ATAOS
A Performative Research between Attachments and (un)conditional Love
ATAOS is a performative research looking into healing trauma by focusing deeper into the possibilities of the body, mind, spirit and heart, as four core elements which need to synchronise in order to transform existing patterns and limiting belief systems. I want to investigate different performative acts, simulating shamanic/healing rituals, which are constructed to seem either very real or very fake, crossing boundaries of personal experience of myself and of audiences, continuously shifting the perception between reality and fiction. In the frame of creating a fake Institute for Healing Trauma at the shore of a lake, I want to experiment with ideas to introduce energy work and spirituality, not only into the Performative Arts, but also into communities and societies which are still reticent and judgemental towards everything which is not or can not be scientifically explained. My current research focuses on psychoanalytical methods of trauma healing and on psychedelic assisted trauma-therapy, which I am translating into a concept for a durational performance, trying to shift the frame of what is performative or what is art or even what is science or therapy. I want to further develop these ideas into a multimedia publication, mimicking a magic act of Healing, similar to an ayahuasca/psilocybin ceremony, analysing collective healing through the experience of emotional pain and healing frequencies.
We all have the capacity to “self-program” and create new mental models and revise old mental models. Creating our beliefs, feelings, and thoughts allows us to open to the unknown, we release our self from what we already think, feel, and believe. When there is a field of “emptiness” we are able to see space rather than barrier, new possibilities can emerge; we are free to go beyond our limiting beliefs. (The Transtheoretical Model (TTM), Prochaska & DiClemente, 1983; Prochaska, DiClemente, & Norcross, 1992, http://web.mit.edu/collaborationtbox/module13/2016/Module13-4.pdf)
LETTER 1
I took all my shoes. All twenty pairs, in multiple designs and colours. One bag and a one way ticket to London. Enough coins in my wallet to hop on a Bus from there, to visit my friends, so I had told you. For months I had been planing this trip. My first solo show. A Houdini style disappearance out of my own life. Standing there in front of a completely empty canvas. I couldn’t tell you the truth. Out of fear? For you to turn me around? For him to break my legs? For wasting maybe the only chance I had to follow my dreams?
Should I regret? Not for a second, no! regret I can not feel. Ashamed? Perhaps. What for… for following my path? For being me? For being born a wiser man than him? Perhaps. I couldn’t tell you where I go.
When I left,
and I knew I will,
I had to, it was the last call.
I would have died, probably killed myself, or jumped off a tower like most of my friends.
Our times were dark and there was little hope.
I am sorry I lied. I am happy I did. It has brought me here. I am on the right path…its mine.
LETTER 1
I took all my shoes. All twenty pairs, in multiple designs and colours. One bag and a one way ticket to London. Enough coins in my wallet to hop on a Bus from there, to visit my friends, so I had told you. For months I had been planing this trip. My first solo show. A Houdini style disappearance out of my own life. Standing there in front of a completely empty canvas. I couldn’t tell you the truth. Out of fear? For you to turn me around? For him to break my legs? For wasting maybe the only chance I had to follow my dreams?
Should I regret? Not for a second, no! regret I can not feel. Ashamed? Perhaps. What for… for following my path? For being me? For being born a wiser man than him? Perhaps. I couldn’t tell you where I go.
When I left,
and I knew I will,
I had to, it was the last call.
I would have died, probably killed myself, or jumped off a tower like most of my friends.
Our times were dark and there was little hope.
I am sorry I lied. I am happy I did. It has brought me here. I am on the right path…its mine.
ESSAY 1.1.1.
Transformation is a continuous process, shaping the base for healthy growth and development, on any layer of the human experience, connecting the body-mind-spirit Pyramid with the roots of existence and beyond. Nonsensical thoughts you might say at this point. Indeed little facts and references seem to be supporting my inner belief systems at this point of my journey, more of a bunch of ‘hunches’, as Peter Brook would utter, which consistently trigger me to take action and embark on a quest of discovery and research. So here I am, now, preempting that what originally I thought to be a Solo Performance of Identities, has already transformed into a Collective exploration of Self Love and mutual support destined to take place between roots and branches of ancient mushrooms and trees, dancing with the emotions of deep waters, purging and releasing into the fire what no longer serves me, nor you, nor anyone else willing or curious to look into the multidimensional shift of realities that comes with the processes of TRANSCENDENCE.
