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Loss of creative play
Why we lose our
ability to creatively play
Our
early life experiences
Become a
creator
Looking
a little deeper at the pain of in our play being thwarted
Creative play is about being free to explore options and having
a
passion and
enthusiasm for life to engage live to implement those options.
It is enter the type and kind of
play of a very young child where the child is free to be
spontaneous and innocent to discover and explore themselves and the
world in which they find themselves. Young children are readily able
to enter this state. Over the years, while watching people in the
work place lose enthusiasm for their work, the question kept coming
back, “Why do so many people loose their creativity and enthusiasm
for life by the time they reach middle age?”
Why we
lose our ability to creatively play (Top)
Where was that spontaneity of
childhood to explore. Young children, in general, seemed to have
such a great capacity for creativity and were so free to try new
things. They engage life with an enthusiasm that is so quickly lost.
Where did the willingness to approach life in that child-like
enthusiasm go? How does one get an individual into that childlike
enthusiasm to flow with the changes that enter their life. How do we
lose this enthusiasm and why? How do we loose that child-like
approach to life?
There are many ways and they are quite diverse. How and why we don’t
live
our creative
passion and why we may have found it necessary to mask our
passion can be explained by a myriad of different reasons. The
most obvious are the incessant do’s and don't’s that are levied upon
us by our parents, our society, our churches and whoever else we
listen to for our direction in life. There are those activities
which cause us to drain and leech our energy that will ultimately
kill our passion. The typical ones are the mundane and routine tasks
of life, especially if they have no importance relative to our
heart's desire, and the endless obligations that we do for others,
to name a few.
Also, we love to judge. In judgement we innocence and spontaneity.
We are taught from the earliest age to judge. We judge the world
outside and are justified because the guilty ones are outside us and
not us. We become attached to the actions of others and the
judgements we levy against them as if those outside us really do
control how we view the world. We judge our actions as
mistakes or set backs as failures and defeats rather than the
learning experiences that they are. We become attached to the
outcome of the action rather that the
lesson learned in the action. We lose enthusiasm for tasks that
are hard failing to realize they build the endurance we need to
sustain our vision. We project the past to the future, expecting it
to be more of the same, rather than knowing the future must be
different because we now know more for we previously knew, so the
future cannot be a repeat because it already is different - unless
we choose it to be the same. We lose the true meaning of life and
blame those external to us for what we have lost inside. We hold
those outside us responsible for extinguishing the flame in our
hearts when we, one by one, allowed each disappointment with life
suffocate and smother the flame within our hearts.
Yet, if we look carefully, all of these reasons involve stepping out
and acting freely and spontaneously in an innocent child like
fashion on the feelings, images or thoughts we had as a direct
result of the energy that we sensed. Then, for whatever reason, we
suffered some
pain and/or the thrust of our energy was thwarted. We literally
or figuratively had our energy and
passion “thrown back in our face.” On the dramatic side, the
pain could have been we slipped and fell, or were involved in some
accident injuring our body in our enthusiasm. It may have been
someone striking us in some way causing our pain. For example, our
care giver got angry at our actions and hit us, or our spouse or
another individual similarly hits us. But there are a myriad more
subtle experiences that similarly thwarted our actions. In time, we
learned to thwart our creative actions ourselves. Having our energy
thwarted as we thrust outward could be anything that caused us to
somehow “stop in our tracks” and forced us to change the flow of
that energy. It could include someone yelling at us, someone
becoming displeased with us, rejection of some type and all the
other types and kinds of things we experience in life that cause us
to stop thrusting out in innocence.
Anything that causes us to deny the flow of our energy, meaning we
do not allow ourselves to act in accordance with that flow, causes
us
pain as some level of our being. For many of us the pain is just
below the conscious level and we feel a dissatisfaction and don’t
know why. Many numb the feeling with some type of pleasure that
makes them feel good. If the material or action we do can be
addictive, we begin to rely on that material or actions for relief
from the pain of not living our creative truth. This in one reason
why It is necessary to align with
our creative
passion we need to do an activity that is creative and enjoyable
and allows for the expansion of our being. If we do something we
enjoy doing but does not allow for the expansion of our being, we
may be only escaping from the pain of not living the truth of our
creativity. By doing the creative actions, our consciousness begins
to feel some freedom to express itself. That in turn allows our
creative passion to feel safe to come out and show its true nature
and it will do so in a gradual unfoldment.
