THE PARASITES WITHIN – TO PURGE OR TO PET by PLAYGRND

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  • February 9, 2026

THE PARASITES WITHIN – TO PURGE OR TO PET by PLAYGRND

We all have parasites in our lives…parasitic behaviors, relationships, habits that are draining our energy. In this session we had the distinct honor to step into our play power and decide: to integrate, or to purge? 

Before diving into the sticky work of confronting our inner parasites, we warmed our collective guts up with some grounding in the physical reality of our digestive systems. As those of us who engage in parts work know, we are so much more than an individual being. We have millions of microorganisms play-fighting, arguing and orgying in our bodies – transforming the world around us into our flesh. The gut is often referred to as the second mind because of the amount of information that gets processed through it, and translated into intuition. Rather than villainizing parasites on the whole, we offered a more holistic framing of their role within a whole digestive ecosystem – recognizing that some parasites co-evolved with us to help us digest things that would otherwise be allergens for our simple bodies. 

With this framing, we opened up with a collective appreciation for our gut biodiversity, inviting the group to collectively populate a whiteboard image of a GI tract with digestive enzymes (i.e. practices, relationships, places, perspectives – with a latinified name) that help us digest the crumbling reality around us. Folks introduced us to microbes like “Dancereleasius” and “Surfthewaveus”, and we got to appreciate each other’s enzymes by renaming ourselves and embodying those beings. Together we transformed into the belly of a whale – with a fully off mute soundscape of helpful microbe noises. 

Nourished by gratitude practice, we dove into a guided meditation to get squirmy with the more parasitic energies embodying our guts – through journaling, movement, sound exploration, and reflection. We then divided into breakout rooms where we introduced our cast of parasites, and had a playful talkshow to get to know a handful of parasites on a deeper level – learning about their origins stories, moments they show up in, needs that they are trying to meet with their presence, and different forms they’ve taken throughout their host’s life. The live studio audience was raucous – interacting with emojis, questions, and eventually some invitations to either “PURGE” or “INTEGRATE”! Obviously the host made the ultimate decision on whether to purge or integrate the parasite – but it was useful to hear other people’s perceptions and instincts when it came to these stickily extractive gut partners. 

We closed out our session with a probiotic gut replenishment – inviting folks to ask for what they needed from the collective. Folks suggested things like “self hug”, “visualize cleansing white light from your mouth to your anus”, “stretch up to the sky”, and other lovely practices that nourished us after the vulnerability and purging we did together. And of course, we directed folks to a folk herbalist comrade from whom they could order small batch parasite cleanse kits to continue to be in this practice at home. 

Typically at PLAYGRND we facilitate in person spaces, where there’s snack and socializing time buffering facilitated activities so people can get to know each other, and feel welcome and comfortable enough to open up and explore with us. We had previously done an iteration of this Parasite Cleanse Experience in our in person series Liberatory Laboratory, where we got to do scene work with our parasites — really sinking into the muck of codependent entanglement that they suck us into. We weren’t sure how this lab would translate online, but we were extremely impressed at the willingness of our virtual group to get goofy with us – at whatever pace worked for each individual. Getting to peek into the wild inner explorations that were happening on each zoom screen felt like looking at a series of petri dishes at the vastly colorful diversity of microbes. 

Because of the constraints of our session – being a new group of relative strangers with little shared context – it made sense for us to focus our inquiries inward, working with parasitic energies in our personal lives. Even so, it was interesting to witness patterns emerge across our differences – energies like “not enoughness”, “screen addiction”, and “overconsumption” sprouted up across the field in full bloom. It had us wondering about what could be possible with a consistent, focused, and trusting group of people doing this kind of exploration on a societal level – and the character play and clowning that would emerge from such investigations.

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This statement marks a shift in our orientation. While the values we describe have been an undercurrent of our work, they’ve drifted in and out of our awareness alongside other, sometimes contradictory, currents. Through writing this statement we attempt to swim in this one more faithfully:

Some strains of Buddhism and psychoanalysis meet in an anti-capitalist critique pushing us to look at the nature of desire as an endless self-perpetuating cycle of attainment and loss. The marketing for a product explicitly or implicitly says something like, “if you buy this product it will relieve your suffering.” These promises fail to disclose the truth about desire, at best, providing bandaids, or temporary resting places along a journey. At worst, their marketing and our participation in the fiction of fulfillment perpetuates even deeper and more prolonged suffering.

