished us after the vulnerability and purging we did together. And of course, we directed folks to a folk herbalist comrade from whom they could order small batch parasite cleanse kits to continue to be in this practice at home.
Typically at PLAYGRND we facilitate in person spaces, where there's snack and socializing time buffering facilitated activities so people can get to know each other, and feel welcome and comfortable enough to open up and explore with us. We had previously done an iteration of this Parasite Cleanse Experience in our in person series Liberatory Laboratory, where we got to do scene work with our parasites -- really sinking into the muck of codependent entanglement that they suck us into. We weren't sure how this lab would translate online, but we were extremely impressed at the willingness of our virtual group to get goofy with us - at whatever pace worked for each individual. Getting to peek into the wild inner explorations that were happening on each zoom screen felt like looking at a series of petri dishes at the vastly colorful diversity of microbes.
Because of the constraints of our session - being a new group of relative strangers with little shared context - it made sense for us to focus our inquiries inward, working with parasitic energies in our personal lives. Even so, it was interesting to witness patterns emerge across our differences - energies like "not enoughness", "screen addiction", and "overconsumption" sprouted up across the field in full bloom. It had us wondering about what could be possible with a consistent, focused, and trusting group of people doing this kind of exploration on a societal level - and the character play and clowning that would emerge from such investigations.
UNLEASHING A CAN OF WORMS [JAN 20, 2026]
alvie & momo
"What if we opened the can of worms and treated them as medicine?" Like freeing worms from a can back into their vital role in the soil ecosystem, in this wormshop we invited our exiled emotions to the surface to wriggle, writhe, and rouse rabble. In this container of compassionate collective witness, we approached them not as problems to solve, but as portals to explore and characters to play with, rich with information about our needs, desires, and deepest wisdom. By bringing silliness and curiosity to what often feels most heavy and hard to access, we hope to build capacity to be with the range of our emotions and get curious about what lessons they hold for our personal healing and collective humanity. Using a combination of sensory exploration, guided visualizations, embodied character-building, journaling, improvisational interactions, and collective imagining, we gave these emotions permission to play, agency to speak their truths, and power to change us and writhe up to mold the world we most desire.
Structure and Techniques:
OPENING THE CAN — worming up the facial muscles with eye and tongue stretches + vocalizations as an on-ramp to our fa-silly-tation, paired with a time-lapse video of worms devouring compost to elicit a spectrum of expressive reactions from disgust to fascination.
SETTING THE SCENE — Giving context about our intentions behind opening this can of worms in the broader sociopolitical landscape. While I *love* gushing about this, it can be hard to do so concisely, and I’d rather devote more time to the meat of the work— the interactive activities— than running my yap so much, so, some workshopping around brevity is certainly in order. I do love the way we ended this part with a SpongeBob clip that tied these themes to the worm metaphor rather perfectly, and we got a lot of feedback about others loving that crossover, too!
DEEP PLAY AGREEMENTS — We modified these to include additional notes (in bold) around access needs and trauma-informed empowerment:
Honor Self: I agree to honor myself + my access needs, and speaking up (verbally or in the chat) if they aren’t being met. This entails setting my own boundaries, and not participating in any activity that crosses my threshold of consent.
Honor Other: I agree to honor other. This entails respecting the other person to set their own boundaries, and not pushing anyone to cross over a boundary that they set.
Explore My Edge: I agree to explore my edge, knowing that i can opt out at any time. This entails assessing where I am in a given moment (between emotional risk and safety) and taking a step in the direction of emotional risk, with the understanding that this brings growth and transformation. (Expanding window of CHOICE rather than window of “tolerance" — we get to choose how deep we go!)
Confidentiality. I agree to not share any name-identifying information from this program with anyone outside of it.
OVERVIEW THE AGENDA — This was an important addition we made after our test-run of the wormshop where a number of people mentioned their desire to know what types of activities we had planned and what durations to expect.
WORM UP —
6-direction Clown Breath (from Barnaby from Clown Spirit) - can be done sitting or standing+moving, or just with imagination. It can be hard for some folks with trauma to engage with traditional breathing exercises, but this one provided an array of embodiment options in terms of posture/ movement that made it feel like more of a dance, which folks loved!
popcorn style "we are // i am” exercise (adopted from Aaron from DPI)— can answer verbally or in the chat. I always really love the broad range of responses that come out of this — I personally tend to opt for the hyper-specific, often disgusting details in each setting as my answer (I wonder what that says about me? feels like a Rorschach in itself!) but there are always also some deeply beautiful, poetic, and even tragic responses as well that tend to bring me to tears.
sensory exploration with objects around room
worms have taste buds all over their body - how can you taste with your whole being?
noticing what attraction and repulsion feel like in the body — This was an important foreshadowing activity for our parts work to come, and I love how well it fit with our metaphor!
