Mindful The Gathering: A View on Play And Shameless Blood-letting

Im/perfect, Impersonal/Interpersonal, Impermanent

Jul 15, 2024

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Hi friends! My name is Logan and every couple of weeks I post about mindfulness, identity, emotions, and…hey, it’s summer. Whatever’s on my mind. Also, hey! I did a voiceover recording for this post!

This post begins with a loose definition of what “skillful view” means to me, followed by a discussion in relation to identity, our bodies, and play. As always, the post concludes with a takeaway practice. But first,

Reminder!

The monthly adoptee and foster care alumni meditation and mindfulness group will be July 21st, 1-2 PM PST. We will meditate for about twenty minutes, there will be a short talk, and the remainder will be chatting about self-compassion.

Feedback from the last session included: “I appreciate your approach and diligence to create a calm, safe environment. I enjoyed the conversations and ideas you brought. The fact that this was all about the adoption experience, too - like, to have a space to engage in one of the most important experiences of my life was very rewarding.”

Here’s the Eventbrite link to sign up and a time zone converter.

Skillful View

This post is tied to “skillful view,” one of eight pathways to mindfulness practice.

Everything is (im)perfect. Holding the paradox of everything is as it is, and everything could be just a little more skillful is core to practice.
Everything is inter(/im)personal. Forgive everyone everything AND maintain your boundaries. As Prentis Hemphill writes, “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.”
Everything changes.

To me, “view” refers to understanding conditionality and contingency. Taking a broader view can help with emotional regulation, empathy, and self-compassion.

As will be the refrain of this post, you are not your thoughts, feelings, or body. You are the thinker, the feeler, the doer.

Who Have You Been?

Who have you been since my last post?

Excerpt from “Please Call Me By My True Names” by Thich Nhat Hanh.

I am a frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond.
And I am the grass-snake
that silently feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.
I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am also the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.

Since my last post, I have been made very aware of this body’s finite time, with a sudden and curious tension near my heart. I’ll know more after the visit to the cardiologist on the 22nd. I serve a dear cat, Portman, whose organs are seemingly held together by spit and hope. We are, as Ruth Ozeki might call us, time beings.

I have been the earth, the wind, the trees, the pollution. From Ayya Santacitta Bhikkhuni’s gentle guidance, I have been reminded I am not “on” the earth, I am “of” and “in” the earth.

On my kitchen table, I have been the cartographer Glesi Galway. I have also been the transgender vampire pirate activist Elinor/Antoine/Pierre/John, adoptive parent to Janie. I have also been a medical test subject, taken care of by my classmate and loving girlfriend (on whom I bailed as soon as my gills were developed enough to swim away). In another instance, I was Morgan Barnes, “the one who moved away,” desperate to find my friend, Alice.

We Are What We Do

This is a spiritual, political, academic, sincerely-held belief: we are not our bodies. They represent our conditions, our histories, our contexts. We are what we do with our bodies.

“Performative” is a neutral fact about being in the world. Performativity is embodied meaning making. Whether linguistically rooted (JL Austin), rooted in identity categories (Judith Butler), or anthropology (Victor Turner), performativity insists we are what we do with the bodies we’ve been given. We are the meaning we make in social context.

The use of this word really came to mainstream attention around 2015, in relation to Donald Trump. He is “performative.”

Finally! People care about how we show up in the world! Absolutely, I exclaimed, look at the meaning he’s making as he behaves, interjects, moves. It tells you everything!

But then I realized “doing things in/with one’s body/speech/social group” (performativity) is…a critique?

For the record: changing “Donald Trump is performative” to “Donald Trump has split Latinx families at the border, catalyzed environmental degradation, empowered an authoritarian and corrupt Supreme Court, slashed voter rights, used the upside-down Bible for a photo op while protestors against racial violence were beaten, and frankly scares the shit out of me,” would also be performative.

All this cognition, belief, and emotion courses through my body and, in response, I embody terror and dread. Inversely, without my body, speech, and social affiliations, there would be no terror, dread, or love, for that matter.

How performative, to let my racialized, queer, middle class shape buckle at the thought of Project 2025. YES! And that’s why this matters.

Let’s call each other by our true names, shall we? Terror is acting within me. This terror isn’t who I am. I am so much more.

Take yourself. You are enough, period. Without decoration, without pomp, without flair, you are always authentically you. The you in a rough spot, in a depressive mood, even you when tired and over-caffeinated, that’s still you. And you are worthy of all the things because you, too, are the heat, the hurricane, the fleeting fragrance of cherry blossoms.

How liberating it might be for everyone to realize we are. Period. Everything else is meaning making in and with our bodies. Everything is performed.

Inversely, it is such a violence to judge yourself and, in doing so, iterate upon a pre-defined world without alterity and grace.

Some say artists learn to see when they draw. Everything is a matter of focus. What if the focus was actually on what we do and say? How we interact with others? The social systems governing what we can/not do?

How do we re-see, re-envision, remember our interconnectedness and impermanence?

Behold the twenty-sided die (d20). It can signify countless things: fate, an alien race, a quest. It’s sometimes a 4. But hey, everything changes, so sometimes it’s a 19. If it is any one thing, it is a reminder of possibility and the futile illusion of control.

Play can be more than restorative. Like joy, play can be transformative.

A turquoise twenty-sided die with gold lettering. — Photo by Timothy Dykes on Unsplash

Deep Play

Play is an orientation of possibility, wonder, and awe. Play is active meaning making through low-stakes doing. Play only exists through doing. It cannot exist in book form. It is performed into being.

As Katherine May writes in Enchantment, to play is to be in a state of focused attention. Her form of “deep play” refers to

the pursuit of pure flow, a sandbox mind in which we can test new thoughts, new selves. It’s a form of symbolic living, a way to transpose one reality onto another, and mine it for meaning. Play is a form of enchantment.

