by kate swooboda

As I type this, I am sitting at the Alameda Free Library in Alameda, California. The local school district has just finished a unit on ancient Egypt, and set up on a nearby table is a display of cardboard pyramids and clay-modeled. All of them are lopsided; all of them are unevenly painted. One pyramid near me has glitter on it, and something tells me that while the Pharaohs might have had gold, they weren’t inclined to dust it all over the pyramids (though maybe some fifth-grader who just finished the unit on ancient Egypt knows more about that than I do).

The thought occurred to me as I was walking by these displays: “Maybe we’re never supposed to stop learning and living that way.” The visual way. The creative way. The lopsided and uneven way. The way where we immerse our hands in something sticky and colorful and where, since we’re not going to replicate real Egyptian pyramids to scale anyway, we might as well have fun. Bring on the glitter!

As a former teacher of English, the thing that broke my heart the most was that I met so many students who “hated English.” They “hated” reading, they said. Ooof! In goes the knife. They “hated” writing. Ooof! The knife has been twisted. I didn’t take it personally, but it was sad to see and I hoped to change it. I wanted them to see that reading and writing were fun, an escape, an opportunity to temporarily live the lives of others, a powerful exercise in putting your life in your own hands, a chance to speak your truth. Somewhere along the line, the classrooms of children who oooh! and aaaahhh! at each twist and turn of a book at story time grow up and become people who don’t want to write an essay in which they demonstrate critical thinking (with perfect grammar. And thesis statements. And topic sentences).

And who can blame them? I hated grading those essays, so my guess is that they hated writing them. And what else was there to assign, with an educational system that seemingly says, somewhere around the age of ten, that we are no longer to bother with moving our bodies, or with creativity, or with matters of the heart and spirit—no, now we need the right answers. We begin to exist from the neck, up.

Many of us don’t shift out of that space after school. For instance, this is fairly common in my coaching practice:  A client reports something fantastic on our call. “That’s great!” I’ll say, because it is. “How did you celebrate yourself?”

The line suddenly grows quiet. “I hadn’t even thought about that,” they might say.

We grow older and, unless we start consciously steering ourselves differently, it can be easy to start existing from the neck, up. Living from the heart? Ridiculous! How “Pollyanna”! Trusting that inner “YES” inside? Be realistic! Celebrate yourself? How arrogant! Reward yourself? What a waste of money! Do you think you’re supposed to get a reward for everything? Life doesn’t work that way!

Then we wonder why it can be hard to make our lives take flight in the way that we want them to. Why would we want to risk dreaming when, along the way, we’re going to deny ourselves periods of rest before going on, or we’re not going to get time to play, or we’re going to tell ourselves that what we feel isn’t as valuable as what we think? Living from the neck up is a recipe for burnout.

Now, if you recognize yourself in any of this, please know that I say none of this to condemn, or to admonish you into putting “Reward myself” on the to-do list. In fact, I actually think that the first step in this whole process of shifting so that we stop living from the neck up is to laugh. Yes, laugh. Consciously. It’s one of the tools that I use daily—taking one minute to do a laugh session where I simply laugh at nothing at all. Usually, when I invite clients into this they admit that they feel foolish. I know I certainly did, the first time I tried it with my own coach. What could be more foolish that laughing out loud, at nothing in particular?

Well, perhaps it is foolish—and few things are more fun. Babies laugh hundreds of times a day, while adults laugh only a few. Try a one-minute laugh session. Literally set a timer for one minute and then force yourself to laugh. Really get into it. Slap your knee. Guffaw. Laugh like Julia Child or Bart Simpson. Just force those puffs of air and then laugh at the silliness of it all.

Congratulations. You just took one step towards living from your whole body, not just from the neck up and all of the great things that logic and clear thinking can give you, but also from that place of inner joy that is in us all, that gets covered up easily by too many admonishments to “Be realistic.” (And in case you do want realistic reasons for laughing, there are studies to be found that say it supports blood flow, the immune system, etc.)

So often, I meet people who believe that to integrate creativity into their lives or to live with passion or to see dreams come true, there is this (often massive) list of  steps. “I just need to sit down and make myself do it,” someone might say of starting a creative practice. This sounds uncannily like my former students, sighing, wishing that they didn’t need to write a paper. The students who wrote the best papers found some passion for the argument, in order to write a good argumentative paper. Otherwise, the sentences marched along like ants in a row, and a few more trees were killed along the way.

Our educational system may still require formal writing almost to the exclusion of creative or expressive writing, but you, reading this, get to choose how you want to experience this day. I would even argue that dreams are not always the thing to go after. Stepping into practices that have some powerful purpose—a purpose like joy—naturally brings about what it is that we want. We don’t “do the stuff” to get to the joy—that’s thinking from the neck up. We step into the joy with where we are right now, and the doing or having of the stuff is a byproduct.

So where do you want to live, right now? Neck up, or whole body? Anyone want to join me for a laugh session?