SOLO EXPLORATION —
Guided visualization from the Creative Consciousness Healing Oracle Deck by Johanna Wright — someone from Frankie Simmon’s Habitual Magic cohort turned me onto this deck and it fit our vibe so so perfectly!
Guided exploration of exiled emotions internally — playing with sensation, shape, movement, sound..
CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE --
1-on-1 character interviewing with curious witness (in breakout rooms, for those wanting to interact) — encouraging folks to feel free to respond using words, gibberish/sounds, gestures, or chat, and get curious + creative + make up their own follow up questions
Embodiment / journal / doodle / ponder time (if solo play is preferred) — we spent a long time hashing out logistics of how to make this section accessible to a whole variety of needs for entry-points to exploration, given that shadow work is *hard*, vulnerable work and sometimes you need to come in the side-door via clowning rather than allowing the ego-mind to form explanatory narratives— why not create *even more* side-doors of different modalities to try on for size in the different rounds? — we tried out having folks add a # sign to the beginning of their name if they did NOT want to be placed in a breakout room, which worked out great (once we cleared up the confusion about the options folks could choose) as the majority of folks *did* want to participate in the 1-on-1 character interviewing, which we saw as the meat of this wormshop and the part that participants tended to love the most! — It’s a shame that what went on inside each breakout room will forever be a mystery to us as the fa-silly-taters— I would have loved to have been a compassionate witness to this exercise in action, but we’ll take folks at their worm that it was indeed fruitful and nourishing and everything they needed it to be and then some! I do want to figure out a way, in future iterations of this wormshop, to have some sort of exile runway show at the end, for folks willing to put their guts on display for more than just one other person. We did invite them to embody their exiles to their fullest extent before releasing, but that was brief and it would have been nice to allow for a one-at-a-time focused showcase. I think that activity would lend itself better to an in-person iteration of this workshop rather than virtual, to soak up the fully embodied experience.
GROUNDING — releasing exile, coming back home to self and the current time + space *insert sad trombone* WOMP WOMPP.
Another guided visualization from the Creative Consciousness Healing Oracle Deck by Johanna Wright to make the transition from the heaviness of shadow work to the levity of..
DAYDREAMING — who could we be beyond our struggle, in collaboration with all our parts? free from the systems that hold us down? — more "we are // I am”s centered around composting toxicity, liberation from constriction, and planting seeds of the world we desire to see. There were some very literal answers of what might actually be in a compost heap, but again I was astounded at the vividness of imagination and world-building potential in these answers. THIS IS THE SHIT RIGHT HERE! THIS IS MY WHY!
RETURN TO EARTH — wrapping things up, having a moment of gratitude for self + others, encouraging aftercare and providing our slide deck as a resource for further digging, as well as a feedback form for folks to let us know how we can improve for next time. Really glad we did that, as we got really valuable feedback from a participant who is an actual IFS practitioner !! We also stuck around afterwards for about a half hour to allow folks to share their reflections and questions, which I really appreciated making space for without the pressure of having to rush through it, as we would have had we done it within the allotted 2 hours.
Journal:
What felt most alive to me in this wormshop was the stomach-dropping, excited-yet-terrified sensation of plunging into the unknown roller-coaster ride that was putting this wacky and provocative proposal into the world and seeing how it landed — recognizing EVERYTHING in this life is an iterative experiment and we never really know how things are going to land until they do (or don’t!), and that it varies from container to container depending on who’s in it, how many people there are, and how their access needs differ. We were very deliberate in our planning sessions about accommodating as many different styles & needs as we could imagine arising for each exercise, with the understanding that real-time access issues we hadn’t anticipated may still occur. Helping out a blind participant who had arrived halfway through by summarizing the activities we had done so far to catch them up to speed, and reading out all of the main-room activity options that were screen-shared during the choose-your-own-adventure section felt effortless. This experience emphasized the importance of having a plan but being flexible, knowing nothing ever goes quite according to plan and there are always bumps in the road or curveballs that slow things down, and factoring that in (or adapting the agenda in-real-time as necessary), as well as accounting for time for transitions and time for explaining (and often re-explaining) each new activity. Accommodating neurodivergence and differing levels of ability are *features*, not bugs!
Any imposter syndrome we had in our planning was quickly quelled by being transparent about our perspective thru lived experienced as a couple of queer AuDHD chronically-ill & traumatized silly little clowns, fucking around & finding out together right along with everyone else. We reject the notions of false-authority and felt it important to let folks know we’re right there in the thick of the muck with everyone else, reminding folks of their agency to mold this as they wish throughout the entire wormshop. Yes, we did spend weeks and weeks scheming and dreaming this thing up together, but everything was designed to be able to be modified to best fit each person’s individual needs and preferences! We put *so much* intention into the exercises we chose and the flow between them to ensure we were creating as safe as a container as possible, given that true “safety” does not exist — choose how vulnerable you want to be, how deep you want to go — knowing and trusting your limits and stepping out as needed if things get too intense to handle — giving folks permission to opt out, adapt, or go deeper as they deemed fit.
