Lucid Improvisations: Part III

A Socially Creative Art Form

I hope the above glimpse into the transformational serial dramas that are ready to play out within all of us, at any age, bears out my opening analogy between surfing and Lucid Improvisations. Riding on our inner motion pictures we ride the waves of our inner lights. They pose continuous challenges to our bodyminds, selecting those challenges we currently need and are ready to meet; and they meet them with surprising ingenuity and grace, producing profoundly illuminating revelations, resolutions and lasting transformations.

Lucid Improvisations are a socially creative, interactive form of expression that brings our natural but hidden capacity for sustained compassion to light. Being socially creative is one public service I believe we all can and, underneath it all, want to perform. Nothing we do is more touching and heartwarming to us than being effectively compassionate; that is, seeing our compassion make a difference in others. Yet, in "going with the flow," we rarely find or make occasions for this. Lucid Improvisations fill this void. Working in what I call sweet time – or growing time – we give each other sufficient time and depth of focus to enjoy discovering and unfurling this much needed side of ourselves and each other.

Because Lucid Improvisations develop personal powers of observation and expression and transformation as well as social strengths simultaneously, I would like to see this new form of communal communication become a basic component of artists-in-community-service programs such as I was honored to be part of when I taught for Teachers & Writers Collaborative under the auspices of the Congressionally funded CETA Artists Project.

I have seen imaging students in many different circumstances filling in missing pieces in their development, and turning their lives towards what’s new within them, thus freeing themselves from replaying same old stories. Enacting their images with others during Lucid Improvisations shows them to that deep and clear level of harmonious interaction where good feelings take precedence over hard feelings, and creativity remains intact, ready to perform the self-healing and re-creation we need to perform, by bringing out new acts in our imagination which have the power to inspire good conduct.

As Lucid Improvisations reveal that we can engage the naturally self-correcting balancing act that remains alive and well at the core of our being, they establish a happier state of expectations in which our natural abilities come through, so that what seemed impossible for us to achieve becomes possible. The more we orient ourselves towards exploring this deeply promising order within us, the more we see the trails of inner light leading us into dramatic actions that let our hidden strengths, full palette of energies, and true colors fly. We gradually learn that during these heroic adventures we can count on the true signals our bodies give us to prevent us from being led astray.

Composing Our Lives

Dr. Ahsen thinks many artists become artists because they are starved for images. That was certainly true for me. In my first twenty-five years of writing, before I met Ahsen, I had devoted much time and effort to developing metaphors, thinking I was "seeing" ever more clearly. In fact I was not actually seeing or sensing complete images, and not releasing biologically sound and needed structures and energies. Now I know

I was only constructing approximations of situations whose structural dynamics I can now grasp clearly and wholly.

When I began studying eidetic imaging – after twenty-five years largely devoted to dance, painting and poetry as well as therapy – I could not sense, behold, tap into, or follow the energies of the fleeting images that showed up. Ahsen's fearless and utterly sensitive approach enabled me to finally contact my inner energy resources directly, see exactly how I am moved by them, and can dance with them.

I began seeing that our true or deepest callings and ambitions are rooted in an impetus to gain experience and develop strengths in areas of action we missed out on. I was very interested to hear that Buddhists speak not of good and evil but of skilled and unskilled behavior. My experience teaching eidetic bears this view out.

Lucid Improvisations set up practice grounds that go with us wherever we go; grounds for practicing skills we didn’t know we could bring out and practice. Such practice frees us from replaying states in which our behavior remains frozen in fear, and yields new acts of creative conduct showing us how we can compose new lives with them, greatly enlarging our imaginations by opening to the presence and range of each other’s imagination.

Discovering Centering

In his article on "the technique of literary consciousness" quoted earlier, Dr. Ahsen says, “The literary technique ... unleashes an intensely centered movement of consciousness leading to resurgence of vital permanent effects.” This centering trend in consciousness, bringing to light our natural powers of coherence and coordination, may be the most unexpected and yet most useful dynamic that eidetic empathy imaging engages us in.

This dynamic accounts for the promising, hopeful, ebullient spirit that sustains Lucid Improvisations even while going through difficult material. At this level we expect to discover the gifts and powers of our imaginations, instead of bugaboos.

Lucid Improvisations provide a playground where our callings can make themselves heard and felt, and our shyest ambitions – which may be our most important ones – can come into play.

My images, for instance, have repeatedly brought to mind my child’s eye view of Leonard Bernstein dancing on the podium, conducting an orchestra in my home town in Arizona, when I was about seven. The recurrent attraction of the image is in seeing my calling to dance and my calling to conduct empathy groups united in one vibrant body, as illustrated in “I’ll Teach You A Lesson.”

An Art Of Conduct

The word conduct, as a verb and a noun, comes from the Latin root conducere meaning "to lead together." Living in a time where people are giving themselves over to what is known as niche consciousness, we all have a great need to discover the images within us that can counter this further fragmentation, images we all have whose function is to lead us together so we can experience our own natural personal and social coherence.

By dwelling on eidetic images during Lucid Improvisations, and taking advantage of Ahsen's rigorous new scientific grasp of their powers, we set ourselves up to delight in discovering and sharing that level of imagination which reveals both how well we can conduct ourselves, and how beautifully we come together, when staying in touch with the naturally fluent lucidity of these self-and mutually illuminating images.

Each session of Lucid Improvisations gives participants a more dramatically clear understanding of the educational and healing function that improvisation can perform in our lives whenever we choose to live up to this wisdom that is alive within us all. The format I've developed provides a systematic chance to be prepared to improvise, which we need to know how to do at least as well as we know how to prepare to be prepared.

Practicing Lucid Improvisations will help those who need to research their relation to scripted parts just as much as those who seek to improvise, because they will get more precisely in touch with the living images that are their keys to good performance in either situation.