journal
The Spirit of Play: Exploring the Role of Creativity and Spirituality in Healing
July 1, 2008
Dogs take play for granted. We have a lot to learn from them. Many of us have forgotten the art of play. Play is anything that involves spontaneity, creativity, the use of the imagination, the use of our bodies in athletic or fun ways, and relaxation. Often we believe that we are not playful, creative or artistic. We think that when there are so many problems in the world around us and when there are so many people and animals in pain and suffering, how can we justify doing anything fun? How can we find the time to do anything lighthearted when there is so much to do to help others?
Some of us also think that only “talented” people can make art. “I’m not talented,” we say. “I can’t paint, write, sing, draw, dance.” You name it. All of the ways that we have been given to enjoy ourselves are somehow only within reach of the most gifted. There are many reasons for this rooted in the way our culture has removed storytelling, artmaking, singing, and other creative outlets from being part of the ordinary day-to-day enjoyment within families and communities. We are saturated with images of famous, “talented” people who do these things for us on television and radio. However, at a more basic level, our beliefs that prevent us from playing are rooted in the challenges of trauma, stress and violence.
People in helping roles often neglect playing and, like their clients, patients, or sick and ill loved ones, even forget how to play. In this way, they become very much like those they are seeking to help: survivors of violence and other kinds of traumas themselves often have forgotten this wonderful human capacity for joy. Many religious traditions frown on activities that engender playfulness, such as dancing, singing, lovemaking, and other creative uses of the body in service of generativity. Further, when your life is in danger or you are constantly at risk for being criticized, all you have time for is to be vigilant in developing and maintaining strategies to protect yourself.
Playing, in contrast, requires leaving behind hypervigilance to enter a light trance in which we forget our worries, leave behind self-consciousness, and allow our surroundings to dissolve into a single point of focus on the activity at hand. When we are nourished often by forms of play, we are smiling, like my puppy, Sym, pictured above. We want to reach out to others and give them a kiss! When we have ample time to play, the energy of love flows through and out of us and feeds the rest of our lives and relationships.
This place has much in common with states of trance brought on by the meditation, prayer, chanting, ritual, and repetitive movement used in many religious traditions around the world. Such activities bring on feelings of balance, peace, happiness, excitement, contentment, and goodwill. Or they bring us into a feeling of communion with energies and forces greater than we. Here we see the connection of play with spirituality.
What happens to us when we don’t play? Most of us at one time or another have met or known a young puppy or dog who has been abused and neglected. They tuck their tails and try to sit as quietly as possible. When you give them toys, they don’t know what to do with them or they guard them obsessively. They are hypervigilant or they have gotten so numbed out, they don’t know how to move.
So it is that if we suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or Secondary Traumatic Stress or even if we just are burned out and exhausted, we become frozen up. It is not just that we have lost the capacity to play emotionally or intellectually, it is also that the neurological networks in our body have ceased to function at optimum capacity. Repeated exposure to stress cultivates certain neural networks and not others. If we have overactive fight or flight receptors, based in the limbic center of the brain, we are always “on” and only know how to go towards aggression.
With our body so primed, it can feel very difficult both physically and emotionally to find the energy to play–the inspiration. Or when our energy is stimulated even by something positive, we find ourselves feeling angry or overly anxious instead of joyful. Our bodies associate the physical, mental and emotional stimulation of happiness and excitement with negative feelings and actions. We do not know how to discriminate between the two.
The ability to play requires safety. Safety means having enough basic trust in our surroundings and the people around us so that we can frequently, confidently and without much thought put our guard down and focus on non-essential activities and thoughts. If we have to struggle to have our basic needs met or if our personal space is constantly invaded (whether emotionally or physically), then there is not enough safety to be spontaneous. We do not feel comfortable expressing who we are.
Safety begins at the physical level: is there always enough food on the table and shelter? Clothing? Is the integrity of our bodily boundaries respected? Is there beauty in our surroundings, whether in the external environment or in our homes? Is our environment free of physical abuse and violence? Is our country in a period of peace?