No matter how we look at it, there is one reason and only one reason
why an individual does not have the ability to fully live their
creative
passion be in a state of
creative play if not the
most creative state of being. Simply said, we got hurt and/or
suffered
pain at some level of our being when we did live
our creative
passion and we were quickly conditioned not to go into such
feelings and actions again. We have not had a
safe and secure space
to freely express our
creative spirit in the way in needs to be expressed.
The major issue is thwarting the free unfoldment of our
creative spirit. It start very early in life. Early in life we
have experiences that block or thwart the free expression of our
creative spirit. We quickly develop response pattern to protect,
suppress or block the free experience of who and what we are so that
we do not experience repeated painful experiences. Often, and most
probably guaranteed, our parents and/or early care givers have not
been free to grow in an optimum way for the environment in which
they were raised. As such, there are habits we copies from our
parents for which we have no consciousness awareness of how we
developed them. Rather we pick them up and uses them in our life not
realizing where the response patterns have been learned. In this
regard, there is the need to carefully study and observe as to what
is really needed to create that
safe and secure space.
Our early life experiences
(Top)
Relative to the lose of ability to
readily enter
creative play, the problems start very early in life. They, in
fact, begin from the moment we are born.
We arise from the source/Source of creation/Creation. As such,
we come into life living in a state of being that can only be
described as spontaneous and innocent childlike play of exploration
and discovery of ourselves and our world. We are born from this
most creative state of being and come with it. We bring it into
the world. As a very young child we were free to spontaneous and
innocently explore and discover ourselves and our universe.
Mind had not yet developed to step in and judge what we are
experiencing and/or how we move to experience it. We were free to
flow with that energy and the energy was free to flow where it needs
to flow based on its natural flow path.
However, in time that flow of energy is thwarted for one reason or
another we were no longer free to follow that direction which arose
as a result of the energy. More often than not, when the flow of
energy was thwarted, we felt
pain. So it was only natural that we developed response patterns
to avoid the pain and/or not repeat the type and kind of experience
that caused the pain.
As a young child, we learned to live according to our parents and
society. However, in addition, many of us were abused as children,
either spiritually, mentally, emotionally or physically. We tend to
think of child abuse as only physical. But it exist at every level
of being Abuse is only forcing an individual into actions and ways
of being that they would otherwise choose not to do. To abuse anyone
is to not respect the individual and/or not to provide what they
need especially when we have the means and/or ability to do so.
As a child, when we tried to live in that innocent state of play,
many of us aroused the concern if not the outright displeasure of
our care givers. Some of us were forced to act by being threatened
and even told we displeased God and He/She/It would judge us as
evil. Some of us were conditioned much like Pavlov conditioned his
dog where our care givers only allowed our needs to be met when we
did what we were told. In such conditioning, we learned to judge
what we were told as good and what we wanted to do as bad. Others
were denied
love unless they responded in a way that was acceptable. Some of
us were physically hit and abused physically being forced to do what
we did not want to do. All of these various types and kinds of abuse
caused us to develop ways of responding in to the world in a way to
protect ourselves. .
Many of these patterns we developed in early childhood we retain and
use all our life. Many of them function on a subconscious level and
we respond to a situation even before we are aware that we are
reacting. More important, as a child, we learned to deny what we
felt and knew within our being. We could feel there was a flow of
energy within our being directing our life but when we were not free
to follow and flow with what we knew we felt
pain. As a child, we used a child’s
mind and a child’s approach to protecting ourselves from that
pain and the pain we experienced externally. Some of these response
patterns that we developed were not the most sophisticated or wise.
Many of them were very childish responses for all we knew and had
was only the limited experiences of a child.
As a child, we believed what we were told and denied ourselves much
to the satisfaction of others. Rather, than learning to stay with
our intuitive guidance at the risk of losing those we needed in life
and risk losing those who created the space for us to be nourished,
we deny the flow of energy within our being and where it was
naturally leading us. We gave into the demands of others for we
needed their nurturing and support. After all, we were only a child
learning how to live in the world.
