Improv is a Spiritual Practice
"Yes, and..." is a very important rule.
(Sometimes I write a post and 10 people unsubscribe. This is one of them. The previous one was about zen. Maybe this time 20 people will unsubscribe.)
Last month, I did some improv. There were, maybe, twenty of us1 standing on a bright green lawn under the sun in the British countryside, looking at our improv leader. She confidently announced the rules of the game:
— Start moving around, and when I announce the character, act it out! The first one is a cat! Go!!!
Moving around pretending to be a cat was easy enough. Then came the next one:
— You’re a 14 y.o. boy who found his dad’s porn collection!
Well, turns out being part of a group of middle-aged adults trying to outdo each other role playing a masturbating teenager is even more fun than being a cat — that is, if you remember the rule #1. If you forget or don’t like the most important rule, then improv is going to be hell.
The #1 rule of every improv activity is “Yes, and…”. That is, whatever happens, whatever anyone else does or says during improv, you roll with it. You never ignore it or argue back.
The #2 rule is that everyone there is to help each other and have fun. It’s not a competition.2 We’re all just having a good time.
These two simple rules make improv an amazing fun to both participate and watch, and it’s usually both: people in the audience can join the action, and those in the spotlight fade into the audience to give newcomers space.
And if I think about it, that’s the essence of spirituality, whatever flavour of it you like — Buddhist, Christian, Hindu or otherwise.
The #1 rule is unconditional acceptance of absolutely everything life sends your way. Whatever happens, the response is “yes, thank you.” But it’s not a passive acceptance. That’s why it’s “yes, and”: I accept the present moment completely and I choose to take action as the result.
A common confusion point in spirituality is that acceptance is the same as inaction. Quite the contrary: we can and should separate the two. Struggling against what already is is insanity: reality always wins, every single time. But once we accept what is as it is, we can continue the story with “yes, and…”.
The #2 rule is deep trust or faith that life — universe, God, divine, reality, however you want to call is — is fundamentally good and loving despite the occasional evidence to the contrary.
It may take us quite some time and some practice to see that three things are simultaneously true: 1) the world is perfect, 2) the world is broken and 3) there’s no contradiction between the two. Until then, deep trust or faith in something bigger than our small sense of self can be of great help.
Writing about such stuff is hard because words can’t ever convey the meaning, as far better writers can attest. Yet I really enjoyed this long read this morning3, maybe giving a sense of why and how we find our way beyond our rational minds: not abandoning them, but putting them into perspective:
Maybe one way to think about a spiritual path is falling in love with reality and realising, feeling, seeing clearly that it loves you back. And then, seeing that maybe the line between you two isn’t as solid as it seemed.
The trouble is that we can’t make ourselves fall in love — neither with life nor with another person. It’s an accident, a miracle, a coming home in a way, but then life and especially spirituality are full of paradoxes.
We can’t really let go as an act of will. We can only let go of even an idea of letting go or the desire to get anything by letting go. That’s the rule #1: unconditional openness to everything, even if we didn’t ask for it. And then maybe we’ll discover that somehow letting go happens and deepens in the most mysterious way without us trying to let go.
And if we’re willing to accept rules #1 and #2, then we find out that life can be like a session of improv: just friends fooling around pretending to be someone else all the time just for fun.
A reminder, I’ll be speaking and offering a workshop at Full Stack Founder conference in London on 22-23 July (in two days!). We’ll be talking AI and how to strategically approach it as a founder and have some fun with Claude Code and Replit.
Other facilitators and I will be pretending that we know something interesting about AI. The audience will be pretending that they’re learning something useful. The organisers will be pretending they’re a bit nervous. Everyone will have good fun :)
Use code EVGENY100 for a discount.
Including some subscribers to this substack :)
Hector, I’m sorry about asking you to do a pantomime about AI chatbots!