A simple Tale, a personal story, as it is common for filmic dramaturgy, becomes the metaphor for the Universal truth. Intertwined and interconnected are all my values, experiences and so far gathered facts. Still missing details, pieces of the puzzle, frames left empty
Just because you might find it unbearable to face your own truth doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try fixing my inner blockages and fight for my right to heal and live a successful life free of judgement and toxic attachments. In reality we are bond to each other in infinite frames and mirrors. My Truth reflects through you and shows me more clearly where I am stuck in old patterns and belief systems. Regardless how much I look outside of myself to fix the problems of others, yours and those of an entire world society, I seem to keep failing only to be triggered and impulsively react to the emotions stored inside my own body. As soon as I think I have cracked open and released one form of attachment, a new one appears and challenges me to take on the fight from scratch. The result is alienation, separation, possible heartbreak, grief, anger, depression and extreme amounts of anxiety.
My whole life I have been guided by love, working hard to receive it, to deserve it, knowing that nevertheless it is within me at all times and I don’t need anyone to bring it into light. Yet are we not all addicted to it and dependant on the gratification of others? Are we not all pursuing heroic quests of finding true love, finding our soul mates, possibly even our twin flames or at least our person, with whom to spend a lifetime unveiling the hidden parts of our true self? Needless to say that in the process it becomes more and more clear that nobody can ever satisfy the desire for the kind of love which we have never received, which we have never learned to truly embrace. A dual kind of love, partially related to having never learned to fully love our selves without expectation or judgement, and also connected by an invisible umbilical cord to our mothers, who sooner or later deceived us, deserted us, or even were not able to begin with to connect and love us without demand and without any expectation of being good enough or doing the right thing. If you look back at your childhood, no matter what your story is, at some point in time, there was surely a moment in which you felt abandoned, once or even twice, repeatedly, endlessly. A state which most probably lead to a sense of clinging to love, clinging to the next best person to fulfil the gap and the emptiness. Our mothers perhaps didn’t even mean to abandon us physically, mentally or emotionally, yet in our perception of vulnerable creatures, dependant on safety and someone else to help us survive, we connected the only dots we knew, which was to fear death by being left alone, even if only for a second or two, in order to go to work or get groceries or just get a moment alone, as mothers surely must be exhausted by the amount of availability and focus they need to give to their children, themselves being just humans in need of some ‘me’ time, as you surely know.
So it seems our lives are guided by fear finally, not love, as we all grow up with a sense of dependancy to be fed and to be kept alive. Few of us really have the luck to be taught throughout childhood and adolescence how to be self-sufficient, how to grow a strong sense of survival capabilities as to not be holding on to someone else needing to come and rescue us. But even if so, most of our survival strategies are about physical matters, perhaps mental ones too, learning to eat, walk, grow strength, resistance, endurance, make a living and make sure we have all we need, especially shelter and food, but also to think through complex problems and find solutions, be more and more efficient in dealing with the riddles of life and the challenges that keep multiplying and intensifying as we grow older, just enough to keep us floating on the surface or staying alive. Some perhaps develop a stronger sense of discipline, determination and focus, as to become successful in different fields and actually thrive in life, not just survive. Nevertheless, on an emotional level most of us are crippled, deeply handicapped, with little or no skills to express or process any of the feelings we experience daily from the moment of being born. Nobody really ever teaches us how to master our emotional intelligence, how to understand and digest our emotions and especially how to grasp the diversity and intricacy of the biggest fear which we all have in common, the fear of death.
From this point fo view Love becomes a surrogate, masking the actual struggle, or better to say, the lack of love, experienced in the first months and years, most probably intensifies the fear of death, triggering a deep need for attaching to whomever, very much like to a rope hanging down a cliff, never wanting to let go, always feeling imbalanced and terrified, if even for a second the rope might move or slide away, or disappear. As our mothers slowly become mentally and physically obsolete, we do accept separation as a normal process of growing up, yet the emotional bond, and the unhealed anxiety of being left alone, probably never fades completely. On top of this emotion, we build other emotions, collecting experiences and sensations, which in various ways mimic and simulate the same, challenging us with the need to learn on our own to protect ourselves, love ourselves and trust that we will survive physically, mentally and emotionally on our own, becoming healthy self-sufficient individuals capable of becoming role models for the next generations. Unfortunately most of us though find it easier to focus attention on other things or other people, as the process of self development and self discovery is hard and painful and perhaps even far too complex to be mastered. Trying to take the path of least resistance, staying in the comfort zone of mediocre experience, we all prefer to avoid and deny what is hidden beyond the surfaces of social life. Even more so, going far into our selves, we all deal with the most recent visible traumas experienced in life, fixing imminent pain by looking at the direct causes. Few methods and sciences really dig deep into revealing the originating pain, which most probably lead us to a series of repetition of events, all meant to trigger and reflect the emotional landscape of where it all started. To come to such conclusions would imply we have to stop for a second looking at the cancerous disease of the present moment, trusting that by not healing that but diving deeper into its source, dig up all the past blockages and traumas, will result in a more holistic healing process, with chances of actually recovery.