Rather than flow with the energy as it flows from the source of our
being in the direction intended by the source of our being, we learn
to redirect it with the
mind to meet the demands and expectations of the outer world as
we come to learn and understand it. It didn’t matter whether what we
learned was right or wrong, we learned what we did and that became
the foundation for our response to life. We redirected the flow of
energy we experience by what we chose in response to our world. In
doing so, we quickly developed a response pattern to life that kept
us safe, free from the
pain we experience in displeasing others, and to address the way
others wanted us to be. We learn to deny ourselves and we were never
taught to follow the guidance within our being.
Many of us have been less than satisfied with life because of how we
have been unable to live what is
symbolized in our hearts and in doing want we are lead to do. We
tended to feel something is missing. No body seemed to
love us for ourselves in whatever way we need to be. We have to
become a certain way to be loved, whether it is by our parents, our
teachers, and/or society, but it is not the unique way the we were.
We only experience conditional love. If we meet the conditions we
receive love.
Unconditional
love did not exist after a certain age if it every existed.
Unconditional love gives the space to become who we are true to
ourselves. It is to give what we need to grow and unfold true to
ourselves. For most of us, There was no space to be who we were. We
had to be somebody else. We had to become somebody else’s
expectations. Many of us were told it was for our own good - a
partial truth, but not the whole truth. Most of the stories we tell
about our life are about the unconditional love and compassion that
was missing in our life.
More important we never learned to
love ourselves. Most of us lack the love and
passion for ourselves as a unique creation or a unique being.
Many of us shut down our heart so as to not to be violated and
abused again. We decided at some level of our being, "this would not
happen to me again!" so, we didn't allow ourselves to feel. We
didn’t allow ourselves to feel our passion and our love of life to
just be who and what we are. We did not allow ourselves to cry and
process the
pain that we experienced when we had to deny who were are. For
many of us there was too much pain and hurt around that way of being
we had to become to survive in the past
In losing the innocence of play as a child we also lost the
wonderment and “ah” of life. Life become a duty and obligation.
It becomes a way of being that was foreign to who and what we really
are and what we desired to express. But we had to survive so we
developed ways of being in the world and surviving but not allowing
us to live in the play within our own being. But we have forgotten
exactly how and why we made the decisions as we did. However, in
doing this, we also lost our ability to feel and to access our
body wisdom that has grown us from an infant into an adult.
Rather than seeing and feeling the pain that came from within our
being we always saw some or something external as cause for our pain
whether it was what someone was doing to our body or what our body
was doing to us. We look outward for that
love and compassion for that person or persons who will allow us
to be who we really are and take away our pain. Now, more often than
not, it is only our own defenses mechanisms the we build to survive
in the world that is denying our access to that one who loves us.
We continually repeat the past and recreate the past because we
don’t allow ourselves to go in and remove those early defense
mechanisms we used to survive. We cannot be with and feel our own
pain so we are constantly running away from it . In doing so we
are running away from ourselves. We live in the separation of our
own being without realize it. We long for the beloved but the
beloved lies within our own being.
We are separated from our own self, our own heart. In reality it is
the separation from our own being that we experience. We keep our
selves busy so that we don’t have to be with ourselves. The reason
for this is because if we become silent, the
pain of the past is there present within us. We try and avoid
that pain so we rather live in the separation of our being that be
with the pain. If we continue to push away from the pain and totally
separate ourselves, we being to feel the intensity of emptiness and
meaningless of life that we have to deal with the pain. Eventually
we are forced to deeply look at it and go into it to heal ourselves.
Until we face the
pain and what is not working in our lives, we cannot create
anything new. We can't give what we don't have. If we can't give to
ourselves we can't give to others. If we are full of the pain of the
past and conditional
love, all we can give is pain and conditional love. If we can’t
learn to
love ourselves and sit with our own pain unconditionally, we
can’t love others and sit with their pain and we cannot give to them
unconditionally.
All our defenses are up and have been designed to protect ourselves.
