Essential Inquiry

Which of the many creatures

(Who live in the wild fields

and forests inside of me)

will dominate today?

Who or how will I be?

What will I embody?

And who will decide?

 

 

Pre-suppositions of the Heart-drama:

• In the Heart-drama, there’s a healing force, a restorative energy, that operates on “the stage.” It arises as playfulness, love, work, and power. When we can bring such energies into reflection on our rich, complex, and meaningful experiences, getting for some moments beneath the simple maps (scripts) that tend to dominate, maps favoring only a part(s) of life, we may be moved to find more Beauty in the world and seek a Truth that has been elusive, often hidden beneath society/familial, left-hemisphere “pertinent” points.

• We seek what we are warmed up to; and explore what Inspiration leads us to in the moment. This is not always pleasant, but a creative state and set allows us to raise and even to face what is gravely serious, what usually prompts avoidance, or to recognize the listless. insulting, distracting, raging or mouse-like or venomous ways we have avoided life.

• Change won’t come from a “prescription” or from information explained from a reasonable notion of what we know or from maps that have lost the territory. Instead, we rely on our spontaneous intuitions.

• When we hold each unfolding drama in our Heart and are courageous enough to explore the realities that come out from the curtains, we can find a more creative understanding of the Barriers that have impeded us. It is not uncommon to find suffering that we have repressed. Or joy—a playful we fear will be laughed at by the serious. This can be difficult, this exploration, but it also allows us to face what is real, to recognize the imbalance and step out of our fears and to invent a creative response.

• By reflecting on the drama that reveals narration, we give rise to a creative pathway to restoration, to repair, and healing, which then suggests Ritual practices. We can use insights after our Work to continue to heal and grow.

 

When the Map is Not a Map

 Psychodrama enables the protagonist to build a bridge beyond the roles he plays in his daily existence, to surpass and transcend the reality of life as he lives it, to get into a deeper relationship with existence, to come as close as possible to the highest form of encounter of which he is capable.  

Jacob Moreno & ZT Moreno

            The Heart-drama process of EXPAND is modeled after Active Imagination, as depicted by Carl Jung. Here, I, too, suggest a method of engaging the unconscious mind through imaginative techniques to better access and explore one’s inner world and to become more aware of how our social world reflects unconscious—sometimes life diminishing—beliefs and impulses. Our goal is to gain insight to prompt our personal growth. EXPAND involves intentionally delving into what is hidden, and in the process expressing a full range of thoughts and feelings. This requires us to adopt a creative and non-judgmental mode of attention.  Like Jung, I believe that we benefit from reflections that include fantasizing, exploring dreams, visualizing, active role-playing, and spontaneous expressive activities. By this we gain a deeper understanding of ourselves, our psyche, and how the unconscious distorts our social world and makes us insane.

For expansion to take hold, it is important to enter Inspired energies, which I have delineated as Loving-Playfulness, Loving-work, Powerful-work, and Powerful-play. The purpose of Warm-up (which I will discuss shortly) is to invite and embody these energies.

Expressive activity is part of the EXPAND self-directed method. Write down feelings or journal or use other creative methods, such as drawing. This will help to clarify the imagery and emotions and thoughts or sensations that come up for you.

The vehicle you choose for this inquiry will depend on what feels right with you. A common creative-expressive method involves creating a collage from words and images gathered from photographs or journals, from magazines. If you are pulling from magazines, then allow yourself the freedom to make a pile of images and phrases that have an intuitive feel, before selecting what you reflect on.

Though of course you can use a pure stage of imagination or begin by recalling a recent dream or a specific moment that seems to have meaning, personally, I find it is helpful to have some way to prompt the inquiry and to capture reflections. You might write in a journal, like the Morning Pages described in The Artist’s Way, or begin more simply with doodling after you have set your intention. Or use prompts. In psychodrama I use a variety of colored scarves to represent whatever starts to be defined: feelings, or even characters, inner voices etc. Feel free to use the painted images I have included here however you wish. And, as an aside, though I am setting out my understanding of the psyche and the dangers we face in the contemporary world and a way to heal and grow, please allow your own path to arise, your own process, your own understanding.

