On Community: Soul Play
A 90-Day Social Experiment
As we turn the page on a whole year of this pandemic, it’s become redundant to comment on how drastically the world has changed. Indeed it has, in ways that we can no longer even feel. And isn’t that the real hallmark of change, after all: when things are so different that there aren’t any reference points left to show us just how different they have become.
One of the aspects of life that shifted (quite dramatically at first, and then, more imperceptibly) is community. Especially the kinds of community we were once a part of without even realising — the groups of people we’d meet while waiting in line at the supermarket, chatting with strangers at a party, making small talk over lunch in an office. This year, some of us grew closer with the circles of people we already knew; our friends and families, and still others grew tired of living through lockdowns under the same roof, and craved new faces, or solitude.
This year has, in many ways, wiped the slate clean. Our experience of community has shifted so deeply, and yet subtly — less like a breakup, and more like a slow drifting apart. And, wondrously, from within that space between all of us, a new freedom has emerged. Now, it’s in our hands to re-imagine what community could look and feel like.
Your project is your mirror
In December, I embarked on a quest for community with two friends, Akshay and Shashank. All three of us were interested in flow states, and wanted to create more moments of flow in our lives. The question that became our North Star was, “What if we could re-imagine community around collective states of flow?” At the same time, we wanted to bring more soul and more play into our work and daily lives, and so we called the project Soul Play.
At first, we set it up like an event: we’d invite a small group of people, and facilitate some activities, discussions, and dinner. We quickly realised that the kinds of discussions we wanted to have were dependent on the progress people had made in their own healing journeys. In order to get to a flow state, or even a vulnerable conversation, we found that people would have had to do a bit of work on their internal barriers: the stories or that inner voice that tells us “What is flow anyway? Get serious and get back to work!” or that whines, “This isn’t for me, I just want to chill, why would I talk about deep stuff with a bunch of strangers?”
We determined that, broadly speaking, people are at various stages of their journey from healing to creating:
- Healing → 2 . Fully Experiencing → 3. Creating
Once we have healed some of our past wounds, we can begin to fully experience what’s around us. And through experiencing fully, we are able to channel creative energies towards building the world we want to live in. In order for a group of people to move forward together, we thought, there needs be a reasonable ratio of folks who are in the creating phase, experiencing phase, and a minority of folks in the healing phase.
Our team made a list of invitations, a venue, and a format for the event. Things seemed to be going fairly smoothly.
Only, once it got down to invitations, I panicked. Suddenly, a whole lot of stories came up: how could I be sure the people I’d invite were as cool as the people Akshay would invite? What if they said no? What if the people I invited weren’t “good enough”? What if I wasn’t “good enough”? I’d committed to inviting ten people, and a few days in, had only invited a handful, and almost none had agreed to come. Akshay asked me, “What’s the barrier here?” and stood for me, as I wrestled with the answers that came up in me, all related to external forces beyond my control. (People are just flaky, it’s a pandemic, my friends are too busy, I am too swamped with work, etc.)
Finally, I realised that what I was really up against was my own stories, particularly the one that tells me “you’re not good enough.” Thanks to Akshay’s committed listening, I learned that it’s almost always our own inertia that stops the things we say we want from happening, not mysterious external forces outside our control. I resolved to take on one thing I was afraid of every month, and do it as much as possible, leveraging Soul Play and our small (but powerful) team as a laboratory for growth.
Bringing the background to the foreground
Soul Play was certainly much more than just a project for our team. One of us faced down a habit of making people into projects, and projecting anger and sadness onto them ( I will never forget the difficult conversation we had one day when we realised I was the project. We worked on ourselves to shift this dynamic; and how it helped both of us grow and deepen our friendship.) That day, both of us were on the verge of giving up on Soul Play entirely. We walked to the very edge, and decided to see it through, for ourselves and for each other.
