Category: Inspiration

Free Play

Human life has largely been stripped of true, free play. 

For adults, the word play has almost negative associations, as if frivolous. Relegated to a domain of less importance, while work has been elevated, has a kind of sanctity to it. 

The truth is that the human spirit is made to play.

Playful by Nature

When we were children, self-directed play happened naturally. We explored, we found out, and we felt what it was like to be in our human bodies. 

Play happens almost the moment we’re out of the womb. Babies flow for hours on end just looking at their fists, putting their toes in their mouths, etc. Exploring and discovering. 

Later on, it becomes more obvious how imagination laces and saturates what young ones are experiencing as they play. They hold an ordinary twig up to us, enchanted, then cradle it like a baby, then put it in a bed made of sand. 

Play lives in a world where a thing is never only a thing, but has many other harmonics, octaves of potency, and meaning. Play is rich and rewarding, full of the resonances of a unified, loving realm, that has more connection, creativity, and impact.

We are part of Nature’s Play

Nature is playful, full of frivolity. Animals play, and nature herself plays, with flowers, with weather patterns, with the creation of the shapes of the world we inhabit. Everything changes, all the time, in ceaseless flow. Dancing, playing, experimenting, expressing.

And we, as part of nature, also play. Nature gave us a gift for open-ended, agenda-less play. Play is one of the core features of a human spirit, and all that is natural, undefined and open-ended in our world. 

Free play means we are free. Free to make our own choices without direction or control, without pre-definition from someone else. Free to find out on our own terms, as the results of our own moves. Play empowers us.

Play is Rehearsal for Life

Animals play at fighting, hunting, and building before they grow into adults. We do this too, by instinct. We pretend to be adults doing adult activities – cooking, feeding babies, building houses – until such time as we are. 

In our creative lives, you could say we pretend, try out, and try on being artists before we become them. Education has shown that children have an easier time learning when a game is made of a learning objective and when a sense of fun and joy is introduced to the skill acquisition process. Play is the rehearsal of real-life skills. 

Play Heals

All of the art therapies and play therapy itself demonstrate the ways in which play is also healing. 

Play answers what’s missing in the psyche. The right to joy, laughter, and self-created pleasure. The right to connect, to integrate, to flow. 

When you play, you don’t need anything else. Play is its own reward, its own answer, its own satisfaction, an alpha and omega completion in its own self. 

Sadly, as adults, we are often scared to play. Scared to look foolish, scared to open up a pandora’s box of shame, inadequacy, or anxiety. 

But we can slowly, gently restore our right to play, with recognition for the pain and damage we all carry around the right to be ourselves in this way, to use our nature-given instinct to play. 

Journal to Recover Your Play Powers

• Identify a memory of a time when you free-played as a child. You may have been alone, guiding yourself, or you may have made up games with other children. What can you recall, that you especially enjoyed as a child?

An example from my own life: my four siblings and I used to climb a big old oak tree. We pretended that each of its branches were different rooms in our “house”. We designated a living room, our bedrooms, and a kitchen, where we made pretend meals out of smashed acorns and little stones. 

Last weekend on a trip home to the place I grew up, I recently saw this same old oak tree again, still alive though decades older. I noticed I still feel a very strong emotional connection to it, as one of the many living beings in my life who have offered me a sense of home. 

What about you, what can you recall from the times in your life when play was allowed? What riches came to you through the portal of play? 

Is there any area of your life now, where you might invite a spirit of play to meet you, once again? Your play powers are yours to recover. 

One of the beauties of human life is to consider how the core blueprint of the soul – our nature, purpose, and path – repeats and reappears in different strata of our being. We each are a uniquely-patterned tapestry, shot through with motifs, shapes, and colors, the combination of which is part of what makes us entirely our own. 

Whatever we experience in our thought stream has a mirrored reflection in the body. What we relate to as emotion is created through sensations arising in our physiology, which we imbue with kaleidoscope-like filters of interpretation. 

Emotion joins sensation with meaning, making stories out of the raw experience. These stories, in turn, dynamically impact our physiology. Everything arises together, co-creates, and sensitively responds.  

The Chemistry Set Inside Us

Whether positive or negative, we feel how we do at any given moment courtesy of our body using minerals and chemicals to create a state within us. 

States are generated through a complex process involving our brain, nervous system, and the circulation of microscopic units of electrically charged materials employed as messengers. 

These chemical messengers, tiny molecules of neurotransmitters and hormones, tell muscles, organs, and our bloodstream which state of neuroception best suits the needs of the moment we are in. 

Neuroception is a phrase used by the trauma researcher Steven Porges to describe how we experience distinct modes of being through the beautifully complex functioning of our neurobiology.  

As Porges’ polyvagal theory explains, a fearful thought is accompanied by a sudden influx of neurotransmitters and hormones circulating in the body that tell the physical body to create readiness for action. 

Physiological changes are then instigated that affect nearly every system of the body: our muscles constrict, our bloodstream is flooded with energizing chemicals, our breathing shallows, and our heart starts pounding. 