Coming full circle to the beginning of this, I came to realise that most people are reluctant, or afraid really, to go down the rabbit whole of their original suffering, not to mention that perhaps considering also a karmic reflection on past lives suffering might also be needed, but lets stay in the here and now, the current reality, one human life worth of emotional journeys, in which we get stuck infinitely in loops of attachments and so called limiting beliefs, becoming a trend and a market for quick fixes and miracle healings, designed to erase our subconscious blocks and anxieties. Many of those I have been studying diligently, convinced myself that it is possible to erase, perhaps even without understanding mentally, what holds us back from being our true self and living a joyful life. I had to accept in the process, that you were not there yet, that all the perspectives and complexities of strategies were too many for you to comprehend at once, that a process which took me almost 20 years was not to be told in the frame of one hour, and especially that you were not as keen as me to stare your demons in the eye, as we were on different stages of our emotional growth, me diving deep into my shadows, you barely starting to define and express your emotions. Somewhere in-between we found love, deeply connected through our souls, recognising each other in the reflections and mirrors, triggering each other to see more clearly and more in depth where we are at and what we need to keep working on, but it became soon evident that our journeys are not fully aligned, and that despite my healing talents and vast knowledge of trauma therapy, as well as diverse skills of physical, mental, emotional and energetic healing, I could neither take responsibility for your process nor fully help you deal with your fears. Nobodies fears actually. Hence I came to accept that the only process I can still research on, and to some extent push forward and consciously shift patterns, was my own.
So I started to investigate and dive deeper into my own shadows and my own pain. I gave up trying to save others and help them heal, but instead brought attention to the fact that each person I have met in my life has merely been a mirror of my own soul. You have reflected me the most in this process, or perhaps the time of our encounter now has been the most intense I have experienced, as I am coming closer to the truth of my own darkness and the depth of my suffering as well as of my light. For years I have been searching for the one unconditional love, the other part of my soul, only to fall repeatedly into the depression of learning that I have wasted my time searching outside of myself what has always been within. Love has been in my heart from the beginning of time, yet the reality of social systems and the reflection of family patterns have made me loose faith from a very young age.
My whole life I have been guided by love, working hard to receive it, to deserve it, knowing that nevertheless it is within me at all times and I don’t need anyone to bring it into light. Yet are we not all addicted to it and dependant on the gratification of others? Are we not all pursuing heroic quests of finding true love, finding our soul mates, possibly even our twin flames or at least our person, with whom to spend a lifetime unveiling the hidden parts of our true self? Needless to say that in the process it becomes more and more clear that nobody can ever satisfy the desire for the kind of love which we have never received, which we have never learned to truly embrace. A dual kind of love, partially related to having never learned to fully love our selves without expectation or judgement, and also connected by an invisible umbilical cord to our mothers, who sooner or later deceived us, deserted us, or even were not able to begin with to connect and love us without demand and without any expectation of being good enough or doing the right thing. If you look back at your childhood, no matter what your story is, at some point in time, there was surely a moment in which you felt abandoned, once or even twice, repeatedly, endlessly. A state which most probably lead to a sense of clinging to love, clinging to the next best person to fulfil the gap and the emptiness. Our mothers perhaps didn’t even mean to abandon us physically, mentally or emotionally, yet in our perception of vulnerable creatures, dependant on safety and someone else to help us survive, we connected the only dots we knew, which was to fear death by being left alone, even if only for a second or two, in order to go to work or get groceries or just get a moment alone, as mothers surely must be exhausted by the amount of availability and focus they need to give to their children, themselves being just humans in need of some ‘me’ time, as you surely know.