To remove those defense we have to be willing to take off the old
scab that covers our wounds to see the freshness and newness of our
heart. We have to deal with that past and all the
pain as an adult and not as a two, three or four year old
emotional child in an adult body. We have to live and let go. We
have to forgive everyone and do so in realizing they did the best
they could with what they were given.
In particular, we have to forgive ourselves in order to create that
new space of innocent childlike play for what we wish to create and
see happen in the world. We have to learn to
love ourselves and our bodies. We have to learn to feel again
and allow those feelings to lead us in the innocence of child like
play.
It is only when we chose to go deeply into source of the intensive
pain and suffering of the past that we will find that for which
we long. This work is not about advocating pain and suffering.
However, until we surrender and experience what we carry within our
own being, forgiving everyone, in particularly ourselves, to create
a new space for what we wish to create we cannot heal and create a
future that is not bound to the pain and suffering of the past.
Become a creator (Top)
Creation is consciousness simply
molding itself to what it chooses to experience. As a child, we did
not have the awareness to know what to choose. We simply learned to
respond to the expectations of the outer world the best way we knew
how. As a young child we desire to create safety for ourselves in
any way we could figure out how to do so. In doing so,
mind has learned to step in and determines what is safe and what
is not safe and when we can have freedom of movement. Mind never
learned how to surrender to let the flow of energy lead. As such
freedom of movement is now defined by and within the limits and
boundaries of mind rather than by the flow of energy unfolding
within our being. In essence, we have created
a cage of our own making. A cage uniquely created by how we lost
our ability to freely flow with the energy we were experiencing as a
child. The challenge is to learn how to dismantle the cage we
ourselves learned to build.
What needs to be understood as we attempt to create the
key characteristics of creative play to create what we desire
will have to face many of the reasons why we lost this ability to
play as a child. No matter how old we are, we can fully expect to
deal with our childhood issues that in one way or another which
caused you to leave this
most creative state of being. How we deal with these past
experiences is our choice. But what we will find is that as we
address these past experiences and release the hold they have over
our ability to freely surrender to the flow of energy within our
being that will manifest our desired creation, the greater our
creative power and creative ability will become.
One point that needs to be emphasized about the loss of play is that
more often than not we stepped out of our play to satisfy the people
in our life. The people who are currently in our life are based on
who we currently are and how we currently perceived ourselves. As we
explore our creativity going to deep creative states of being and
learn to use the creative we access, we will become different. As we
become different, some of those individuals currently in our life
may not like who and what we are becoming. It is recommended the
following be set as an intention. Tell the Universe, “As I become
different, those who do not like what I am becoming are gently
guided to where they are safe and secure.” Then, trust that those
who do not like what we are becoming will leave our life for some
reason and those that stay, even if they complain about what is
happening to us, do not ultimately oppose what we are becoming. In
fact, they may be looking to us as an example of what is possible to
guide them into their own creative power.
Looking a little deeper at the
pain of in our play being thwarted (Top)
There are two subtle results of
thwarting the innocent creative thrusts we made as a child. The
first, it is the
masculine part of your being becomes crippled, and second, we
learn not to trust the universe - namely that
feminine nurturing part of our being.
Whether we are male or female, we each have a
masculine aspect
and we posses the
masculine thrusting nature that desires to plant its seed, its
creative actions, in the world to grow and bear fruit. We also have
a
feminine aspect that allows us to nurture our seed and the seed
of others. Thrusting our creative actions and nurturing our creative
actions and the creative actions of others are completely natural to
our being.
Our
masculinity allows us to thrust into the unknown to create. Both
men and women have that ability and it needs to be protected and
developed in both men and women. Whenever our thrusting actions,
namely our conscious or subconscious choice to act or flow in
alignment with our
creative life energy, are thwarted, a part of our
masculine psyche shuts down. Without it, we stay bound and
confined in the world that we know. We end up living in
a cage of our own making within the limits and boundaries we use
to define ourselves. To be a very “masculine” individual as the
known world where they conquer and suppress is not really
“masculine.” Such actions are only actions of a strong individual
too scared to thrust into the unknown so they thrust into the known
world using physical strength, military power or financial power.
The true masculine ability is to be able to thrust into the unknown
to manifest a new creation.