HOT TAKES FOR WARM ENCOUNTERS [JAN 11, 2026]
GABRIELLE REVLOCK
What this was Good Vibrations: Micro-Encounters for When Socializing Feels Stagnant, was a workshop I offered for DPI through the Playing when the Playing gets Hard 2026 series. It was an experiment in cultivating interpersonal aliveness in online encounters—especially when socializing starts to feel stale, performative, or effortful. The workshop combined research-based prompts, improvisational structures, and relational play to invite boldness, curiosity, and attunement.
Structures & Techniques 1. Warmth as an entry point As participants arrived, I invited them to make a warm beverage. This was inspired by a 2008 study suggesting that experiencing physical warmth can promote interpersonal warmth. I like beginning with something simple and tactile—I personally find online group gatherings to be challenging so grounding myself in the physician reality of my environment at the same time is one of my hacks.
2. Agreements, with an emphasis on collaboration While reviewing DPI agreements, I added on a value that is particularly important to me—collaboration. Even if someone feels a “no” to an exercise or idea I present, can that refusal still be framed as participation in a shared investigation? Rather than boundary-setting as withdrawal, I invited a “yes, and”—where subjectivity and somatic truth are part of the co-creation. I would rather someone speak up if they are disagreeing with me, instead of keeping it to themselves because I perceive all engagement as having the possibility for connection and collaboration.
3. Group warm-up: testing the edge through self-disclosure without pressure One early activity began with cameras off. One person turned their camera on and shared something true for themselves. (I modeled this for the first few rounds.) If the statement was true for other people, then they too turned their cameras on or wrote “me!” in the chat. What I love about this structure is that it centers self-disclosure while preserving choice. Someone might say something tame (“I have a younger sibling”) or something riskier (“I’m estranged from my family”). Boldness was a recurring theme for this workshop, but never a requirement.
4. Gathering of excellent questions As a group, we brainstormed a list of “excellent questions.” In about a minute, we generated 152! Again, I invited boldness. If we are only brainstorming questions, might you feel inspired to add an edgier question? As people considered this, some of the questions became darker, more specific, and less censored. A few that stood out:
What’s a place you’d tell someone to visit to understand you?
What kind of mischief do you typically get into?
Have you ever killed someone? (Wow, that caught my attention and maybe that’s more the point than getting an answer.)
I framed this list as a backup plan. Presence and spontaneity are the goal—but it’s helpful to have questions in your back pocket that are not the standard “How are you?” and “What do you do for work?” I’m leaving the google form open in case you, reader, would like to contribute.
5. Beautification break At the halfway point, I suggested using the five minute break to beautify oneself or one’s space: lipstick, a favorite shirt, a plant, festival lights, incense, a silk scarf. This wasn’t about presentation but rather an opportunity to observe the effect of beauty. I find that beauty opens me up and incorporating texture, color, and sensory pleasure into my vicinity affects me on a bottom-up level. What I feel affects how I feel.
6. Bold, Observant, Authentic, Succinct (It’s pronounced “boss”) After the break, I shared reflections drawn largely from my experiences with online dating. My guiding principles are: be bold, be observant, be authentic, and be succinct. I shared an actual text exchange with an anonymous person and pointed out moments where I took a risk—aware that it might not land well. This was a moment of vulnerability for me. One participant shared that they wouldn’t have responded positively to my risky message. That moment felt especially alive. It revealed exactly where connection can fracture—and how subjective tolerance for risk really is. Their honesty, however, made me feel more connected to them, and I suspect vice versa was true because later they told me that they wanted me to teach a dating-specific workshop. (Yes! I want to do that.) The type of boldness I’m interested in yields disagreement without disengagement–this is authentic connection. 7. Breakout rooms: mystery and rhythm I used several breakout rooms with 2–4 participants per room to vary interpersonal dynamics.
Cultivating Mystery: Describe your work or how you spend your time without using titles. Don’t give it all away. Invite curiosity. This was primarily a listening exercise—notice what made you want to know more, without immediately acting on it.
Observing rhythm and f-ing with your normal flow:
Part 1: One person had two minutes to do anything they wanted while others observed their rhythm. The active person could scroll on social media, read emails, meditate, move…whatever.
Part 2: Participants reflected verbally—and this is key—intentionally inserted pauses to disrupt habitual speaking tempo and create more space for sensation and thought.
Part 1 was inspired by an exercise from my friend Lauren Mark, a professor in communication and culture. Part 2 comes from a pandemic-era score I practiced daily with Sarah K Williams, where by embracing the pause, conversation slowed to an almost absurd pace—often about milk and pancakes—and generated a surprising tension. We later used this text score in a performance called Orientation.
