Just wanted to post while I’m still buzzing from this morning’s AWESOME training. Last night was good too. It’s getting hard in a new way; now that we’re working with specific material instead of making new stuff up all the time, we have to be careful not to let our ideas about how the material needs to go interfere with the truth and real exploration of what we’re doing. Matthew has been taking a more and more active hand directing us, and so we’re dealing with the additional distraction of someone telling you to do stuff that you then have to justify and make your own, instead of just doing whatever feels natural.

But here’s the discovery from this morning, something that I realized during training and that Matthew reaffirmed in his comments to us afterward: many of us, me included, are prone to moving on from the work we’re creating way too quickly.

It’s that simple. You start doing something, you push it as far as you can think to push it, and then you look for something else to move on to. But the training only really begins once you’re out of ideas. It’s when you don’t know where to go or what to do next that the work really starts, and all you have to do is know that, and stay with it, and suddenly you’re taking your improvisations to that deeper level I’ve been wondering forever how to find.

So many promising beginnings I’ve abandoned because I thought I was done with them, only to walk away before the really interesting part was going to happen! I’m looking at the work in a new way again, and it is good. I need to go to the place where I don’t know what happens next, and stay there instead of continuing to seek out territory I know.

I type it, and it sounds obvious. But I didn’t realize what I was doing, before; I only saw the limit of my ideas being exhausted, and concluded that that was all there was. To keep pushing is the lesson here, which is a lesson I keep thinking I have learned, only to learn it again in a slightly different configuration.

Good training is good. I am buzzed and happy and warm and only now starting to feel the pain I will surely feel for training so hard all morning. Oh boy.

In other body news: for the last few days, my ankles have been really swollen. I’m like a pregnant lady. I have no idea what’s causing that.

Love!
Alissa