The Joy Of Age

Archy and Mehitabel: A One-Man Theatre Experience

On this episode, Patrick talks to publicist Ali Arif about his solo theatre show he’s still performing at the age of 70. KEY TAKEAWAYS * Archy is a cockroach, the reincarnation of a bad poet. His friend, Mehitabel is a down at heel alley cat who claims to be the reincarnation of Cleopatra. Their conversations are very funny, Mehitabel gets into all sorts of scrapes and Archy has a jaundiced view of human nature. Every night he crawls out of his hiding place in the apartment owned by ‘Boss’ and types a poem on his typewriter every night about Archy’s life. * It was written in the 1920s-30s so it has a jazz age feel to it and includes wonderful New York street slang. The language is brilliant, witty and funny. * When I was a child there used to be huge clouds of butterflies in the summertime, & that doesn’t happen any more except in protected areas. We’re losing so much of the insect population which is affecting the bird population. There’s a while chain of events that occur when we don’t protect even the smallest life forms. Archy has a message to the human race about what we’re doing to ourselves.  * I love the young people who are much more environmentally aware than my generation who squandered a lot of the resources of the planet. What’s fantastic about Archy and Mehitabel is that Don Marquis wrote it nearly 100 years ago. People then were well aware that industrial scale society was already using up the resources of the planet, as did Zola, Dickens, Blake many years before that. BEST MOMENTS ‘It’s a funny, satirical view of human nature and its follies.’ ‘I play about 20 different characters during the course of the play.’ ‘All actors are, in one way or another, show -offs, and this is my show-off show.’ ‘Insects will inherit the planet, we are destroying ourselves & turning the planet into a desert.’ ABOUT THE HOST Patrick Kealey has been an actor, theatre director, writer and teacher and workshop leader for over 40 years. He runs a professional theatre company based in Hastings UK where he currently lives. Please get in touch with me on the following links below! CONTACT METHOD www.theatrenation.org [http://www.theatrenation.org]  https://www.instagram.com/pktheatrenation/ [https://www.instagram.com/pktheatrenation/]

Connection

On this episode, Patrick is joined once more by Harold Lewey to talk about how everything is interconnected & how some humans can often close themselves off from the web of life while others seem to be able to connect to everything. KEY TAKEAWAYS * One of the greatest blessings I ever received is that I see beauty everywhere, I literally identify that everything no matter how beautiful, harmonic, or dissonant & annoying, there is beauty absolutely everywhere. Live is a big, strong river coursing ahead & all things are connected to that river. * After what my father lived through in a concentration camp he became an addict of life & truly helped everybody along the way. He never spoke about it, but he did. So, I had examples & teachers, people aren’t necessarily meant to know, we learn as we go by example, mimicry, by need – which is the greatest inventor. * There are different types of connection. One of them is inside: Knowing who I am. Once I know that & I have self-identity, then the ‘I’ exists & I look, I see, I go, I touch & can then reach out to the outside. There’s confusion, a lot of people mix it together & look for self-identity based on how other see them because they haven’t taken the time to create the ground base of connection with themselves. These are not interchangeable, you won’t survive with only one, there needs to be balance. * All human beings need belonging. The question is; what do we belong to & what do we give up of our individual identify to belong. What most people do is create their own little pack, but even within the pack, we’re all different, so we’re doomed to be alone. The first difference we have to accept is our own difference within ourselves, we have our own parts that are different, we believe certain things & there are parts that don’t agree with that part. We tend to meet people that touch that particular point. BEST MOMENTS ‘Creation is a series of beautiful & sometimes absolutely terrifying manifestations of an endless flow of energy going on. Truly, we are in the river of life.’ ‘I don’t believe there’s anything that’s correct or incorrect, as long as we’re not hurting others or ourselves what’s the danger to connecting to & seeing the beauty in everything.’ ‘The work begins inside.’ ‘The greatest importance for baby is to be held.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Harold Lewey has 40 years in group dynamics leadership, & finding one's voice & direction using theatre, art, music & movement. Harold's focus has been reading of the unspoken body languages that reveal who we are + how we operate. Accompanying change, seeking Peace, finding humour in detail + perspective in the bigger picture. ABOUT THE HOST Patrick Kealey has been an actor, theatre director, writer and teacher and workshop leader for 0ver 40 years. He runs a professional theatre company based in Hastings UK where he currently lives. Please get in touch with me on the following links below! CONTACT METHOD www.theatrenation.org [http://www.theatrenation.org]  https://www.instagram.com/pktheatrenation/ [https://www.instagram.com/pktheatrenation/]

