Transcript of Edited Interview with Arawana Hayashi
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Christine:
Could you give me a sense of your identity as an artist, an educator? How would you describe what you do?
Arawana:
I am senior faculty at the Presenting Institute and I direct the creation and the teaching of Social Presenting Theater, which is an awareness-based movement practice in service of both individual and collective transformation. I create and teach embodiment practices that enable leaders and facilitators of institutional and social change to bring the wisdom of the body—embodied knowing— into their relationships and conversations. Social Presencing Theater is a method for exploring stuck places in systems and for uncovering the basic healthiness and creativity in any system. It invites presencing—being present with open awareness as the ground of our artistic process.
The word social in the name indicates that we are cultivating the quality of social relationships. The Greek root of the word theater is a place of seeing— a place to behold something. Unlike thoughts and words, bodies and social bodies are highly visible. How we arrange ourselves in space is visible and communicates without words. My work is often about connecting to the Earth's body, opening to the social body, and noticing that a spacious collective felt-knowing can be the basis for both creativity and learning.
Christine:
One question that immediately occurs to me is that there's the relationship between that visible body and the experienced body,
Arawana:
I am interested in the relationship between what we see (in this case, others’ bodies) and what we feel in our own body/mind system. I do not mean emotions, particularly, but more a sense of something—a feeling sense. I am interested in the collective body/mind system and the porousness between what I call my body/mind and the social body/mind.
Christine:
When we are carefully attending to our sensations, our inner experiences and our large and small movements, what do you think might be going on there? How is attention influencing those experiences?
Arawana:
I love this word. Careful.
Christine:
I also use the word deliberate a lot.
Arawana:
Careful attending to sensations invites our body's voice into our knowing, and that knowing enriches and deepens conversations and decision-making. In Social Presencing Theater practice, we invite our conceptual mind to rest, and we place our attention on the body, listening to the body's language— feeling or sensation. Careful attending enables that voice to be more vivid. Oftentimes the voice of the body is in the background. Thinking is in the foreground. By attending, by letting the mind rest on the feeling of the body, body sensation becomes more lively, more vivid in presence. We can call that synchronization of body and mind and embodied presence.
When there's an embodied presence, there's more coherence, not only between the body and the mind, but this synchronization allows for more open relaxation into the context, the environment, the space. When the body and the mind are separate, the body may be walking to the car, but the mind is ruminating about something that happened yesterday. When the body and the attending mind are disconnected, there is also a disconnect from the environmental context—from sense perceptions and resonance with the world. We experience a general lack of groundedness and coherence.
It seems to me that when the body and the mind are synchronized, open awareness naturally is present. There is less worry about me, and how am I doing. There is a natural sense of being, which can be experienced as a sense of wellbeing. And it is wellbeing for no reason, not based upon circumstances going well or not. Just because I'm a human being standing on the planet, my feet on the Earth and my head in open space, that in itself is enough. I am adequate as a human being. I mean, I could use some improvement, or course; but nonetheless, I am a perfectly good example of a human being. I feel there is a connection between careful attending and this sense of coherence, being, and wellbeing.
Christine:
I really appreciate you're saying the phrase wellbeing for no reason. You don't have this goal, ‘I'm going to get more fit, or I'm going to work on this X and improve it’. You're just in a state of presence that creates this sense of wellbeing for no reason.
Arawana:
I am not sure I know what a “state of presence” might be. I seem to notice more discontinuity in my attention. But yes, it is not about a goal separate from the immediate experience. There is gentle attention and loyalty to whatever the experience is, and that could be either comfortable or uncomfortable—wanted or unwanted. The goal isn't to be comfortable or to improve. There is no agenda. The invitation is to be genuine and to welcome whatever our embodied experience is, without judgments, opinions, or any effort to fix or figure out. Simply being friends with discomfort is a kind of wellbeing.
Christine:
One distinction that could be made is when we are immersed in an experience and when we are thinking about an experience or reflecting on an experience. Could you comment on how your work holds that difference and possibly uses those two states in different ways?