At the emotional levels, safety means that we are consistently loved and supported even when we occasionally make mistakes. Mistakes are not punished, but seen as part of being human and used as fuel for our learning and growth. We are told often we are lovable, beautiful, kind, sweet, or any other adjective special to who we are. Criticism is offered in a loving, fair and balanced way. We are praised when we do well. We are told the truth about ourselves, our families, communities, nation and world appropriate to our age and capacity to understand and integrate the information.
At what the Q’ero tradition of the Peruvian Andes call the mythic levels of experience, we are frequently told and hear stories that help us navigate the challenges of being human and explain who we are and where we came from. We are told stories that inspire and guide us. At what they call the spiritual or energetic levels of experience, we are taught that there is a source of sustenance complimenting and transcending the merely human, whether it is grounded in a strong moral philosophy about how others should be treated and/or in spiritual and religious values and beliefs, such as in the existence of a loving God or in the fundamental capacity for the world to repair when there is struggle or harm. In other words, we see ourselves and the rest of the world as a place that is filled with love and that is part of a greater endeavor in service of good. In such a context, violence and trauma are put in a framework of meaning that gives us hope when things are tough.
I myself had forgotten how to play from a very early age. I attribute it in part to my very serious temperament and also to various traumas I experienced as a child. We each have different ways of responding to difficulties in our lives. What caused me to lose my natural spontaneity might not have had the same impact on someone else. There were many ways I eventually reclaimed the ability to play: I have always been a writer and kept journals. When I stop writing, it has always been a sign that I am lapsing into numbing out. In my mid-thirties, I returned to drawing and painting, something I had not done since childhood. I acted when I was a teenager and in my adult years, have reclaimed the spontaneity of playacting in my work with people.
I consciously put aside negative internal criticism and dive into the wonderful world of creation. Drawing and painting enabled me to express and externalize my emotions and due to the fact that it is not a primarily cognitive medium, to translate them into the level of the mythic. To tell a story through image.
Lately, it is my two constant companions, a 2-year-old Pug named Wee and a growing young Great Pyrenees, who keep me in the playing frame of mind. There’s nothing like a young and energetic dog to keep you from getting too serious! I can’t sit and work too long or go past our due date for a romp or walk without them reminding me to let go and ease up. Yet it is not just the act of play that is afoot here: it is where play takes us, especially when we are faced with death, illness, loss, or other challenges.
When we engage with our personal stories at the level of the mythic, we are led towards a reality greater than our own personal pain. For instance, when we view Michaelangelo’s moving sculpture, the Pieta, in Saint Peter’s Cathedral in Rome of the grieving mother holding her dead son in her arms, we recognize a common human experience of loss and grief. Our pain is framed in a larger human story. In the case of the story of Jesus, most people can also look at that sculpture and know that it is also telling the story of his resurrection, which for some is a story of hope. Or it is telling a story about the ravages of violence or the lack of justice. Images are interpreted according to our own personal, familial, cultural, environmental, religious, and national frames of reference.
Even if we are not Michaelangelo, however, when we express our own pain–our own stories through words or images, movement or ritual,we are taking a leap from the personal to the collective. At this level, our “art” grounds our experience in a realm where we meet the elemental forces of at the edge of life and death. In this place, the transformative powers of healing are invoked. Lawrence E. Sullivan, Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University defines healing as “pointing toward a renewal of creative powers, toward a condition that is vital, stirring, strong, and whole, as befits a creative beginning” (from an interview in Parabola Magazine, Spring, 1993). Healing does not necessarily lead to a cure or the cessation of illness, and visa versa.
As Sullivan puts it, healing involves conjuring “the image of the whole” or a central axis point in human experience, often represented by a tree whose roots go from earth to sky or in the Christian tradition, by the crucifix. In this central point of human experience, transformation can occur. One way of understanding wholeness in this sense is to remember a moment when in the midst of a time of struggle, we have suddenly felt a great sense of ease, peace, and connection to something greater than we. We have felt held, soothed, even cured of an illness. It might have been evoked by watching a beautiful sunset, by prayer, or by a moment of connection with a loved one.
