Adam Blatner

There’s a new field emerging: Life Enrichment. It’s for just what it says. It emerges from improvisational theatre and psychodrama, and has roots in the way we played with imagined scenarios as kids—cops and robbers, house, hospital, whatever.

Our great grandchildren may say about our generation, "Can you believe they were mostly just one person? Nowadays, just about everyone has three or more sub-personalities, but then they actually prided themselves on being just one. Consistency was taken to ridiculous lengths!"

Hallowe’en is coming! E’en is the way it’s spelled, short for evening, or more technically all hallows eve, a chance to celebrate the realm of those who have passed on. (Just a bit of intellectual fluff for conversational purposes.) If you can get over your fear of the dead it’s rather jolly.

For Hallowe’en I’ll be up at the California Institute of Integral Studies where they have a Drama Therapy training program, and my wife and I will present a work-shop on integrating what Carl G. Jung (a pioneer in psychology) called  “The Shadow” complex, all those parts of us that we disown. It’s an opportunity to play with re-owning some of those dimensions.

Face it, you may be a fairly nice person to the world, mostly, but inside you’re a mixture. Gandhi confessed that he had many unworthy desires! He just was able to let go of them. You’re no better. One way to do this is to play with them a bit rather than to try to pretend to others and even to yourself that you don’t have any unworthy parts. So that’s what we’re doing. Perhaps not embracing these parts, but welcoming them into the play-crucible of Hallowe’en.