Lab Report #21: How and Why to Externalize Your Insides
findings from playing with our personal guidance system
Dear Ludic Liberators,
At last week’s Lab, immersive theater maker and game designer Janet Howe led us in a cozy 90-minute exploration of personal joys, strengths, and accomplishments and invited us to use the data to chart the path of our own futures. We played with and created new self-guiding practices, using our interior symbology, divinatory techniques, and dynamics from some favorite party games!
I won’t reveal Janet’s specific process secrets here (you had to be there), but this particular Lab embodied a theory that has been brewing in Ludic Liberation investigations for some time — the theory of how and why to externalize our insides.
When I say “externalize insides,” I am not talking about producing any literal digestive or surgical excretions, nor am I talking about the metaphorical practice of “spilling your guts.” What I’m talking about is the act of taking the affective, cognitive, imaginative stuff that’s swirling inside our heads and nervous systems and representing it using something tangible or manipulatable: a piece of paper, a rock, or pillow, text in a google doc, a drawing, a repeated motion of the body. Once we have the inside thing outside us, we can begin to change our relationship to it. We can play with it. We can study it. We can transform it. We can invent a different game for it. We can make it into a playground, rather than feel like it’s playing an involuntary game on us.
At the Lab last week, we specifically played with externalizing our indecisions regarding the near future. What project should I work on next? How do I get unstuck in my business? What do I need to do to make new friends? Should I choose option A or B? While the potential pathways may involve specific directions and concrete commitments, our internal indecisions are made up of swirly and slippery and hard to pin down psychic stuff, all mixed up together in a murky soup.
The contents of this soup are aptly illustrated by the popular rendering of the 7 of Cups from the Rider Waite Smith Tarot Deck. In this card, a person appears mystified by a display of 7 gold chalices floating in front of them on a cloud. Each gold cup contains a symbolically-rich image: a human head, a glowing figure covered by a shroud, a snake, a tower, a collection of shiny jewels, a wreath, and a dragon. In a reading, the card typically represents the querent’s (person who is consulting the cards) relationship to a choice or situation they are facing: the querent’s dreams, desires, fears, and fantasies about the thing in question. The cups’ imaginal contents aren’t actualities, they are projections of possibilities, the internal swirly psychic stuff cast outwards. Each unknown-to-us future experience may involve finding a treasure, experiencing an epiphany, an encounter with a hidden danger, a rise to a position in a revered structure (or, alternatively an institutional trap).
We never know what the future will bring, other than the potential for everything. (Oh, and eventual, certain death).
So how should we ever decide what to do and which way to go? We need a compass, a personal GPS. This is where “externalizing insides” comes in.
A familiar if somewhat crude way of externalizing our insides about an indecision might involve making a Pros & Cons list. Making a Pros & Cons list is a game we play with ourselves! It isn’t a terrible game—it’s one way of helping us externalize some facts about a choice. But because it’s most often associated with rational decision-making, the Pros & Cons list might be quite constraining to the more holistic way we actually make decisions about our lives. For example, you might not feel it is appropriate to write “just have an unexplainable bad gut feeling about it” on the Cons side or “reminded me of a cool dream I had 3 months ago” on the Pros side, because these data points might feel too loose and subjective for something as “objective” as this tool claims to be.
But if our phenomenological experience of life isn’t actually objective, why should our decision-making process be? Our personal compass ought to include the murky ineffable stuff, and will probably be completely different than someone else’s internal navigation system.
What can you make your compass out of?
Janet invited us to use symbols our personal joy, accomplishments, and trusted techniques for grounding as some locators of our True North. Some other things you can use are: your core values, your body’s energetic responses to a particular prompt or image, muscle checks, emotional reactions, dream communication, channeled wisdom from your higher self, spontaneous visuals that occur to you, personal myths and metaphors. You can externalize these things using just as many varied tools: playing cards (my fave!), a personal oracle deck made of drawings or collages, wooden blocks, a dream journal, crystals or dioramas, even a verbal description of an image that represents some part of your swirly psychic stuff. Really almost anything outside of you that you can manipulate in some way. (I remember years ago being really inspired by the work of David Gauntlett whose research involved asking people to create Lego scenes representing their identities). If you like the elegance of a two column list, why not make a list of Values and Vices about the option (which of YOUR values does this choice honor and which personal vices might it be in danger of feeding), of Fears and Hopes, of worst-case-scenarios or best-case-scenarios, a list of colors-feelings-smells-tastes associated with choice A versus choice B. Or– why not get two friends together and ask them to act as advocate and prosecutor of the choice, revealing underlying considerations that more lukewarm comparisons would not be able to arrive at? By externalizing our insides, we can play with our indecision, and remember that there’s no “objectively correct” choice – it’s only our thinking that makes it so!
Many previously shared Ludic Liberation games involve externalizing your insides. Probably my favorite game, Desire Sourcery (chronicled in the Lab Report on desire) helps to externalize the hidden sources of wants, using a simple looping sentence structure. The Playful Year Generator helps to externalize our plans and resolutions in an experimental way using a deck of playing cards. Other Ludic Liberation games that play with externalization are Truth Detector (a game of externalizing our internal conflicts), Measuring Sticks (a game of externalizing the standards that harass us and helping us make new, more liberating markers to follow), Energy Blocks (a game of externalizing and transforming our energetic obstacles during the creative process), Meta-Metabolism (meta game of externalizing internal experiences), and SYZYGY (the board game that plays with externalizing our sleeping and waking dreams).
Are you interested in playing any of these games? If you’d like to experiment with externalizing your insides about some decision, direction, or action you’re stuck on, I’m currently running a special: sign up for the annual Lab Report subscription and get 11% off the already discounted annual cost AND a complimentary 1:1 session with me where we play out of the Inside Outside games in the Ludic Liberation repertoire 🎉. You will also get free admission to the Ludic Liberation Labs for a whole year (if this was QVC, the screen would flash “Additional $180 VALUE!”). And of course you will receive the slab report, which regularly includes secret playtest invitations. The offer is only good until December 1, 2021, which is coming up alarmingly soon.
I’ve been trying to understand the role of 1:1 play in my Ludic Liberation practice. The truest reason I can name for why I invite others for 1:1 play sessions is because as a Gamemaker, it brings me immense pleasure to observe other people play these games. The encounter is always emotional, revelatory, intimate, and fun. Observing the infinite variety of how people play also enables me to continuously refine the games so that they can be more fun and more liberatory! Because the session demands deep attention from me and is meant to create a psychic shift in the player, I have found that some form of energetic exchange is necessary to enable the process and create significant enough stakes for the player to benefit from the experience. One easy/convenient form of such exchange is $, but other forms are possible too (e.g., art, books, other kinds of sessions or services or space holding). If you’re curious about 1:1 Ludic Liberation play and want to propose a trade, please reach out!
Oh, also, next month I’ll be visiting The Stoa (a “digital campfire” for philosophical experimentation and innovation) to talk about Ludic Liberation! The event is free, and is called “Pegging Yourself w/ Ludic Liberation” in reference to the Ludic Liberation practice of the “PEG” – Personal Existential Game. Maybe I’ll see you there?
Are there games you play that involve externalizing your insides? Are there particular insides you find most difficult to externalise? Reply and let me know!
🗓 Don't miss any more labs! The Ludic Liberation Lab meets every 2nd Thursday of the month, 6-7:30pm Eastern Time, so add it to your calendar. WE'LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH ON DECEMBER 9th!
Humbly Externalizing My Insides For You Since 2020,
Natalia
Existential Game Maker/Destroyer