Something tends to happen when we work on intense issues. Our life becomes incredibly serious. This is not to say that traumatic situations shouldn’t be treated with care, compassion and kindness. However, when we loose our sense of humor when doing work on ourselves, it’s time to take a step back and reflect.
There are a couple schools of thought on healing that are misleading:
1. You can quickly move through your issues and difficulties just by thinking it. Healing can be instantaneous.
2. Healing will take an incredibly long time and you will have to talk about the same issues over and over again for years to even get through a tiny piece.
Both beliefs are set-ups for expectations that the western mind clings to. We live in a go go go culture, so working on healing can seem like a to do list:
“Let go of what Dad said to me about being tone deaf.” CHECK!
“Finally feeling a semblance of forgiveness toward that jerk that constantly teased me in the first grade.” CHECK!
“Self-esteem seems to be increasing when I don’t eat as much chocolate.” CHECK!
Not Too Fast, Not Too Slow
Accomplishments are fine and all, but speeding to the finishing line is not the point, nor is thinking that getting through a particular trauma will take a decade. There is a balance between the two. When you slow down, taking your time to get to the heart of what’s troubling you, the shifts can be profound. So it’s a combination: going slowly so that the healing can happen with ease, depth and resolution.
When we forget that we all just want to be loved and experience joy in our body and mind, we loose sight of why we started to work through the layers of muck in the first place. It isn’t anyone’s fault either. The amount of information and theories about how to heal and what is most effective is exhaustive.
Returning to a Sense of Playfulness
How do we return to a sense of playfulness in healing our most difficult issues and traumas? For one thing it must be done carefully, keeping in mind that pain is pain and is often not a laughing matter. It isn’t about poking fun at our tragedies. It is about being more light-hearted in being able to go deeply to the core of a problem and seeing the divine joke that exists within that framework.
In other words we need to laugh and play. It’s an imperative part of our make-up. Children long to play despite any kind of external environment that may say otherwise. So much can be learned by watching children interact a playground. How each one shares, includes or excludes others, how they develop rules for games that don’t even exist yet.
They will make a game out of kicking a can, run forever playing tag. Playing is how we first understand how to be with others and understand ourselves within those relationships.
Compartmentalizing Life
We can quickly forget this as adults, compressing our life into boxes: the parts that work, the parts that are broken. The parts we’re not sure are ours, the parts we strongly protect and defend. We create goals to achieve, desires to accomplish and impacts we want to make. We can easily forget our playfulness under these circumstances, especially when the problems we have don’t feel like they can be resolved.
Yet we are not alone. Even in the darkest night of the soul there is a light that flickers and can help us to remember who we are on a fundamental level. Who are we without the title we have at work, the degrees we have on our walls, the status of our family and who we know?
Play as a Divine Activity
One thing is for sure: we are still human. Our grasping to identify who we are in the world and make a mark can lock us out of the Divine Playground (and it doesn’t even have a fence around it).
The point is that playing is a divine activity. It is very real and provides a bridge between difficulty and transformation. There are times when I have worked with a client on a very intense issue that is completely overwhelming when we begin, and as resolution takes place laughter starts to happen spontaneously. I see it as a sign of relief from the burden that holding that issue carried. The more trust that develops in healing, the more room there is for that playfulness to be a part of the process.
We can return to remembering what playing (for no specific reason) is like. We can tap into that place within us that is free to look like a fool and just express ourselves without reservation. The power of playfulness is an extraordinary gift.
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