Creativity and Yoga Retreat Day (or, What Happens When We Make Space for Ourselves)

Hello friends,

Life is often busy. Our minds are often busy. Our emotions can be like the ever-changing waves of the sea. Somewhere in the midst of the busyness and shifting inner tides, we can seem to lose ourselves and our sense of peace.

But that peace is always there. It is ever-present, a vast space within us, bigger than any busy schedule or emotion ocean horizon. We just need to make time to connect to it.

We can access that sweet stillness and sense of true self or Source or love (for it has many names) in many ways:

We can move the body, breathe the body open as we stretch it through movement. This soothes our nervous system, balances our energy and also quiets the mind. When we create inner space, we can then receive all that we need.

From this space of receptivity we can allow ourselves to unfurl further and explore. Through playful activities, we remind our hearts and minds it is safe to be spontaneous, to let go of control and to deeply connect to ourselves, to others and the world around us. Through play we expand our awareness, become curious and child-like as we re-see life with truly open eyes. We no longer chase a sense of peace; we are opening to it, allowing it to flow up and out from within us, as we laugh and delight in the moment.

From this space of expansion we are ready to listen. When we engage in creative practices, we can better hear the wise, quiet voice deep within. We can then allow out that which has been calling for expression. By simply engaging in nurturing, creative practices, we tell ourselves: 'I hear you. I love you.' We open, we receive, we expand, we listen, we express and we allow. And so we return to the peaceful, playful path that leads us home, home to our true nature, to peace, to love.

On Saturday 27th June, I'll be sharing a specially created Creativity and Yoga Retreat Day at the Lightworkers Cottage, Brisbane. And you, my friend, are invited.

Come journey together with me as we connect to the sweet inner expansion that comes when we make time for ourselves.


(Image: Karolin Schnoor)

Words and Worlds

Blue-faced Honeyeater. Photo credit: Lip Kee via flickr.com

Hello again.

It’s been a while. Why? Well, for the last five-and-a-bit months I’ve been settling into life in Australia. What does that mean, settling in? All sorts really. On a practical level it has meant feathering the nest in which I live. It has meant walking heel to toe, heel to toe, sometimes barefoot, sometimes not, letting my feet meet the ground of my home-for-now. When you’re new to a neighbourhood it is very important to get your bearings. This ensures you don’t get lost. And so, I have taken time to walk the streets and note landmarks as guideposts. Energetically too, there is a grounding, a connection I feel that occurs when we walk on land that doesn’t happen by simply driving around a new stomping ground. Moving at speed doesn’t serve connection in the same way. The same goes for truly connecting with people, another aspect of settling in.  The importance of community is highlighted when you arrive in an unfamiliar city. Connection and community are also essential to creating extraordinary theatre. It’s uphill work if you try to get a show up by yourself. It’s far more fun to create with others and, by engaging others to use their specialist skills as writer, designer, producer etcetera, community and connections are strengthened, everyone's gifts are valued and given space to bloom. I digress. I’ll come back to communion and community, earth and earthly bodies another day. Now to bodies of feathers and fur...

Crimson Rosella. Photo credit: Arthur Chapman via flickr.com

One of the best parts of settling into this leafy suburb of Brisbane has been getting to know the flora and fauna. It is such a joy and thrill to spot yet another strange and wondrous bird whose feathers are splashed with rainbow-shades: vivid greens, red, yellow and blue. I race to borrow my neighbour’s bird book. I find out this happy creature’s name: a Rainbow Lorikeet. Then there’s the bird with the long and daintily curving beak, the one who wears a light blue mask and looks at me coyly through the fronds of the tree leaves. Oh you Blue-faced Honeyeater, you. At night, out come the bats that chuckle like a jack-in-a-box and the brushtail possums that climb high across the telephone wires perhaps sensing my desire to keep them as pets. It’s the same desire I had as a child, nursing eggs from the fridge in the hope that they would hatch. Oh please, be my pet. There is something in the need to know the name of things in the world around us.  Like signposts that give us a sense of direction, a sense of safety and place and home. I wonder if the English colonisers of 1788 were desperate to name and to own and to find a sense of place and home – did they make up the names of the birds as they wished? I’ve heard that the early European settlers encountered huge flocks of Rosellas in Rose Hill, NSW (now Parramatta according to the font of all knowledge that is Wikipedia). The birds became known as ‘Rosehillers’ which was contracted further to Rosellas. They’re quite something to behold with their bold blue and rich red feathers although there are many varieties within the species, each group with their own vibrant plumage. 

