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My One-woman show is about the roles we play in life. And how they can keep us from fully participating in life.

I just returned from a solo 54-day road trip spending time in nature, visiting friends and performing my show in California and Arizona. It was an expansive and invigorating adventure.

As an observer, I realize I was playing an old role of a schoolgirl wanting approval. Trying to make the person on the other end of the call feel important. This is how I acted at times with my Dad and my older sister.

I compared this to how I felt on the road where no one had any pre-conceived ideas of who I was.

I felt free. I was fully participating, not from an expected role but completely in the moment. Whoever I was participating with was also free to express themselves.

That’s the beauty of coming from our internal spark, not an unconscious role.

We can fall into the trap of playing roles with strangers too, but the trip highlighted this differentiation for me.

On another trip traveling through Darwin, the wife of an Austrailian government official met me and invited me over for tea. With each sip of her tea, she released more and more of her feelings of sadness and frustration. Apologizing with every admission, yet saying how good it felt to be with someone just passing through. How freeing it felt to express herself without the need to look like the perfect, happy wife people expected her to be.

Staying with a friend during the Chicago Fringe Festival, I wondered why I felt so free in his house. Suddenly it hit me. He’s got expressive works of art on canvas in his living room. All without frames. Then I stopped at a relative’s house who has wall to wall pictures of family members in wooden frames. I felt boxed in looking at them. It’s beautiful to see big smiles and fancy clothes, but are we putting pressure on ourselves and others to live up to a certain way of being?

My one-woman show is about overcoming the suppression I felt growing up as the youngest child in a farming community. It’s an autobiographical play where I reveal how I continued playing roles in order to get love. And how liberating it is when we stop playing roles others expect of us. In an entertaining and truthful way, it demonstrates how much deeper our relationships can be when we truly participate with each other at a soul level.

The workshop I facilitate after my show is a place where people learn to speak their truth while deeply connecting with the person in front of them. Even when people have known each other for a long time, they see a new side of the person in front of them. We take time to notice how people are changing every single second. It’s slowing down enough to get a glimpse of the true soul of a person. Names and titles drop away. Genders don’t matter. It’s a vacation from having to perform a role that either we’ve placed on ourselves or accepting a role others have placed on us. It’s getting out of the proverbial box and keeping our spirit alive.

As Hafiz, a Sufi poet from the 14th century said, “The small man builds cages for everyone he knows. While the sage, who has to duck his head when the moon is low, keeps dropping keys all night long for the beautiful rowdy prisoners.”

If you know a spiritual center, school or women’s group that would like to book my show and follow-up workshop, please contact me at www.PamelaZiemann.com.

My head hurts. I just returned from a memorial service of a good friend who passed away a few months ago.

I wonder why we’ve been taught to hold back our emotions. Maybe you’re from a family that freely expressed their emotions, but that wasn’t the case for me. Crying was a sign of weakness. It wasn’t just sadness, we were taught to hold in our anger and at times, to hold back expressing our joy as well.

Over the years I’ve come to realize the importance of expressing my emotions. Days like today shine a light on the effect it has on my body. How it keeps me separate from others. How I’m out of integrity with myself when I don’t reveal what’s true.

My one-woman show “If I Were Me… I’d Know What I Want” is my 50 year journey coming back to myself and learning to express my emotions more freely. At first I thought it was just about me, but as I perform it more I realize how each character in my play has learned their unique way to hide their feelings. For one it’s over-eating, for another it’s over-working, another becomes rigid and numb.

My heart goes out to each of us living in a world that teaches us to repress our natural humanity. We all hurt in one way or another and when we acknowledge our grief we can experience more joy.

If you know any groups who would like to explore this more, I’d be happy to perform my show for them. The talkbacks after witnessing my journey allow for deep sharing. Please contact me via my website. www.PamelaZiemann.com

My eyes widened and my jaw dropped when I learned about the Mankato Hangings of 1862. At a drum making circle near Seattle, I learned that the largest mass execution in America’s history happened in the same city where I got my four year college degree.

I was a cheerleader at Mankato State University in 1977 when we were told that our mascot was being changed from an Indian to a Maverick. My cheerleading friends and I were disappointed about the change but at the time, we didn’t think to ask why.

Our football stadium was right down the road from where 38 Native Americans were hung and people came from miles around to witness. None of this was in our history books.

I learned from the drum making leader how offensive it is to Native people to see an Indian mascot parading around the football field with a large feather headdress playing a snare drum.

Now that I know about it, I’m beginning to understand this deeper shame that’s been ever-present in my psyche. I feel a responsibility to understand both sides and repair the damage done by my people.

With the help of a friend, I drove from Seattle to Minnesota to the site of the hangings. After being on the road so long, I needed to ground. I needed to feel some good healthy dirt. At the St. Peter Coop, I took my soup, salad, and a potted parsley plant to the checkout aisle.

I ate the leaves with reverence and gratitude, held the dirt and the root structure in my hands at Reconciliation Park.

In the polarized world we live in it’s more important than ever to listen to each side. I have hope as I see what’s happening in Minnesota and across the United States with reconciliation projects springing up in unexpected places. Being heard and accepted is everyone’s birthright.