Neighbor Post

The Life-Dance Check-in

By Piankhy Thompson

"Practicing Utopia

Healthy Culture, Consensus, Inner Consensus, and the Life- Dance Rituals

-Piankhy

This workshop will be an experiential introduction to the theory and practice of Healthy Culture as the Cosmology, Identity politics, ritual, and Infrastructure of Togetherness. Following an Individual- Personal introduction and some theory, the centerpiece of the workshop will be an experiential sampling of aspects of such rituals as the Life-Dance Party, the Individual-Personal Check-in, and various other projects and practices of Healthy Culture.  The idea is to show both the necessity and the possibility of intentional communities' demonstrating a realistic but truly alternative and sustainable way of Living Together--of living in togetherness inwardly and outwardly. Finally, there will be a time set aside for questions and feed- back, which will also be welcomed throughout the workshop.

The preceding is a description of a workshop I'll probably be giving in the Open Space part of the Communities Conference being held at Twin Oaks community this year. Although I think I implied it, what I didn't really get across with the description--but which certainly intend to get across in the workshop itself--is the way in which both the unusual rituals I will describe, and the "normal" repeated actions and activities we do everyday, constitute a ritual practice. I want show that "ritual" can usefully be defined to mean any repeated action that stems from and reinforces a given cosmological assumption.  What I want to show most of all is that, when we are not practicing Healthy Culture in a conscious way, we are, in fact, practicing the default sick culture, the culture of Apart- ness, of Denial, in an unconscious way (that is really the only way it can be practiced).  In a sense, with every such action stemming from the cosmology of the default culture we practice dissociation, Apart-ness, and inner and outer Alienation.  We are both enabling overt violence, war, political and economic and ecological catastrophe in the lives of others and ourselves actually rehearsing for the ultimate overt manifestation of these things in our own lives. Conversely, as we practice rituals of real inner/outer togetherness, we are both enabling this for others and rehearsing for its increasing realization in our own lives.

However, the workshop itself, even though its happening in my neighborhood of Twin Oaks, is more of a Collective event then a Neighborly one, since there will be so many relative strangers involved.  But what is mostly local--or at least what has been--are a lot of the practices I will be sharing with whoever comes to my workshop.  I have already given a partial description of a Life-Dance Party (even If a somewhat atypical one) as one of these kinds of rituals.  As part of this neighborly post, I want to describe another--which I am calling the Life-Dance Check in, as it has happened here at Twin Oaks and as I hope it will happen in the Future.  I hope that by that description I can show some of what I have just claimed in the preceding paragraph.

The Life-Dance Check-in

One a week, whether alone or with others, I do a kind of Check-in that is in its basic structure, not very different from that of this Blog. Just as I am here checking in with you the reader as an Individual-Person in the 5 venues (collective, local, familial, psycho/religious, and Individual), so that is what I and whoever else is there do face to face in the Life- Dance check-in. The differences all come from the non-virtual nature of actually getting together with another live individual-person to do this.  When there are only two people--even more so when there is only me--what happens is this:

First, as in the life-dance party, there is a ritual welcoming of our selves and each other. This time though, the accent is a bit more on the horizontal (Personal aspect of our identity as Individual-Persons than on the vertical ("Individual) aspect of that identity. With the same four gestures that welcome the mind/heart/body/intuition at the Life-Dance Party, we now, as we face a different direction as we make each gesture, welcome ourselves and each other as family-members, neighbors, citizens, and souls. The fifth gesture however is made in the same in spirit as it is in the life-dance ritual; with it we, welcome the verticality of our individual selves into the field of relationships and responsibility that is our personal nexus.

Having thus welcomed ourselves and each other in that spirit, we proceed with the five-fold Check-in. Now in the early stages of this practice one of us would just have started with a venue, such as the Local Neighborhood for example and began checking-in as to the level of Healthy culture (the quality of inner and outer togetherness or consensus) that pertain in our lives as neighbors and then proceed to the other four venues. What kept happening of course is that we would always end up going off on a tangent in that one area and so not have time to check in about anything else. This felt like a problem since a big part of the point of the ritual is just to see how the five venues are inherently related and implicated in each other. What evolved as a response was a kind of matrix mandala (a figure with a space in the center of four surrounding spaces) that we started making with sticks on floor (it could just as easily be drawn on paper or more aesthetically, it might take the form of a multicolored woven or knitted cloth). Each of the spaces represents one of the five venues and before checking in on any venue we would put one of five objects into the appropriate space.  Then we would check the time and, giving ourselves ten minutes for each venue, we were able finish both our check-ins in under two hours. Of course the mandala device serves primarily as a kind of talking stick, but I find it also brings something aesthetic, something for the heart to enjoy--as well as a little bit more for the body and intuition to do--during a time which would otherwise be more or less dominated by the mind and by talking.  Having introduced this "tool" (for some reason I hesitate to call it that), we would proceed to take turns checking-in, each starting with the venue of his or her choice.

