You gotta play!!!!

The missing piece of a balanced life.   

Do you play in your life? Are you enjoying fun and play as an integral part of your everyday life?

Good question hey?!! The reason it’s such a good question is because the answer is NO for so many of us. Why is play important? I’m going to go right into that actually. Firstly, one of the key coaching tools that I use with my clients in sessions is to gauge an understanding of how balanced one’s life is before I really go into too many details. So, my question to you right now, using the very coaching tool I use with clients is; if you had to rate from 0 to 10 how satisfied you are with the current amount of play in your life, what would be your answer?

Play is just a luxury?

Now for most of us play has become something of a luxury. In fact it’s very much part of our programming in our western society; that we are here to survive, and play is secondary. So, if you look at the school curriculum in today’s mainstream education system (and i was once a teacher for a brief time in high school here in Australia) you’ll find the priority of play has been massively reduced. The focus is on “productivity”, i.e., giving us the skills to be more productive in society. Now there’s nothing wrong with that in itself but there is something completely imbalanced when we push play out of our lives to be just this glimpse every now and then that we experience.

For some of us we don’t even know as adults how to play. It’s become such a repressed aspect of our human experience. So this is the fundamental question: how satisfied are you with the amount of play in your life right now?

What’s your play rating right now?

Now I can guarantee that if you have rated your play quite low out of 10 then you’re going to be feeling imbalanced in your life. Allow me to talk a little bit about this… If you can imagine a circle and half of it is survival and the other half is the sacred in this life experience. Survival activities are basically everything that we’ve been taught is the most important thing right now to focus on in this life. Things like work/career, things like doing your chores and getting your responsibilities out of the way and just eating and training and fitness and everything that has to do with your basic survival.

Sacred versus Survival

These activities have become the priority despite us not being in these dire situations where we have to focus solely on survival such as food, shelter and water. These aspects are no longer required to be the core focus for the majority of us (of course for some of us this may very well be the necessary focus). For the majority of us reading this article, we are still in this survival mindset which the current western society has programmed into us.

Unfortunately, our focus has become completely imbalanced. We are not spending any time on the the other 50% of what we should be focusing on if we are to have a balanced life; and that is “the sacred”. What am i talking about when i talk about the sacred? For most of us we don’t recognize that the sacred are things in our lives that put us into flow or the flow state.

The Flow State

What is the flow state? it is a beautiful place to be where our brain waves slow down into the alpha-theta range, where we lose track of time and space and where we become completely present in what we’re experiencing in the moment. The flow state is sacred activities such as music, dancing, laughter, joking, singing, etc. Anything that puts you into a beautiful state of gratitude, appreciation or love.

These states take us from our head (which is all survival – the reptilian brain or fight-flight-freeze part) back down into our heart – the seed of the soul where we can experience flow. The heart is where we connect to streams of pure consciousness. Often people in the zone or the flow talk about streams of consciousness. This simply means that they are accessing Divine guidance, wisdom, intuition and intelligence direct from source. You are “downloading” direct from our pure being that is pure potentiality or loving awareness.

So, we need to remember and make it really become a conscious awareness exercise in our lives that we rebalance and seriously introduce back play and the sacred into our human experience every day. This means that we no longer have an imbalanced circle of life that is all about survival. It restores to a 50/50 balance between survival and the sacred.

Masculine versus Feminine?

One thing to note here – if you look at this concept with the masculine and the feminine in mind, we see that the very same core lesson here is that the masculine has become this “produce-create-achieve” mentality, i.e., the survival mentality. Meanwhile, the feminine is the flow state where we go into intuitive flow and enjoy the sacred activities where we nurture ourselves and our soul. Our feminine side is about receiving. Masculine is about creating. We must balance both aspects within ourselves.

Our true eternal essence is that of pure loving awareness. It’s integral if you’re on the spiritual journey looking to master the mind and live in the heart that you look seriously at the balance you have in your life between survival and the sacred.

How can adults play?

Let’s talk a little bit more about play. How can you integrate play back into your life so that you are satisfying the inner child in you? How can you ensure you are connecting to that flow so that you can continue to spread this higher vibrational frequency into every area of your life including those things you do to survive? This is the key reason right here -> recognizing if you get into play regularly in your life then like will attract like.

If you get into these flow states that bring you into love, appreciation and gratitude on a regular basis through play you’re going to create a frequency in your life. This will be a vibration that will entrain with matching vibrations of the same nature. You’re going to bring in more reasons for play, more reasons for flow, and more reasons for peace!

You see, the flow state brings us into a place of true peace because we fully recognize and align with our true nature of pure loving awareness and we connect with our creator in the process. This is the Creator that we were made in the image of, or that we are sparks of.

So, how do adults play? Some well-known activities include music, dancing, socializing, laughter, comedy, adventure and exploration etc. Whatever that might be for you it has to be an activity where you’re not trying to overanalyse, where your monkey mind is not in control. The sacred means that your brain takes a back seat and you instead move down into the heart field.

The Heart Field knows play very well!

