Casey Newton

Sit with yourself in silence or journal to discover a quality of yours you would like to expand, like whimsy, compassion, confidence.

Create a character whose defining characteristic is this quality.

Name them.

Write a short description of them.

Begin to inhabit them in your own body.

And basically that's like come to session two as your character and then we will reintroduce ourselves.

Wow.

Casey, you're more of an improv guy, but my sense is there's some similarity here and overlap between doing improv acting or comedy and what you're talking about with inhabiting a character.

To me, it's seeming like there's a couple things that are coming together.

One is Buddhism, frankly.

It's focus on attention and where the mind goes and re-grounding yourself in the physical world.

And in the present moment.

And in the present moment.

There's sort of like this improv, like, you know, explore your feelings, explore your imagination.

There's this sort of like tech resistance piece of it, which is like, I don't like what this technology is doing to our brains.

And, you know, it's interesting.

And it makes me think about previous waves of technological change and some of the, like,

social and cultural movements that have grown up in response to those.

Like during the Industrial Revolution, there were like the transcendentalists who like wanted to like reconnect with nature because they felt like the whole economy was like getting away from the land and the farms and like going into these dehumanizing factories.

And they were sort of like, we want to go to Walden Pond and like write poetry and look at leaves.