If you are laying out images into spreads, as in Tarot reading, begin to imagine and explore them in relation to your own inner and outer worlds. This can involve elaborating scenes that come to mind, encountering inner characters or people, or events, memories. Pay attention to what you resonate with and what seems intuitively meaningful.

            The rest of this book I will speak of a Heart-drama process—a map that isn’t a map. It is predicated on my assumption you are using some Inspired strategy to concretize or externalize what you are finding, some active vehicle to dig deeply yet create clarity.  If you feel “creating” is beyond you, then you can purchase a card set (there are many available) that might prompt you to reflect. But I would still encourage you to record your own reflections in some way.

As I must I am imagining a specific audience, someone who is on a self-directed creative search who might wish to experiment in a Heart-drama way, but of course I welcome you in whatever way you read this or find some worth in it and maybe some hope.

The Nature of Inspiration

The Cistern contains; the fountain overflows. William Blake, “The Marriage”

            Let me claim clearly, Inspiration needs to be nurtured and trusted. Because it can feel like a gentle push rather than the frantic sucking into a black hole, the Inspired can be missed, overlooked, dissociated from and will dissipate if we fail to hold it as it comes, often lightly.

            Often with cognitive dissonance, Inspiration nudges us in directions that our intellect will not understand. And so, it must be, the trajectory of a Heart-drama is not known (planned and strategized) ahead of time. It arises in the experience. For instance, just to provide an example, we are urged to revisit the moment when our wife of 20 years met our repeated cries for understanding and compassion with an unsmiling smile. We can be called to encounter a younger version of ourselves (whether 2 months younger or two years), see him in a chair in the familiar room of this turning point confronted by the realization that this is unsustainable. As we journal feelings, there is a full range from disgusting, self-loathing, to pity, compassion, confusion, while we can also be aware now of a wisdom we did not have then.

            Inspiration may softly remind us to take a breath, to walk in nature, sit with it, or feel our insights. We may be prompted to reread journals we have written in the past, or access new thoughts by watching videos that can help us or by listening to podcasts. To step out of the daily mess of incoming opinions and conflicting data, there is a spiritual retreat—now we see it—that might fit us now or a program, or a group, a simple practice to aid our inquiry.

Our next dive in the drama may perturb us toward a different encounter, perhaps inspiring us to bring an image of our ex-wife into a place we feel safe and grounded, a park we walk in for instance, imagining her at a distance, then let her walk closer, noticing the neuro-gravitational energies that stir and pull us toward the rocks as if to drown us. Of the thousand possibilities in our imagining, we feel encouragement to stay with our triggered physiology, rather than give in to our tendency to avoid. We imagine the feeling as a boulder in our gut that we have been carrying, aware now that something like his has existed in us, and we carried it with us out into our world for as far back as we can remember.

            What to do with it? Well, there is no cookbook, and our intellect will mislead us, direct us to some-worn path or will be contemptuous of the journey or will duck and cover, calling this Work irrational. We have more important things to do, and humility, spontaneity, vulnerability, creativity and unselfishness or self-care are childish.

Inspiration:

• Often calls to us quietly and paradoxically comes only when called.

• The trajectory of a Heart-drama arises in the moment to lead us where we need to go.

• For the novice, Inspiration flickers in the face of Titans in our nervous system.

• There is always resistance that pulls us toward the familiar and provides faux excuses.

A map is not a perfect analogy for EXPAND, since it suggests we’re going to be traveling to a known destination, something that Triple A can assist us with, like boarding a plane with a ticket to Salt Lake City. We hope the pilot has a clearly charted, detailed fight plan. Behavioral therapy purports to be more like that, taking us from point A to B reliably, predictably, measurably.

            Maybe traveling by car is a better comparison? The driver can at least allow time for sightseeing, taking scenic byways, as they appeal to the passengers in the moment, which better depicts a creative process. But EXPAND is not like taking a Sunday drive, no matter how much we wander.

I’ve considered other analogies. For instance, a compass is an image that captures the way Inspiration can act like a pointer pushing us magnetically in a certain direction. EXPAND can feel like that in the flow, but it’s nothing like using a direction-finder that always points true. People who sell you art and therapy workbooks can sound like they are pointing to wherever they are…urging a combination of product, method and techniques which might also require becoming a paid subscriber to their podcasts. Others are rather vague, as if they are discussing magnetized ore that offers direction and, as a bonus, mysteriously communicates with the muse or spirits. That muddies the compass metaphor for me.