HOW TO BE ANGRY WITH GOD [OCT 16, 2025]
MARTJE WITZEL
The workshop How to Be Angry with God explored our relationship with anger, despair, and the sacred. The invitation was to turn toward difficult emotions—rage, grief, disappointment, and betrayal—rather than bypass them in search of light. We asked: What if anger at God, or at life itself, is not a sign of disconnection but a doorway into deeper intimacy?
Structure and Techniques
We began with a playful introduction round, where participants shared a metaphor for their current relationship with life or God—warming the space with humor and honesty. I then offered a short talk on our developmental reluctance to show anger toward what we depend on for love, and the tendency in self-development circles to avoid darkness in favor of positivity.
Through guided embodiment and writing, participants revisited moments when life had not gone as it “should have.” This prepared the ground for the main practice: a Divine Rant— where participants voiced their unfiltered feelings toward God or Life while being witnessed with compassion and openness.
We closed with an open circle of reflection, inviting participants to share their takeaways while staying connected to their present experience. As homework, they were invited to write a letter from God or Life back to them, letting the relationship speak both ways. The session wove together relational presence, creative expression, and trauma-informed pacing to support emotional safety and authenticity.
Journal
What felt most alive was the collective courage to step into what so often remains unspoken. Beneath rage, I could feel a deep tenderness. Some participants found joy and release; others met confusion or hopelessness, longing for transformation before the ground of full acceptance was laid. It reminded me that healing often begins with simple inclusion—to stay, to breathe, to let anger exist without rushing to resolve it. Facilitating this felt deeply personal. I had just emerged from my own week of rage and uncertainty, and it felt vulnerable to guide others from within that rawness. Yet that very honesty seemed to deepen the space.
Afterward, I felt both emptied and expanded. The group’s willingness to meet this edge affirmed a truth I keep learning: intimacy with life includes our storms. When anger is welcomed, it transforms not by force, but by presence. Perhaps being angry at God is, in the end, another way of saying yes to the whole of life.
In the summer of 2025 the Deep Play Institute hosted 2 back-to-back long-weekend runs of a cult live action role play called, “Order of the Amethyst Heart.” In this fictional world, which takes place a few years into the future, the signs of a deteriorating society are getting more prevalent, and chapters of the Order of Amethyst Heart (a group devoted to worship of the inner ultraviolet) have been popping up around the world as a means achieving of spiritual and psychological liberation. The backdrop for our LARP was that worldwide Armageddon was so immanent that the only way to prevent it was to gather elected members from the various chapters around the country, and for us to combine our individual psyches into a collective oversoul. Pilgrims came from near and far to our chapter - the Cascadia Branch, a few hours from Portland - to undergo this challenging and vital ritual.
TECHNIQUES:
The style of LARP that we hosted was called a nordic LARP - because it was developed in Scandinavian countries (not because it is about Vikings). The style is known for being highly structured, and taking on serious content (not just elves and warlords, but AIDS epidemics and mental institutions for example). For our LARP weekend, we arrived on a Thursday night, and from then until Friday evening we workshopped out-of-character by going over safety rules, warming us up to the group, developing our characters, and learning some of the rituals that we were to take part in once the LARP began. Then from Friday evening until Sunday at 3pm the invitation was to stay in character the entire time. Players had a designated zone to chill in if they wanted to go out of character, but for the most part all 18 of us remained in character for 3 days. We slept in our humble quarters (tents), we ate together simple meals (as they do in monasteries), and we did all kinds of rituals and practices together to dissolve our egos and worship the inner ultraviolet (an energy field we believe to be held within all sentient matter).
The LARP was designed by myself (Aaron) and Denzolo. And each of us had a unique contributing role. Denzolo’s background was more within the realm of esoterica, magik, astrology, kundalini yoga, but also process oriented psychology. They were the leading voice behind the world we created, a world co-created from a wide array of real esoteric practices from the past few thousand years. Most notable this included a morning practice of mantras, the 9 rites, yoga, breathing techniques, and osho-style cathartic release. My contributions were more structural and psychological: thinking of the general arc of the weekend, the ordering of events, and activities centered around psychological exploration and depth (psychodramas, circling, group processes, etc).
Within the fiction we were using 5 elements to bring us towards the collective oversoul - a process named Spagyirca Pleromata. We began with earth as we gardened and tended to the earth. We then went into fire, a practice called Clearing, which is an emergent group-field offshoot of psychodrama that attempted to raise the psychological heat of the group and provide catharsis of our inner parts. Then we practiced water, and played Spaceship (developed by Ilana Simons), an authentic relating, surrealist sentence stem game that blasts participants off into murky relational interstices. Then air as Denzolo led us through a Stanislav Grof inspired breath work session. And then the final ritual was a processession to a field whereby we led a circle of protection rite (calling in the 5 directions), then a wildness lab (a time to truly purge our psyches of all the dross of our parts), and then, blindfolded, the time was then around 10pm, we walked to a distant field where me and Denzolo (and a few notable helpers) had dug out a huge donut in the earth. The final part of the ritual was an initiation into the oversoul which called on us to donate a vital fluid into a collective chalice (blood, urine, spit, etc), for us to give up our personal identities, and then to lay in a collective symbolic grave, where we then buried ourselves in about 2-feet of soil, all symbolizing our dissolving, our becoming one. And again, all of this was in character.
