Shaping and being shaped

*Ritual Theatre Labs*

*When Do We Shape Reality And When Do We Let It Shape Us?*

That's the real question in ritual theatre.

If we're really in control, can we relax control when it's appropriate to do so?

Because we are shapers; and we are the shaped.

Ritual often invites energetic intensification. You walk into a lab and suddenly there is a greater energy than you are usually accustomed to. And in that moment, you only have four ways to respond:

1. Control or direct it

2. Fight and resist it

3. Work to ignore it

4. Serve it

That conversion point, between directing the energy and serving it , that is where a major revelation is initiated. That is the threshold.

When we are in charge of determining the direction of an energy, our source of authority and power rests in the personal will of our ego.

This is when Ego is The Boss.

If we were to relax the tendency to determine the outcome, we might increase our awareness of the energy itself and its innate, autonomous direction.

By relaxing control, space is created for energetic expression, whereby we may rely on it to guide and inform us of its inherent direction.

This is where Spirit is The Boss.

These two Bosses set up an effective polarity for ritual work. We need both. We need to know which one is boss right now.

Surrendering control is difficult, risky business, because it exposes our vulnerability. Our vulnerable, open self knows how to be touched, moved, and even broken.

Without it, however, we are as good as dead and our rituals become mechanistic parodies of what could've been.

One way of giving up control is in realizing the futility of our personal efforts. When we are confronted with severe limitations and the growing awareness of our immobilization, our despair and helplessness sometimes telegraph our need to surrender.

Hitting Bottom initiates a conversion, if we don't fight being down when we're already there.

Hitting Bottom expresses an "ego-death", the collapse of a self-image that is and/or was sacred to oneself. It was sacred because of our identification with this image. We were too busy being it to recognize its illusory status as just another image, or creation of thought.

The conversion from ego-identification to Self-embodiment occurs through disillusionment, which is often the price paid for illumination, until we become responsible for adjusting our thoughts to coincide more with the innate.

Occasionally, we dawn upon the possibility that we don't have to be anything at all. Nobody special, in other words.

One way of telling the difference between Ego-Personality and Essence-Self is that the former is image-defined and the latter is quality-expressive.

When an image of a quality is in direct conflict with the living expression of that quality, an essential friction is revealed whereby we are living a lie.

For example: The socially-accepted ideation for Positive Energy is that it's "good" and that Negative Energy is "bad."

That's an image. Not the living quality.

Join us in ritual theatre labs *Fridays at 8:30 PM EST on Zoom.*

We practice letting Ego be boss, and letting Spirit be boss, and learning to know the difference in our own bodies.

One sign-in gets you in the lab area and is good across the whole Collective:

*https://paratheater.arts-collective.com/login?sso=1*