Play is Like Pray

“Play is like pray,” my daughter said to me in the car today. I thought about it and realised that it was very profound.

Play is like pray, but we rarely see it as such. I have been thinking about this more often, of how we can create from joy rather than through suffering and by doing so, we get to feel deeply connected.

Opportunities to grow often arise through the moments of suffering, the tougher times in our lives. Often the impetus for a great change, a total shift, is the potential to be found and tapped within the darker times. But we can get so immersed in those times – we see the stories as the only viable reality and thus feel trapped.

But seeking out the joy, that which makes us really happy, can herald the onset of profound change. It is the beginning of transformation. I find it to be magical. By touching that which brings us joy and recognising it, then it nourishes us and begins to open up a different space within our lives.

We can begin to create from that space. And it is not necessary to know what it is that we are creating, I think that it is enough to be familiar with the feeling state and to ask for that to inform what we manifest. Working with intent is very powerful, but I think to set the intent to the feeling state is the point from which it all flows. It leaves the space open and allows for much creativity to come through.

It is, however, important to become familiar with that feeling state of joy. I find it can bring up many things. In my case it brought up feelings of unworthiness, I didn’t deserve to feel well. All my issues of self esteem moved around this. Why would I deserve to feel good when there was so much in pain in the world? It brought up the dis-belief that anything of value can arise that hasn’t been suffered through. I could only deserve my creation if I first paid a price for it, till I earned it. 

What exactly was joy anyway? What truly made me happy, what was true joy and what was fulfilment of needs and desires?

That is where the play comes in. The more you play, the more you touch the feeling of joy, a feeling of wholeness and fulfilment. It is for me a strengthening of my connection, to God, to All That Is, to Source. And it is most acutely felt in joy. When it is felt it bubbles up inside me and overflows. It is love and it is joy and it can be sent to anyone and anything.

I can walk past a tree and feel such appreciation for it, such love and it can be sent back and forth and beyond. But first I had to play with what my concept of a tree was. I had to play to touch it, to hold it, to recognise it, play with my mind in relation to the tree and let go of my limits, the self-consciousness, the rational judge that blocked me. Play and playfulness is a way of going beyond things easefully without the traditional head-on confrontation.

Play for me is like pray, because the more I play, the deeper and more joyfully connected I become. And from touching and holding that state of being, the physical manifestations in my life, more and more arise from there.

Drawing Ideas Into Being

Yesterday someone said to me that I have ideas that I am able to bring into fruition. It got me thinking, because up until very recently I had characterised myself by having been someone who spoke a great deal and did nothing. I used to talk up a storm, but I could feel the energy of the project depleting even as I talked. It led to years of frustration and sadness and a coming to believe that I was not really capable of doing much.

How did that change? For it clearly has changed. There were many reasons I had reached that point, but there were also several ways that I went beyond it.

One of the beginning points at turning it around was going back to find what I really enjoyed as a child. Guided in meditations and my own explorations I journeyed to my childhood self to rediscover what I truly loved. In my case it was drawing, piano, horseback riding to name a few.

I was advised to make them real. And this I believe is the key. It is not only to discover something; it is to bring it into the present moment and to do so with no aim behind it. If you stop to ask why you’re colouring in a children’s book and what the point is, then you won’t do it. But if you do it for sheer enjoyment, you have no idea what you might connect with.

It is again about not considering things as products in themselves but rather as parts of a flow. Colouring led me to cake making, cake making led me to doing it more seriously. That in turn led me to giving a workshop on it and earning money, which in turn was part of a greater theme of working through my twisted relationship with money and my right to earn.

In the meantime I began drawing and creating works of art, which opened up new horizons within myself. These works I later made into cards to sell and sold. All of that together opened up the realisation that I could combine art with my spiritual interests and design workshops for children, the design of which is flowing.

If at any point I had become mired down in the questions of what it all meant, I would have broken the flow. If I had tried to use an interest as a means to create an identity, am I now a cake maker? am I now an artist? I would have stopped because I didn’t have enough experience as others therefore I couldn’t be. But if I did it because I enjoyed it, I could avoid my own judgemental comparisons.

But the main point is that in the process of just experiencing these things so much opened up inside me. By seeing that one thing did lead to another with no forcing on my part, it became easier to know that what I’m doing now is also part of some unfolding strand which has its relevance.

Mediations and visualisations have been a big part of my experience. I was told from the beginning that I should ground what I experienced in meditations, that I should anchor it in some way. I have done many guided meditations in which I journeyed to meet my Full Self or my guides, or many other experiences.

It always seemed very clear to me that these were lived experiences no different from the run I had this morning on the beach, just as real and just as relevant. And so I worked to anchor it. If a word popped up, a stone for example, then I tried to bring that stone into my ambit. I would look up what came through in the meditations, I would write them down and whenever I had the opportunity to physicalize a part of it I did so.

The same was true with dream work. I was very disciplined for a long time writing down my dreams; I still do, though a little less frequently. One suggestion that Robert A. Johnson in “Inner Work” has for dream interpretation is to look for where the dream intersects your daily experience. What is the dream mirroring to you? By focusing on the feeling of your dream you are more likely to see how it is reflected in your daily life.