            EXPAND reminds me most of an experience from childhood. A few times in the summer as a preteen I would have the full day to do what I wanted, and what I wanted most of all was to cross all those identical suburban neighborhoods on a long hike to a wilder landscape, where there still existed acres upon acres of forest.

Each time I followed a particular stream, which was merely a dusty bed during a heat wave or a determined trickle of water after rainy days. That’s what the EXPAND journey might be analogous to—a child’s playful challenge to follow a stream and streams and other streams. It was easy to feel lost, and at moments I had to beat through brush and bramble into new openings, striding across sunny spaces, then getting back into the thick of it. We follow the winding course as we can, feeling gravity dropping us deeper into the landscape.

Maybe this is more like a hero’s journey?

In the roots

“Deep in their roots, all flowers keep their light.” Theodore Roethke

At its best, the process of Heart-drama is a way to descend to the deepest places, “to get into a deeper relationship with existence,” as Moreno puts it. In our imagination, we explore the energies that have a neuro-psychological pull. If you are using some system of images, don’t get lost. Some “experts” will claim that certain images (or arrangements of images) are like (or are) messages from the gods, and the expert has of course deciphered their meaning. Or some “advisors” might explain the astrological alignment forged between your personality and your lifepath at birth, and they have the algorithm to prove it. Etcetera. Resist anyone else’s interpretation.

If you reflect on imagery, maybe juxtaposed with phrases or words that are intuitively associated, or on a narrative (which are images in a certain arrangement), then depths will begin to resonate. We are meaning making mammals, with capacities to see patterns beneath appearances; and when we are in the energies of Inspiration, encountering images and stories and memories. experiences that have energy, and feel important, we find a way to the depths.

The images that I include here are part of my vision, not yours. And not everything will resonate. I passionately encourage you to take on a similar lifelong project; to create your own system of important images and reflection, so, as William Blake warned us, we do not get mesmerized and trapped by another vision, not our own.

We are creatures that orient toward the symbolic, if we can get beyond our resistance, and I am convinced that some deeply personal imagery—visualizations, visual memories—can elicit the “surplus,” beyond the mundane, beyond allegory or even metaphor. I believe you will begin to project into the visual some new interpretations, revealing something important. I am suggesting you use a “practice” frequently. Taking a Jungian perspective, I would imagine that each visual, whether a memory or on a card, collage, in a painting is a synchronistic unveiling of some part of yourself or some energy that you are encountering worthy of reflection. I believe overtime, or maybe in one special session (just as one specific dream can be hugely significant), you will tap the foundational myths that are alive in your psyche.

Proto-myths

These “myths” I refer to have deep roots. Those who study neurobiology tell us that the implicit right brain experience of our self in the world is the first story that’s told in our bodies and nervous systems, formed in an ancient part of the brain—Antonio Damasio refers to this as a proto-self— an embodied entangling of the physical and emotional. It is downloaded from the emotional climate we lived in as an infant before our left hemisphere came online to capture memories. This bedrock experience of our being in the world talks to us through images and symbols (the natural language of the right brain). As I understand it, the proto-self has the answer to two questions:

• Is the world a safe place? If it is, then it’s beautiful. If not, then it’s ugly and terrifying.

• Am I lovable/capable enough? If so, then I can risk my truth. If not, then I’m weak and unlovable.

The answers determine if we live in the garden or in a Fallen world. Our original “proto” conclusion impacts us fundamentally. And I believe Heart-drama leads us uniquely close to our source story, with the potential to effect some serious change. If we have been living out a tragic narrative, largely unreachable or unimpeachable with our conscious strategies (our medications, our fixations, and intellectual applications), EXPANDing gives us a means, if not a clear path to be mapped, to recognize what is occurring and to alter, at least to perturb, our core perception.

Obviously, to change, to heal and grow, we first must know what is happening in us and around us; only then can we reflect on how to shape our lives. In this work, the Heart is the real expert with knowledge of where it needs to go, while the drama (by which I mean a session with the cards) invites us to transform, to see more Beauty around us and to access more of what is True. In this Work, we become like dreamers entering old dreams with new powers.