So it seems our lives are guided by fear finally, not love, as we all grow up with a sense of dependancy to be fed and to be kept alive. Few of us really have the luck to be taught throughout childhood and adolescence how to be self-sufficient, how to grow a strong sense of survival capabilities as to not be holding on to someone else needing to come and rescue us. But even if so, most of our survival strategies are about physical matters, perhaps mental ones too, learning to eat, walk, grow strength, resistance, endurance, make a living and make sure we have all we need, especially shelter and food, but also to think through complex problems and find solutions, be more and more efficient in dealing with the riddles of life and the challenges that keep multiplying and intensifying as we grow older, just enough to keep us floating on the surface or staying alive. Some perhaps develop a stronger sense of discipline, determination and focus, as to become successful in different fields and actually thrive in life, not just survive. Nevertheless, on an emotional level most of us are crippled, deeply handicapped, with little or no skills to express or process any of the feelings we experience daily from the moment of being born. Nobody really ever teaches us how to master our emotional intelligence, how to understand and digest our emotions and especially how to grasp the diversity and intricacy of the biggest fear which we all have in common, the fear of death.
From this point fo view Love becomes a surrogate, masking the actual struggle, or better to say, the lack of love, experienced in the first months and years, most probably intensifies the fear of death, triggering a deep need for attaching to whomever, very much like to a rope hanging down a cliff, never wanting to let go, always feeling imbalanced and terrified, if even for a second the rope might move or slide away, or disappear. As our mothers slowly become mentally and physically obsolete, we do accept separation as a normal process of growing up, yet the emotional bond, and the unhealed anxiety of being left alone, probably never fades completely. On top of this emotion, we build other emotions, collecting experiences and sensations, which in various ways mimic and simulate the same, challenging us with the need to learn on our own to protect ourselves, love ourselves and trust that we will survive physically, mentally and emotionally on our own, becoming healthy self-sufficient individuals capable of becoming role models for the next generations. Unfortunately most of us though find it easier to focus attention on other things or other people, as the process of self development and self discovery is hard and painful and perhaps even far too complex to be mastered. Trying to take the path of least resistance, staying in the comfort zone of mediocre experience, we all prefer to avoid and deny what is hidden beyond the surfaces of social life. Even more so, going far into our selves, we all deal with the most recent visible traumas experienced in life, fixing imminent pain by looking at the direct causes. Few methods and sciences really dig deep into revealing the originating pain, which most probably lead us to a series of repetition of events, all meant to trigger and reflect the emotional landscape of where it all started. To come to such conclusions would imply we have to stop for a second looking at the cancerous disease of the present moment, trusting that by not healing that but diving deeper into its source, dig up all the past blockages and traumas, will result in a more holistic healing process, with chances of actually recovery.
Coming full circle to the beginning of this, I came to realise that most people are reluctant, or afraid really, to go down the rabbit whole of their original suffering, not to mention that perhaps considering also a karmic reflection on past lives suffering might also be needed, but lets stay in the here and now, the current reality, one human life worth of emotional journeys, in which we get stuck infinitely in loops of attachments and so called limiting beliefs, becoming a trend and a market for quick fixes and miracle healings, designed to erase our subconscious blocks and anxieties. Many of those I have been studying diligently, convinced myself that it is possible to erase, perhaps even without understanding mentally, what holds us back from being our true self and living a joyful life. I had to accept in the process, that you were not there yet, that all the perspectives and complexities of strategies were too many for you to comprehend at once, that a process which took me almost 20 years was not to be told in the frame of one hour, and especially that you were not as keen as me to stare your demons in the eye, as we were on different stages of our emotional growth, me diving deep into my shadows, you barely starting to define and express your emotions. Somewhere in-between we found love, deeply connected through our souls, recognising each other in the reflections and mirrors, triggering each other to see more clearly and more in depth where we are at and what we need to keep working on, but it became soon evident that our journeys are not fully aligned, and that despite my healing talents and vast knowledge of trauma therapy, as well as diverse skills of physical, mental, emotional and energetic healing, I could neither take responsibility for your process nor fully help you deal with your fears. Nobodies fears actually. Hence I came to accept that the only process I can still research on, and to some extent push forward and consciously shift patterns, was my own.
So I started to investigate and dive deeper into my own shadows and my own pain. I gave up trying to save others and help them heal, but instead brought attention to the fact that each person I have met in my life has merely been a mirror of my own soul. You have reflected me the most in this process, or perhaps the time of our encounter now has been the most intense I have experienced, as I am coming closer to the truth of my own darkness and the depth of my suffering as well as of my light. For years I have been searching for the one unconditional love, the other part of my soul, only to fall repeatedly into the depression of learning that I have wasted my time searching outside of myself what has always been within. Love has been in my heart from the beginning of time, yet the reality of social systems and the reflection of family patterns have made me loose faith from a very young age.
inspired and continued from ZOOMdotEYE performative research @Theater Im Depot, Dortmund ............... https://youtu.be/4fKXxMAg0eI