Sunday was a strange and murky finish. We told participants in the workshopping day that we would be instituting a structural change after the burial ritual whereby we were encouraged to use “we” pronouns, rather than I pronouns, or to use non-worded sound to connect to connect to others rather than language. The hope was that these tools would help us dissolve into togetherness. Some of us felt more united than others. Others thought the ritual was a failure. We had a very wild group process on Sunday morning (inspired by process oriented psychology) whereby we stood in different parts of the room to represent different inner parts and played them out in an emergent unfolding. And then we ended the LARP with a unified dreaming/visioning activity, where all of us lay on each other in a circle under a huge old growth maple tree, eyes closed, dreaming into the future of our collective and world. We then took off our roles (i.e. exited our characters) and then after two hours of integration out of character the LARP was over.
WHY? / INTENTIONS?
From the website (i.e. what all our participants read upon signing up)
In our modern, western secular culture there is a lack of communal belonging that can hold both a devotional practice to the divine, and a wild, expressive transformative process of authentic embodied experience. So many of us are enchanted by the ideal of living with friends in the country. So many of us are enchanted by the ideals of radical community – an antidote to our radical western individualism. So many of us are begging for a deep immersion into the sacred, the natural, the divine – an antidote for our scientific secularism. And so many of us are needful of wild, authentic expression – an antidote for the stale, prescribed formalities of our culture. We want to create an experiential container (safe-enough space) to provide people access to these desires, not only as a means of giving our souls something that we desperately need, but primarily as a means of exploring and playing with vital existential questions. What is it to lose all sense of self? What is it to give up our psyches into the collective? To share in a wider set of bodies, beliefs, images? To disown our individual egos and to become part of something larger? Each other, nature, the divine? What fissures, fractures and frictions arise on this journey? How can we be with them, and how will they impact this process? What happens to us as we follow others towards behavior that has positive intentions, but whose means are edgy, challenging or dark? What happens to us as we lead others towards these places?
ON REALITY & AUTHENTICITY
One of my biggest concerns throughout the two iterations of the LARP was on whether we were authentic or not. Many participants, including myself, had incredibly profound experiences and said at the end “that was amazing, but now I want to do it for real!” I.e. I want us to play this whole this thing now out of character. I.e. I want to start a real cult.
Was it real? Were we ourselves?
There was an ongoing resistance of pretense or pretending. Perhaps some people join a LARP to pretend. But like any good method acting coach may say, I’m not interested in pretending, I want us to feel as though what we are playing is really happening. And maybe my question is: is that possible? There were times when players were putting on accents, or telling jokes, or being somewhat absent minded about their character, moments where I was in disbelief about whether they were holding the world in a kind of serious regard. But even if players were trying to be serious, sometimes the seriousness was overwrought, sometimes a role was played too hard, the acting was too overdone and overly saturated with affect.
I began to think of character and authenticity in a few nuanced ways.
1- An authentic pathway into character, is to feel what is really being felt. For instance do you feel in your body rejection, or joy, or love, or disinterest. Start there. And then ask (with each authentic emotion) how would my character respond to this feeling. So character is a kind of sieve that all real emotions pass through.
2- Techniques are vital that can have an effect on one’s body, i.e. that can inspire REAL emotion. The most notable one was perhaps breath work. There was no way to trick your way out of feeling the intensity of that practice. Perhaps also with the burial. There was no way to pretend your way out of that. Rituals or experiences that have a visceral entry-point are vital for bringing about realness.
3- Snowballing. My character was named Gideon. And to begin with I felt like I knew hardly anything about Gideon. Gideon had lived at the order for 15 years, and was devoted to the practices there, and was devoted to our guru Martaji (who passed away a few years back). And so very soon it became clear that Gideon was exacting, and severe, unflinching, and totally devoted to success of the weekend’s ritual because it was necessary for saving the world. This came out only through playing Gideon. It was almost as if the character revealed this to me.
4- Finding bridges between a character and your real self. The main way I tried to do this was with my core intention. Gideon wanted the ritual to work. But why was Aaron invested in the ritual’s success? This became clear after the first Saturday night’s burial, and through reflection on the meaning of Spagyrica Pleromata (a Peraselsian alchemical technique) which means to take a thing apart into its respective parts and then put it back together. I, Aaron, realized that our psyche (in our selves, in groups, in society) is polarized, but that a necessary way of healing is to dissolve these polarizations into thier individuated expressions (i.e. to truly play out and feel: father energy, mother energy, abandonment, savior, etc) and then hold those energies in the group field in order to bring them together. And so a bridge was formed between Aaron and Gideon in terms of a core intention.
