PLAYWORKS
"This is the real secret of life - to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead
of calling it work, realize it is play." - Alan Watts
When asked how I got into "play work", I have given all kinds of answers: wanting to have more joy and fun in my life,
tired of the drudgery of personal struggles and weary of working "seriously" full time with clients enshrined in their
own painful dramas. Then there's believing that I can always benefit from more healing through Inner Child work, and
that my improvisational play workouts are really deep meditations, opening me spiritually. After all, the spontaneous,
improvisational quality of expressive play builds presence, making it a dependable route to Self discovery. It's also
true that the discovery of who and what I am - we are together - is my dearest form of play, and that play is my favorite
way way of relating.
Which brings me to the subtle undercurrent of my attraction to play: the deep balm it provides to my lifelong
loneliness, a loneliness that stems, ironically, from a dearth of human playmates. Having a rich inner life of
continuous "creative possibilitease" that merges with magic, mysterium and madness, and so seldom encountering
another human being available to go there with me, I've died inside a thousand sorrowful deaths.
- Not that I think that others are the whole problem. I freely admit that I am all too often intimidated about
initiating deep play with others outside the protective walls of a workshop. Imagining rejections of incalcuable
proportions, I hide my outrageous and bountiful self and play it safe. Sadly, that safety pattern is a cage
leading to results I know only too well: confinement to solitary play with non human playmates, while suffering
the strain of acting civilized and proper with humans, prisoner to predictable, even soul stealing conventions
from a world that has forgotten its glorious origins.
My hunger for playmate experience has served up feasts with wild flowers and mushrooms, dances with wind spirits
and stars, treks on wilderness trails explored with my playdog Kristol and fun collections of feathers and bones.
I've made weird driftwood huts on southern Cal beaches and left stone goddesses atop mountainsides and hearts of
broken glass and gunshot shells in the middle of military target practice sites. I've risked naked encounters
with desert creatures and wolfish howls at metropolitan moons. The steep, jagged terrains of my sorrows and
fragrant meadows of my joys taught me that I could play with scores of artforms, even invent them to suit my
adventurous purposes. My pallette of colors and range of sounds, ways to move into my psyche and through my
bodyself necessitated inventing a vocabulary to say what I meant - expanding along with my thirst for ways
to continually express my discovery that I am, that you and we are amazing, gifted beings.
Yet still I have ached for more. More human friends to bond with in this theatre of self discovery, playhouse
of the gifted Self, sacred arena of joyfulfillment with my own species. I look through eyes that still see a
world of sad, tired human beings, animating anxieties rather than delights, lost to sufficient play of their
moment: what's the trick, I ask myself, to turn the tide?
To help remedy my frustration, for the past fifteen years I've maneuvered to legitimize play and conjure
more of it as a facilitator of spontaneous, free expression. My thrust to share high play has yielded a
handful of marvelous players Bkindred artists, healers, lovers and other passionkeepers, friends and
clients alike. Like my own mentors, I've taught playshops, comedic improvisation, dreamwork, character
voice dialoguing, art "therapies" and played as a tantric shamanic healer and artist. Self discovery
Bfinding out how God and Goddesslike I am by divine birthright, how constant and enormous is my creativity,
how utterly imaginative and wondrous is my mind, and how good and kind is my heart, and how strong, flexible
and pleasuring host my body can be - remains the most intoxicating form of play to me , the play of the gods
themselves. I become an Instrument of amazing expressions!
Bringing us up to date. Ever lusting for more of my own play therapy, I've conjured up a creative Atraining@
that takes place in the universal playground of our Being. Come improvise in the theatre of the creative Self
and play a bigger "game" for Life. I invite all of you to be Players. I invite you to be my teachers. And best
of all, be my Friends . For keeps. -MS