Performing The World

08/25/2026

Join Melissa Meyer and Desire Wandan for a 6-week dive into Lois Holzman’s "The Overweight Brain: How Our Obsession with Knowing Keeps Us from Getting Smart Enough to Make a Better World." Through selected chapters and group dialogue, participants will explore how the belief that knowing is required for growth can limit creativity, risk-taking, and our capacity to create something new. Together, the group will explore “non-knowing growing” and learn about key influences, including developmental psychologist, Lev Vygotsky and philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. No prior familiarity is needed. Sept 8 - Oct 13.

Sign up 👉 https://ow.ly/BiPv50ZuJMx

08/20/2026

What if the ruling ideas don’t just shape what we think—but become embedded in how we move, speak, react, and relate?

In Part 3, Dan Friedman turns to Pierre Bourdieu and his concept of habitus: the deeply ingrained habits and ways of being that carry the values of a culture, often without our even being aware of them.

Bourdieu called the body “a memory”—a place where culture gets reproduced without needing to be explained or consciously chosen.

So what happens when the world we want to change is also living through us?

This short video is Part 3 of a three-part excerpt from one of Dan’s lectures in his annual East Side Institute class, Crawling From the Wreckage, held in July 2026.

Dan leaves us with the question: What can we do about that?

08/19/2026

If ruling ideas become our “common sense,” how do we begin to challenge them?

In Part 2, Dan Friedman turns to Antonio Gramsci, who asked why oppressed people so often reinforce the very systems that dominate them. Gramsci’s answer was hegemony: the slow process by which a ruling culture’s values, assumptions, and ways of seeing come to feel natural, universal, and simply “the way things are.”

But Gramsci also pointed toward another possibility: building new cultural, intellectual, and social environments where different ways of seeing, thinking, relating, and creating can emerge.

This short video is Part 2 of a three-part excerpt from one of Dan’s lectures in his annual East Side Institute class, Crawling From the Wreckage, held in July 2026.

Watch—and consider: How can we create a new cultural “common sense”?

08/12/2026

“The ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class.”

When Dan Friedman first encountered those words from Marx and Engels as a 19-year-old in 1969, his reaction was: Duh.

Of course the people who control the material institutions of society also shape the ideas we live by.

But that realization raises a harder question: If ruling ideas become part of how we think, feel, and make sense of the world, what does it actually take to challenge them?

This short video is Part 1 of a three-part excerpt from one of Dan’s lectures in his annual East Side Institute class, Crawling From the Wreckage, held in July 2026.

Watch—and tell us what it brings up for you.

07/20/2026

06/30/2026

Can we break out of the box that captures how and what we see?

This is at the heart of Dan Friedman's five-week East Side Institute seminar, "Crawling From the Wreckage or, trouble with you is the trouble with me, got two good eyes and still don't see."

Begins July 6.

👉 More info and registration here: https://ow.ly/uLlN50ZhCVr

06/26/2026

Performing The World Presents...
International Storytelling Circle
led by Gwen Johnson of the Letcher County Culture Hub (Kentucky)and Dan Friedman
Thursday, July 16, 10am - 12pm

Storytelling is a part of every culture in the world. When people from different cultures with very different histories and experiences get together to tell stories, some beautiful things can happen.

Registration is limited. For more information about the Storytelling Circle and how to register for it, contact Dan at [email protected].

06/25/2026

How do we get out of our heads and into the world?

Fortunately, that is an East Side Institute specialty. Play, performance, philosophizing, all help us get into the world, into life. And they're all fueled with GIVING! All are invitations to give.

Watch Chris Helm’s Community Meeting presentation, Get Out of Your Head and Into the World, and help us keep creating something different from the culture of grabbing all you can: a culture of giving, development, and possibility.

Our Spring Campaign goal is $100,000 by July 15, and we’re already 82% of the way there. Your gift helps us create this global community that has always, and will always, build a new way forward with what's broken, spaces where people discover and create new possibilities.

👉 Watch the video�
👉 Give here: https://secure.givelively.org/donate/east-side-institute-for-group-and-short-term-psychotherapy/2026-spring-campaign