Introducing Awareness at Play
Without a Net blog presents the Awareness at Play podcast. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts.
Welcome to Awareness at Play, the podcast that accompanies the Without a Net Program created by Dori DeCamillis. The Without a Net Program is a comprehensive treasury of practices that illuminates both our innate joy and uncovers the network of old beliefs that hides our innate joy. We call this network the Net, and we surrender it through awareness, in a spirit of play.
Hi I’m Dori DeCamillis. In his first episode of Awareness at Play I’ll tell you how the Without a Net Program got started and what it’s about. And I’ll go over what this podcast will cover. This platform will be a place to access the practices and teachings of WAN.
A little bit about me…I’ve been an oil painter since I was in my teens. I sold my paintings for about 20 years and then I started teaching art after that, in my own setting. Painting has been my bread and butter career my entire adult life.
I now own Red Dot Gallery in Birmingham, AL. It’s a working studio and teaching space where I teach painting and my husband Scott Bennett teaches pottery. We opened in 2004 and have been enjoying teaching art and making our own art ever since.
My paintings have taken many forms over the years. In 2011 I began a series of paintings meant to depict my mind states. In order to be honest with myself and get more familiar with my thoughts, feelings, habits, beliefs, and perspectives I painted characters that represented them as they came up in my life.
I’d been pretty rigorous about self-inquiry for decades, but always in the form of writing or sharing with others. I’ve found that painting as a means of inner investigation is more powerful than I imagined.
It was and still is a transformative practice on all levels.
After I’d finished 55 of these painted characters I had them made into the Without a Net Card Deck. Pretty quickly I found that when other people responded to the cards their interpretations of meaning were all over the map. Unlike a lot of card decks, the images don’t represent archetypes or specific ideas, so their wide-open meaning makes them like a kind of psychological inkblot test. They can be used for games, as prompts and conversation starters. Probably the most common way I see people use them is they draw one in the morning and see what it says to them.
The cards opened me up to diving deeper and broadening the way I practice creative self-reflection. It led me to start teaching creativity workshops.
In the Without a Net Workshops we use the cards, various artistic media, meditation, and movement practices to cultivate awareness and curiosity and basically question our ways of seeing. This podcast will highlight a lot of the work/play that we do here.
Eventually the workshops evolved into a program that draws upon other areas of my experience. I have spent decades in various wisdom traditions, and my experience with the spiritual and psychological aspects of that along with my life as a creator and teacher all came together to inspire the WAN program. The program now includes a course and we have weekly gatherings. It’s growing and evolving.
The program brings together the things I’ve found fundamental to awakening or recovery. It gives equal attention to self-awareness, spiritual practice, relationships with others, and being grounded in our bodies and our day-to-day life. It’s been my experience that if we don’t touch on all four of these areas it’s harder to make sure we aren’t in denial about one part of our life and experience.
I got the name WAN from a line in a poem by the poet Rumi. I have no idea which it is, I just opened a book randomly. The name Without a Net refers to becoming free of the network of ingrained beliefs that keep us from waking up to our fundamental radiance. I use a tennis racket as a prop. I put it up in front of my face to imply what it’s like to see reality through a net of old ideas.
The Program is made up of practices. I do teach concepts, but they are not doing their job if they aren’t inspiring people to practice. It’s kind of like in my painting classes when students want to talk out answers to their painting issues. I tell them that actually painting is the teaching.
I didn’t start the seeker’s path because I wanted to immerse myself in ideas or be a part of some tradition. I sought because I was hurting. It wasn’t just that I knew something didn’t seem right, I felt there was something fundamentally wrong with me. This program was designed over decades to share what I’ve found to be the clearest means of overcoming the incessant sense of lack that comes with being a human who’s affected by conditioning.
WAN addresses the net of old beliefs by recognizing they are a symptom of one mistaken core belief: that we are small, separate beings in a big world that needs to be managed by our will and our wits. We perceive that outside circumstances are the cause of our problems, so we create narratives and behaviors to navigate every encounter. In between encounters our thoughts run riot. We rarely give a moment to turn inward, or rest, or question this ineffective and exhausting way of living.
Our program addresses the net with care, with playfulness, and with as much accuracy and honesty as we can. Our practices naturally transform our relationship to the net and releases the hold it has on us.
I created WAN for myself. I felt like the world of spirituality and self-honesty offered great teachings that helped me uncover my inherent peace and freedom. But I needed to arrange this wide world of wisdom into a structure that helped me know what practice or principle was needed at any given time. And especially to know what was most fundamental.
I found that esoteric, transcendent principles or deep wisdom were easier for me to digest and live into when I had an accessible framework to place the teachings. Like in my art career, I was better able to access the mysteries and metaphor of creativity when it was held in the container of a practical structure that integrated into my daily life.
I’m a visual person, so I laid the WAN program out in a map. No one needs the map to use the principles, but some people find it makes the information more convenient and intelligible. It is orienting for some people, as in a “You are Here” sort of way.
The program offers a large variety of practices, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that all its practices lead to one place—an acceptance of what is, in the present. It leads to an immersion in our True Nature, which is both transcendent and immanent.
Someone said, what we came here needing, we came here with. it means our fundamental essence is already free and at peace, and with us at all times. All of our practices point to this. We learn to see through the net that covers this joyful sense of being.
I’ve gotten off track over the years, and I’ve seen others get caught in the same pitfalls of the path. I’ve seen people re-traumatize themselves from hashing over their narrative too much, or feeling emotions that never get deeper than reactionary emotionality. We can get caught up in philosophical intellectualism, over-analysis, and spiritual bypassing. WAN is designed to address and move through these distractions.
We favor the essential over the fascinating. I always liked theory, but big ideas got old quick if I couldn’t turn them into lived wisdom that permeated my everyday life. I liked feeling spiritually aware and a sense of love permeating everything. Who wouldn’t? But if I saw it as contrasting with or better than my everyday challenges, I knew there was more to learn.
My process led me through an experiential course of re-identification. WAN helps us do that. We watch our old idea of self become less of a nuisance, and we reside in the presence of our contented true nature, without a net, more and more. We begin to see and live from a bigger picture. We become at home and joyful in our little moments and more resilient and even welcoming with challenge. Higher wisdom and presence becomes our living reality.
My favorite thing about WAN is that it embodies a sense of play and creativity. By creativity I don’t mean art, but that can be a part of it. I mean there’s variety and choices for ways to do this intuitively. We break out of the linear world of black and white into the colorful realm of spontaneity. We learn to allow an unfolding rather than pushing for knowledge and progress.
It was always hard for me to let go of grasping for meaning and change. Eventually I learned the hard way that I wanted instead to learn acceptance in my bones. I found that transformation happens naturally from a place of allowing. This is the constant underlying current of all the WAN practices.
I had one student say, Wait a minute, isn’t every part of this program just Awareness? I said yes, exactly. Then another time a student said, Well you could just call everything we do here Play. I said yes, exactly. But it happens that many of the people I work with have been on the spiritual and/or psychological path for decades and they say they’re finally breaking through their big attachments and getting what the seeker’s path always promised. So even though it can seem like we’re playing around, we are doing profound and life-changing work.
Our work is to shed light. Light as in playful. Light as in illuminating the truth. The truth about who we are without a net.
So about this podcast. I’ll at least be offering guided practices and commentary about the principles of the program. There might be interviews or recordings of our gatherings. We’ll see how it evolves.
If you want to take something with you from this episode, do something playful today.
Your comments are welcome!
