Beyond the Cushion: Play as Concentration Practice
Imagine!
Hi friends!
Here’s the bad news: chronic stress literally reduces your brain's capacity to envision alternatives. In times of crisis, when we most need to imagine new possibilities, our neural pathways narrow. Our brains, trying to keep us safe, default to familiar patterns.
This essay concludes my series on the Buddhist Eightfold Path and focuses on concentration and play.
Especially after the recent election results, I couldn’t think of two more crucial practices: continually returning to the present moment and cultivating the capacity to embody alternative ways of being.
Skillful Concentration
“Wholesome one-pointedness […] a deliberate attempt to raise the mind to a higher, more purified level of awareness.” — Bhikku Bodhi
My last post on the four foundations of mindfulness concluded with “the kitchen sink” of external influences on our experience. We have lots of tools. The goal is to use them in sitting and daily life practice.
Concentration is a mental practice. Traditional Buddhist texts highlight deep meditative states (Jhanas), while contemporary teachers stress the importance of continually returning to the path. Both/and.
While I can hear your cushion calling you from here, don’t forget that mindfulness is meditating in daily life. Richard Strozzi-Heckler describes this as persistent presence:
Everyday living practice occurs in the most mundane aspects of our life, as well as those of high importance. […] This builds an embodied presence that is fully connected to life on a moment-by-moment basis.
Do not be mistaken: there is no transcendence from material realities here. One’s embodied sense of self cannot be separated from our social contexts that leave imprints on our bodies. He continues:
The themes of privilege, inequity, oppression, environmental injustice, and so forth are as embodied in us as our experiences with our parents and primary caregivers.
Who are we, separate from all these forces? How do we even find out? Without over-identifying, how do these things matter?
Concentrated practice offers a path forward. Bhikkhu Bodhi describes it as a “deliberate attempt to raise the mind to a higher, more purified level of awareness.” Mind-full-ness. Allowing more in.
This embodied understanding leads us to examine how stress and imagination interact in our nervous systems.
Creativity and imagination are essential ingredients of psychological health absent from the traditional medical model that dominates psychiatric care—ingredients that our work indicates are life transforming and even in some instances lifesaving.
— Dr. Alisha Ali and Stephan Wolfert, MFA
Imagination and Stress
Your capacity to imagine is vulnerable to your stress levels.
The hippocampus, once thought to only handle memory, also supports imagination, highlighting why storytelling and practice are impactful. The more you train neurons to fire together, the easier it becomes for a pathway to form.
The challenge is we already have those conditioned pathways and patterns, so our capacity to imagine is informed by what we’ve already learned.
Imagining is cognitive labor and our brains will grab the closest thing regardless of context and accuracy. This contributes to stereotypes circulating, forgetting details, and the formation of “triggers,” external stimuli evoking a psychosomatic response. One of my favorite YouTubers, Man Alone, prefers the crunchier, clear quantification of a die roll. He dislikes journaling games because they feel like “homework.”
Donna Rose Addis, senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto, has stated both imagination and memory are faulty for different reasons:
When we imagine a future event, we have to integrate details that may never have been integrated before. When you remember something, you are reintegrating details that already had linkages so it’s not as demanding for the hippocampus.
In addition, the hippocampus is incredibly vulnerable to “the stress hormone,” cortisol. Cortisol is useful because bursts of it might help you escape a rabid lion or cocaine bear.
But increased levels over time reduces the hippocampus’ size, volume, and output. And increased levels during childhood—including relinquishment or navigating marginalization or poverty—can significantly impact one’s capacity to imagine as an adult.1 Natalie Y Gutiérrez has compiled some sources of stress:
Racism is toxic stress. Homophobia is toxic stress. Transphobia is toxic stress. Ableism is toxic stress. Sexism is toxic stress. Hate crimes are toxic stress. Immigrant families separated at the border is toxic stress. Isms are toxic stress. […] Feeling unloved and “othered” creates so much toxic stress on the mind, body, and spirit. […] The world’s lies become your own.
And sometimes, we keep circulating those stuck, congested, stories because they have become what Strozzi-Heckler calls “embodied states.”
So concentration practice. That cognitive labor is an exercise in opening your mind, developing new connections, and primes your mind to take action. Mind-full-ness.
Consider: When did you last give yourself permission to imagine freely, without judgment or purpose?
Mindful play offers a space for creation without the pressure of productivity, accumulation, or goal. It's about narrativizing for the sake of creation, embodying possibility because we are alive and we can.
Play can help us build the world we want to see.
Emergent Storytelling
What I’m calling “mindful play” has many siblings, including narrative, drama, play therapy.