The other subtle result is our
feminine
aspect is also crippled when our actions that it becomes
thwarted. The feminine aspect of our being is that nurturing and
sustaining part of our being. The true feminine power it to be able
to take the seed of another and nurture its growth. However, what is
unrecognized is that Creation recreates Itself in Creation. Our
actions and our choices individually and collectively are Creation
recreating itself. As discussed in the
observer - observed pair are created to have an experience of
creation/Creation,
we are pulled into each others lives subconsciously through the
interconnectedness of all that is, to nurture the creative thrust
that others make into the unknown.
Unless we look at the process of how creation arises to create an
observer - observed pair, it is not obvious how we each enter
the life of another to give them the experience they desire at some
level of their being. Similarly, others come into our life to give
us the experience we desire as some level of our being. Many who
enter our life are there just to give us the experience being human.
Then there are others enter our lives to give us the particular
experiences we incarnated to have.
Rather than being aware of the intention we hold which create the
experiences we have, we become distracted by the world and/or forget
we hold certain intention and push them into our
nonconscious
mind. We are puzzled by what life gives us but we never play
attention to our intentions and where we have focused, and are
focusing, our attention and awareness. We reject what comes into our
life as thought it has been imposed from the outside. Yet when we do
so, we, in turn, feel the
pain of rejection deep within our being for we are rejecting we
what ourselves either created or something in which we agreed to
participate. In feeling the rejection, we learn not to trust and not
to act. In doing so, we reject the
feminine
aspect of our being which is nurturing our desires. In the
denial of our feminine aspect, we loose trust in the nurturing and
feminine aspects of Creation itself. So we learn to doubt Creation
to meet our needs.
Whether we realize it or not, we create our own diseases through our
dis-eases and our own
pain by the way we judge ourselves, others and what life is
providing us. When our defenses are up (judging ourselves and
others), we experience stress and we don’t allow our
creative life energy to flow in a way that can allow us to be
healed and properly nurture our being.
Our defenses that keeps us the way we are arise from our
mind , our judgment and the experiences we have had. The mind
cannot distinguish that which comes from the external world from
that in the internal world for it has no sensor of its own. With out
the feeling of the body, the mind does not know where the
pain is coming from. It does not necessary know if the pain is
because we are physically being harmed or it is being generated from
within the mind and only being expressed in the body. Since we have
come to associate pain as originating in the body we always looks
for external causes for the pain the body feels. We never consider
looking inside ourselves for its cause. Since, we live in our
physical body, it is the body that is the main vehicle or the key to
access all levels of healing. Our body and what is
symbolized by our hearts is the sensory organs for feelings.
In the end, whenever the actions that flow from, and in alignment
with,
our creative
passion are thwarted from the external world or our own denials
and judgements, we retard the growth of both our
masculine and
feminine aspects. Literally and figuratively, our
creative power and creative ability and the creative aspect of
our being remains suck in a very frightened and fearful immature
state. This is because it was early in life in the innocence of
childlike play our creative passion stepped out into the world and
we developed childish defense mechanisms. We need to both literally
and figuratively relearn how to play, explore and discover the
universe and our own being in the spontaneous innocence of childlike
play so that
our creative
passion can grow into its proper adult form. And, as with a
child, a child does not grow instantaneously into adulthood. It will
take a little time.
Two notes need to be made here on thwarting our actions that flow
from alignment with our
creative life energy and
our creative
passion. First, the experience that caused us to suffer may need
to be revisited and evaluated with the perspective of an adult and
not as a child. The second is whether or not we can actually
remember the particular experience. Some of the experiences that
shut down our freedom to be innocent and spontaneous occurred before
we had a fully developed conscious
mind and we many not have an accurate memory of exactly what
happen and why. But we will have the feeling. We can use the feeling
to guide us.
What needs to be understood, is that for any experience we have, we
respond to that experience. Our responses, whatever it is, becomes a
model we can use for the next similar experience. If we respond the
same way each time we have a particular type and kind of experience,
we develop a habit. Whenever we are faced with that experience we
respond out of habit. To change a habit, we need to know what
experiences caused us to fall into the habit. In this way, with
becoming mindful and aware, we can become aware of how we are
subconsciously choosing what we do. In becoming mindful and aware,
we can change our response. We literally make our subconscious
conscious to change the way we to respond to a given type and kind
of experience.
