5A. Eyes Closed

• Find a place for yourself on the floor, either sitting, standing or lying down. Get comfortable and close your eyes. Bring your attention inside. Relax. Watch your breath: your inhalation, exhalation, the pause in between. As your breath goes out, let go of any tension you're aware of either in your mind or body, or both. Become still and quiet, so that your attention may settle entirely on the experience of your breath.

• Keep your eyes closed for the next fifteen to twenty minutes.

• You can begin moving at any time. Start with any impulse. Do exactly what you feel like doing. A twitch, stretch, bend, contraction, an expansion, or jerk. Allow that movement to cue the next. Continue to follow them, one movement cueing the next movement, that movement cueing the next.

• Whatever feelings, emotions, attitudes or states of mind arise, play with them, express them through your movement, the tension in your body and the expression on your face. Continue to follow your physical sensations.

• Whatever you're doing right now, intensify.

• Whatever you're doing right now, intensify.

• Accept invitations as your body presents them: If you're moving with softness, be really soft. If you're moving into a hard, tense place, go further into that. If you're moving into a painful place, go further into it. If you're moving into fun and play, go further. If you're moving into any unidentified stateright now, go further into it. Whatever you're doing right now, intensify

• Work up a sweat if that's what's up. Breathe hard if that's what's up. If you come in contact with another person in the room, do whatever it is you want. Play with it. Mess with it. Get tense. Get loose. Do whatever it is you want. If you want to leave and travel on your journey alone, leave. Whatever you're doing right now, intensify.

• Take this twenty minute period to move through an inner journey of mind and body, whatever that may be. Don't try to understand it and don't try to create it. Give your body the time to speak.

• Be still right where you are . . . Now, open your eyes, maintaining a relaxed focus, your eyelids half-open. Let your gaze rest about ten feet in front of you. As your attention returns to the room, open your eyes more but keep your focus soft. Come to standing and begin a very slow walk ... As you walk bring your attention back into this room, allow the others to come into your awareness.

Protection

We have learned to separate from our experience, to relate to it as an object to be analyzed, evaluated and planned. But, somewhere inside us, another type of experiencing calls. For some, it calls loudly and insists on a response.

In Eyes Closed, students have the opportunity to give up all the chat­ter, quiet the mind and follow experience without comment. This is often terrifying. It's so unfamiliar. Vulnerable. Unprotected. It's frightening to enter a state, or condition, that is unfamiliar and can't be called anything. Fear of the unknown, of getting into what we don't want to, of going into an "other" state and not coming back, fear of being crazy, all prevent us from examining those states.

By entering the states we fear again and again, taking small doses a little at a time, we build up tolerance for those states. Our capacity increases. In action, repeated entrances, fear lessens. We enter the name­less states which are bound by fear as investigators and become aware of what is inside. The actions are viewed as what they are, instead of the mythology we have given them.

We step into the unknown with awareness. We build survival skills with this awareness. Eventually, judgment vanishes and only inquisitiveness remains. We don't need protection when there's no fear. Aware­ness itself is the protection.

An exercise such as Eyes Closed offers inroads into the mysterious territories of mind. Students new to this experience often approach it hesitantly. They need to feel their way. They need to know where they are. They may move with their arms outstretched, fingers reaching, feel­ing the floor, walls and others as if they are blind. In fact, they are. They're blind to their habitual responses in a visual world. They're still attached to this external visual world, and resist going inside themselves for infor­mation. As they practice and gain confidence step by step, their fear begins to leave.

In the darkness, one slips inward. With eyes closed, there are less distractions—nothing to see, no lights, colors, shapes. No people. Even the student isn't there, in a sense, the familiar sense. We repeat this exercise several times in the training, each time offer­ing a further excursion into the unfamiliar.

Privacy

Privacy is a myth. We support it with two beliefs. The first is that we "have" a limited amount of "material" (secrets), and that if we reveal them, we'll be out of the material, left empty. The second belief is that our inner world and our outer world are different, and that privacy is the watchdog that keeps them separate.

All phenomena, whether secrets, chocolate, or trees, are either totally you, or totally not you. They're all constructions of the mind. Personal stories, the ones kept under wraps, are burdens better to be lifted into the lightness of expression. Every secret kept is a blockade, a stone stuck in the mouth of a cave of memories, images, convictions, emotions and surprises. What we keep hidden, we are hiding from.

Three students are out on the floor improvising: inching along together, dripping and leaking bits and pieces of their psyche, lightening up, upping the ante of what's worth putting effort into, what's worth expressing, what's drawing their attention. The rest of us are audiencing. Through the course of their ten minute improvisation, they experience and express many states of mind: emotions (envy, anger, lust, complacency, etc.), attitudes (pride, passivity, secretiveness, etc.) and un-nameable, yet recognizable, conditions.

Audiencing

When they're finished, we talk about it. The audience tells them what aspects of their event they "connected" to and what aspects they didn't. By "connected," we mean that we recognized, or identified with, the performer's experience; their bodies communicated directly. No thought, analysis or interpretation.

We identify with a state of mind because we have experienced that same condition in our own lives. But there are states we haven't directly experienced, yet we feel they reside in our psyche. We may not be able to identify them but they are recognizable, states stored in all human experience. Maybe you've witnessed someone in a trance state exhibit­ing exotic behavior, or an autistic child rocking back and forth, their mind obviously elsewhere, or the Whirling Dervishes. These may not be expe­riences you have had, but if you relax and fully accept them through your body in the moment, you will find them familiar.

If the audience doesn't connect to the experience of the performer, it's because of one of two reasons. Either, the performer has distanced herself from what she is expressing and is not reflecting her immediate experience—audiences are uncomfortable with the discrepancy between the performer and the performance, the space within which the performer is judging, planning, dying. They feel that something's not right. They're being bamboozled—or, the audience, for whatever reason, is not letting the actor's intention touch them.

Being audience to one another is part of our education. It's another way to stretch and experience ourselves. We watch each other drip and leak then we speak from our individual recognitions. When we perform, we repeatedly dispel secrets from our private worlds; when we are in the audience watching others, we recognize those secrets. Our voices talk of humanness. Nothing's personal. "Privacy" is a burdensome concept.