We aspire to consciously uncouple from the logic of commodity in what we offer at DPI. We attempt to disclose the truth regarding desire itself: that it endlessly perpetuates, and that no material or immaterial substance given to our psyche will ever truly nourish us; we are hungry and insatiable.

Through this orientation, where commodity acquisition offers transcendence, we attempt to offer immanence. Like monotheism’s vision of the afterlife as a relief from the present, capitalist consumption dangles a more pleasant future just ahead. We design structures and rituals to sanctify the mess of the now.

Even as we attempt rigor in this regard, we constantly fall into traps of desire. It is endlessly tempting to read salvation into our offer to sanctify the messes of the present. As facilitators we too want to be saved from suffering, and we unknowingly bake that longing into our offerings and affects. The same unfortunate situation occurs within both Buddhist and psychoanalytic traditions, where students encounter the truth of each system as a salvific balm.

Our task then is to keep insisting that we will not heal you. That you are always broken. And that playing with your brokenness, our primary task, will ultimately fail as well. And that, as Pema Chödrön insists, real bravery is not about holding on to hope, but about allowing ourselves to touch hopelessness directly. That when we lean into our groundlessness, rather than scrambling to escape it, we discover a deeper kind of courage — the willingness to rest in the unknown. Can we hold that immeasurable loss? Can we at least touch this loss together? Can we play with it not by only offering lightness and buoyancy to it, but also by merely sitting with each other with our shrunken, bated breaths, as we encounter aloneness together? That is the kind of deep play we aspire to offer.

We, the leadership and facilitators of The Deep Play Institute, want to speak to what it means for us to hold authority in our programs. We want to acknowledge the lineages of what we are offering, as well as our ignorance of many of the branches of those influences. In this acknowledgment, we borrow heavily from the language of Hana Van Der Kolk in their facilitation of somatic practices. The methods we offer are only in small part influenced by our own creativity—they derive from a complex interweaving of teachings and teachers, who themselves are complex interweavings of teachings and teachers. We will name these teachers, lineages, and influences wherever we are aware of them. However, as Hana writes: “We recognize that colonization, white supremacy, and globalization have erased some of the clarity of influence. We will do our best to unforget in the context of a culture that actively produces ignorance.”

At DPI we see it as our responsibility to explore barriers to play—to explore the question of: “What makes play hard?” We work this question into the structure of our play so that we don’t miss out on the wisdom that’s offered by participants of various social identities, legacies, and landscapes of ability. People of different races, classes, ethnicities, ages, neurodivergences, sexual orientations, abilities, and genders may find particular play with particular people and leaders challenging in ways that reflect the impacts of their intersecting identities. Rather than orient toward these hardnesses as obstructions, we work to see them as opportunities to play more deeply and reverentially with one another’s perceptual gifts. The play becomes magical, political, and deeply experimental as it continually welcomes friction as an impetus for creativity.

We recognize that people from marginalized groups—whether due to visible or invisible identities such as race, age, ability, or disability—often carry a heavier burden in shared spaces, including our play spaces. For someone with relative privilege, it might feel brave to say something like, “I feel shy” or “I’m struggling to speak up.” For someone from a marginalized identity, however, speaking a simple truth—such as acknowledging the discomfort of being the only visibly disabled person in the room—might feel profoundly vulnerable—in large part because they might reasonably expect the dominant group to struggle to gracefully receive this. The challenges and tensions in these spaces are not evenly distributed, and there can be an illusion of equality when everyone is invited to “speak hard truths.” At DPI we are committed to exploring ways to reduce and cope with this inequity. We also believe profound creativity and resilience can emerge when people play with these tensions, and discomfort can be redistributed in ways that are meaningful and liberatory for all involved.

When friction arises during our workshops, we observe it through the lens of the inequities and dynamics we’ve described. In these moments, we improvise to understand the unfolding group process and learn from the experience rather than rigidly follow our original plans. This is much easier said than done, however, and we recognize that as facilitators, our various privileges and limitations can impair our skillfulness in navigating how to responsibly and reverentially hold authority. Sometimes, our own shame, resistance, and avoidance prevent us from seeing, let alone playfully encountering, these frictions. We see these moments as some of our most profound opportunities for growth and seek feedback throughout our programs to that end. We hope for your grace and patience as we continue to refine our practice.​