Playing with the Trouble

A guided meditation exercise to help you get in touch with your inner wildness, your untamed inner reality.

A 45-90 minute activity for 1-200 people

‘Open Hearted Devils’ is a guided meditation exercise to help you get in touch with your inner wildness, your untamed inner reality. We live in a time in which dominant systems benefit from us working hard to fit into social expectations. But these dominant systems are often destructive and unhealthy. Change is urgently needed. Change is also very hard. This is why it is important to help each other access our inner power, emotional energy and resources.

Header image: A bunch of open hearted devils wearing their masks at the end of a session at Earth System Governance 2023

Is this the activity for your group?

• 30-90 minutes duration
• Any number of people
• Needs a facilitator to introduce the exercise and start the opening discussion, but the guidance itself can be done with pre-recorded audio.
• Either Low or High setup (the low setup can be done with minimal materials or digitally. The high setup is a more elaborate version with masks and coloured pens)
• Low difficulty (a simple imaginative exercise)
• High imaginative load (asks people to be in touch with something core to their identity)
• High trust required (sharing and reflecting on your inner experiences)

Why play this?

• Surfacing worldviews (bring to the surface what people’s inner realities are like)
• Collective Imagining (imagining your untamed roles in the world)
• Unmaking systems (builds agency to resist and transform unjust systems)

 Open hearted devil by Joost Vervoort

Notes for the organiser/facilitator

This meditation has audio guidance (see below) that takes 21 minutes. This guiding text is to help you set up a session. The session can be done with a small group, or a very large group (it has been tested with 200 people ,for instance). It is also possible to do it alone or with one other individual.

The most elaborate version of the session also involves people making masks that represent their open hearted devils. The masks give people a symbol of their open hearted devil to take home and remind them. But it’s also very possible to run the session without this symbolic element.

The session follows this structure:

5 minutes: introduce the session. Briefly explain that this is a guided meditation that helps people get in touch with their inner wildness, power and joy, to help them take on personal and collective challenges. For the full version, explain that you will have a brief conversation about emotions that are not given space in our normal lives, followed by the guided meditation and a reflection discussion. It’s also possible to organisze a version of the process without the conversation about emotions and to launch right into the meditation.

20 minutes (or more if you like): discussing unaccepted emotions in your professional or social spaces. Have a straightforward, frank conversation about what emotions and experiences people feel are not accepted in their professional and social spaces. You can start with what people are angry about that they normally do not talk about, then what they are sad about, and then what brings them joy but that they feel has no place in their contexts. This conversation is a powerful primer for the guidance because it allows people to ‘let out’ their frustrations and wildness in a very direct manner. It raises the tone and the freedom felt by the room to investigate their inner wildness through the guidance. And it provides a groundedness to the more fantastical, imaginative guidance process.

21 minutes: Play the guided meditation, which can be downloaded here as a file or here on Spotify [link to add]. The alternative is to provide the guidance yourself.

Guided meditation (21 mins)

20 minutes: Ask people who are willing to do so to share the descriptions of their open hearted devils with the group. The time for this can be variable – the more examples are shared, the more people learn about each other’s open hearted devils. It is also possible to start first with 10 minutes of people sharing in pairs, before opening it up to the bigger group – so that everyone has the chance to share with at least one person.

10 minutes: reflecting on the exercise together. It is possible to provide a form as well where people can write down both their open hearted devils and briefly describe their experiences – but keep in mind to get permissions if you intend to share this.

Components

The most minimal version of this guidance can be done entirely without materials; but a valuable element can be introduced by bringing simple colourable eye masks (or even entire face masks) for everyone, and bringing plenty of coloured pens so people can represent their open hearted devils in a lively, playful and colourful way.

The guided meditation can be found above; slides that may be useful for the presentation can be found here. [to add]

Background and objectives

The first versions of open hearted devils were piloted with Joost Vervoort’s meditation group the Dharmagarage and developed together with meditation and imaginal practice teacher Rosa Lewis. The guidance is rooted in the idea that deep seriousness and deep playfulness do not have to be seen as opposites, but that they are complementary ways to go into the depths, complexity and mystery of life.