We know the heart field is 5000 times stronger than that of the brain. So, we move out of the head and down into a stronger place where we can experience more unlimited possibilities and miracles and solutions in our life beyond our monkey minds capabilities of even imagining.

Think about what your beliefs are around how worthy it is that you put play into your daily life. Why would i bring that up? Because there is a very strong belief system in this culture that says play is a luxury. Can you see the problem here? If we’re putting play as a last priority that we do and only consider or contemplate doing if we’ve got everything else done in the survival category, can you see why we might be stuck up here in control systems and three-dimensional paradigms because we do not access that state of flow on a regular basis? We get stuck in the illusion that we are our body and mind rather than remembering through the act of play who we really are.

Questions to ask yourself around PLAY

Question yourself; what are my beliefs around play? Am i worthy of play? Is play worthy of me? What value do i place on play? What have i been saying about play? Why i have been putting it off? What are my excuses for not prioritizing play in my daily life? What am i putting before play that i deem so important that I’m missing out on moments with my true nature where i will receive guidance, wisdom, intuition and intelligence to move forward in every area of my life?

Maybe, and this is probably true for most of us, we didn’t recognize that play actually does form part of our flow and part of our alignment with true self. So, ask yourself how balanced is play in your life right now. Ask yourself what’s stopping you from playing right now and how can you insert play into your life. Get really practical about this and think about and brainstorm all the ways that you feel in the flow state. It’s going to be unique to each person but you can guarantee that it’s going to be a list of beautiful sacred activities that are not about survival.

I would challenge you to sit down and brainstorm what you consider is play in your life. It might be an exploration for you. I know it was for me. I had a very limited mindset of what play was until I sat down and really explored when are the moments that get into flow state where I’d lose track of time. I actually realized that when I would go on a hike somewhere new, I would be so wonderfully present, in the moment of new curiosities unfolding and that put me into this place where i lost track of time. Think about when this occurs in your life. These are moments of play and flow.

What’s a 10 out of 10 look like in your life if you have play integrated into your daily experience? Again, this is an individual experience and you cannot compare to another human being because we’re all unique we all have our own unique filters of perception that deem what is appropriate for play. We all process information differently that deems how we enjoy experiencing new information in each moment.

Ask yourself; how much time do i want to allocate to play each day? Perhaps you only want to start with 10 minutes if it’s not part of your life at all yet. Well, then 10 minutes is a wonderful start! 10 minutes could be maybe turning on some music and singing at the top of your lungs, or maybe it’s closing the curtains and dancing around the house, or even just turning everything off and going outside and looking up at the sky and feeling inspired. Whatever it is that brings you out of the distractions of the monkey mind and into a place of presence so that you’re not counting time. Really think about this.

Play is integral for many reasons but one of the biggest is that the most beautiful world will manifest for you, not by logic (stuck in your head) but by love. Where does love come from? Down in the heart field. We get to heart-filled flow through play. Play is integral to a beautiful world. So, it starts with you.

How will PLAY change your world? Allow me to run through some really important selling points here…

• You will have increased states of flow.
• Putting yourself into alpha-theta brainwave states moves you into states of joy and relaxation. Joy and relaxation are very, very healthy for healing the physical body, as well as the mental body and the emotional body.
• Increased heart coherence! You may be aware of the heart math institute studies but we know that when you are in your heart in these flow states where you lose track of time, when you’re in pure appreciation, gratitude, compassion and love, you go into a heart-brain coherence and this will produce regenerative feelings
• You will be regenerating healthy cells in the body.
• You will be decreasing cortisol levels, the stress hormone! This is really important in this day and age.
• You’re also going to have increased inspiration in your life. The more time you spend in flow, the more inspiration you will receive direct from source into your life. This means you will take inspired action in your life as a result because this inspiration will lead to an action that will create more flow.
• Flow equals more flow! The more you practice flow the more flow will appear in your life. This is simply the principle of the law of attraction; similar frequency will entrain with similar frequency.
• We need to remember to play more if we want to feel joy more. Playing will give us more opportunities to play. And obviously with more play, there’ll also be that increased stream of direct connection to our Creator, our guidance system, our GPS system if you like. More signs, more synchronicities, more direction in our life on our highest available timeline in this experience.

So, you can see it is paramount that we play. This is what i really want to communicate to you today. For a long time in my own life i did not prioritize play. I believe there is many of us living similarly, without play. I thought it was just for those who had the luxury of lots of money or those who had the luxury of not caring or were lazy. I had this mindset that a lot of us do that is programmed into us: that play is unimportant.

We need to undo this programming. It doesn’t work. It’s a delusion. We need play. We need balance. It’s not all about survival. Recognize that you’ll inevitably create and achieve beyond your wildest dreams when you include flow into your life. Please go out an play my friends! I do hope that this is inspirational for you. I encourage you to include more play in your life. We will be changing the world from within. I’m sure you understand that we are the ones we’ve been waiting for to create a change in this world of survival and rat race thinking. Play needs to be integral in our lives. Go out there and find out what makes you feel joy and fun and puts you in these flow states and do more of them in your life. This will be of great benefit to our entire planet and of course, you.