Miguel Sicart once critiqued videogames for being a conservative medium. To engage at all, one must abide by the arbitrary rules, values, and narrative consequences of the game designers, on top of the laws and social rules of the player’s lived world.
The mindful play I intend is more liberal and exploratory. It offers a unique form of concentration practice - one that specifically builds our capacity for imagination. When we play, and among other things, we
Explore character and consequence without pre-defined goals
Practice embodying alternative ways of being
Create safe distance to examine patterns
Build new neural pathways through storytelling
Co-create community narratives and consequences
Knowing the play is not real, and everyone knows it’s not real, and all of this is okay and safe and brave, gives us freedom to explore more of our emotional range. The exploration of that freedom is a concentration practice.
This is one of many reasons why I started the Creative Coalition, a monthly group that focuses on individual and collective play. Participants create the characters, the consequences of behavior, the solutions to problems, together. This allows everyone to represent and reflect conflict, resolution, and narrative change as a group.
In it, I blend empowerment pedagogy with role-playing game facilitation and narrative therapy guidelines like David Denborough’s. Narrative therapy and game facilitation share core principles: both help us externalize problems, explore alternative storylines, and recognize our agency in shaping narratives.
Before and after play, the facilitator usually runs a set-up and debrief. The debrief usually goes through what went well, what people liked, what resonated with or confused them. I completely nerd out over these out-of-character post-game analyses. But these also help us integrate what we can from our storytelling, our characters, into our lives.
In narrative play, what we do matters because we see immediate consequences. It can be a delicate time. Therefore, it’s important for me as a facilitator to maintain a brave space through maintaining community guidelines and reminding everyone of safety tools as needed. Even if we are presenting stories through fictional characters and the conscious respect for the magic circle, Johan Huizinga’s notion of a shared contract, we can still take care of each other.
As I’ve stated before: play for liberation.
DEBRIEF: You want us to play? Now?
Concentrate. If not now, when?
Friends, these are the times of our lives. I was soothed by Daniel Hunter’s article, “10 ways to be prepared and grounded now that Trump has won” that included the above graphic.
Still, it’s clear we have work to do, for ourselves and each other.
And work isn’t everything. We are worthy of our own time as a band of Psychic Trash Detectives.
Taking care of your body, your spirit, matters. Orienting toward joy and building the future we want is a concentration practice, a discipline, of returning to the truths that matter.
One of the most tragic actions taken by abusive parents is swearing their child to secrecy, gaslighting them in public, reading parts of their journal aloud. Betrayal, humiliation. On a larger scale, oppressive regimes is limiting a people’s ability to tell their own stories. They re-write the past, control communication, destroy archives and cultural treasures. They ban books while storing national secrets in a hotel bathroom.
Play isn’t about being creative, but about being willing to try to exist outside spheres that would judge us for not being perfect, productive, and complacent.
Rest and joy is resistance. Play on.
Takeaway Practice
I would love to host you at the next Creative Coalition (promo code: Asercion), where we will play i’m sorry did you say street magic together. But if you can’t make it:
This week will be a choose your own adventure between heading back to the cushion for an additional 5 minutes OR:
1. Notice one role you play in your daily life (mother, teacher, writer, coach). Choose a pattern that feels accessible and amendable rather than charged and permanent.
2. Select one tiny variation in how you perform this role. Perhaps it's using a different tone of voice, trying a new routine, or shifting your physical posture. The change should feel playful and expansive rather than pressured.
3. Debrief with one person: how did you choose what to change? was it fun or something you’ve been meaning to do? how did it make you feel to do something because you were curious?
Whether you join us at Creative Coalition or practice on your own, you're engaging in vital work - creating spaces for play and presence in challenging times. Start small, stay curious.
Reminders
Adoptee Alchemy: November 17
Adoptee Alchemy offers adoptee meditators a safe space to discuss engaged mindfulness. No experience is required to join.
Thank you for reading! Use promo code “NAAM” to waive registration fees.
Creative Coalition: December 1st
The Creative Coalition centers mindful play and respectful engagement. The goal is to leave feeling connected and inspired to innovate beyond this space.
NB: This one is open to a maximum of six participants.
Thank you for reading! Use promo code “Asercion” to waive registration fees.
Bio
Logan Juliano, PhD (they/them) is a mindful integration mentor offering 1:1 sessions and group workshops. They currently teach writing at the University of California, Los Angeles and hold an PhD in Performance Studies.
Robert F. Anda et al., ‘The Enduring Effects of Abuse and Related Adverse Experiences in Childhood: A Convergence of Evidence from Neurobiology and Epidemiology’, European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience 256, no. 3 (April 2006): 174–86.