Chapter 2, Lesson 7: Beyond the Four Movements: the Nature of Play

Welcome to Chapter 2, Lesson 7 of Finding Your Way. In this final lesson of Chapter 2, we take the Four Movements of seeking, hiding, clinging, and shattering that we have spent the past six lessons exploring, and we look beyond them, perceiving the first glimmers of what it means to transcend them entirely.

In Interlude I, Lesson 2, I discussed how most of humanity conflates playfulness and silliness in their minds, and therefore in their experience. This leads to a world that is unconsciously dominated by silliness, and in which playfulness is largely forgotten in adults. Increasingly, play is forgotten in our children as well, as we continue as a society to expand the structure and rigidity in their lives. I also spoke about how play is an easy path to grace and joy. Without play, we lose that path, and often lose our way in life as a result.

Children, by their nature, wish to play. If left to their own devices, without all of the structure, rigidity, and trauma that society and their own traumatized parents impose on them, children will play all of the time. That is their natural state. It is ours as well, if we only remembered how.

From this understanding, we can perceive how each of the Four Movements only arise to the extent that we are not playing. When we are playing we are quite literally in a state of grace, and therefore not shattering from overwhelm, hiding from our fears, or clinging to our existing beliefs. We are also not seeking when we play. The word seeking contains an energy of searching, of striving, of effort — an orientation, at least to some extent, towards the future. When we play, we are present, in the moment, experiencing what life has to offer now, and not reaching towards something that has not yet occurred.

It is in the movement of play that we can let down all of the psychic boundaries and barriers in our minds — all of the resistance that prevents us from flowing with all things in the present — and open our minds in each moment to all that reality is teaching us, which is all that we are teaching ourselves. We can orient towards our existence by inviting everything we experience, positive or negative, to change our mind and help us grow, trusting in our own capacity to wholesomely integrate what we learn. If we learn to play, we learn to be free of limitations.

This is the end of Chapter 2. In the next lesson, we will begin Chapter 3: our exploration of the 5 Virtues and how they individually and collectively allow us to transform our reality into heaven on Earth. Until then and always, may you rediscover the magic of play in your lives and how all of life can be infinite wholesome play. Be well.