UNLEASHING A CAN OF WORMS by alvie & momo

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  • January 20, 2026

UNLEASHING A CAN OF WORMS by alvie & momo

“What if we opened the can of worms and treated them as medicine?”

Like freeing worms from a can back into their vital role in the soil ecosystem, in this wormshop we invited our exiled emotions to the surface to wriggle, writhe, and rouse rabble. In this container of compassionate collective witness, we approached them not as problems to solve, but as portals to explore and characters to play with, rich with information about our needs, desires, and deepest wisdom. By bringing silliness and curiosity to what often feels most heavy and hard to access, we hope to build capacity to be with the range of our emotions and get curious about what lessons they hold for our personal healing and collective humanity. Using a combination of sensory exploration, guided visualizations, embodied character-building, journaling, improvisational interactions, and collective imagining, we gave these emotions permission to play, agency to speak their truths, and power to change us and writhe up to mold the world we most desire. 

Structure and Techniques:

OPENING THE CAN — worming up the facial muscles with eye and tongue stretches + vocalizations as an on-ramp to our fa-silly-tation, paired with a time-lapse video of worms devouring compost to elicit a spectrum of expressive reactions from disgust to fascination.

SETTING THE SCENE — Giving context about our intentions behind opening this can of worms in the broader sociopolitical landscape. While I *love* gushing about this, it can be hard to do so concisely, and I’d rather devote more time to the meat of the work— the interactive activities— than running my yap so much, so, some workshopping around brevity is certainly in order. I do love the way we ended this part with a SpongeBob clip that tied these themes to the worm metaphor rather perfectly, and we got a lot of feedback about others loving that crossover, too! 

DEEP PLAY AGREEMENTS— We modified these to include additional notes (in bold) around access needs and trauma-informed empowerment:

  • Honor Self: I agree to honor myself + my access needs, and speaking up (verbally or in the chat) if they aren’t being met. This entails setting my own boundaries, and not participating in any activity that crosses my threshold of consent. 
  • Honor Other:  I agree to honor other. This entails respecting the other person to set their own boundaries, and not pushing anyone to cross over a boundary that they set. 
  • Explore My Edge:  I agree to explore my edge, knowing that i can opt out at any time. This entails assessing where I am in a given moment (between emotional risk and safety) and taking a step in the direction of emotional risk, with the understanding that this brings growth and transformation. (Expanding window of CHOICE rather than window of “tolerance” — we get to choose how deep we go!)
  • Confidentiality. I agree to not share any name-identifying information from this program with anyone outside of it.  


OVERVIEW THE AGENDA — This was an important addition we made after our test-run of the wormshop where a number of people mentioned their desire to know what types of activities we had planned and what durations to expect.

WORM UP — 

  • 6-direction Clown Breath (from Barnaby from Clown Spirit) – can be done sitting or standing+moving, or just with imagination. It can be hard for some folks with trauma to engage with traditional breathing exercises, but this one provided an array of embodiment options in terms of posture/ movement that made it feel like more of a dance, which folks loved! 
  • popcorn style “we are // i am” exercise (adopted from Aaron from DPI)— can answer verbally or in the chat. I always really love the broad range of responses that come out of this — I personally tend to opt for the hyper-specific, often disgusting details in each setting as my answer (I wonder what that says about me? feels like a Rorschach in itself!) but there are always also some deeply beautiful, poetic, and even tragic responses as well that tend to bring me to tears. 
  • sensory exploration with objects around room
    • worms have taste buds all over their body – how can you taste with your whole being?
    • noticing what attraction and repulsion feel like in the body
      — This was an important foreshadowing activity for our parts work to come, and I love how well it fit with our metaphor!


SOLO EXPLORATION — 

  • Guided visualization from the Creative Consciousness Healing Oracle Deck by Johanna Wright — someone from Frankie Simmon’s Habitual Magic cohort turned me onto this deck and it fit our vibe so so perfectly!
  • Guided exploration of exiled emotions internally — playing with sensation, shape, movement, sound..


CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE — 

  • 1-on-1 character interviewing with curious witness (in breakout rooms, for those wanting to interact) — encouraging folks to feel free to respond using words, gibberish/sounds, gestures, or chat, and get curious + creative + make up their own follow up questions
  • Embodiment / journal / doodle / ponder time (if solo play is preferred)
    — we spent a long time hashing out logistics of how to make this section accessible to a whole variety of needs for entry-points to exploration, given that shadow work is *hard*, vulnerable work and sometimes you need to come in the side-door via clowning rather than allowing the ego-mind to form explanatory narratives— why not create *even more* side-doors of different modalities to try on for size in the different rounds?
    — we tried out having folks add a # sign to the beginning of their name if they did NOT want to be placed in a breakout room, which worked out great (once we cleared up the confusion about the options folks could choose) as the majority of folks *did* want to participate in the 1-on-1 character interviewing, which we saw as the meat of this wormshop and the part that participants tended to love the most!
    — It’s a shame that what went on inside each breakout room will forever be a mystery to us as the fa-silly-taters— I would have loved to have been a compassionate witness to this exercise in action, but we’ll take folks at their worm that it was indeed fruitful and nourishing and everything they needed it to be and then some! I do want to figure out a way, in future iterations of this wormshop, to have some sort of exile runway show at the end, for folks willing to put their guts on display for more than just one other person. We did invite them to embody their exiles to their fullest extent before releasing, but that was brief and it would have been nice to allow for a one-at-a-time focused showcase. I think that activity would lend itself better to an in-person iteration of this workshop rather than virtual, to soak up the fully embodied experience.


GROUNDING — releasing exile, coming back home to self and the current time + space 
*insert sad trombone* WOMP WOMPP. 

  • Another guided visualization from the Creative Consciousness Healing Oracle Deck by Johanna Wright to make the transition from the heaviness of shadow work to the levity of..


DAYDREAMING —  who could we be beyond our struggle, in collaboration with all our parts? free from the systems that hold us down? — more “we are // I am”s centered around composting toxicity, liberation from constriction, and planting seeds of the world we desire to see. There were some very literal answers of what might actually be in a compost heap, but again I was astounded at the vividness of imagination and world-building potential in these answers. THIS IS THE SHIT RIGHT HERE! THIS IS MY WHY!  

RETURN TO EARTH — Wrapping things up, having a moment of gratitude for self + others, encouraging aftercare and providing our slide deck as a resource for further digging, as well as a feedback form for folks to let us know how we can improve for next time. Really glad we did that, as we got really valuable feedback from a participant who is an actual IFS practitioner !! We also stuck around afterwards for about a half hour to allow folks to share their reflections and questions, which I really appreciated making space for without the pressure of having to rush through it, as we would have had we done it within the allotted 2 hours.

JOURNAL— What felt most alive to me in this wormshop was the stomach-dropping, excited-yet-terrified sensation of plunging into the unknown roller-coaster ride that was putting this wacky and provocative proposal into the world and seeing how it landed — recognizing EVERYTHING in this life is an iterative experiment and we never really know how things are going to land until they do (or don’t!), and that it varies from container to container depending on who’s in it, how many people there are, and how their access needs differ. We were very deliberate in our planning sessions about accommodating as many different styles & needs as we could imagine arising for each exercise, with the understanding that real-time access issues we hadn’t anticipated may still occur. Helping out a blind participant who had arrived halfway through by summarizing the activities we had done so far to catch them up to speed, and reading out all of the main-room activity options that were screen-shared during the choose-your-own-adventure section felt effortless. This experience emphasized the importance of having a plan but being flexible, knowing nothing ever goes quite according to plan and there are always bumps in the road or curveballs that slow things down, and factoring that in (or adapting the agenda in-real-time as necessary), as well as accounting for time for transitions and time for explaining (and often re-explaining) each new activity. Accommodating neurodivergence and differing levels of ability are *features*, not bugs! 

Any imposter syndrome we had in our planning was quickly quelled by being transparent about our perspective thru lived experienced as a couple of queer AuDHD chronically-ill & traumatized silly little clowns, fucking around & finding out together right along with everyone else. We reject the notions of false-authority and felt it important to let folks know we’re right there in the thick of the muck with everyone else, reminding folks of their agency to mold this as they wish throughout the entire wormshop. Yes, we did spend weeks and weeks scheming and dreaming this thing up together, but everything was designed to be able to be modified to best fit each person’s individual needs and preferences!  We put *so much* intention into the exercises we chose and the flow between them to ensure we were creating as safe as a container as possible, given that true “safety” does not exist — choose how vulnerable you want to be, how deep you want to go — knowing and trusting your limits and stepping out as needed if things get too intense to handle — giving folks permission to opt out, adapt, or go deeper as they deemed fit.

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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.​