Arawana:
This distinction between experience and reflection on experience is very important in our work. Although awareness practice and social art are important aspects of our work, the Presencing Institute is not a meditation center, nor an arts organization. People attend our programs because they want to help out in the world within their work context or their community activism. They want fresh insights, like-minded community, and courage to step into challenges. Attending to the body and the felt social body in Social Presencing Theater is in service of this. Many with whom we work are within institutional contexts—schools, companies, community organizations. They are in a culture in which meaning making and problem solving are normal frames of reference—highly valued. The Social Presencing Theater practices invite people to suspend their normal context of immediate meaning making to first simply slow down and stay with body sensation and spatial knowing.
The format is simple. We work with simple body shapes, postures, or embodied sculptures. We stay with the feeling of those shapes until the shape wants to move. We do not head toward any preconceived goal. We suspend thinking. The invitation is to stay with experience and separate that from thoughts about where this is going or conjectures on what the experience means. The question is, “What does the body want to do?” This can be a question for an individual or for a configuration of many individuals, a social body. What is the experience of this embodied sculpture and what does this sculpture want to do?
The movement will begin and continue. We let go of any idea of what we want to happen, what we think should happen, or how to fix this in some way. We let go of meaning, staying loyal to physical experience and to the social body. The premise is that if we let go of our habitual approach, the body and social bodies will naturally move toward health. They will not deliberately choose pathology. The premise is that there is goodness, health, and creativity in every system, and if we stay with the body-knowing, it will lead us in that direction. After moving, we come to a rest in a second body shape. Often we let a word of a phrase arise from the embodied knowing.
We are very deliberate in how we reflect on experience. We are careful to only speak of our own experience, never interpreting or projecting onto others. We first surface data by sharing only statements about what we saw, felt, or did. We evoke our experience and use descriptive language. Ex: “I saw you walk to the edge of the space and sit down.” “I felt settled.” “I felt surprised when my shoulders went up.” “When I saw you sit down, I stretched out my arm.” This is a description without opinion, judgment, or meaning.
This descriptive process—describing non-verbal experience without judgment or opinion—is an important part of our work. It strengthens our perceptual ability. It gives us a shared language with which to talk about experience. It boycotts the habit of quickly wrapping experience into our conventional or psychological sense making. It delays quickly putting experience in habitual boxes in our mind. After this time of describing, then we open the space for a generative dialogue, a spacious conversation in which people can offer their reflections on the experience. We create an open space with no agenda. The openness of not knowing enables words and shared meaning to emerge. We give language to non-verbal knowing. The groundedness of embodied experience, the sense of social connection, and the open space invite insights, shared meaning, and an emergence of something new.
Our work is largely about awareness-based, heart-based creativity. How do these practices unlock this collective creativity? How does this inner work of embodiment translate, inform, and connect with the outer work in the world, with social transformation. Our reflection is not only about what we experienced or learned by engaging in the practices, but it also has to point to how it relates to creating good futures in teams, institutions, families, and communities. The reflection invites us to embody an emerging future. It is not a vision of a better future. It is an embodiment of an emerging future. Reflection includes cultivating heart knowing and real ability to step with some confidence into what we don't know—an emerging future.
Christine:
It feels like you're saying that there's this holding of experience in a careful attention that allows emergence to operate. And I'm curious if you have a sense of this term emergence, because I see it also in philosophy, and in Artificial Intelligence. Is there a way that you want to describe where you think it's coming from or what fuels it? Once something emerges, how do you shape it for useful purposes, whether it's choreographing a dance or educating someone in a classroom, etc.?
Arawana:
I think what I mean by emergence is something that is coming out of nothing, something that arises from open space, an open space of mind. For instance, I'm in a body shape and I wait there. I feel my body and I sense my environment. Sights appear, sounds appear, Sensations appear, thoughts appear. And they all appear in this big space – the big space of awareness. When I stay present to that, a gesture may arise. The movement emerges on its own, without contrivance. I call that a true move. It arises from the open space. Something spontaneously will emerge that is not simply the same old, same old. It is actually fresh and arises or emerges from this moment.