Nonetheless, I still question what character does to group experience. What would our weekend have been like if we just called it, “A group ritual inspired by esoteric practices and western psychosomatic techniques.” Well, it doesn’t sound as catchy. It doesn’t have the same pull as “Cult LARP.” There is something really HOT about playing a cult. But what is that appeal? It’s the chance to play with serious edges. It’s a chance to play with things so hot that they are hard to touch. I like to think of characters as condoms. They let you do all kinds of risky things, but ultimately don’t feel as good as if you weren’t wearing one. Someone pretended to chloroform a participant who wasn’t complying with the ritual. Another person dommed me by forcing me to get on the floor and say how much of a shit I was. Neither of these would have happened if we didn’t have the crutch of character. Character lets us do things that are unimaginable. But it comes as a price. The price of a buffer. The price of distance from our real selves, real worlds and lives.
I keep wondering if I can have my cake and eat it too. And keep thinking that the key is perhaps within intention. What are the stakes? Why are our real selves here? If we can get on the same page about that, and if those intentions can somehow find a way into our characters, then maybe we can pretend in a way that feels unified in its seriousness.
Some of the most exciting moments of play are the moments where we can’t tell if we are playing or not. Where we can’t tell if what is happening is me, or my character. Where the walls that say “pretend” erode a bit, and we can’t tell what is going on. These moments are so exciting (perhaps sometimes too exciting, i.e. terrifying) because we lose a sense of identity, the wild uncontrollable force of divine play flows out of the container meant to capture it, and it breaks out, and plays us in ways we cannot contain. It is here that we truly play, because the play plays us, and in doing so we lose a sense of if we are really playing or not. I long for these moments. And I hope to create more containers where they can be co-created.
How to do that in the future? Would that look like another cult LARP, or a cult that isn’t quite a LARP? I don’t know. But perhaps I’m already on the pathway there.
WHERE WE GO ON THE SPACESHIP [APRIL 3, 2025]
NETTA SADOVSKY & ILANA SIMONS
Spaceship is a spirited game that’s played in a seated circle where we start with sentence stems like “I want” and “I fear” and work up to embodying personas/archetypes like “mother” and “creepy uncle” and parts of self like “angry vindictive energy!” until we’re in a collage of real, imaginary, historical, associative utterances. We try to keep our utterances brief enough and the prompts varied enough that we’re in a nimble balance between the absurd and the real unfolding emotion in the room, the interpersonal and the imagined, the beautiful and the dumb. Among other mysterious balances. We facilitators liken ourselves to witches stirring the brew, managing those balances and ones outside our conscious awareness while picking up and amplifying themes and energies we detect in the group.
TECHNIQUES
Sentence stems: In which each person finishes a sentence from the same beginning phrase: I want, I fear, people see me as, etc.
Archetypal play, a nod to Jung: In which the group, in addition to the sentence stems, can start to embody different archetypes. For example, invitation to mommy energy! Animal energy! The shadow, the magician, the fool.
Working with personas and parts: some of our prompts are designed to invite parts into the room. These are interspersed with the sentence stems and archetypes. This might sound like, “bringing bitter energy,” or “invitation to parts preoccupied with climate change.”
JOURNAL
Ilana: Each time we play this game, I think the game is about something new. This time, for me, it largely felt like an exercise in remembering not to take things personally. In the game, we speak sentences without real context - little daggers of meaning thrown this way and that. And, at the same time, other sentences in the game are said earnestly, directly, to the person you’re speaking to. So it’s this jiggly wedging game – this flinging of sentences around the room, all sent with the challenge to remember that projection is the backbone, or engine pack, of every sentence. This game is an invitation to practice de-sticking yourself from someone’s projection.
This time, I was also working on my own need to be liked. Right before the group, Netta told me a story about a dancer who she loves for a certain courage he has: He moves at the pace of curiosity. That is: while he might feel familiar impulses to impress or entertain, he lets his honest curiosity lead him, which can mean moving with such slowness that for many it would be embarrassing. I loved the idea of this and was paying special attention to how often my body jumps into action as a leader to deal with the frustration, boredom, or judgment I imagine in others.
Netta: After a rousing, and at its apex, upsetting and somewhat uncontained version of Spaceship, I’m preoccupied with safety. Some of our participants were in an active conflict and we watched together the way this game of flagrant projection (speak as if we’re your mother!) does not helpfully facilitate conflict. Ilana and I talked through this afterward and decided to add some agreements to the game. Something like: This is a game of projection and an unthinking mind, and in light of that, we will try to unglue ourselves from taking things personally. And, some of you may have pre-existing relationships and unfinished business in the room. This game is not well designed for sifting through tension like that, and we will try not to dig around in conflicts.