Now just as is the case in the postings in this Blog (though the reader might not have noticed) there is an understanding in the check-in, of the dynamics of Living Friendship between Individual-Persons in terms of Listening, Supporting, and Challenging. (This this way of thinking about friendship comes from a modern version of the Native American tradition--it think its called the "Sweet Medicine Society"--which I learned about during a workshop and decided to try out in this context. By now though, I'm not sure we mean exactly the same by these terms.). What this means is that the intention in sharing the level of health and Life in each of these five venues is to listen, and/or support and or/challenge ourselves and each other in bringing more Life and Health to each of them in way which mutually and not one-sidedly beneficial. So what happens is that I check-in on, for example the state of things in my familial household with an implicit and explicit reference to whether or not I feel I just need the other person to Listen to the state of affairs, whether I need Support in changing that state for the better, and whether I need a little Challenge, a little nudge, in making that change.

One of us having checked in about a given venue, the other person can give feedback if there is time. It is not however the point that the other person should then immediately respond by offering the help the one thinks he or she needs even if they agree with their assessment (which is by no means always the case). The gesture of friendship that is the Life-Dance Check-in is not about any kind of unilateral gesture or "charity". What both participants are looking for in there alternating dances of listening and talking--and what they have faith in the existence of--is the opportunity for a win-win gesture of mutual healing between them. What we each do then, besides waiting until the whole checking in complete before even thinking much about it, is make sure that what ever either of us suggests as a gesture of living Friendship is as conducive to our own healing as Individual-Persons as  as to the that of the other. Nothing is done until we both (all) have inner and outer consensus that this is so and even then it is with the understanding that the gesture agreed to is to be discontinued and renegotiated as soon as this is no longer the case. At any rate, the process of getting both the idea for the gesture and--even more so-- the inner and outer consensus required, goes on more between the formal check-ins than during them. Often we take notes of each others check-ins as a focus for our creativity on the reality of the other as well as ourselves between check-ins.

After we are both done checking-in in each of the five venues, the ritual is closed with a 5-fold thanking gesture similar to the one that began it.

Of course the main benefit of this ritual is that it constitutes practice in the identity politics of Individual-Personhood. I suppose it could be seen as a "counter-practice" or a "counter-ritual" to the habitually factional rituals of Identity that constitute our default ways of thinking of ourselves and each other in terms of Gender, Race, Profession, Religion, Class, etc.  Repetition of the ritual, especially interspersed with that of the Life-Dance Party, leads to the gestalt experience of ourselves and of other people as first and far most Individual family members, neighbors, citizens-of-the-world, and souls. I have had this experience which is much more than merely a change of thinking. Even as I make this claim though, I feel the need to "disclaim" in some way that warns of a purely "end-oriented" or otherwise dissociated approach to this or any other Life-Dance ritual. What I am attempting to describe in this blog are really not  fundamentally separate rituals or experiments but rather living, changing aspects of integral gesture which is a kind of Cultural Singularity. It is as though what you are reading is the words and written music to a song that I am singing while am dancing, it is not even the song itself, let alone the music or the dance it self--just an imperfect prose description of them meant to wet your curiosity.

I considered actually recounting the details--the content--of a real Life-Dance Check-in in this post, since I have audio and video tapes of them, I decided that to do so would be sharing another’s life-dance as well as my own, and as yet I don't have the other person’s consensus about it. Also, such reproductions seem better in there original forms.

Before closing though, I feel the need to bring all this back to the present state of things with me as a neighbor at Twin Oaks. The Fact is, that although I still do the check-in myself every week (and it just a healing done alone as with another--though in a somewhat different way), I am no longer doing it in a fully ritual manner, nor with anyone else in my neighborhood. The person I was last doing with realized that she was having resistance to really taking on the ritual or the experiment in Healthy Culture of which it is a part. (I will not say more of that for fear of mis-describing her reality). I think that that realization and the (temporary?) withdrawal that followed it was actually a good thing, but the fact (and the point) is, though many here know that I do this ritual, I have never formally advertised it. I have typed up a poster to post on the Opinions and Ideas board but have never posted it. I am not sure if my lack of inner consensus to do so is really just the tyranny of my fear of vulnerability or a justifiable response to some intuition about timing. Perhaps just writing this post will provoke some clarity and action about it.

As it stand now, my neighborly cultural activism amounts to doing Life-Dance Parties in the Twin Oaks court yard and having occasional dialogs with Oakers in the car pool to the city three times a week.  I have plenty of Ideas about things to do and I'll probably write about them here as a way of challenging myself to do them or just to describe them after the fact. Still, I'm only a little uneasy about the present state of affairs in the context of everything that is happening with me in the other venues of my Life. I really don't feel in any danger of being "dead" to my community; to my neighborhood.