Nadia Chaney is a master arts facilitator, a talented artist, and a beautiful friend. In this conversation, she offers pathways to break free from a search for constant productivity and to gently orient ourselves in the direction of play and uselessness. 

-GUEST BIOGRAPHY-

Nadia is a multi-disciplinary artist, community arts facilitator and facilitation trainer. She is known for her ability to clarify and simplify complex concepts, to work joyfully with participant resistance and challenging dynamics, to engage powerful diversity and inclusion practices, and for her creative and bold arts-based group process design. She is the founder of The Time Zone Research Lab (community arts-based research into the nature of Time) and Toolsi (on demand facilitation training).

More about Nadia Chaney:

www.nadiachaney.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadia-chaney-59637021/

https://www.instagram.com/eternalflux_/

 Link to Toolsi: https://facilitate.toolsi.ca/

-EPISODE SUMMARY-

PRACTICES: 

• Oracular Poetry - a process to answer unanswerable questions.
• Play with acausal stories, maps & drawings with children. 
• To tune into the group, expand to the underlying mind in the room. Where does it want to go ? 
• Use psychodrama to explore other forms and ways of knowing that are transpersonal.
• Use the metaphor of moving from the small room to the big room to get a wider perspective through regulation of the nervous system.
• Visualization practices where you travel to a safe space as well as anchoring gestures can help us regulate our nervous systems by slightly adjusting the dial. 
• Shaking is a baby step towards dance and the disinhibition of dance.
• Build up embodied experience with the tools before you need them. 
• Go for a walk without a destination. 

IDEAS: 

Play

• If they can fail at it, it's not play, even if it's a game. You can lose but you can't fail. 
• In play, we open our senses to the swirl of possibility and where the playful can take fire. 
• Place requires preparation (what made the container possible) and has repercussions after having been disinhibited.
• An ensemble mentality requires having your senses open so wide that you move, see and breathe together.
• Play has no usefulness in that way. It is useful but it doesn't have a use function. There is an emancipatory side to it: can I take time to do what I want, without getting better ? Can I simply be in pleasure ? 

A culture of extraction 

• In a capitalist structure, so many things are considered useless until they are sucked up. Yet, those things that are useless and abject are also beautiful and valuable. This also goes for relationships. We can strive to this inner state of non-succumbing to effectiveness and usefulness. 
• Study can also be play when you take away the burden of being efficient. 
• What is on the other side of the current of productivity is where innovation lives. 

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