Now we have a date for our next weekend of exploration: April 4 and 5 in Sheffield. Leave a post, with your e-mail address if you are interested in coming along.

Introduction to our methods

Today I am posting the first of the introductions to some of the core methods of our emerging practice. Feel free to extend upon these, or comment, or ask questions. It can all be done on this site.

The Clown, and its relation to our present work.

The Clown is an essential aspect of the core personality of every one of us. He and she is our unspoilt and unsophisticated selves, equipped with the complete range of human emotional response and yet oddly incapable of grasping the everyday rituals and the subtle dishonesties that accompany these, which our adult social life requires of us.

In some ways the Clown reminds us of our own child selves - but there is a stoicism and an unhinged quality of independence about the Clown persona which is different from the child quality. The child, we should remember, is always ready to adapt to prevailing adult demands, whereas the clown merely pretends, or else tries and inevitably fails, to make these adaptations.

The Clown aspect, is most essentially living in the moment - which means also living with the immediate emotional tides of the moment. The logic of the clown's life is always about to fly off at a tangent - abandoning those acculturated commitments to everyday normality - and regularly offending against the received definitions of what we suppose to be the real business of life. The clown is incapable of conducting this "real business" because he or she is always subverted by the inordinate flux of his or her emotions, and constantly the victim of the de-railing influence of happenstance and accident.

We as observers cannot predict how the clown will respond: as a seagull flaps past the window one clown may respond with beatific delight, as if this were the most glorious moment in her entire life; another clown, perhaps, might become horribly and strangely depressed. We are unable make sense of the clown's emotional response; the clown herself is not concerned about whether it makes sense or not.

It is not just inexplicable surges of emotions, or random everyday events, that hijack the clown's attention and focus. Even in moments of calm, the clown will be seized by unprovoked flights of imagination. So it is that - in a variety of ways - the clown's world resembles our dream life far more closely than the life we enact during waking hours.

The Clown persona is worth cultivating simply for its entertainment or therapeutic value. It offers us a sorely needed respite from those exhausting definitions of ourselves which we conscientiously maintain: for the supposed benefit of our work colleagues, for our clients or other social contacts, for our loved ones, and for our own oppressively conformist super-ego. The Clown is available for a more radical employment however, and this is what I want to borrow him/her for. He/she is going to help us enhance the negative capability which is the core of our method: the "configuration of grace in the now".

The clown's way of cultivating negative capability begins with suspending our practical commitments; we have to release ourselves (temporarily at least) from the domain of practical consequence so as to claim for ourselves that same freedom of expression, that fluidity of experience and action that is the stuff of our dream life. This is to find a way of being in the moment freed from all practical and moral responsibilities - for as long as we remain within this protected, imaginary improvisational space. Here we may inhabit our artistic persona, our clown persona, without reservation, and with no need for censorship.

In our research setting we shall practise this same negative capability in a variety of different ways (which I plan to introduce in other sections of this blog). Our practice will include the warm-ups, inductions, and improvisational set-ups which some of us have learned from the "Nose to Nose" school of clowning under Vivian Gladwell. This is a set of skills we can practice and support in our own small group settings. In this, we shall learn to take equal responsibility for our own improvisational presence of mind and performance, at the same time as we are committed to facilitating and helping to nurture a similar quality of presence in our companions.

More information about Nose to Nose Clowning

Process Work as an ingredient of our method

"Process Work" is a method of working psychologically, with individuals and small and large-scale groups, developed by Arnold Mindell out of a background in Jungian psychology and quantum physics. It is an effective integration of these influences, as well as drawing upon shamanic and Taoist traditions. Out of this broad practice, I wanted to take a selection of elements friendly to our own emerging method.

The process work ethos would encourage us to nurture a sensitive attunement to the subtleties of the present moment and to our co-presence within the now. We will be helped in this, by drawing upon other, related disciplines: the Feldenkrais Method, Eugene Gendlin's method of "Focusing", and the Nose-to-Nose style of clown impro. All of these enable a fine-tuning of our subtle awareness, helping us to bring the shifting energies and contours of the interactive field into sharper focus. This becomes a much simpler task when we have the support and co-presence of others who are doing it with us. In other words it is greatly enhanced by the mutual encouragement and inter-personal facilitation we shall bring into play.

Here are some of the aspects I want to pay attention to:

• The "dream quality" of our feeling and our awareness - of both self and other.
  
• The underlying pattern of roles, of invitations and inhibitions, that guides the flow of our interaction.
  
• The recognition of "no go areas" (also known as "hot spots") which are regions - or topics - that seem to carry a high emotional charge and that in normal social situations we are mostly enjoined to avoid. Given a level of emotional "holding" by the whole assembled group, it is possible to find ways of inhabiting these "hot spots" and allowing the emotional high tension to find real pathways for expression and reconciliation.
  
• A similar recognition of "edges" - which are the barely recognised borderlines of our emotional or cognitive comfort zones. We tend to behave as if straying "over the edge" were absolutely unthinkable. But with support we can come to realize there is always a choice and that exploration "over the edge" can bring real enhancement of personal power and flexibility; the expected catastrophes from this straying beyond the zones of habit and comfort, are either an illusion, or have a very different meaning than our habitual fears would have us believe. (For example, the risk of "losing face" may be unconsciously confused with the fear of death.)
  
• It is an important aspect of our own way of working, that we will fully value and respect the aspect of ourselves that wants to stay on this side of the "edge". We will support and help to clarify this aspect, so that it fully participates in any re-appraisal of what this "edge" is really about, and how we will conduct ourselves in relation to it. (This is an application of the "Focusing" method, mentioned above.)
  
• A willingness to "role play" in order to bring out the underlying tensions or polarities in the interactive field.
  
• A willingness to surrender to the ongoing drama; this needs to be coupled with the building of the maximum possible trust between the "actors", the "audience" and those in the group who are acting as our facilitators.
  
• The recognition of unexpressed or "ghost" roles who may have a decisive influence in structuring the field we inhabit. (Sometimes we are massively freed up, as soon as someone is willing to play the part of "the tyrant", "the monster", "the other woman" or "the person we are all leaving out".)
  
• A recognition of the essential role of facilitator: he or she who helps to maintain some of the aforementioned emotional "holding"; who will also try to attune and amplify the processes flickering in the background. these are processes and patterns that may be needing attention and encouragement to flow more freely. The facilitator will also help us keep our bearings and remain to some degree anchored in the consensual reality. (Some of us are fearful we may be engulged by our fantasies, or by the fantasies of others, or simply by the unleashing of the flow of our own emotions. It helps if we will trust that the facilitator has the capacity to "bring us back" to a shared reality in which we will be able to find ourselves - and the other people - again.)

Several of us in the research community for "Grace in the Now" have experience in Process Work, though none of us is involved in continuing training, and none of us has a formal qualification. My personal view is that we are offering here an alternative context for the process-work sensibility, and we are looking to provide a new integration for it, within our contrasting set of working methods. This is a form of piracy, it must be admitted, but we are not stealing anything that has formal copyright attached to it. (Very much the same situation applies to the discipline "Discovering the Clown Within" which is covered in a separate section.)

More information about Process Work in the UK