When I look at these creatures, I wonder what their Aboriginal name or names are. I say names because there are many Aboriginal languages. According the Creative Spirits, an indigenous knowledge website, there were 250 Aboriginal languages and 600 dialects spoken prior to the invasion of the colonisers. The website states that there are now just 60 Aboriginal languages spoken as mother tongue today. What would be different now if the English settlers had asked the Aborigine people for the names of all they saw? What if the English paused to connect with the land? What if they had chosen to respect and connect with the people who had inhabited it for tens of thousands of years before the English arrived, rather than attempting to subjugate them to British rule? I wonder…

Rainbow Lorikeet. Photo credit: runmonty via flickr.com

The words we use have such power. We can name a bird. Name land or re-name land, use words to claim and label. On a daily basis we humans do this to others, to what we see and also to ourselves. What labels do we carry on our backs that we have burdened ourselves with or let others plaster upon us? And how can we let go of them? I remember British yoga teacher Rowan Cobelli gently offering a path to such freedom during a candle-lit yoga class. As we rested in Child’s Pose Rowan suggested we experiment with letting go the labels upon us. A practice so simple and yet so profound.

 

Photo Balasana, Child's Pose. Note the variation with arms extended and not by sides. 
Photo credit: minishorts via flickr.com

Here’s an echo, a variation of that practice. Five minutes to forget who ‘you’ are and remember the ever-present peace within:

Child’s Pose, Balasana

Kneel on the floor on a mat or towel. Sit back on the heels, knees hip width apart. Allow the spine spine to lengthen and the torso to slowly fold forward, resting the torso between the thighs, relaxing the forehead towards the floor. Bring the arms by the sides of the body, palms upwards. Inhale deeply, breathing into the torso; expand the breath into the back of the torso [1]. With every breath, have the sense of opening yourself into this restorative pose. Inhale. Exhaling, release the tops of the shoulders towards the floor.  With each exhale, invite the sense of shedding the labels that you might carry with you: man, woman, mother, sister, brother, job title, friend, family member, lover, partner. Observe the body, the mind, the emotions; let thoughts and feelings float gently to floor like leaves from a tree. Rest in the space that is revealed, when the words we surround ourselves with are placed to one side. How does it feel to be in that space?

Words, energy, movement, thought and feeling. A powerful inter-connection. Alchemical process. And we are the creators of our worlds. What words will you use today?

Photo credit: minishorts via flickr.com

[1] Much thanks to YogaJournal.com for their insightful doorways to deepening such a seemingly simple practice. In their ‘Beginner’s Tips’ section they offer this:

"We usually don't breathe consciously and fully into the back of the torso. Balasana provides us with an excellent opportunity to do just that. Imagine that each inhalation is 'doming' the back torso toward the ceiling, lengthening and widening the spine. Then with each exhalation release the torso a little more deeply into the fold." 

I highly recommend reading their thorough exploration of Child’s Pose here.

September: spectacle and strange happenings, both on and off stage.

Where is offstage when, according to Shakespeare ‘[a]ll the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players’? This question jumped out at me, bouncing on its dot, following the opening night performance of The World Outside, a story of family and folklore – both that of the New Forest and that of the tales we tell ourselves as we grapple with our sense of identity and roots, our position in a place and the notion of home. All those ideas and queries we ask ourselves at some point in our lives, whether sat in the audience or washing the dishes at the kitchen sink.

 My friend and I sat in the audience in a small village hall, deep in the New Forest. The World Outside – commissioned by Forest Forge, directed by Kirstie Davis and written by David Lane – is set in the New Forest is rich with its stories and history. Forest Forge tours throughout Hampshire and Dorset, bringing theatre to towns and conventional theatre spaces as well as taking it to village halls and rural communities. The play explores what it means to live in the forest, to have roots, to run from your roots, to feel lost and to search for connection with – and freedom from – place and people. The superb cast (Isobel Arnett, Michael Cole, Verity Hewlett and Andrew Wheaton) were a joy to observe and work with in rehearsal, as was Kirstie Davis for whom I was assistant director. The highly skilled cast created characters full of life and truth. The actors searched out their truths in each moment, following the scent within each sentence, silence, action and stillness. They had researched, unearthed these truths over the preceding three and a half-weeks of rehearsal. During rehearsals it seemed to me that the actors were exceptional archeologists, finding motivation behind each motion, sifting through dialogue to detect every shift and subtlety, every clue to the character and their past, in order to accurately convey them in the present. At the end of the performance my friend turned to me. Impressed, he said quietly 'It's like life isn't it? We're humans watching humans playing humans: “Now, you be a woman and I'll pretend to be your brother and…”’ And so it is we humans examine what it is to be, to exist alone and alongside others, through theatre. Theatre helps us understand the world within and without.