These are the tell-tale signs of nervous system arousal. Nervous system arousal is felt to us as discomfort. It isn’t meant to feel good – the bad feeling is part of the motivation to act quickly to save our lives. The trick is understanding that the body has already created the state of unease long before the moment we consciously notice that we are thinking a fearful thought. 

Going Positive

Positive experiences like happiness, inspiration, and love are also created in the body as physical sensations. 

Our muscles relax, our breathing slows and deepens, and we notice that the body creates sensations of pleasure, relaxation, safety, and unrestricted energy flow. The body creates these positive-feeling experiences through the exact mechanism of circulating chemical messengers.

The trigger for whether the body should create feelings of well-being or discomfort lies deep in the brainstem, out of sight of our conscious awareness. 

Lest we feel that we have no edge of influence, though, the good news is that over time, through yoga, artmaking, breathwork, mindfulness – any of the sundry practices that develop mind-body connection – we can learn to work with our bodies to gain a greater measure of self-authority.

A Core of Mystery

So much mystery lies at the heart of us. Researchers have argued that the body drives our experience, with our thoughts only coming up with invented explanations for a reality driven by biology after the fact. Nature decides how we will be, and our mind is told afterward.

Other lines of inquiry point to the supreme relevance of will, thought, and focus, highlighting how our thoughts create our feelings, driving behavior, and results in our lives. Here you might say that mind is the driver, directing experience through its lenses, filters, and shaping constrictions.

Then again, in certain states of the body, linked directly to neuroception, some thoughts cannot live and will fade away. Worry thoughts need a beta brain wave state to linger, and creative flow happens with alpha brain waves. 

We cannot think practical thoughts while sleeping, only swim in symbol-laden dreams. Feeling terrible when up to our chins in a warm, lavender-scented salt bath is hard. These are restrictions. 

The Cathedral We Build

All in all, the whole miracle of experience co-arises in mind, body, and emotion simultaneously. Far from being hapless and chaotic, our life is largely harmoniously organized, as self-coherent, beautiful, and graceful as a symphony. 

This artistic integrity of design might cause us to wonder, what genuinely underlies our existence that gives us our patterns? Looking at the shape of our lives, we can get a hint of what the blueprint of the soul might be. 

What instruction sets are we working with, have we been working with this the whole time? What palace for the soul are we building, breath by breath, thought by thought, move by the move? Getting a hint of it, might we more consciously align to what we’re really here to do?  

Sometimes, on the winding, yellow-brick road back home to ourselves, we get tired. Our spirits flag, and we lose motivation for a spell. 

On such days we might ask ourselves, why do all this hard inner work? When so many people in the world choose to stay hard-hearted, numbed out, or absent-bodied? Why should we bother to try to retrieve our aliveness, nourish our tenderheartedness, revive our colorful human soul? Why shouldn’t we just give in to the difficulties, to our self-destructive urges and patterns, to our desires to fall back asleep? 

Here are some thoughts of my own. I hope you will also add to this list and think of your own reasons for keeping on keeping on. Take heart, fellow traveler, on lonely stretches of the road, knowing good things are around the bend for all of humanity. Thank you for walking the road, it does mean something, to me and countless others. 

1. We Have to Keep Going to Get There

The journey to wholeness can feel endless sometimes, but the idea that our wounds won’t ever be resolved comes from the trauma experience itself, of feeling stuck and frozen in a hellish moment. The actual truth is that little by little, we are getting better, bigger, fuller, deeper, more ourselves. It just takes a long time, like a very long hike to the top of a mountain. 

The main thing that gets in the way of getting to the top is when we get discouraged and stop walking the trail. We have to give ourselves many, many chances to release, repair, and repattern. Sooner or later though, one fine day, we’ll get there. 

So it’s ok to stop and rest, it is. Maybe even kick and scream for a little bit, have a toddler tantrum and cry into our elbows. Then we get back on the road. Because we have to keep going to get there. 

2. We Do It to Stop the Cycle of Broken-heartedness

Many of us experienced intense suffering in our lives at the hands of people whose wounds were too big for them to hold. They themselves most likely didn’t mean to hurt us, but the damage in them damaged us. Because these people we loved and needed to love us back were so addled with heartache themselves, they passed their hurt right onto us. We end up holding the same damage they held. 

So those of us with the privilege of being aware of this do the hard work of healing so that we stop the madness of passing woundedness on from person to person, generation to generation. Not only that, we give from the best of us. We choose something else. We create new patterns that can be passed from person to person in the other direction. We do it to stop the cycle of broken-heartedness.

3. We Do it for True Love

True love requires full self-acceptance and self-love. If we want to experience the deep satisfaction of a true love union and partnership (or even a deep, real friendship), we have to do some work to be ready for it. 

We must learn not to push away the intimacy, needs, and yearning of others, and yet still hold onto ourselves. We must find a way to be our own selves fully, vulnerable and real, while also holding the power that belongs to us intact in our hearts. We have to combine all these paradoxes of strength and yielding into one human heart. It’s a lot, but then, true love is the best. So we do it for true love. 