I’m not sure those rules would have helped; I don’t think we or our participants thought the game would hold conflict well. It simply was there. I am curious though about making the guest list of these events more public, so people know who’s going to be on board the ship.
Now I’m setting that down and thinking about my desire to push towards absurdity. The gravitational pull of the group during Spaceships has often been towards earnest relating. I think Ilana and I both find it thrilling to entice the group towards more erratic theatricality intermixed with this earnestness. Why’s this kind of absurdity so thrilling? This feels core to the beauty of Spaceship. To intersperse the earnest group process with the associative-poetic mode. A frothing of an emotionally syncopated, chaotic stream of group consciousness. The embrace of intensely unpleasant emotional states through wacky juxtaposition: allusions to relationships that haunt us beside invented irate accusation beside genuine discomfort beside innocent curiosity.
THE POWER OF MEOW [FEB 20, 2025]
HAMSA FAE
Meow when you don’t know. Meow to greet a stranger. Meow when the playing gets hard. It’s the OM equivalent in another dimension. Now do it again but exaggerate your mouth. One more time but make it slower. Throat to diaphragm to pelvis, the vagus nerve spirals. Can you hear all the vowels, each seed conspiring to create your vocal signature?
Everything is vibrating around me. Each object has some sort of synchronicity to help me remember the layers of my subconscious. The nonsense and the random are all playgrounds for liminal space. My voice teaches me to shapeshift, code switch. My coffee order voice. The voice I use for my crush. The grunts and groans of pain and fatigue. My voice is also a social contract. How high/low must it sound to subscribe to some sort of post-colonial idea of gender. This voice is a place of in-between-ness. Saddle up.
Tone down these vowels in one breath cycle to ground. Continue nine times, and if you lose count, start back at zero. Can you feel the resonance of each seed sound in the correlating center till it hits the rectum? Perfect for after a night out.
Tone up these vowels to energize anytime of the day. How does heat or energy start to move after expressing? When you reach the top, how does your third eye antennae whip around to find center? Stim this while waiting in line, driving, or staring at a wall.
Which vowels are challenging/easeful to vibrate? The pudding is in the permission. Unlock that jaw, baby. It’s time to show teeth, tongue, and tonsils to explore the void of each center.
Re-call the four beat body drumming (left thigh, right thigh, chest, clap). Give a vowel for each point of contact. Continue until the rhythm takes you. This practice is a place for failure and fun.
Watch the rebound of energy. Pretend like nothing happened and drink some water.
What is most alive during integration is watching my intentions of child-like wonder, pushing through the domestication of my daily routine lately. I found a eucalyptus grove near my home and danced for the nymphs. The dappled light through the trees was a nice touch. The crunch of all flammable bark. Seducing the invasive, I say. Piscean princess is on her way!
The Zoom portal is a ceremony space. Aphrodite works in tech. The faeries are conspiring every code and cog to spin the wheels of our intentions. When one of our participants said, “can we try it with all our microphones on”, mute be gone. It was such a shift to experience the chambers of community within lag. Call and response is now a symphony, never ending waves until silence sits us in the rebound. I wonder about how our intentions will butterfly effect into the next moment, towards the next stepping stone to the lotus. I question, what is the lotus moment I am envisioning? A springtime bloom. Freedom. Something like the dream I had last night – three baby horses cuddling me in all directions.
AM I LEADING? [JAN 19, 2025]
HOLLY ADAMS
FLOCK: Playing with spontaneous synchronicity January 19 2025
When we move with strangers, sometimes we move together. I’m interested in the power of these moments, in the satisfaction that comes with improvised coincidence, and in circumstances and scores that can create the atmosphere where this can happen. FLOCK is a two-hour workshop where we explore spontaneous synchronicity through various scores.
Techniques
FLOCK begins with grounding exercises to bring our attention to ourselves and our bodies individually, before we bring our attention to the movement of others. Then, we dive into a series of short games and scores, some as an entire group, and some in groups of two or three. Between rounds we debrief and try to name what we’re feeling.
Flocking is a group improvisational movement practice. The group stands together, facing one direction. The primary score is to follow the movements of the person you see in front of you; as the group rotates and moves through space, the 'lead' role shifts from one person to the next. In this FLOCK, we explored the following iterations on the form:
An experiment in Pauline Oliveros’ Tuning Meditation through physical movement:
Sit in a group, eyes closed. Everyone finds a position or gesture to hold.
Someone says “on!” and everyone opens their eyes to see the positions everyone has taken.
Someone says “off!” and we all close our eyes, then each move into a form that we saw another person hold.
Repeat, finding ways to alter or emphasize the gestures of others as we embody them ourselves.
Mirroring
Sit in small groups or duos facing the others. Verbally decide who is taking the lead first.
The leader moves in any way they would like, and the others mirror the movements at the same time.
