Letter to a Teacher

The book arrived!!

I thought I’d just write you a letter for all the public to read.

I haven’t done near enough practice these past few years but I can provide my personal testimony that training in Emotional Effector Patterns provided an access to an emotional range I didn’t think I had. I subsequently realised that restriction of emotional expression is a survival and identity development mechanism for the psychic impositions, even trauma, put on many boys and youth.

The training has wonderfully supported other training I have done in leadership and I am finding, now in my 60s, I am able to bring a better contribution to the world than ever.

I can give more straightforward expression to my upset. I can hold my ground for love and care and fairness all at once, without capitulating to upset. I can make strong requests. I can be generous and then hold a line against exploitation by others. And I can feel at ease with have multiple feelings at once, which I once held as ‘out of control’. The work comes with me into the many arenas of my life and even when I feel I have dropped the ball, it assists me in cleaning up the mess with others and in my return to confidence – a set of real tools that I can call on, that give me reassurance I can get back on the field and make my next engagement count.

Dr Laura, I count you and your trainer team as among my true teachers and I haven’t told you enough how impactful the course I attended with has been in my life. I can vouch that you and the Emotional Body trainers are very safe hands in the theatre (can’t help the pun) of the fully expressed human being.

Back to the readers. Of course, Dr Laura is only one of 15 of the world’s best in dramatherapy workers and researchers who contributed to this book, so it is packed with the extraordinariness of this work.

The Bottom Line

When you look at your brain. Your brain is looking at your brain. And it’s making it up.

Well, it’s not entirely making it up. But let’s look at what’s really going on here.

What’s really going on here is that we can’t get a handle on what’s really going on here.

So far as we think (something that is happening in the brain) our brain receives a great deal of data in the form of various electro-chemical signals from our peripheries – eyes, ears, skin, joints, muscles, nose, mouth, tongue.

Our brain then takes those signals and organises them into a pattern that forms a consistent quality that shows up as perception.

Perception is a way the brain presents qualia (quality) to our consciousness.

We don’t know what consciousness is. Presumably it is some side effect of how the brain works.

80% of our perception is from our memory of something like that we are experiencing. So from a 20% input our brain guesses the rest and overlays our memory of how that guess was previously and provides our reality experience.

So when our brain is looking at our brain (and input nerves) we can presume there is something like nerves and something like a brain.

We can’t presume that we have all the data. Our nerves from our periphery and our brain are only capable of a finite selection of information.

We do know about some of the information we don’t have direct access to because we made tools to pick up that data.

We made tools from a guess about how the universe works from what data we could pick up.

Our guess was good.

Our guess came from our brain.

And our brain is making up the qualia (objects), and only that qualia it CAN make up.

We have no idea how much of reality our brain can get data about, nor guess or imagine about.

The bottom line is

We KNOW 2 tiddly-squats about reality.

We know there’s probably more to the question.

We don’t know whether there’s not much more or a lot more.

Given what we’ve already guessed and guessed good,

I’m guessing there’s a lot more.

Fundamental characteristics of a Society based on Equity

Magnus Hendrickson in Quillette argues for a contributive justice in social equity. I am in considerable agreement so my comments here are more to do with some of the transformations I see are required to mobilise society as a whole towards those ends:

1. Education should be founded on moral education i.e those characteristics that underline one’s opportunity to contribute to the community including a world view that we human beings are in the one boat, so to speak.
2. Education should be designed around the enactment of contribution / service from the earliest ages (3years) and enrolling both parents, teachers and others in the community contribution in action pedagogy required to facilitate the child’s and youth’s growth in contribution through their age related developmental stages.
3. Education teaches fundamental skills necessary to take part as a fully fledged member of society: reading, writing, basic mathematics.
4. Education provides access to advanced skills to realise the full potential contribution of the individual in society.
5. Education format design has 3 equal aspects: i) Basic through advanced learning of epistemologically objective subjects; II) progressive and community integrated service (experiential training) in family and community with specific responsibilities including team work and leadership; iii) development of the integrated individual with the ecology (human and natural) as might be facilitated through natural environmental access, agriculture, the arts, and trade skills including team work and leadership.
6. Economic models should be based in commons models e.g Henry George. In such modelling each human being is seen as having equal ‘ownership’ of the planets resources. Such ownership is as regulated by the elected government to realise that view, not as an economic equalisation of everyone but as a conservation of the commons for the long term future of the human optimal ecology. Within such modelling is required: i) an acknowledgement of the basic resources for every human being to participate fully in society e.g in today’s world not to have ready and reliable access to the internet is a poverty; II) economic behavioural modelling is enrolled to design economic policy including taxation that creates the appropriate incentives and disincentives that on one hand conserve the commons and on the other hand motivate the individual and business toward their optimal contribution, added-value, productivity, and legacy. Profit might be one incentive, status another – esp if being known as who-has-made-a-significant-difference to community. iii) Commons law (government regulation) aims to mange rent payable for access to resources (human and natural) on behalf of all constituents. In this way, who has more access to the commons returns some of the gains of that to the constituency as public services and infrastructures. In an economic sense the process provides incentive for individuals and businesses to realise innovations or higher value adding while amply recognising those people who provide untrained, technical or trade services i.e following a more rote skill training.
7. Government is founded on participatory democratic process at all levels, with education and election processes that amplifys the meritocracy of contribution or service to community, from local to national governance, not necessarily a meritocracy of the most profits or academic results, nor the most argumentative or trained political careerist. Although I would fully expect that people of strong intelligence and moral character some who also show acumen in business or science or arts or agriculture or social leadership.