According to Sullivan, artistic creativity also has a central role in moving us to this place. “So much of the creativity of a culture is a response to the reality of sickness, whether this be in the realm of oral tradition, written literature, music, dance, visual art, or the festival mobilizations of communities.” This process within most cultures is usually connected to spirituality, whether it is described as Sufi, Christian, Muslim, or any other faith system. Yet we do not have to follow a particular faith to tap into these elemental forces that move us towards wholeness.
Marta Sanchez, a survivor of sexual violence, activist, and also a friend and colleague of
mine, writes the following words about her painting included in The Art of Surviving exhibit called “Embracing Hope”: “When I began to paint I was convinced that there were no words to express what it is like to be raped. There were not words to describe being molested, assaulted, intimidated, and silenced. My experiences left me quiet. My paintings served as visual protests. In my art I found my voice.” Her painting shows her standing in the lower right hand corner with the wings of an angel. The elements of earth, air, sky, and water swirl and emerge around her. Her personal story–indeed, her very personality as Marta is transformed in the painting into a mythical creature, a winged woman–and is held in the great soup of all of creation.
Mr. King, whose piece, “Abused Ponies” is also part of the exhibit and which appears here to the left, writes: “Creating art separated me from reality and gave me a feeling of utopia.” Here he touches on the way art, a form of play, took him to a different place akin to wholeness. An anonymous artist in the exhibit notes: “Drawing creates a concrete expression of the inner world and some short-term relief.”
Much research has shown us that creativity enables us to engage with these dimensions of experience in service of our own and others’ recovery from violence. In a study by Christopher Elkofer, an art therapist exploring “patterns of brain activity following an hour of painting and drawing” was suggestive that artistic creativity alters brain activity (press release, AATA, 2008).
Where it fits into each individual’s or community’s process may differ. In the western disciplines of psychology and psychiatry, art and other forms of creative self-expression are sometimes used to aid in a survivor’s recovery. However, they are still considered secondary to more conventional western models approaching healing through talking, analyzing events of the past and their relevance to the present, and behavioral and cognitive forms of understanding. On the other hand, among indigenous cultures worldwide, the embodiment of one’s experience, wishes, and desires for healing through forms of art, ritual, and play is considered primary to cognitive understanding. In their systems, we must invoke concrete energies through putting our internal world into an external form.
When we do this, we actually access levels of the unconscious that are normally clouded from our everyday view. Here, as Carl Jung notes, “completely new thoughts and ideas that have never been conscious before [present themselves]….many artists, philosophers, and even scientists owe some of their best ideas to inspirations that appear suddenly from the unconscious” (Jung, Man and His Symbols). What are the implications to play? And how does an innocent romp with an energetic young puppy correlate to more structured activities such as ritual or making art?
In my experience teaching workshops, when we do feel safe, we are able, even if momentarily, to access our natural spontaneity. In this space, the boundary between the conscious and unconscious becomes far thinner and we can have breakthroughs and insights. If we cultivate these states of being on a daily basis, we will be like Einstein whose ideas of relativity came in a moment of rest. We may also feel the presence of God or forces that appear to help us if we are in pain or difficulty. To this end, I consider play and creativity in all its forms part of spiritual life. When we are open, we are in touch with more than the material concerns of the day to day. We are in touch with something that feels immanent, bright, and non-ordinary. Gerry Mitchell’s work, Rapture, pictured here,
shows how creativity can move us into this place of wholeness. She writes: “As an incest survivor, I have managed to forgive and continue with my life anyway. I am very happy and finally at peace with the world. All of my life experiences have helped mold me into a very optimistic being. My paintings reflect the joy of being alive and still in awe of what life can bring.”
May all of us rediscover the playful one in ourselves, as Gerry has done, and in so doing, feed our spiritual life and capacity to love deeply!