I spent decades doing bugaku, Japanese court dance, which has been performed for hundreds and hundreds of years. I tried to do it exactly as my teacher taught me. The arm is at this height—never slightly higher or lower. I practiced the dances over and over, trying to embody every gesture as perfectly as possible. Even though I knew the gestures and had done these dances hundreds of times, moments arose fresh and new. I had never been in this movement before, done this gesture at this time. So whether the movement is improvised, made up, or whether it's something that's already choreographed, we don't really know what will happen in the next moment. The quality of not knowing and being open to this moment is what I mean by emergence.
Christine:
That's fascinating that you're saying that there's a process of emergence even within very strict inherited movement forms.
Arawana:
Yes, that has been my experience. Every day we have moments that are fresh and open —something appearing from this moment. And we are interested in how this happens collectively —even in organizations with all the weight of structure. Can there still be an emerging culture of sanity and compassion?
The premise of our work is that within every system—the body-mind system or the social system, family system, team, organization—within every system, the core is wakeful, healthy, sane, kind, and cares about something. There's no such thing as toxic to the core, whether you're talking about a company or a healthcare organization. I hear people say, “My work situation is toxic.” I do not doubt that there are very confused, aggressive, and challenging environments. And I am not saying that this premise of system health is the truth. I am aware that there is ample evidence that this may not be true. However, I am saying that this is the premise on which my work is based. And therefore, the sense of emergence from openness connects to wakefulness in the world.
Every system has blind spots and stuck places. If we attend to the felt sense of that, stay with the discomfort, we find that something will emerge and move toward a more embodied sense of wholeness and beauty. This connects with your question about lived experience. Feeling this possibility in the body, gives us more perspective on what actually is keeping that health from emerging and empowers us to create conditions for healthy systems to emerge.
Creativity or innovation is the sense of something fresh coming out of nothing. And that's also probably what I think of as learning or healing, for that matter. There's something about listening into possibility, rather than fixating on all the reasons why this is a mess. Our work acknowledges the mess— yes, this is how this mess feels—without having to go back and unravel who did what to whom. We stay with the discomfort of it both in our individual body and in our social bodies. What do these social sculptures actually want to go toward? I've just never seen people go towards making themselves more ill than they were to start with. People's bodies go toward a little more freedom, a little bit more intelligence and kindness.
Christine:
Is it possible that when we attend consciously to our ongoing experience, that we access information or resources that weren't accessible before?
Arawana:
I am certain that is true. In the solo practice called the 20-Minute Dance, I learn something new about myself each time I practice. It is a mindfulness of body practice—attending to the body sensations in stillness and movement. Sometimes I capture that in a little haiku—what did I notice, without trying to find meaning from it.
We have done the Social Presencing Theater practice called Stuck online. Recently I was in a breakout group with a couple of men who had signed up for the course. Without saying anything about my challenge, I showed them my stuck shape and let a few words arise from my shape. Then I attended to my shape until my body moved into the second sculpture shape, and I again let words arise from the shape.
Then the two men reflected back to me what they saw or felt from their careful attending. In the form, they can't project what they think I'm experiencing. They can only talk about themselves. As they shared their “I saw, I felt…” statements they gave language to something that I knew but could not access. They offered what they noticed and those words unlocked insight that had been hidden. How could I have missed that? It's so amazing how the reflection of another person who's also attending with careful attention, suspending their judgments and opinions—how insightful and helpful this was. I don’t really know how that works.
Christine:
You're saying that emergence doesn't just come from within your interior experience, it also comes through that social field.
Arawana:
Mindfulness attending honors our interior experience, but there always seems to be some kind of openness. I am not sure what I mean here. But as soon as we are interacting in the world, then it seems that interior experience is within the open space of perception and relationship. There’s always some kind of felt sense of interiority, attending to our body/mind knowing, but then there is open awareness that does not exactly seem to be interior. I wonder about the boundary between inner and outer.