The Narrative through Narrative.

In reading a beautifully narrated essay on “Narrative” by James Jeffrey, a freelance journalist and writer, I pondered on the remarkability that the ‘answer’ to our propensity to be stuck in a narrative of our own narrow perspective on ourselves, the world, and others, is for us to stay in the conversation of narratives.

We are beginning to get quite sophisticated in the practice of looking at language and it’s anchoring with our identities. We all(?) know that to attack someone’ s world view is more than likely going to ‘harden’ it. Yet leaders who practice deep listening and really ‘get’ the other, have been responsible for the transformation of aggression to peace, misery to hopefulness even joy, becoming powerful in the workplace, or leaving a job to take a risk on a life preferred, and being a contribution to community or the world.

However unless we are prepared to enter our narrative into a bigger conversation then stuck maybe declining, we may perpetually find ourselves. The more we are able to coax our identity to sit with the discomfort of the dissonance that will come up, the more we gain being human. In one sense, this is the epitome of sacrifice, the giving up of the lesser for the greater. And when that conversation is impactful on a large level, then we begin to see it translated in political terms.

If anyone reading all this is inclined to think “Oh, hippie BS”, then can I suggest re-read the sentence about dissonance. And have a very good life.

A BOLD Presentation

March 8 – 12 2017 saw the inaugural BOLD Festival in Canberra, Australia. The BOLD Festival, celebrating the legacy of Dance in Australia, is the brain-child of Liz Lea, dancer, choreographer and event organiser.

As a new comer to the dance theatre scene, a ‘mature mover’ (over 50), and facilitator of dance and performance, I was honoured to present and perform at the BOLD Festival.

The invitation came about through the successful project, “The Forging of Men”, designed and performed with 6 rural men, under the directorship of career theatre-maker, Sue Hayes.

The presentation to The Bold Festival was in the form of a short Pecha Kucha (powerpoint slides presented within 5 minutes). Below is the text to go with the slides. To enjoy the presentation, please open the slides and arrange them beside the text below

Slide 1	Cover slide: This presentation is about my recent journey into dance.
Slide 2	From my years of health work I recognised that a healthy community requires robust empathetic leaders who are the enzymes for bringing that community into integrity and discourse.
Slide 3	ACTUALLY being fully alive, being fully human, is a function of wonder, inquiry, creativity, and performance / action. Novelty, the surprised recognition of a distinction, is the source of wonder and a vital ingredient for brain development and learning.
Slide 4	Performance is that we are in action in the world and there are witnesses. Performance is where we get to become adults, leaders, and dancers. Performance is the wonderful, human thing about life.
Slide 5	The performing arts can be a fantastic access for ethics and leadership training by: ·      supporting the empathetic imagination of the live of others and; ·      the possibilities of self as leader through the conditions for wonder, inquiry, creativity, and performance.
Slide 6	Over the past 7 years I have designed human sized board games, as a fun approach to movement training, and a way of seeing the world through the body.
Slide 7	2011 – My first dance project with Jess Jones on the Atherton Tablelands. The project was an awakening for me to the possibilities for facilitating dance theatre work with untrained people. DANscienCE 2013 was an inspiration – a motivation to develop my own skills as a mature aged dancer, and find that breakthrough into establishing a community dance group.
Slide 8	Mastery – the ability to recognise and perform as by the finest distinctions as a function of performance before increasingly discriminatory witnesses. Taking any age you were and any skill (technical or creative), plotting novel and masterful experience over time might give some indication of your actual neural and physical ageing robustness.
Slide 9	I have been creating small dance programs for the middle to older aged person for a few years. From that came a vision and a model for an inclusive dance training program that I call rEvolve with connotations for dance as transformative in life.
Slide 10	In my rEvolve program I work with several characteristics of training and design to allow the most embodied expression of an idea. The team works by building through exercises by collaborative feedback until eventually, there’s the performance.
Slide 11	I recently began to feel it is time for me to take a stand for a male culture that is authentic and embodied. At stake is the flourishing of our communities and nations.
Slide 12	In 2015, I found three men who were interested in attending work in dance / physical theatre . We called ourselves ‘Men in Motion’ We won a grant to bring theatre-maker Sue Hayes weekly from Cairns to Atherton to building a performance about our male identity After we had commenced the development of the work, a further two men turned up, and so a performance was developed, “The Forging of Men”.
Slide 13	The men were, mostly, inexperienced in theatre, dance or any type of performance which gave us a perfect conditions to trial a ‘proof of method’ of the rEvolve model.
Slide 14	There was a moment in the project when Sue Hayes turned to the men and said, “Okay men, tonight you are going to touch each other.” The contact exercises essential to physical theatre is another potential boon to a transformed male culture.
Slide 15	As the project progressed, one of the men told me, “You’ve been a bit bossy lately. I’m not enjoying myself.” The group conversation that resolved that tension showed up in the performance in what the audience saw about the team work.
Slide 16	I’m now facilitating two groups of about 12 dancers in total: ·      the all-men group for the contribution to male culture that could continue to make; and ·      there’s now an all-in group. FINE