2018: Deep Play in Spacious Passion

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Happy 2018 everyone! These days I do feel very special when I get to wish people Happy New Year; it’s quite a beautiful feeling of connection when I realize we are all stepping into this new year with a lot of unknowns.

This week, I invite your imagination.
Imagine you are in a dance studio with people, some you know, some you don't. You notice a sense of comfort and enjoyment stirring from inside. Your body relaxes, you become in touch with your own, pleasuring breath. It wants you to slowly, but surely, move.

You take a deep breath, slowly close your eyes and let the thickening darkness comfort you from the deafening light. Your body creases onto the wooden floor, your soft skin melts with the space like a wild animal returning home. You start crawling slowly, sensing the surrounding. You encountered another body, and slowly entangled into a dance, not trying to figure out who this is but rather staying with the sensation. For a while, you temporarily suspend the belief that a person has a body, but that the body is the person.

Soon, you find yourself folding and unfolding with multiple bodies in space. Joy springs through the porosity of your skin as you surrender yourself into the fluidity of the moments and movements. Having no sight, your body paradoxically never know more clearly what to do. A hand dances with your left, a rib rolls on your right while a back holds your right foot up, you are simultaneously dismembered and put together. You never expect how such a dance of disorientation, fluidly acting and yielding, losing and gaining control, can be that rapturous.

How does that feel?
That was what I experienced a few weeks ago at a blindfold Contact Improv dance jam.
When I first started learning contact improv, we started with the floor so that we learned how to ground ourselves there. Once we learn to trust ourselves to fall safely on the floor, we move from that comfort base to more wilder, more disorienting endeavors. In the word of a dance teacher:
"The transition where they begin to take their grounding less preciously. Where they become strong enough in their own self to know when to stand firm, when to bend and when to blow away like tumbleweed. They begin to ground not only in themselves, but in fear, in excitement, in imagination, in paradox."

"Grounded in fear" What a beautiful expression. Not fight, not embracing, but "grounding" in fear. Staying present and learning to enjoy the texture of that primal state. Then dive deep in and discover the endless vital stream of life behind it.

In many ways, this dance is a metaphor for how my life will be in 2018. To dance with multiple centers, to pursue various complementary visions and interweave different life strands into a dynamic yet coherent fabric. I don’t want to draw the distinction between life and work, between personal and professional, between romantic desires and love of the greater world. Doing so is killing myself slowly but surely.

To live that way requires a heightened awareness of the senses as well as the mind, the heart and the hand. To cherish uncertainty over script, to continuously
listen, respond and co-create. It's a different kind of focus, one that is more open, diffused, but nevertheless always ready.

Speaking of focus, I hang out with a lot of entrepreneurs, for whom execution is paramount, who are told to focus on The One Thing despite the constant vying for their attention. I too think of myself as somewhat entrepreneurial, but for me, the disciplined practice is not to focus on one thing but to keep quitting well when things don't work in the present moment. When I quit enough, I'll be forced to finish the few that remains. I hope that sparks a different way for you to think about focus.

I'm also questioning the value of loyalty. For me, it is not to a person or an organization but rather to a process of continuously composing a coherent, tasteful life, one that dynamically integrates personal development and contribution to the world.

Given how messy the world is right now, I’m not expecting this process to be always easy, but I do expect it will gradually become more engaging and fun.
I wish you the pleasure of weaving your life strands and beauty of seeing your life as a whole.

From the warm of LA, after a week of being snow-bombed in Boston,
Khuyen

2018: Deep Play in Spacious Passion

Before you started your new year resolution, consider a slightly different approach. Pick a theme. It is simple a practice that has given me a lot of meaning, and I'd love to share and help you pick a theme too.

Deep as in multiple levels. When we say something is deep, we mean it keeps revealing to us unexpected meanings, I have come to enjoy more generous multiplicity than single minded certainty.

Play both in a trivial sense (“playful”) and also dramatic (a “play” as a theater production). As Johan Huizinga notes in Homo Ludens, a classic study of play and culture, play “creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, limited perfection. The least deviation from it spoils the game.”

To quote my new favorite writer Venkatesh Rao, deep play refers to a state of

• deep absorption rather than attention deficit disorder,

• intense relationships rather than private self-indulgence,

• tumultuous emotions rather than overstimulation,

• uncertainty rather than scripts.

[....]
Passion alone is blinding. It must go with spaciousness, the patience that allows oneself to stretch out in time and space. Spaciousness alone can feel too dissipated. It needs the urgency of passion.

I have been noticing many longings in myself, what you may call a romantic orientation. I don’t grow up watching romances; instead I learned to appreciate the mundane work of relationship building. Such foundation has served me well so far, but it also holds me back.

One reason is the fear of not knowing and the inability to “define the relationship”. As I continue to explore this sacred wound of wanting to know, a shift happens from The One Thing to Multiple Possibilities. With that comes the loosening of certain ideal of how a relationship should be and welcoming other possibilities. “What should be?” becomes “What could be?”

The upside of having been a serious person is that I can and do enjoy stress testing relationships. Call me crazy, but one of my relationship fantasies is to struggle with someone whom I care a lot about till the wee morning hours, feeling frustrated and pointless as we muddle through treacherous emotional landscapes.

I love people, but sometimes caring too much makes me too serious. Human relationship is one of the latter frontier that I want to explore more, in the sense of playing with its boundaries. I’m not entirely sure of what I am looking for, but I’ll know it when I see it.

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