Abundance

On this episode, Patrick is joined once more by Harold Lewey to talk about abundance & what it means for them. KEY TAKEAWAYS * For most people abundance means plentifulness, the cornucopia of life, the richness of fruit pouring out of a conch shell in great quantity. My personal take is that all things I need, want & are meant for me will find me & I will find them. That is the philosophy of abundance & living in abundance. The question is when? Through whom? & how? * There is an issue that for certain people it has nothing to do with quantity, it has to do with quality. They’re not really interested in quantity, they want a certain quality to their lives. For them abundance has nothing to do with quantity, it has to do with the specifics of quality. * Is the glass half full or half empty? If you’re looking at the part that’s half empty you will experience the emptiness, if you’re looking at the part that’s half full you will experience the fullness. Look inside & think: “Let me appreciate what I have at this point as being the perfect amount and quality for what I’m capable of doing.” It has a lot to do with people learning humility & patience & being able to handle their own arrogance that they deserve or are supposed to have certain things, jealousy & envy. These are issues we need to deal with * For one person abundance might be owning a lot of clothes that they never wear, for another it might be having lots of toys, for another simply having one pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses is abundance. Many years ago I heard a guru saying the for her abundance was stuffed olives, they were the ultimate in luxury because you could get a kilo of regular olives for the same price as a small jar of stuffed olives. BEST MOMENTS ‘Abundance itself is purely an attitude. You can be with nothing & feel & experience abundance or you can have everything & feel short-changed.’ ‘Life is full. If you’re rich in problems you’re still rich.’ ‘Just because you have a lot of something doesn’t mean you can appreciate it, absorb it or even realise that’s what you have.’ ‘A lot of us are still working vacuum which has nothing to do with what does & doesn’t exist in the world, it has to do with our relationship with the emptiness we experience, & no amount of abundance can ever fill that.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Harold Lewey has 40 years in group dynamics leadership, & finding one's voice & direction using theatre, art, music & movement. Harold's focus has been reading of the unspoken body languages that reveal who we are + how we operate. Accompanying change, seeking Peace, finding humour in detail + perspective in the bigger picture. ABOUT THE HOST Patrick Kealey has been an actor, theatre director, writer and teacher and workshop leader for 0ver 40 years. He runs a professional theatre company based in Hastings UK where he currently lives. Please get in touch with me on the following links below! CONTACT METHOD www.theatrenation.org [http://www.theatrenation.org]  https://www.instagram.com/pktheatrenation/ [https://www.instagram.com/pktheatrenation/]

Energy (Life Force)