Role-playing provides a forum to be enchanted by ourselves and others.

Yet when many hear “role play,” they think something sexual (no shame, tiger) or Dungeons and Dragons.

Most won’t think of the interpersonal roles we’re already performing (e.g. mother, teacher, partner, man), and how the added layer of the character might help them identify the nuances of inhabiting a new set of circumstances...just like taking on a new job teaches us new things about our preferences and habits.

Most won’t think of Emma Wieslander’s Mellan Himmel Och Hav (trans. Between Heaven and Sea), a live action role play wherein participants created new genders, family relationships, and political systems. Or Just a Little Lovin’, wherein participants worked through queer grief.

Role-playing reminds us we aren’t our circumstances and, simultaneously insists our embodied materiality matters. For one to inhabit the character, they necessarily draw from their own lived circumstances and conditions. The improvisational interface between embodied somatic experience and becoming a character reveals multitudes about both.

“I don’t play.”

I recently had a conversation with people who “don’t play.”

I truly suspect this was due to an unshared definition of “play.” Cooking can be playful divination and alchemy, for example. Still, their insistence brought to mind this section of Susan Raffo’s Liberated to the Bone.

The cultural framing of professionalism and adulthood have largely become categories, shapings, that raise their eyebrows at uninhibited silliness. This suspicion of uncontrolled movement is one of the weapons used to dismiss bodies of color, bodies perceived as fem, bodies perceived as poor. Every supremacist ideology depends on a public presentation of control—tight, emotionless control.

But the obstacle can be the path. Especially for people who insist they “don’t” play, who struggle to release fixed views of themselves, role playing provides a structure to try on new kinds of embodiment, character, and circumstance. A new role can teach skillful view, foster self-compassion, and empathy, while building a creative muscle.

“What could/should I say” becomes “What would [my iteration of this character] say?” And then saying it, trying it on, performing “as if,” can illuminate new ways of being.

Or, in the case of Thousand Year-Old Vampire, after centuries of torment by a fateful die, what would I still find beautiful after 500 years of thirsting?

Or, in the case of A Wood Heart by James Chip, what would players say as our collective forest body is exploited, shrunken, by humans?

Or, in the case of the two-player game Together We Write Private Cathedrals, how does censorship impact the way queer romance is communicated through letters? How does censorship move in the body and across our shared relationship?

What persists from “everyday” life? How can we evolve together? What can we imagine differently?

Mindful Mxfits

Mindful creative and non-judgmental play can change our our bodies, our views, our relationships, our lives. Doing it in a safe community multiplies the effect.

Mindful Mxfits is my invitation and initiation to play.

WHO IS A MXFIT? People with lived experiences of systematic marginalization, normalized trauma/disenfranchised grief, and frequent othering. To me, this means adoptees and foster care alumni, BIPOC, queer and trans folx, and immigrants, but it’s a pretty wide umbrella. As long as you consider yourself a mxfit, and can uphold community guidelines, you belong here.

HOW? This group will blend creative exploration, mindfulness, and play, and will meet the first Sunday of every month for two hours. We will always begin with community guidelines, followed by a short, silent meditation of about 15 minutes. Anyone who misses this first part will not be admitted.

Thereafter, we might draw, color, build maps, and share based on prompts. Because of my own bias, we might often write. I will always announce the next month’s activity in advance so you know what you’re getting into.

On August 4th, from 4-6 PST, we will begin with Takuma Okada’s Alone Among the Stars. You don’t need to buy anything (but props if you do, this is a wonderful designer). After a short sit, we’ll alternate between writing based on prompts and reading out loud. This is a creative mindfulness practice. We are here to create and appreciate, not to judge “quality.” We will conclude with a short reflection on how it went.

Here’s the sign-up link! Come create with us. :)

Takeaway Practice

Remember: Everything is inter(/im)personal. You aren’t your thoughts, your feelings, or your body. These things are, of course, extremely important and central to our lives.

But, in the end, you are the thinker of the thoughts, the feeler of the feelings, and the speaker/doer. You get to choose how to be.

The next time you hear someone else critiqued for being “performative” or “inauthentic,” I encourage you to investigate the claim. It will, at least, reveal much about the social standards being created.

How is the way they occupy space or use their voice is offensive? "Offensive” means a social transgression has occurred. Which? How?
Might there be a more specific and skillful critique?
How can a more diverse range of embodiment be honored or kept safe?

The point is maintaining safety for all. I suspect the responses you receive will be illuminating.

Solid Reads from the Past Couple Weeks

Kerala Taylor’s “There is Nothing Sexier Than a Man Signing a Field Trip Permission Form” is hilarious to me, even as a solo, childless queer. It’s such a witty take on domestic division of labor.
Maia Duerr’s “July New Moon / waking up” offers some notes on processing the news as of late that includes a link to
Roshi Joan Halifax’s Fourth of July letter, “The Bodhisattva Ideal: Five Rare Powers”
Sebene Selassie’s “Really Intimate: Living Without Shame” is a powerful piece on pride from a revered Queer of Color teacher.
Zi Corley’s “How to Assimilate: A Polite Guide for the Other” is a beautiful poem of loss, grief, and erasure.

Bio and Mentorship Info

Logan Juliano, PhD (they/them) is a mindful integration mentor offering 1:1 sessions and group workshops. They teach writing at the University of California, Los Angeles and hold an MA, PhD in Performance Studies.

What is mentorship? Mentorship is you asking me about mindfulness of emotions, identity, or writing, or whatever else you’re looking to develop. It’s kind of a tailored question and response. Drop in for thirty minutes, we’ll chat. Schedule a chat!