The leader indicates when they’re passing it to the next person, who then becomes the leader.
Eventually we move to not signifying when leadership is passed, and attempting to instead sense the transfer of leadership within the group.
Walking for coincidence
Everyone walks through the space, looking for moments to “catch the drift” of another person walking.
Experiment with moments of coincidence between your movements and the movements of other people; seeking out those moments and creating them.
Try finding the opposite of someone’s movements. Try tracking another person’s movements from the other side of the room and stepping into their actions. See how it feels to put someone else’s steps into your own body.
Journal
There are two overarching qualities that I’ve begun to understand as part of these practices: unsureness and satisfaction.
Unsureness:
Anticipation and unsureness come up both individually and within the entire group atmosphere. Individually, sometimes we’re not sure if we’re the one leading, or what to do with our leadership. As the whole group, things can feel unsteady or incomplete if things fail to collect into a coherent sync. Nancy Stark Smith, dancemaker and artist, proposed the language of the gap [ ] to articulate this feeling of in-between. Moments in improvisation where you’re not sure what’s happening, what to do next, why you’re even here.
Satisfaction:
Shared power and satisfaction emerge in sudden moments where everything in the room collects around one idea, like marching in two groups in opposite directions, or everyone’s speed slowing down as one person follows another, who follows another, who follows another, who slowed. When without communicating about it verbally, we all find a shared quality of movement or timing. Things feel like they ‘click’ into place, even just for a moment.
I’m particularly interested in the overlap of these moments. There was a moment when we were mirroring, and I felt like a kid playing with a ouija board – “Are you moving it? I’m not the one moving it! You must be the one moving it, because I’m not!” – as the group was never quite sure who was leading, but we were moving together in sync regardless.
In following and leading, and in the ambiguity between these states, there’s almost too much to take in, sometimes. Do I pull my focus into the movements of their feet, and try to feel how they hold the balance of their body? Do I tap into the languidity of their movements and the associated emotions? And what about the people who are following me? How do they influence me and my path through the space? How does the enthusiasm of a following encourage my own exploration and risk taking? If I pay attention to someone's hands, can I feel how they feel? How can we hold all of it at once? Relaxing attention is equally important as concentrating it.
Wildness Labs have been happening in Portland for about five months now. They are monthly events where we explore wildness, spontaneity, and the full, uninhibited expression of all our parts. The event emerged from a solo practice I was exploring in my room, where I gave myself permission to move, gesture, vocalize, word, and express any energy or emotion that was coming up. I would writhe, bite myself, hump furniture, moan, whine, and yell. Typically, if the exploration lasted longer than 5–10 minutes, different “characters” would emerge—more stable energies with postures, voices, or accents that would last for more than a couple of minutes. Afterwards, I would feel incredibly alive, fluid, and empowered. The thought then occurred to me to create a relational container for others to explore this.
TECHNIQUES We do a warmup from clowning where we walk around a room, and the walk takes on different emotions (sadness, happiness, anxiety, pride, etc.). Then the walk begins to incorporate sounds and gestured expressions. I explain that it’s helpful to lean into resistances. For example, if an inner critic is telling you your expressions are inauthentic, instead of shutting down, you can voice this critic. For this particular Wildness Lab, we used a method of continuous vocalization, where at all moments we were vocalizing (humming, laughing, crying, talking, moaning, etc.). The lab has music for about 75% of the time, which I think really helps to activate expression. The music is mainly from the genre of electronic minimalism.
JOURNAL I have a few lingering curiosities about the Wildness Labs that keep cropping up:
Is the wildness helpful for our psyches? I guess I have a part that wonders if all the catharsis, fluidity, and spontaneity bring about too much fragmentation. Is there some contrasting need for calm, unifying coherence? If I just focus on the phenomenon itself, I don’t feel fragmentation after the labs. I usually end up feeling calm and at ease. But still, this curiosity lingers.
Would it be helpful, useful, or otherwise good to push ourselves beyond certain edges of expression? The human psyche is vast, and some of its edgier domains involve violence and sexuality. When I practice wildness in my room, these edges are easy for me to explore and feel cathartic in their exploration. Are these edges too risky to explore in a group context? Or is the group already teetering up to these risky domains at a pace that feels right?
How do we navigate the balance between self and other? There seems to be a qualitative shift that occurs when I focus purely on myself versus when I open up my field to include and engage with others around me. It’s not as if my expression is lessened—it’s changed. It’s almost like I’m moving into a different medium. Or as if there are different challenges that arise with others that don’t occur when exploring my own spontaneous states of expression. There are moments of not knowing what to do that feel charged in a different way when I’m in the company of others. There are shyness and critics that emerge with a different flavor. It’s as if there are different techniques for maintaining authenticity with others than with myself. And I do feel like I’m learning these techniques, though they’re difficult to explain at this stage of exploration.