Maybe I am interested in the collective interiority, which is the social field – the interiority of a social body or social system. With all our trauma and projections and fears, can we access this amazing ability to really care for one another and for this planet and move toward manifesting the wisdom of the collective body-mind system that we desperately need now.
Christine:
It sounds like what you're saying is that the information and the resources are in a sense non-local. They could be experienced from something that feels internal, but that the information and the resources are also stored around your body in the social field. Did I get that right?
Arawana:
Yes. Stored is an interesting word. What is inspiring or informing or strengthening arises from where it’s stored. Magic. It could arise in anybody or in some ordinary situation that happens in a day. I may not have not been able to access the insight myself, but somebody else sees something or feels something. They just say that without any interpretation, and it unlocks something that I know but haven't been able to access. And we experience that it happens online! It's amazing how much of a shared social field can be created online.
Christine:
It also seems like you're saying there's not a fixed border between self and environment. It sounds to me like you're describing something that's very fluid. In my work I would say self and environment are along a continuum rather than a binary.
Arawana:
Yes. It's porous — inner and outer. Sometimes we feel very separate with fixed boundaries. But when we relax a bit we notice that every moment is co-created. All of us living on the planet are co-creating social reality, every moment. Obviously there are power and influence differences. I'm not saying that these are not important and challenging. But given that, there's still enormous room for building a just and compassionate system within whatever social context we are in. It's not out of our reach.
Christine:
This brings up the idea of what change is and how conscious moving can be a change agent. What kind of embodied changes might you be looking for in your work, and what are the practices that support change?
Arawana:
The Social Presencing Theater practices are an invitation to attend carefully to an embodied journey from where we are now (where we begin) to emerging possibilities. And as I said before, this is both as individuals and as groups. We can feel how our bodies can soften and open when attended to. We know how we can change to become more grounded and present. So I am applying this to social bodies. How can our social body become more grounded, open and present?
In social bodies I am looking for the quality of attention and the quality of the relationships. And that quality will generate what I often call the true move. What is a true move has always been my art question for decades. It comes out of the relationship between loving precision and open spaciousness. We are our individual body-mind and are also a social body-social field. The question becomes “how can we create social fields that enable and support compassionate innovation and learning for positive change?”
We bring caring for ourselves into embodiment practices. We attend to our own experiences with loving attention. Then naturally we care for this world and feel compassion for suffering. This sadness for the world rouses our motivation to help out—to care for folks and for the earth itself. Even though we don't know the complexity of many of our situations, we can feel that we could step forward and engage.
Christine:
So once we immerse ourselves in ongoing experience, how can that transition into the possibility of making something of it later? Something like art or learning or feeling and acting differently in daily life?
Arawana:
Maybe I can go in two directions here. On the one hand, I guess I think of what we are doing as an art form. And there is no doubt that it affects how people experience themselves and their work in the world. We know that the process of engaging in the practices, reflecting, and then applying that learning to everyday life and work settings seems to be working. We have evidence that people can bring aspects of Social Presencing Theater into their work setting, and many can bring the practices themselves into their teams and organizations.
But I am interested in this question of art, and particularly social art. And this question of how the practices and this careful attending informs or inspires more formal art making is of interest. My background is as a performer and maker of dances. So when I first met Otto Scharmer and heard him talk about Social Presencing Theater, I assumed it was a performance form. I made several performance events at that time—one with neurodiverse folks, one with doctors, and more recently we made a performance with Mayan youth in the Yucatan Peninsula. Although some of our practices have “doer” and space-holders (audience), for the most part they are studio practices. We have incorporated haikus, drawings, clay sculptures, photos, videos and other visual art forms into our trainings, and hold a strong curiosity about performance.
We are also interested in creating learning programs and products. My colleague, Ricardo Dutra, and I have created a set of Aesthetic Language Cards to accompany our practice called the Village—to support peoples’ perceptions of the design of social settings and the language with which they describe non-verbal experience. The creation of these came directly from our experience with students. With high school students we used Polaroids and created Postcards on which their “Stuck” would write them a message. We created Journey Maps and games to support the embodiment work.
