UNLOCKING WILDNESS: GROANING, HUMPING, WRITHING by Aaron Finbloom

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  • January 15, 2025

UNLOCKING WILDNESS: GROANING, HUMPING, WRITHING by Aaron Finbloom

Wildness Labs have been happening in Portland for about five months now. They are monthly events where we explore wildness, spontaneity, and the full, uninhibited expression of all our parts. The event emerged from a solo practice I was exploring in my room, where I gave myself permission to move, gesture, vocalize, word, and express any energy or emotion that was coming up. I would writhe, bite myself, hump furniture, moan, whine, and yell. Typically, if the exploration lasted longer than 5–10 minutes, different “characters” would emerge—more stable energies with postures, voices, or accents that would last for more than a couple of minutes. Afterwards, I would feel incredibly alive, fluid, and empowered. The thought then occurred to me to create a relational container for others to explore this.

TECHNIQUES 

We do a warmup from clowning where we walk around a room, and the walk takes on different emotions (sadness, happiness, anxiety, pride, etc.). Then the walk begins to incorporate sounds and gestured expressions. I explain that it’s helpful to lean into resistances. For example, if an inner critic is telling you your expressions are inauthentic, instead of shutting down, you can voice this critic. For this particular Wildness Lab, we used a method of continuous vocalization, where at all moments we were vocalizing (humming, laughing, crying, talking, moaning, etc.). The lab has music for about 75% of the time, which I think really helps to activate expression. The music is mainly from the genre of electronic minimalism.

JOURNAL

I have a few lingering curiosities about the Wildness Labs that keep cropping up:

Is the wildness helpful for our psyches? I guess I have a part that wonders if all the catharsis, fluidity, and spontaneity bring about too much fragmentation. Is there some contrasting need for calm, unifying coherence? If I just focus on the phenomenon itself, I don’t feel fragmentation after the labs. I usually end up feeling calm and at ease. But still, this curiosity lingers.

Would it be helpful, useful, or otherwise good to push ourselves beyond certain edges of expression? The human psyche is vast, and some of its edgier domains involve violence and sexuality. When I practice wildness in my room, these edges are easy for me to explore and feel cathartic in their exploration. Are these edges too risky to explore in a group context? Or is the group already teetering up to these risky domains at a pace that feels right?

How do we navigate the balance between self and other? There seems to be a qualitative shift that occurs when I focus purely on myself versus when I open up my field to include and engage with others around me. It’s not as if my expression is lessened—it’s changed. It’s almost like I’m moving into a different medium. Or as if there are different challenges that arise with others that don’t occur when exploring my own spontaneous states of expression. There are moments of not knowing what to do that feel charged in a different way when I’m in the company of others. There are shyness and critics that emerge with a different flavor. It’s as if there are different techniques for maintaining authenticity with others than with myself. And I do feel like I’m learning these techniques, though they’re difficult to explain at this stage of exploration.

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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.​