Grown-up PLAY - how to enter the creative mindspace?
The way we like to divide life into categories and sections is unnatural to animals and children, to Natural Life. Life is a self-organising mechanism that doesn’t benefit from arbitrary input. Our only function is to create an atmosphere, the overall vibrational-physical setting, wherein everything can find its place.
As grown-ups, we find it soothing and proper to create reading nooks and sandpits for our children. But for them, there is no border between life and play. The whole life is one huge playing field and their very nature is to start combining and finding new ways to use the things and setting they find, to create connections. They throw pillows on the ground and play with loose gravel. They ask for random ropes and sticks and read their comics behind the kitchen table, on the staircase, or under the bed. They connect and create and break all the rules we find to be so essential and needed.
I’ve always been rather awful with structure and arbitrary systems. For example, when I dedicate a separate time from my schedule to “create”, I either do anything else with that time (literally anything, from accounting to reading to wriggling my toes) or I spend hours on end designing something I later throw away because I feel that it wasn’t inspired and it lacks the “oomph”. And it does. It is the same thing as telling your bored child to, “well, go play something.” It never works. Creativity, fun and inspired mind is not something we can exclude from the rest of the life and order in as a sandwich.
So. I’ve found a key. It is about going back to the space of nature. It is about allowing yourself to kindle the spirit of play at all times. I’m not working, creating or writing an email. I’m playing. My play doesn’t have to look like anything childish or “playful”. I don’t have to smile or jump around or interact if I don’t want to. I don’t have to laugh or “be creative”. It’s about the space I enter. The way I do things. It’s creating an inner atmosphere where anything can happen and all is allowed. I can follow my subtle inspiration from one activity to another and offer an inner smile to the activities that feel blocked. I can honour the side of me that is not “on top of everything”, but is constantly swimming inside of different currents like the Blue Whale in the ocean. I am enough.
I always tell my parents (and I mean the people in my parenting programs) that the role of the parent is not to micro-manage and solve all the problems but to create the emotional-vibrational (and also physical) atmosphere and then observe everything fall into place. And it does. My only function is to create raw space and observe the simple or interesting elements in this space. These elements, be it feelings or sensations in your body, your breathing patterns, different thoughts that float in your mind, movements or activities that invite you, computer programs or assignments, or even things in your physical environment - are the elements that make up your playing field. This is the space where you can start playing and bouncing and connecting and investigating. Grown-up PLAY.
Hi! I’m IIDALA, aka Iida-Leena Materasu, and I’m a professional therapist, writer, spiritual guide, mother, woman, and human being, who has walked the path of healing for more than 20 years. I facilitate breathwork and nondual healing groups, offer courses, subscription programs, and silent nature hikes as well as receive clients one-on-one live and via zoom. To book a session or get more info on NONDUAL courses or programs, feel free to explore the website or contact me directly.