On this episode, Patrick is joined once more by Harold Lewy to talk about energy, with a particular focus on health & wellbeing as well as the commodification of energy. KEY TAKEAWAYS * I’ve heard so many people talk unqualified drivel about ‘energy’, but they’ve not done a smidgen of work to actually know what energy is & they hide in there because it sounds good. But, to me, it doesn’t sound good. I don’t think the human race has a shadow of an inkling of how the universe actually works & how great resources have been put to our advantage, & how we haven’t just squandered our own lives but everybody else’s at the same time, thinking we know something we know very little about almost everything. Speak to me about life force. * The human being is, as most true disciplines describe it, a vector of electromagnetic flows that come through us from the universe down into the earth & that come from the earth and flow through us towards either the sky, the air, or into our bodies & are stuck there. We have several energy points (acupunctural/meridians/flowing levels/pressure points/chakras) in our body, do we truly learn how to use & channel them to turn them into life force? Most people bumble about & find out they’re able to have sex or create life, how much they do with that life or revere & honour it seems a contradiction in terms.  * We are there but for the life source inside ourselves & when that life force either comes to its termination or moves on from us because we’re not chose as vehicles for that lifeforce, we’ll be physically dead. But there are many ways to enhance that life force. * To enhance the life force we must be willing to take a step back and say we don’t really know how it comes about. There are many theories & beautiful stories and things written about it. What we need to do first of allis respect it as something we don not control, we have an effect & an influence on the life force but we don’t actually control it.  BEST MOMENTS ‘We’re being arrogant, self-inflated, uneducated, uninformed, partially looking, partially understanding, mal-interpreting fools. We’re just not getting it.’ ‘We honour life yet we show it no respect whatsoever. Life force is everywhere, to mistreat an elephant is to ultimately mistreat your own life force.’ ‘Human beings are not very good with things that we don’t control, we tend to have a spurious non-respect for things we don’t control.’ ‘You mustn’t overuse your strengths & you must practice & strengthen your weaknesses so that there’s a greater balance.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Harold Lewey has 40 years in group dynamics leadership, & finding one's voice & direction using theatre, art, music & movement. Harold's focus has been reading of the unspoken body languages that reveal who we are + how we operate. Accompanying change, seeking Peace, finding humour in detail + perspective in the bigger picture. ABOUT THE HOST Patrick Kealey has been an actor, theatre director, writer and teacher and workshop leader for 0ver 40 years. He runs a professional theatre company based in Hastings UK where he currently lives. Please get in touch with me on the following links below! CONTACT METHOD www.theatrenation.org [http://www.theatrenation.org]  https://www.instagram.com/pktheatrenation/ [https://www.instagram.com/pktheatrenation/]

Why Do We Fear Change?

On this episode, Patrick is joined by Harold to talk about change as we get older and why we fear change. KEY TAKEAWAYS * We fear change because it’s meeting the unknown. Knowing where I am spatially and time-wise gives me a sense of security because I have a basic definition within which to define myself. Self-definition is what – at least the majority of human beings agree – will distinguish us from the rest of the animal species: self-awareness & being able to look at & define ourselves. We have a need for self-definition. * The two major reasons for change are: The curiosity of the unknown & therefore the pull towards difference. The other is when it’s too painful or constrictive for us to remain as we are, or in the current construct. * Whether we want to or not, life is made of change because that’s how we matrix, that’s how we our ADM or DNA is already programmed. We’re in a steady evolution & there will be a constant living, growing, dying going on over time. * It’s as if we’re born with an empty rucksack & as we’re born we put a little pebble in it. Each year & with each experience we add more pebbles & rocks & by the time you get to your 60s or 70s half a mountain is on your back, no wonder you get bent over, it’s a lot of weight to carry. Lighten up, let go, throw out the ballast. The older we are the less we’re supposed to be carrying, not more. BEST MOMENTS ‘It’s very comforting for human beings to start off knowing the ‘where’ and ‘when’ & the ‘what’ is what we fill in afterwards as self-identity.’ ‘A map is only as good as if you know where you are on the map.’ ‘The soul doesn’t need to be rooted.’ ‘We have slow experiences to learn. We don’t have them because we are slow. Experience is all about integration & knowledge on a cellular level.’   ABOUT THE HOST Patrick Kealey has been an actor, theatre director, writer and teacher and workshop leader for 0ver 40 years. He runs a professional theatre company based in Hastings UK where he currently lives. Please get in touch with me on the following links below! CONTACT METHOD www.theatrenation.org [http://www.theatrenation.org]  https://www.instagram.com/pktheatrenation/ [https://www.instagram.com/pktheatrenation/]