Playful Awakening

Releasing the Gift of Play in Your Life

Dianne Gammage

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781849051507
• eBook ISBN: 9780857003508
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Playfulness has the power to reconnect us with our sense of self, and help us achieve growth and self-fulfilment.

The author of this wide-ranging book explores the universal significance of play in the pursuit of happiness and authenticity. Providing a brief overview of the role of play in social, spiritual and intellectual endeavours throughout history, she discusses the harmful consequences of taking things too seriously, and reveals playfulness as a necessity for both the psyche and soul. Informed by the Core Process psychotherapy model, Buddhist philosophy and personal testimonies, the book illustrates how the lighter side of life enables us to re-examine the makeup of our identity and recover from negative experiences. Much more than an insight into the therapeutic properties of play, it is an eloquent ode to the importance of simply "en-joying" ourselves.

ACT 1

Act 1

Scene 1

THE UNIVERSALITY OF PLAY

All the world’s a stage

And men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts…1

The adverb ‘merely’ has a modern-day meaning of ‘only as specified and nothing more’; however, there is another now-obsolete meaning – ‘simply, purely, altogether, entirely’ – which offers quite a different sense to the meaning of being ‘players’.

We begin our enquiry with play: what play is and where it might be found.

When we speak of play, many may immediately associate it with children and perhaps only with children. Indeed, play is what children do naturally, given the opportunity. They meet and make sense of their world through the medium of play – in particular, those experiences that carry an emotional meaning. Play is often referred to as the language of children. Play in the development of a self in the creation of a cloak, an identity, is explored later, but straightaway let us challenge the myth that play is only for children. It could be argued that play is probably most common during the times when we are growing in our understanding of ourselves, our environments and our social relations; hence, play is associated with children and childhood. Yet it is illogical and shortsighted to believe that only children have a capacity to grow in these areas and that when we are adults we stop developing.

Play is something many adults struggle to engage in because, as we grow up and take on responsibilities in the world, other things take over or get in the way. In the West, we are familiar with phrases such as ‘stop messing/playing around and get on with your work’, so the word ‘play’ becomes synonymous with messing around: play is something someone does when they are not doing something worthwhile and important. We are told that the opposite of play is work, and work is what adults do, isn’t it? Such phrases go hand in hand with others such as ‘stop being childish’, which is usually intended as an insult. So we learn that play and playing belong to children, not to the serious world of being adults, and our capacity to play becomes obscured by layers of responsibility – to our own, our children’s and the world’s detriment. It has not always been so. Dr Stuart Brown2 said, ‘Play is more than just fun.’3 He draws our attention to a 16th-century painting by Netherlandish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel, showing a joyous and complex scene of sheer playful delights. Against a European courtyard backdrop, adults and children of all ages are depicted engaging in, according to Brown, over a hundred variations of play including rough-and-tumble, imaginative, storytelling and object play. Life and vitality are positively bursting from the canvas. Brown contrasts this to a cover story published by the New York Times Magazine4 extolling the values of play, and yet only children are depicted in the image. Brown concludes, ‘I think we may have lost something in our culture.’ Medic Bowen White5 has pioneered an approach as a medical clown, undertaking significant humanitarian work with his clown colleagues including the renowned physician Patch Adams, made famous by Robin Williams in the film which took his name. White believes that in society today ‘we are all being acculturated to devalue play and fun or to relegate it to some later, after work time frame’.6 He goes on to note that we have a way of separating play off from the rest of our lives – if we are working, play is excluded; if we are playing, work is excluded. White fundamentally challenges this ‘bivalent’, dualistic viewpoint. He shows how being a playful doctor can succeed in engaging desperate and traumatized patients where conventional approaches fail.

Furthermore, in so many so-called civilized societies today, children’s play as defined in this book is in serious jeopardy as consumerism becomes god and many parents are worried for their children’s futures in this highly pressurized world. For these parents, play is an extravagance the contemporary child cannot afford. Perhaps it is the parents, driven by their fear of what might become of their offspring, who cannot afford this space for play? Folklorist and play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith describes the opposite of play not as work but as depression.7 This is a sobering thought.

Thankfully, many disciplines still do understand the importance of play for both children and adults and regard it as a necessity throughout life for the growth and evolution of the individual and society. Play is the root of creativity and thinking. Einstein, arguably one of the greatest thinkers of all time, is reputed to have said that play is more important than knowledge. Play is innate in every human being, whether they choose to cultivate it or not. Stuart Brown holds the view that fundamentally play is largely accountable for our existence as sentient, intelligent beings. Paul Harris8 argues how a child’s capacity to imagine alternative possibilities – in other words, to play – makes a significant and continuing contribution to intellectual and emotional development and lasts a lifetime.