4. We Do It Because Healthy Bodies Need Healthy Hearts

Physical health, immunity, and well-being at the biological level are influenced by whether or not we find ways to attend to the wounds of our souls. If we want to be in fit physical condition, we have to do our best to be in fit emotional, mental, creative, and spiritual condition, too! So we do it because healthy bodies need healthy hearts. 

5. We Do it for Our Dreams

Whether we have a bucket list of experiences we want to have before we pass on from this plane, or a set of accomplishments it would be very satisfying to one day achieve, we will benefit from doing the hard work of healing. When too much of our pain is neglected, cast aside, rejected and unaddressed, we will either not even try, give up at the first challenge, self-sabotage our dreams just when they’re blooming, or be unable to enjoy them when they do happen. So we do it for our dreams. 

6. We Do It for the Planet

If we don’t do the difficult work of healing our minds, bodies and emotions, we will always be manipulated by our wounds to continue to live in the ways that the Powers that Shouldn’t Be want us to. 

If we truly, really want to stop waging wars, victimizing the vulnerable, and destroying the world’s beautiful flora and magnificent fauna, the body of mother earth, we must learn to find ways not to respond to nudges and urgings that come from the appetite for destruction within us. The  most powerful action we can take to stop being part of the problem is to heal our hearts, bodies, minds, and souls. So we do it for the planet, too. 

What are your reasons for keeping on keeping on?

The Yin-Yang of Seasons

In the northern hemisphere, this time of year represents the seeds of sunlight buried in the most lightless pockets of earth, so that within the darkest time of the year, we are given the promise of the light. 

In the southern hemisphere, it is the opposite, as if to say that in the heart of the sun’s full bloom, there is a seed of darkness, of return inwards. The exchange of energies from inner to outer, outer to inner, is linked like a yin-yang symbol. 

Seeds of Light and Seeds of Darkness

In the darkness, we might see, if we’re lucky, the seeds of light. It takes extra faith to look around in times of fruitlessness, and imagine what seeds are buried around and within us. 

When past fruits are gone, we grieve, mourn the flowering, the lost fullness. But still we are always left with something. What did our last fruits give us? What did the loss of them give us? 

Fruits are full of seeds. Even after they’re gone, they leave us with something for our future. It takes extra levels of hope to see how a such a little lightseed has a whole orchard inside it, a lush forest.

Life is a Reclamation Project

When I was living nearby and working at Villa Kali Ma in person, I volunteered at a place called Coastal Roots Farm. I remember one day being put to work in the food forest, where they were rehabilitating a piece of land through permaculture. 

It was full of toxic residue from construction materials, and it was dry, hard, barren, and poisoned. They told me it would take seven years to rehabilitate the land. 

At the time, seven years sounded like a long time. Because by nature I am caught in the moment, my struggles and joys, I can lose track of the bigger progress. Now seven years have passed since that day of volunteering in the food forest.

Nature’s Patience

Day in, day out, the food forest, the trees, the earth worms, the chickens, the farmers, and the plants have been doing their slow work. Each turn of the earth, they do a small, important act of returning a toxic piece of land back to the arms of the rest of nature.

This makes me wonder what slow but important I, you, we, may have all been doing, in ways so hard to recognize in the moment. 

Have we been slowly improving the terrain, have we been working through the hard knots, breaking down what is ossified, old and inorganic? 

Have we been dismantling the artificial, have we been incinerating what hard, black, recalcitrant structures have been keeping us cramped in unhappy positions for so long? 

I believe that I have, even though the pace feels geologic and my impatience runs hot and high every day, wanting to run like the wind, not move like earthworms through the soil and the slowness. 

Journal Questions for Ushering in a New Cycle

Wherever you are, you may like to take some time to reflect, with the patience of nature, on what your life has been this last year. Consider the last seven years – the time it takes for nature and humans working together to rehabilitate half a city block of poisoned land.

How have you slowly moved from darkness to light to darkness to light again, and what has your movement accomplished, in the slow, fair way that nature does? What have you reclaimed, what have you rebalanced? 

May these questions guide you into new blooms. 

What am I grateful for?

What do I acknowledge about myself and my journey this past year, these past seven years?

What has been positive, that I can truly approve of and celebrate?

What do I honestly, truthfully need to let go of, release, say goodbye to?

What open topics do I surrender to God/Source/Spirit/Nature, for rebalancing into the heart of oneness?

What burdens still rest on my shoulders, that I have not yet found a way to complete or give over? What parts feel hopeless, unchanging, that I could name, to validate my experiences more lovingly?

What has changed, within or around me? Can I see the earthworm-paced transformation of the soil of my life? What has been broken down, removed entirely, or turned into rich fluffy soil? What is still here? 

What new sprouts, saplings, or entire trees grew up in this time? What has nature given me, between her balance of dark and light? Can I see what design she may have had for me? What is still here in me that’s green and true, in spite of all that has changed? What pieces of me endure? 

What do I wish to call in, if it should be aligned with what’s best for All? What seeds feel exciting, beautiful, desired by me? What makes me perk up, smile, feel my heart again, feel like dancing? What newness waits for me, still hazy but full of summer lights?