Writing the dreams down is a way of anchoring it. With both meditation and dreams it is about bringing a certain kind of knowledge into your conscious camp. It is about increasing the stores of what is available to you and actively bringing them into your ambit. In terms of dreams I got to see that I was working out many things in the dream world that were pertinent to me in waking life.

In terms of meditation, I was able to draw on inspiration I do not know how I could have accessed otherwise. From there, the version of myself and of the reality in which I inhabit naturally shifted.

As that shifted so did the awareness that I could work in the wings so to speak. Instead of working only with tangible events, I work through envisioning and feeling realities. Things I might be able to do, projects for example, I could work with on how they felt. Build up the feeling and continue to anchor that. It is not about delineating how it is to happen or what it must be.

Since very small my father always said to me that I would only be good at what I really loved doing. I never realised until recently how wise and how true these words are. But I didn’t believe them to be possible. I couldn’t see how my interests were to fit into the world around me or how, if need be, I could shape them into the catalogue of jobs that were agreed upon, but felt limited. I also didn’t see how I was capable of fulfilling what I loved.

I had not realised that by searching within myself, by working with my own reality and expanding and discovering more of who I am that my reality could shift so drastically. I did not consider that I could begin to work from this. I am still amazed at how my interests seem to be coming together to create viable projects, which I can feel coming into being.

It is a thrillingly creative process and one I believe is available to all. It is helpful to have the openness of a child’s mentality: they learn and try things out just for the fun of it. If we can enter into that space and work with envisioning and grounding what comes up, I believe we can begin to realise ourselves in different ways and thus shift our experiences within this world.  

Seeing Others as a Result of Self Acceptance

Today when I went for a run, I came across an older man walking with a bamboo cane. I greeted him and ran on, but in the second that I passed him I took so much of him in. I saw the shape of his head, his skin already glistening with sweat, the curve of his spine, his legs, the ricketiness of the bamboo cane. It all flashed past me and was attenuated.

I understood once I had passed him that I had been able to see him. I saw and felt for a moment his feelings, walking in the early morning, a bit surprised to come across me. He was so human.  It was as though I could feel the trajectory of his life, still on-going, as if I could glimpse him as a child, a teenager, a young man, all contained within this instant.

It struck me, as I could see the contrast with how I used to see people and still do a lot of the time.  I have been so trained to see, or rather react to people defensively, that I have rarely been able to see them. Every time I crossed a man when I was running alone, I would steel myself against my fear. Men were threatening, regardless of who they really were. I couldn’t see them, I could only react to my own fear as I mirrored it through them.  

It is linked to the idea that I always thought that other people knew more than me, were more capable than me, stronger than me. I had something to prove, which swung me into arrogance, or something to hide, that swung me into self-effacement.

If someone was older then they should be more assured than I was, it would not occur to me that they might not be. I wasn’t able to allow them their humanity and because of that I had many personal relationships that were skewed. I worked on assumptions and expectations based on my projections that did not really stop to quietly explore the person in front of me. I could not feel people as I had been able to do today and as I am increasingly more able to do. It is coming naturally without my forcing it or trying for it.

But it begins with self-acceptance. To give an example: about a year ago one employee stole from another and the one who was robbed was devastated. It was a real betrayal. She had trusted her co-worker, they had been real friends, and it was a huge blow. It was clear what had happened and I didn’t doubt her. I sat with her as she sobbed and she was very distraught, numbering all the difficult things that had happened in her life culminating in this. I was empathetic and I felt compassion. She went home and I dealt with the situation.

But in her absence, and the following days, something started to happen to me. I began to feel increasingly suspicious of her. It didn’t make any sense, but I was losing all trust of her. In the following days my suspicions mounted and although I knew they had no foundation, I couldn’t shake the feelings.

So I began to explore what was going on. I started to track my conscious thought and to keep writing to see where it would lead me. After a few days I realised that an event from my life had been passing through my thoughts. We have so many thoughts that pass through our minds that we treat them almost like white noise.

This time, however, I was able to hold onto a memory that had reappeared and it was of a car crash I had had when I was twenty-one. I started to write about it and I realised that it was directly related to my current situation. I had driven the car into a tree and totalled it whilst travelling in Australia. I had been sober, but exhausted. A friend was with me. I had gotten out of the car and lost it, shouting and screaming, jumping and swearing in front of the car. I was practically unhurt, but my friend had very bad whiplash and was lucky not to have broken her neck.

It may have seemed totally unrelated, but the common ground was shame. I was ashamed at having lost control, I was ashamed at becoming totally hysterical and letting myself go in the surge of the emotional release. I was still ashamed today and I had not accepted that in myself. I was still, fifteen years later standing in very harsh judgement over myself.

This was the reason I was losing faith in this other person. Her reaction to the stealing was the same as my reaction to the car crash. As I could not pardon myself for my loss of control, it was simply not possible that I could treat her any differently than the treatment I meted out for myself. The moment I understood what was going on and how unfair I was being with myself, the moment I forgave myself, all conflictive feelings towards her vanished

I feel that it is work like this that has allowed my heart to expand. By seeking to understand and accept myself, without forcing it, it spreads outwards to my perception of others. It is in these moments of seeing another in such a way that I feel awash with appreciation simply at being here.