WHERE WE GO ON THE SPACESHIP by Netta Sadovsky & Ilana Simons

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  • April 3, 2025

WHERE WE GO ON THE SPACESHIP by Netta Sadovsky & Ilana Simons

Spaceship is a spirited game that’s played in a seated circle where we start with sentence stems like “I want” and “I fear” and work up to embodying personas/archetypes like “mother” and “creepy uncle” and parts of self like “angry vindictive energy!” until we’re in a collage of real, imaginary, historical, associative utterances. We try to keep our utterances brief enough and the prompts varied enough that we’re in a nimble balance between the absurd and the real unfolding emotion in the room, the interpersonal and the imagined, the beautiful and the dumb. Among other mysterious balances. We facilitators liken ourselves to witches stirring the brew, managing those balances and ones outside our conscious awareness while picking up and amplifying themes and energies we detect in the group.

TECHNIQUES

Sentence stems: In which each person finishes a sentence from the same beginning phrase: I want, I fear, people see me as, etc.

Archetypal play, a nod to Jung: In which the group, in addition to the sentence stems, can start to embody different archetypes. For example, invitation to mommy energy! Animal energy! The shadow, the magician, the fool.

Working with personas and parts: some of our prompts are designed to invite parts into the room. These are interspersed with the sentence stems and archetypes. This might sound like, “bringing bitter energy,” or “invitation to parts preoccupied with climate change.”

JOURNAL

Ilana: Each time we play this game, I think the game is about something new. This time, for me, it largely felt like an exercise in remembering not to take things personally. In the game, we speak sentences without real context – little daggers of meaning thrown this way and that. And, at the same time, other sentences in the game are said earnestly, directly, to the person you’re speaking to. So it’s this jiggly wedging game – this flinging of sentences around the room, all sent with the challenge to remember that projection is the backbone, or engine pack, of every sentence. This game is an invitation to practice de-sticking yourself from someone’s projection.

This time, I was also working on my own need to be liked. Right before the group, Netta told me a story about a dancer who she loves for a certain courage he has: He moves at the pace of curiosity. That is: while he might feel familiar impulses to impress or entertain, he lets his honest curiosity lead him, which can mean moving with such slowness that for many it would be embarrassing. I loved the idea of this and was paying special attention to how often my body jumps into action as a leader to deal with the frustration, boredom, or judgment I imagine in others.

Netta: After a rousing, and at its apex, upsetting and somewhat uncontained version of Spaceship, I’m preoccupied with safety. Some of our participants were in an active conflict and we watched together the way this game of flagrant projection (speak as if we’re your mother!) does not helpfully facilitate conflict. Ilana and I talked through this afterward and decided to add some agreements to the game. Something like: This is a game of projection and an unthinking mind, and in light of that, we will try to unglue ourselves from taking things personally. And, some of you may have pre-existing relationships and unfinished business in the room. This game is not well designed for sifting through tension like that, and we will try not to dig around in conflicts. 

I’m not sure those rules would have helped; I don’t think we or our participants thought the game would hold conflict well. It simply was there. I am curious though about making the guest list of these events more public, so people know who’s going to be on board the ship.

Now I’m setting that down and thinking about my desire to push towards absurdity. The gravitational pull of the group during Spaceships has often been towards earnest relating. I think Ilana and I both find it thrilling to entice the group towards more erratic theatricality intermixed with this earnestness. Why’s this kind of absurdity so thrilling? This feels core to the beauty of Spaceship. To intersperse the earnest group process with the associative-poetic mode. A frothing of an emotionally syncopated, chaotic stream of group consciousness. The embrace of intensely unpleasant emotional states through wacky juxtaposition: allusions to relationships that haunt us beside invented irate accusation beside genuine discomfort beside innocent curiosity.

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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.​