Allow Play – Just for Fun
The thing is, the longer you stay on the planet the greater degree is the possibility that you will experience stuff that grows you in ways you cannot anticipate. And, most importantly, be glad you stuck around long enough to have that experience.
I just finished facilitating the "Loving Yourself Into Creation" retreat with my dear friend Margaret Lindsey. Margaret specializes in Conscious Creativity. Her specialization and mine meld beautifully in creating a space for participants to be present to themselves in ways they cannot anticipate. Opportunities to play, play, play with paint, words, talk, and listening to oneself allowed each person to come to choose to participate in their life when they didn’t even know they had a choice.
A retreat such as Loving Yourself into Creation is kind of a mini-course in Life 101.
As children, we play and we learn through playing. It requires imagination, creation, problem solving, disappointment, frustration, sadness, and we either learn to hang in there for the juicy good stuff, or we develop an attitude of ‘not good enough’ and failure.
If we are lucky enough we have people in our lives who listen to us when we talk about our thoughts, our feelings, our wants and our needs. They help us to make sense of our experiences and our interpretations about those experiences. They help us see that maybe what we’ve been playing at, or who we’ve been playing with, just isn’t right for us. They encourage us to find our real true desires – what’s really fun for us, and go for it, no matter what.
Play is hard work and is so important to all of us regardless of whether we are young or old. In fact, the participants in this retreat were all in their 70’s. Each in their own way discovered that how they’ve been playing in their lives hadn’t yet allowed them to live the juiciness of life. They became conscious of how they were limiting the possibility for greater fulfillment and delight. How awesome is that!
For me, I became aware of the interpretations I have about what happens when we age. I recognized the belief I held – unbeknownst to me, that ‘people get depressed as they age. That as life changes and they aren’t who they thought they were decades ago, that their lives become full of sorrow and hopelessness. Slowly they decline into decrepitude.’
I’m learning so much about aging as I immerse myself in the presence of aging people. I get to see how wrong I am about so many things, and I’m so very glad about that!
In play, as in life, we are always making adjustments to the story, in the how’s and the when’s of the unfolding imaginations that are occurring. Many of my imaginations about aging are still stuck in that old paradigm: "Life sucks and then you die." As I continually play with people who are playing the game of being old, I get to see that we get to make it all up – even now. I get to see that we can have all the fun we are willing to have up to and through our transitions to what’s next! It’s hard work for us grownups, as hard as it was when we were children.
A retreat is just a playground for grownups. Even as a facilitator I get to play, imagine, & grow, joyously following where my heart desires to go. This is the way I believe all life should be for all of us guru-children: playful learning led by our hearts and witnessed and embraced by loving beings.
The point of this podcast is not to sell you on a retreat, but to perhaps discover ways to create a “retreat” for you, where you can play hard at what you love to do, and be present to all the various you’s who show up with you on your retreat. Allow play!
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For more blogs, books and videos, or if you are interesting in coaching or training with Dr. Rosie, check out her website: www.theparadigmshifts.com
