By Gary Hirsch
We all improvise. We don’t wake up with a script for our day. Sure, we have plans, ideas, desires, and fears. We want certain things to happen so we can be happy and thrive. But our days never unfold in the way we expect. So, we improvise. On good days we improvise with grace and curiosity. On bad days we can suffer, grieving the moments that didn’t go as we thought they would.
At the height of Covid I forgot about improvising with grace and curiosity and found myself like many others locked into an anxious cycle of worrying about the future. This was when my very wise daughter handed me a 21-year-old book and simply said “this will help.” It did. That book was the seminal work about presence by author and teacher Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now. In it, Tolle helped me catch a glimpse of relief from my obsessive worry about the future by describing a world that exists in the present moment. The ideas captured in The Power of Now helped me focus on my own presence and less on the constant chatter of my thoughts.
So, it was with much excitement and curiosity that last week my son and I found ourselves an hour and a half South of Oslo Norway signed up for a 5-day retreat with the man himself, Eckhart Tolle. We had never been on a mindfulness or spiritual retreat before but were game to try, especially because The Power of Now had such an impact on both of us.
As you could imagine it was a lesson in being present, but also in improvisation. For 5 days Eckhart and his partner Kim Eng would sit on stage for up to 2 hours at a time eloquently and spontaneously talking: about presence, the mind, silence, and consciousness. They had no notes or prompts. The talking was broken up by long stretches of silence, where Eckhart would simply pause and scan the audience with a slight smile on his face. Being present to his intense presence was, well very cool. You could feel it.
Later in the week I felt inspired to lead a brief improv workshop at the retreat, offering it on a community message board. I was curious if improv experiences, which demand that you are present to be able to do them, would resonate with folks who had come from all over the world to be mindful and learn to be present.
So, on a sunny afternoon on the retreat center patio about 25 mindfulness practitioners messed around with improv, many for the first time. We created spontaneous products and services that until that moment didn’t exist in the world. We discovered imaginary holidays gifts. We laughed, played and as one participant who pulled me aside afterward said, “This improv thing is a whole other way of accessing a bit of the now.”
The entire experience was a great reminder that be it through silence, stillness, improvised play, or simply letting go of an expectation and being available for whatever shows up, there are many ways to practice being present.
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Gary Hirsch is speaker, trainer, artist, and facilitator with a deep passion for co-creative experiences. He is the Co-founder of On Your Feet Improvisation for Business and Creator of Botjoy: an art movement that aims to spread joy, hope and courage one hand-painted robot at a time. You can contact him at gary@oyf.com
