How to Make Better Meaning.

Alt text: A dancer stands on an empty stage, moving their limbs against a black backdrop.

*Originally published on March 9th, 2020

As a theater artist, I spent many years creating stories and framing meaning for audiences. 

Great art is a dance between universal meaning and the opportunity to create personal meaning. 

If it is so abstract that no universal meaning can be gathered, people feel confused and disconnected. If there is only one intended meaning that is forced on viewers, it is either sheer entertainment, propaganda, or a little of both. Effective art helps both creators and audiences to cultivate their skill of meaning making. 

As a yoga and meditation practitioner, I have explored meaning making through the tools and practices of Eastern philosophy. I learned how to examine my own mind, to watch thoughts arise and observe the layers of my consciousness process the thought through emotion, story, context, and meaning making. Ultimately, most meditation techniques teach you to be unattached to meaning, by noticing that you are the one creating it, and it is therefore “not real”. This can be helpful, and is a foundational skill to understanding that you are the creator of thoughts, you are not the thoughts themselves. 

The third chapter of my personal and professional development has been the lens of coaching, which blends the proactive and creative stance of intentional meaning making that I experienced as an artist, with the introspective personal healing and spiritual growth that I experienced as a yogi. This is next level mind training that teaches us to notice that what we think, and the meaning we make out of what we think, is what creates the world around us. 

I’m going to say that again for the people in the back: what we think, and the meaning we make out of what we think, is what creates the world around us. 

I resisted this idea for SO LONG, because I have seen too many people use this basic truth as a way of spiritually bypassing the injustices of the world, as a way of exploiting people’s most base fears and desires for profit, and because I never want people to feel that I am blaming the victim for circumstances they have not chosen, but I have ultimately come to see it as a foundational, undeniable, and totally empowering fact of life. 

My exploration of this truth has led me to an ongoing inquiry: If we create our own reality through our thoughts, and simultaneously many people find themselves in situations that they genuinely cannot think themselves out of, what else do we need to know? 

As usual, pop culture has answers...

A friend recently texted me saying “Have you watched Troop Zero yet? The main character is a little girl who is exactly like you!” I just watched the movie over the weekend, and besides the trait of wetting the bed, I would say we do have a lot in common.

Christmas (our 8-year-old protagonist) is an optimistic dreamer who is growing up in a trailer park. Her mother has recently died, and her father is doing his best to keep the family going. Christmas spends her nights stargazing, watching for signs from the Universe that there is something bigger than the petty trials of the humans around her. Obsessed with making contact with intelligent life in the cosmos, Christmas learns about an opportunity to get her voice onto the Golden Record (here is where I could diverge for many hours, as my masters thesis performance was about the Golden Record, but I will simply resource you here if you want to learn more about this incredibly meaningful human artifact that is currently floating on the only spacecraft ever to have left our solar system).

In order to win this prize, she must form a birdy scout troop and win the birdy scout jamboree. She pulls together a rag-tag crew of kids like her: underdogs who live behind trash heaps and are told they will be nothing, should ask for nothing. She convinces them to want something for the first time in their lives. 

Their nemesis is a prim and proper school principle who runs the top-dog birdy scout crew, and she is a wonderful blend of cynical and compassionate. She truly believes she is doing them a favor by trying to stop them. She keeps saying “you’ll learn that life will be a lot easier for you if you don’t want so much from it”. 

Fast forward to the big jamboree showdown (spoiler alert here!), where the leading troop does a fancy tap dance number in expensive costumes, and our crew, Troop Zero, does a weird David Bowie interpretive dance with some killer handmade set pieces, and ends up peeing all over the stage. In a more cliche Hollywood formula, the underdogs would have somehow won the show, but that’s not what happened here. The tap dancers won the jamboree, and they got to have their voices recorded for the Golden Record. 

If we run the plot of this film through the “your thoughts create your reality” question, we get both answers: The underdog kids did change their experience of life dramatically by challenging the meaning they had previously bought into: that they could not be winners. Simply by entertaining another possible meaning, they took risks, grew, formed bonds, and created new opportunities for themselves. However, all of this was ultimately not enough to overcome the classist prejudices that each of them faced in the systemically oppressive structure of the Birdy Scout Jamboree. The meaning you make matters, A LOT. And...there are other things at play too. And then, the meaning you make out of those other things also matters A LOT. 

So perhaps we could come to this conclusion: The meaning we make has a huge impact on our reality, but that doesn't mean we get to control the exact outcomes of every situation of our life. Still, making better meaning is always a worthwhile endeavor. Also, we must work together to smash the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

INTEGRATE:

Take some time to get resourced and rested, and then sit down with the following journal prompts:

• What is ONE outcome you wish was different in your life or business right now?

• What is the meaning you are making out of the result you are currently getting?

• What are some other possible interpretations of the outcome (that also feel TRUE) that are more empowering to believe than the one you are stuck on?