One problem we face is that many of our response patterns only arise
in context. It is here ritual and metatheater can be helpful. We can
create certain types and kinds of situations and we can then see how
we response to them. How we respond will show us if we have patterns
of the past that do not serve us or serve us in a way that is not
necessarily appropriate for the types and kinds of situations we
face.
If we don’t believe the process we can do a simple experience. We
only need to learn a series of simple tasks in a given order. Then
change one of the tasks in the sequence. See how long it takes us to
stop trying to do the task the old way and incorporate the new way.
Then leave it. Come back at a later time and try the series of tasks
again and see which way we do then. Some remember to do it the new
way but quite frequently we find ourselves doing it the old way when
the old way no longer applies. Many of us feel puzzled because we
know we had the new way firmly established in our
mind - or we thought so. However, if we can remember and
recognize the actual circumstances where we learned a particular set
of habits there is the possibility you can go back to effectively
change all that needs to be changed. Sometimes we can and sometimes
we can’t.
For most of us, the experiences and the reasons why we do not act on
our creative
passion go back to our earliest days of life and how we adapted
to living in the world in which we found ourselves. For others, we
lost it later in life but the circumstances are really not that much
different that childhood. The only difference is that, as an adult,
it is an adult experiences that must be faced as opposed to
childhood or childlike experiences to regain our creative passion.
Adult experiences always seem to have additional complicating
factors if only because more of our adult decisions are not innocent
decision but couched and biased by many influences and tradeoffs.
Sometimes we need to address the tradeoffs to address the response
pattern.
Adult experiences that cause us to deny
our creative
passion are sometimes more difficult to address. This is because
our actions in these situation are frequently based on consciously
acting in a way we think and/or feel will provide the necessary
precautions to protect ourselves. Or we acted within the bounds and
expectations of the external world and we thought those bounds would
protect us. Yet we still experienced the
pain of set back. So we become puzzled and even more hesitant to
act. However, if we looks carefully, we will find our adult
experiences were only a continuation of decision patterns we
developed in the past to survive and we never really learned how to
survive while being in our creative passion.
Although there are many life events that we allow to rob us of our
creative ability, many of the most dominating patterns go back to
who we learned to be in the world when we were children. We continue
those patterns though out our lifetime and, in some cases, across
lifetimes. More importantly, and as already stated, many of these
patterns developed in childhood were developed before we became
consciously aware of what was happening. Much of the programming was
done subconsciously. The memories may not be easily retrievable in
our consciousness to understand why we think the way we do. Adult
experiences are easier to pin point as to the actual circumstances
of where we lost some of
our creative
passion because we have a greater conscious awareness of what we
are experiencing.
In closing this discussion on how we lose our ability to creatively
play, it is appropriate to prove an example of how we lose innocence
and how quickly how quickly we can develop a thinking process as a
child. Here is one relayed to the author. It goes as follows: “I
remember that about the age of seven as I stood on a porch, I
accidently dropped a stick on the head of a neighbor’s child. The
child was about five years old. They happened to be of a different
religion. He went home crying. I distinctly remember thinking, ‘Oh,
its okay, his is a ______(a different religion than mine).’ To this
day I often wonder exactly where I learned that way of thinking at
that early age such that it was okay to actually hurt someone of a
different religion. My parents did not think that way. Although my
parents were taught and told in church to believe one religion was
better than another, their hearts were too big to knowingly hurt
someone of a different religion. At age seven I was not even aware
of the implications of my rationalization. In later years as I
remembered the event I felt an uncomfortableness in myself knowing
that I dismissed the
pain I caused in another in the way I dismissed it. I knew as an
adult, I carried some obscure programming that would allowed me to
hurt others who were not of my tribe - however I defined my tribe.
It made serving in the military quite easy for me and it took years
before I was able to drop blind tribal and family loyalties and the
associated thinking patterns. But I know many probably still exist
and they will not reveal themselves except in context.”
Related topics
Understanding the impacts of loss of creative play
The need to play - a playful creative spirit
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