I really enjoyed the Storyteller’s Gym today. The breathing exercises really opened me up. I hadn’t breathed so naturally and so deeply in a while. The yoga pose pushed me physically. I tend to be a sedentary person (and it shows!) so even otherwise simple poses, like pushing the arms up overhead, have made me sore now. Also I deal with a pretty stiff left hip, so I could only perform the lunge with the one leg. Suffice it to say, I had to adjust a lot of the routine to account for my physical capabilities.
But what I enjoyed most was the imagination play that we engaged in and particularly the part wherein we all were lying on the floor and describing the dentist’s office. Just listing items was a lot of fun, but the challenge occurred when you asked us to now describe the room. I (and I think my classmates were with me on this) was shocked as to how daunting it felt to compose all of those individual details into a complete scene. And that’s why I wanted to go first. I did my best but felt that my performance and use of the materials (the individual bits everyone had mentioned before) was lacking. I was especially disappointed that I had forgotten the fishtank, even though it instantly put a picture in my head of the fish tank at the dentist’s office in Finding Nemo.
I also noticed that we at least tried to incorporate all of the aforementioned details. We didn’t add any, although you didn’t say we couldn’t and it didn’t seem like any of us flippantly ignored any of the details mentioned. This was interesting to me because it reminded me about how you talked about the unspoken rules we automatically apply to ourselves. I suppose we could have mentioned a dentist’s office with a totally different suite of details. But we followed those unspoken, self-restrictive rules.
I find it interesting to read how people felt during the storytelling exercises. Like the, "why I wanted to go first" type stories, such as the one featured in this post. While we were working on the "dentist" exercise I had an image in my head of a plant that was near the secretary that hadn't been recently watered and so it was not as full of life as the other plants. But there were other plants mentioned and I didn't want to add too many more plants, then the exercise changed to incorporate the entire scene and, though I could remember parts of the scene I also had a difficult time remembering everything. We seemed to be describing a few different rooms, which confused me because I wasn't sure if I understood the room or rooms correctly or not. I still don't know if we were talking about one room or a few different rooms, that's how far off I was. But I understand how you feel about forgetting the fish tank.
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