THURSDAY 12/8 ~ Ludic Liberation Lab: AMBIVALENCE
Can we liberate our conflicting feelings?
Dear Ludic Liberators,
I like to argue that ambivalence is the highest form of love. When we can see and hold our own annoyance, disgust, disappointment, exhaustion towards another, and love them anyway, then we know we REALLY love them. Loving in ambivalence helps us stretch the thin line between love and hate and avoid polarizing our intense feelings.
But does the experience of ambivalence — of holding "simultaneous conflicting feelings" — necessarily liberate us from unrealistic expectations or simply help us settle for something ultimately unsatisfying? Does accepting too much ambivalence come from fear that we don't deserve to have what we really want?
Join December's Ludic Liberation Lab to play with Ambivalence! Are there aspects of your life you suspect you need to cultivate more ambivalence in? Are there others you'd like to make less ambivalent and possibly more intensely positive or more fully free? We will play an original game of AMBIVALENCE CALIBRATION to help us experiment with imagining new ambivalent possibilities for ourselves. Still ambivalent, but newly exciting!
This month's lab will be collaboratively facilitated by Natalia Stroika (Ludic Liberation founder) and Sarah Schwartz, a Baltimore-based writer and ritual maker (one day she may develop her presence on Instagram: @ritual_presence — if you connect with her there, she’ll be that much closer to making it happen).
🗓 THURSDAY, December 8, 2022
⏰ 6-7:30pm EDT
📍 Zoom
🎟 FREE but registration required!
The theme for Winter 2022-2023 Ludic Liberation Labs is ADULTING. What does it mean to become an adult? Does it mean giving up playing or inventing games? Does it mean keeping a calendar and having serious conversations and paying lots of bills? Can the enthusiastic acceptance of ADULT RESPONSIBILITIES be liberating?
This season, Ludic Liberation Lab will explore questions of ADULTING through games related to AMBIVALENCE, ACCOUNTABILITY, and BOUNDARIES! We'll need your help to make these topics fun and thrilling but ludic liberators believe that EVERYTHING CAN BE PLAYED WITH! Join the Labs and/or follow along in your personal existential experiments by subscribing to the Lab Report.