If we are able to play, we can bring a lightness and softening that allows for a loosening around how we perceive ourselves, others and our own thinking. Play allows us to open up and question concepts, beliefs and assumptions that we perhaps were not even aware we held, offering us opportunities to deepen our understanding of ourselves, others and the world we share together. Play is universal, however much it is ignored, obscured or derided. Scratch the surface and there we will find it – a little rusty perhaps, but nevertheless present.

Negative or dismissive attitudes towards play often arise from our failure to grasp the overall purpose of free play because its values are often not linear, goal-orientated and immediate (discounting the obvious gains of fun, joy, laughter). It is not always easy to link a particular form of play to a desired outcome, and maybe we need to question the validity of trying to do so. The relationship of play to our evolutionary trajectory is abstract and, more often than not, oblique. The ‘evidence’ is there if we wish to discover it. Harris makes a convincing argument for the link between the emergence of modern humans – homo sapiens – some 40,000 years ago and the engagement in cave painting, refinement of tools, the creation of jewellery and burial rituals which could be considered as forms of play.

Game designer Jane McGonigal9 speaks of the population in the Kingdom of Lydia in Asia Minor over two and a half thousand years ago. On the brink of starvation and in grave danger of wiping themselves out completely through warring, the Lydian ruler in desperation invented a dice game using sheep knuckles. The ruler decreed that his people would alternate their days – one day eating, the next playing, the next eating and so on. They survived for 18 years in this way. When it was eventually safe to venture out, the Lydians were able to find the resources they needed. In the 21st century, Stuart Brown cites an experiment carried out on rats wherein two groups of young rats are observed managing an intrusive threat in their environment. One group of rats have had a normal upbringing in which they were able to play freely together; the rats in the other group were deprived of play in their early life. Both groups have the same reaction to the danger, withdrawing to a safe hiding place; however, after a while curiosity gets the better of the playful group and they begin, tentatively at first until their confidence grows, investigating and exploring the alien presence among them. Upon discovering the intruder to be benign, the rats in this group resume their normal business. Those in the play-deprived group, however, remain hidden, too afraid and lacking in basic curiosity and self-trust. Consequently, this group fails to eat and starves. The playful group is able to take a risk whereas the non-playful group is not and suffers immensely as a result.10

We might expect to see play at work in familiar creative fields of endeavour such as theatre, art, music and dance, subjects we will enquire into more deeply throughout this book. However, the arts do not have the monopoly on play. Scientist and evolutionist Charles Darwin11 described the creation of new variations in species as ‘sports’ that, if found to be advantageous to the species, would be passed on to future generations through the DNA. These were (and are) happy and fortuitous events in nature. Diversities in species would be eradicated if found to be useless for the species’ survival – hence, only the fittest and the most adaptable survive. Paul Schoemaker12 suggests that in the field of scientific endeavours more than half of the discoveries in healthcare have an accidental origin. He claims that such fortuitous breakthroughs as the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming come about by creating opportunities for serendipity, being open-minded enough to recognize even the smallest observations and curious to explore further – all aspects of play.

Play is evident, for instance, in such diverse spheres as cooking, such as the playful curiosity of celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal, and biomedical engineering, in which Chris Toumazou13 works alongside biomedics, atomic physicists, biologists and engineers and talks of a ‘playground of innovation’, encouraging his colleagues to be disruptive in the pursuit of discovery. Toumazou is known to ask the questions that most others would not think to ask, and his intuitive approach has led to groundbreaking inventions. Educationalists have long been fascinated by the role which play has in children’s learning and have sought to increase international awareness of its importance. Anthropologists have studied play directly, exploring the role of play in adults’ ability to make sense of and challenge societal norms and create new ones. Primatologist Isabel Behncke Izquierdo understands play to be evolution’s gift from the bonobo apes she studies to human beings. She describes play as ‘the chemistry of yes!’ that epitomizes the essence of openness and discovery, adding that ‘it is the only space where uncertainty is really fun, otherwise uncertainty is awful, it’s scary’.14

In her prize-winning memoir H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald records the exact moment she realized that hawks play. Macdonald had read all there was to read about goshawks and had never known this about them, yet her willingness to observe that upturned head and narrowed eyes – which she understood as play signs – led to her scrunching up balls of paper and watching her goshawk grabbing and gnawing at them. Next she rolled up a magazine, telescope-like, and peered through it. Her goshawk rewarded her efforts by ducking her head to reciprocate the gesture. Passing sounds through the tube of magazine resulted in her hawk ‘shaking her tail rapidly from side to side and shivering with happiness’.15

Researcher and writer Brené Brown, in developing a concept she describes as ‘Wholeheartedness’16 that embodies authenticity and a sense of worthiness, recognized play’s central position in this way of living life. Brown noticed people who were having fun and celebrating the simple fact of being alive. She was puzzled by these folk until she ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Stuart Brown, MD
• Permissions
• Prologue
• Act 1
• Act 2
• Act 3
• Epilogue
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Join our mailing list
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright
• Of Related Interest
• Endorsements