Circus and the Medicine of Play
The Om-FLY circus yoga summer program has run at the Sanctuary for over ten years. Created by Sanctuary Co-Executive Director Jen Taylor, this program features an innovative pedagogy Jen developed over the course of many summer circuses with a wide variety of students. This pedagogy, described below and in the video, showcases the Sanctuary’s environmental and spiritual mission and focus on education for ecological and social well-being.
Circus & Yoga: Re-Wilding Medicine for Domesticated Times
By Jen Taylor
Co-Executive Director of The Sanctuary and Founding Director of Om-Fly
Circus and Yoga are both ancient traditions, each over 5,000 years old. The oldest known representation of circus arts is an Egyptian Hieroglyph, depicting both juggling and partner acrobatics. Ancient Egyptians considered juggling a meditative, even magical practice. A sphere with its sacred geometry, implies the shape of planets, suns, moons and stars. To the ancient Egyptian mind, a juggler was one who held the cosmos in balance, the world in her hands. The hieroglyph represents Priestesses engaged in the ritual as part of funerary rites.
What the ancients described in enchanting terms, modern day science de-mystifies. Circus arts, like juggling, quite simply make you smarter by encouraging right brain / left brain connectivity. Western culture and language is right brain centric; our brains are lopsided. Reading linear script uses only the left side of the human brain. When we read hieroglyphs, both sides fire. We have lost our whole-brained connectivity. Circus arts offers a kind of re-wilding medicine for domesticated times. It's a space to bring the classroom back to the forest.
Education is a practice of freedom, but it is also a practice of fearlessness. How do we overcome fear? Play is one tool. A classroom should evoke curiosity, and curiosity happens naturally in play. To invite the spirit of play, I invoke the following principles:
The Power of Circles & the Eco-Circus Classroom / How We Teach & Learn
In the circus, we come together in a physical circle. In a circle, everyone can see everyone equally well. The heterarchical (non-hierarchal) structure of circus transmits partnership values naturally, prioritizing cooperation over competition for one. Every circle is a new container. The wisdom of the circle is greater than any one individual (the whole is greater than the sum of its parts).
Make a new mistake. When we make a new mistake, it means we are learning. We risk something to arrive at a new understanding. If we are making the same mistake over and over, there is a problem. When we learn a new thing, we create new neural pathways. A brain that plays well, ages well.
Play is a backdoor to discipline. Anyone who hangs out with children knows that exercise happens naturally in play. Discovery also happens naturally in play because play over-rides our analytical brain. Our pleasure leads us to the next shiny thing and in this way, our instinctual / embodied self is engaged. We can expect an adventure with this kind of approach.
The more we concentrate, the more fun we have. Mindfulness is a way of describing the energy of concentration. This energy increases our field of choice dramatically. The more engaged we are with our world, the more we discover.
Two tricks put together, make a new trick. Integral education fused with feminist pedagogy creates a third space, one that can attend to both social justice (outer) and soul (inner) work. Circus fused with yoga creates a new form, as well, expressing the community of circus while transmitting the discipline of yoga.
When everyone shines, we experience true community. What is beautiful about working with children is simple: their drive to discover their gift and share it with the world is unbroken. In adults, it usually is. In these times, to heal domination systems education wounding, teaching is about restoring our natural compulsion to actualization.
Circus is an art of community, a kind of re-wilding medicine for domesticated times. Humans have domesticated animals, but we have domesticated ourselves perhaps more so. We have to return to our bodies. When we are in our bodies, we are connected to each other. Connection is everything. We can’t heal the world without it.
There is a place for everybody under the big top. Everyone can learn here and everyone has something to teach here. I tell my students that once you learn something, you become a teacher.
Run away to join the circus and be home in time for dinner. Circus is deeply rooted in anarchism, archetype and the activation of soul-desires.
In the past, I have used the term eco-circus to indicate that the place of learning is just as important as what and how we are learning. The traditional classroom rectangle was designed to accustom students to factory or cubicular life, sitting still and taking orders. The new pedagogical classroom has to accustom students to living in connection to people, nature & non-violent systems. Embodied education allows us to enjoy a moment of bodily integrity in relation to our environment. Therefore, optimally, the location where this learning takes place must also be in alignment with its eco-system.
Discussion Questions
1. Play can also be understood as the activity in which you experience "the zone." Where do you experience play in your life?
2. Do you have enough play in your life? How can you get some more? Do you think of exercise as something on your to-do list?
3. The oldest definition of the verb "to play" in the Oxford-English Dictionary means "to be in the present moment." What can take months or more to achieve in meditation happens instantly in a state of play. Play offers us an important roadmap home. What do you think of the idea that play is a backdoor to discipline?
4. Share a favorite childhood (or adult) memory of play. I would love to hear it.
“At the very thought of ‘circus’ a swarm of long-imprisoned desires breaks jail. Armed with beauty and demanding justice and everywhere threatening us with curiosity and spring and childhood, this mob of forgotten wishes begins to storm the supposedly impregnable fortifications of our present.” - e.e. cummings