Currently much of the work of the Presencing Institute is with the United Nations, supporting the Country Teams in implementing the Sustainable Development Goals on a country level. I would love to make some kind of performance or film or product, based on our practices, to bring more awareness of the SDG’s. We appreciate prototyping, improvising and making things up, and we would love to do more in bringing this embodied mindfulness and awareness into the formal performance art and education.
Christine:
So how might conscious moving be used as a contemplative practice, and what do you think happens as a result of embodied contemplative practice?
Arawana:
The practice of conscious movement slows people down. It simplifies experience. In personal work we rest our attention on the shoulder or on the low back, or on the muscles of the face. It brings more simplicity, more subtleness and groundedness to our experience. We are not making war on our experience. And I think it has to do with genuineness. We trust that if we really attend to our experience, that's trustworthy. The result of settling this body on the Earth's body, open to the social body is a sense of trust.
This sense of contemplative settledness then can extend to how we experience others. Oftentimes people say to me ‘I don’t feel connected.’ They seem to have a set idea about what they need in order to feel connected. But given interdependency, there isn't a prayer that we're not connected all of the time. So embodied contemplative practice brings more relaxation and appreciation for what is, without wanting it to be different. Connectedness for one person, let’s say in Brazil, might be quite different for a person in China. Contemplative practice enables us to feel more settled in our bodies with more equanimity and open curiosity in whatever our circumstances are.
Christine:
Could you say the practice creates the conditions for emergence? Or is emergence also happening just like connection?
Arawana:
This is so interesting. Embodiment practice is something we do and as practitioners we seem to be creating enabling conditions for emergence, for creativity. But emergence and creativity are always present and are a natural and spontaneous non-doing— not depend upon our practice. Living is a creative change process, so evident in the natural world. Everything is changing— being born, growing, fading, and dying. Always emerging, appearing. Both effort and non-effort.
On the planet today we find ourselves in unsustainable social and environmental stuck situations. Inner and external, local and global forces are keeping us from our innate creativity. Change is always happening, but is it going in the direction of creating a good world for our grandchildren and all beings on the planet? What kind of choices and decisions and partnerships and conversations are needed to afford emergence. Can we trust that emergence, moment by moment, in the collective experience will create a world going forward that's livable and flourishing for those yet unborn?
Christine:
How do you adapt your work to connect with different peoples?
Arawana:
Well, context matters in some way but not in other ways. It doesn't matter in terms of what we're actually doing— resting attention on the body, letting the body's knowing speak, feeling our social bodies and the vast space of possibility. In one way, people are people, everybody's got a mind and body.
But after that, context does matter. Since we work in many places in the world with many different populations, we are sensitive to that. Working with corporate people is different from working with high school students. Spatial relationships (close/far) in Latin America are different in Northern Europe or China. But adaptation is mostly about listening to what people are challenged by or inspired by and offering practices that can address their concerns. We're in service of whatever it is they want to create. We keep with what it is that they want to create and how we can support that.
Often we need to adapt in terms of language—talking about the work in a way that makes sense to the listener. Presencing Institute has its own language, presencing or social field, for instance. So finding words to describe or invite or connect to people is important. We are often in contexts (like companies) where people are resistant to engaging physically or in groups. So we also might need to scaffold the learning—try small movements. For instance, if you can't get up and make a shape, what about making a shape just with your hand? We never ask people to do anything “dancey” or theatrical and emphasize the ordinariness of movement.
It is good to have a champion if you are going into situations in which people will be resistant. It’s good to have somebody in the room who knows that this work is important.
Christine:
What are the essential ingredients in your work?
Arawana:
Invitation. Suspending judgment. Stating the view and the intention. ‘Why am I asking you to do this? Giving incredibly clear instructions—verbal, visual (flip chart), and demonstration so people feel like they could have the courage to stand up and do this. Gratefulness. Ordinary beauty. Tenderness and willingness to step into something. Never interrupting, intervening or correcting. Never telling them what they experience or what they should be experiencing. Joyfulness.