Life Is A Game: LARPing – #8 of 50 Things That Help Me Heal (video)

Live from a faery glen! It’s time you all know — I am a Live Action Role Player, a.k.a. a LARPer. The healing of benefits of  moving toward awesome fun with LARPing are limitless.

I have spent two decades teaching, staffing, directing, designing, and playing with this awesomeness (Wayfinder Experience). I spent (and still do on a good year) my summers and some winters in the woods pretending to be faery princesses, evil mages, brave knights, possessed kings, queens of the underworld, zombies, clerics, and earth sprits.

You know . . . normal things. Well, normal high fantasy things, and farther into the reaches of sci-fi, horror, and mythological stories.

The heart of Wayfinder Experience LARP is improvisational theater and community development.

I have learned more about my self by being “other people” and “other creatures” then I could ever share, but I will share as much as I can.

One of the biggest lessons from my experience LARPing is that Life is Game, and if we play it to the best of our ability, then everyone wins.

When I use the rules for the adventure game (or the fuels of improvisational theater as I call it) outside of LARPing, it makes my real life work better — just like when I use these rules in the game.

Here are those 4 rules:

1. Yes, and . . .

• Accepting and building. When someone puts an offer out there — a perspective, a possibility, an invitation — I accept the invitation first and foremost as real, whether or not I am agreeing to the request, and then I build on it.
• “Yes” is the acceptance of the offer.
• “And” is the response. Give a response. Engage and build the communication.

2. Dare to be average

• Trust your gut.
• Go with your instincts.
• You don’t have to BE anything. Just show up and be yourself.

3. Make your partner look good

• By making your “scene partner,” a.k.a. another human, look good, then you win too!

4. Violence kills the improv

• Domination and controlling another person ends the communication, the connection is longer exists.
• Give and take is what’s called for.

50 Things That Help Me Heal is a collection of 50 bite-sized, short vlogs to help you find healing in, and from, anything. Learn skills that can help get you back on track to heal a broken heart, apathy, loneliness, body aches and pains, lack of self purpose, or whatever you’ve got going on. Here’s a hint: NO FIXING — There’s nothing to fix.

Come with me on a journey to learn down to earth, reality based concepts to help you heal without having to be perfect or positive all the time. We often think of “healing” as some mysterious thing that can’t be explained, and although we can’t explain it per se, we can develop skills and practices that promote healing while restoring our joy, love, and faith. Watch Now >>