Now, we’ve discovered that it’s not about making people into projects anymore, it’s that projects are a love language! Another one of us overcame a long-held belief that teams could only be successful if we were physically present to coach them. But we coached a small team in Chennai to run Soul Play on their own and it was a wild success, without even meeting the organisers in person! Over time, we came to see that Soul Play was hardly about the events at all. It had given the three of us an excuse to work together, support and coach each other on weekly calls, and break down our internal barriers around work, community, projects, and so much more. Over the course of three months, we were really the ones who embarked on the journey from healing to creating.
That’s not to say that the events weren’t powerful. Think of how much impact there is in being vulnerable in groups, à la Oprah Winfrey, and then get fifteen creative souls in a room. Almost every participant left saying, “This was the best gathering I’ve been to all year!” and for many, it was a game-changer. At our last event, there were tears as some people let go of old stories they’d been holding on to. The power of letting go of a painful story in a group is sorely underestimated — it’s as if the healing is amplified by each listener, and each person’s sharing brings courage to us all. The same goes for dreams; like messages in a bottle that need to be released into the universe in order to come true, so too do our dreams await being heard. Sharing a vision in a group is akin to letting go, giving it some breathing room so it can amplify itself in each mind, and in a collective consciousness.
The practice of “bringing the background to the foreground” was incredible — voicing the thoughts or fears we have in the back of our minds, and bringing them to the fore, is almost like shining a light on a room full of “demons” in the middle of the night. Suddenly, they are just tables, chairs, and a discarded pair of shoes after all, and they lose the power they had over us. For me, that looked like standing in front of a room of 20 strangers, declaring, “I am hosting this event precisely because I am scared of speaking and being seen in groups!” As I said these words, the knot in my stomach loosened, and I could lead a whole event with all 20 pairs of eyes on me — without flinching. I began to look forward to the events with excitement instead of apprehension. Now, if I had to speak in front of hundreds, I’d be ready!
If you want to go far, go together!
Another major shift was in our belief that if you want something to happen, you have to do it yourself. The power of the collective is not necessarily a dominant narrative these days (Hello, social distancing!) and it can be easy to believe that we are all alone with our laptops; dreaming, creating, working in front of the screen. Yet, through Soul Play, we could engage with each other deeply and meaningfully over Zoom and on the phone — and it’s more about the context created than the medium of communication. In fact, some of the most powerful and transformative conversations I’ve had this year were thanks to Soul Play. The three of us became truly committed listeners for one another, and could identify blind spots and patterns that we would have missed, left to our own devices (pun intended).
One day, I was in a state of despair because nothing seemed to be coming together at work, and I got this concise but clear message from Shashank: “When context is missing, we experience misalignment.” Those seven words completely turned my day around, because I realised I needed to stop and reflect not on how to get the work done, but on why I was doing that work in the first place. We cannot set a context once and expect it to stick around every day — we have to continuously re-create context for ourselves, our teams, and our circles — and once we do that, we can uncover meaning in the mundane, and distill learning out of frustration.
And we don’t have to do it alone. Having a community of people who are committed to listening for the future we want makes it so much easier to get there. (Not to mention, having friends around makes the whole journey so much more fun!) The best part is, when Shashank sent that message, we had only met twice in real life. We only knew each other thanks to Akshay, the backbone of the whole Soul Play experiment. It’s the alchemy of intention and connection that makes such moments happen.
What’s next?
It’s the question everyone seems to be asking us. The event is a pay-it-forward model, so anyone could reach out to us and host it in their city! But what we are really dreaming up is a festival where the 100+ participants (so far) can meet each other, and deepen the community — Soul Play 2.0.
Pandemic-permitting, in the next few months we are planning to host an overnight festival where folks pitch in to book a homestay in nature, and can contribute their ideas and energy in an un-conference format. We also want to explore Soul Play virtual events, and even host events globally.
But Soul Play has always been much more than the event, and now our team has turned inwards to see what areas of our lives we can transform into Soul Play. The words have taken on a definition of their own, somewhere between play, flow, community, and possibility. Each of us have taken on a month-long commitment to bring Soul Play to our work, art, family, or personal spheres; essentially shifting from an external event to internal reflection and action. We are each asking ourselves, where can we bring more soul, and more play, into every aspect of our lives?
Stay tuned!