Notions of identity are also unravelled and reshaped in Born, the companion piece to The World Outside. Born is delivered by Forest Forge's excellent youth theatre, directed in a distinctly physical way and innovative style by David Haworth and Lucy Phillips, performed by a dynamic young cast. I recommend seeing both performances if possible as David Lane has expertly crafted the pieces so that each holds secrets that belong to the other play. The shows are on tour until the 29th of October 2011 for full details and more information about the show and Forest Forge’s work, please click on this link:


http://www.forestforge.co.uk/shows/11/performances


The Grand Grotesque Parade also explored the issues of identity of place and people, in an experimental processional performance involving local artists and public participants. On the 24th September 2011 as part of Bournemouth Arts by the Sea Festival, hundreds of costumed characters (and the odd dressed-up dog) floated through the eras whilst moving from the pier through the gardens to the heart of the town and back to the sea. We 3, (performers Antonia Beck, Felicity Crabb and myself), were associate directors for this project, one created specifically with Bournemouth past and present in mind. Prior to this year’s event, the parade last happened in the town in 1910. Artistic directors The Girls (Zoe Sinclair and Andrea Blood) set out to re-invent this tradition by blending symbols, characters and cultural issues of the present-day seaside town with those of its past. We 3 were lucky enough to explore these ideas with an energetic, creatively generous team of local actors and dancers, devising the final performance piece working with over eleven extraordinary women in response to The Girls’ ideas, imagery and focus. Collaboration was the key to the success of the parade, with The Girls bringing in artists from all disciplines including Ali Sharpe who led the haunting, feral choir and filmmaker John Holman who captured our all-female troupe of artists on camera in a surreal short film, also directed by The Girls, that flickered on loop throughout the parade. In his essay Carnivalesque and the British Seaside, writer Bevis Fenner speaks of the Grand Grotesque Parade and The Girls work, highlighting the links between cultural events that offer release and a chance to invert social norms and the way in which ‘[…] the environment of the seaside resort facilitates a kind of alter reality’ where we adopt different behaviours and, arguably, other identities for a single night or an entire holiday. And, on the 24th September, that is exactly what we performers did.



As the sun slid from the sky and into the sea, a strange hybrid creature was birthed and she slithered through the streets: suffragettes in pink regency dresses and painted faces seemingly ‘swept their way to the future’ according to one on-looker, whilst a ghostly choir, sepia-stained, sang a strained and melancholic ode to the seaside. A luscious mermaid was served up on a deckchair, mistaken for an ice-cream by unthinking consumers, she was devoured before the crowds. Suffragettes transformed into zombie-hens on a riotous night out. Underground steampunks came out to play – as did other groups of public participants – their presence reaffirming the town’s creative identity and the importance of community involvement in such processional performances. Equally important is the desire to engage the public, to connect with them. Theatre is not theatre without an audience. The audience, as it is with the actors, also has its part to play. Perhaps during a processional performance, the lines between public and artist/participant become exceptionally blurred, particularly when the parade’s creative source and soul is the very town in which it is being performed. Where then, is offstage and onstage?



We all take on roles within our families and relationships, we perform niceties every day, we sometimes talk through a mask of grinning, gritted teeth, we put on a telephone voice, we act the fool, we entertain a fantasy in the private auditorium of our mind. We are all actors and audience at once. Acting and observing. From a yogic perspective, the whole of life is a huge play – Lila – the Divine Play. And through observing this, we need not get fully caught up in any drama. Yogic philosophy suggests we are all here for a reason, all performing our roles as best we can. Someone’s role is to be an astronaut, another’s role is to be a film star, another’s: a fish. Someone’s role is to act the ‘bad’ person in order that somebody else can fulfill their role as the ‘good’ person. Everyone plays their part. Arguably, these are all roles which we will drop come curtain call. In fact, it is often the passing of someone – a fellow player – that reminds us the oft-quoted truth that ‘life is not a dress rehearsal’. Perhaps like actors, those archeological experts who uncover the motivation and meaning behind a character’s thoughts and actions, we too can dig deeper in our art and in our daily lives. How would it be if, as humans and creatives, we were to act from this position of awareness? Whether onstage or offstage, there is fun and freedom to be found in realising we’re all simply playing a part, in order that we can focus on what is really important: connecting with the heart of others as well as unearthing, and then acting from, our core values and truths as we explore our role within this drama, seeing how the story unfolds.





For more information on Bournemouth Arts by the Sea Festival and a whole range of artistic treats happening right up until Saturday 15th October:
http://www.artsbournemouth.org.uk//



For images of the Grand Grotesque Parade 2011, the following Flickr accounts of Fraser Donachie and WheelzWheeler capture some striking shots:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/-phraser-/6180190549/in/photostream/


http://www.flickr.com/photos/wheelzwheeler/6185891539/in/photostream/



Eerie live footage from Many Chef’s Broth:
http://manychefsbroth.co.uk/bournemouth-arts-by-the-sea-festival-grand-grotesque-parade


Soundscape from the parade, composed by DJ Bacon: http://www.archive.org/details/GrandGrotesqueParadeBournemouthSept2011



Joseph Kent’s article about the parade via Bhbeat.com:
http://bhbeat.com/17808/bournemouth-goes-grotesque-in-first-grand-parade-for-100-years


For Bevis Fenner’s essay Carnivalesque and the British Seaside:

http://www.thegirls.co.uk/photo_8435987.html



For further details about The Girls, artistic directors of the Grand Grotesque Parade, see:
http://www.thegirls.co.uk/


And, last but certainly not least, for a full list of the amazing array of generous and talented people who also made the event possible:
http://www.thegirls.co.uk/photo_8165759.html

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