Mind, Body, and Soul Food: Nourishing the Creative Life

Christine Caldwell, Ph.D., LPC, ADTR

Keynote Speech, Creative Arts Therapy Conference, Denver, CO, October, 1997.

The statement that psychotherapy is a creative act surprises no one, and blending creative processes with therapeutic ones enjoys a long and diverse history. It all springs from the same source, a creative womb that dwells in the mystery and germinates unexpected and novel forms, forms that heal us and send us out as astronauts into a luminous and achingly beautiful world.

It is my deepest hope that all of us understand ourselves as alchemists of the creative spirit before we define ourselves as any specific kind of therapist. It is my hope for this field that we can grasp how bone deep our human need to be creative is, and how the suppression of our creativity is a major source of human suffering. And for those of us already convinced, I hope that we can more deeply appreciate our calling to be advocates of a creative life. Our lives are our greatest works of art, and getting clear about that can put us all on the right track a lot quicker than any standard therapy session.

With these mandates in mind, I'd like to speak about soul food , but come to it first through the territory of mind food and body food. If we scroll back to the onset of modern western psychotherapy, we can see that in the days before Freud and his compatriots, society was writhing itself out of a more collective consciousness, one that devalued the individual and made men and women subservient to various institutions, such as church, government, and guild. People lived completely embedded in a social hierarchy that was quite fixed and pre-determined. In this context, individual psychopathology could never be well understood, much less treated. The literature abounds with horror stories of the abuse and neglect of sick individuals during this relatively modern and civilized time. And due to Alice Miller's pioneering research, we also know that this kind of social control involved the subjugation and widespread abuse of children, who were thought to be uncivilized creatures that needed to be broken and trained so that they would submit to the will of higher authorities.

With the various political revolutions that established democracy as a social form, the concept of human rights could then be born. Championed by philosophers such as Rousseau, Humboldt, and John Stuart Mills, we began to think and behave more as individuals, each possessing “inalienable rights” that were more sacred than any institution or social construct. The radical idea that each human had needs that must not be interfered with was born.

It was into this milieu that Freud, Reich, Jung and others establish their profoundly revolutionary ideas that gave us tools and methods for developing ourselves as individuals and countering the repressive forces of society. Before they “invented” psychotherapy as a field, we had few other routes but religion to lead a self examined, self reflective life. In those days, and even sadly into current times, classic religions largely tend to champion a fixed adherence to given beliefs, beliefs that advocate obedience and passivity to higher authority. Because of this, religions' ability in the Victorian era to nourish our emerging consciousness as individuals was severely limited. Hence the birth of psychotherapy.

The pioneers of modern western psychotherapy located self reflection where it can develop in the most healthy and unrestricted manner - inside each and every individual. Why is self reflection so important? Why does living a revealed and examined life carry such value for us? Why does it assist in healing our wounds and help us to construct productive lives? If we look at self reflection in a cultural context, we see that it crafts a check and balance system to the power and influence exerted by social institutions. An individual who can know him or herself, who can locate and support a sense of personal worth and identity, can stand up for themselves in the face of social control. In a family system, self examination can help to deconstruct dehumanizing childrearing practices, and promote bonds built on care and respect rather than coercion and repression. But purely in an individual context, I would like to propose that self reflection provides us with what I call mind food . As we look at what constitutes mind food, lets begin by paying attention to its handmaidens, the brain and nervous system.

Our nervous systems are designed to operate within a stream of constant informational input. This input comes from sense receptors for taste, touch, smell, sight, hearing, balance & tone embedded throughout the tissues in our bodies. Mind food begins in the body. Our sense receptors are like periscopes, peeking out from the surface of our bodies, sentinels alerting us to the comings and goings of the external world. They also peer inward, plunging into the dark recesses of our bodies, attentive to our inner pulsing, rumbling, and metabolizing.

Because of this set up, our attention naturally oscillates, pointing itself alternately outside, then inside in a wavelike manner, each wave bathing us in the basic nutrient of information. It is from these physiological surges that we construct a sense of individual identity.

If we deprive ourselves of this constant flow of data from the senses, a curious sequence begins. Sensory deprivation studies have shown that for the first few minutes to hours of no sight, no sound, no smell, no feel, no touch, we tend to experience a quality of profound quiet, which can be quite ineffable, expansive and relaxing. This state may parallel what can be achieved in meditation. If we keep this up, however, in the next hours our nervous system begins to starve, as if for lack of food. Just like our bodies cannot be deprived of food for very long, so our minds cannot long tolerate a deprivation of information. If not enough information is forthcoming, the nervous system copes by literally making some up, borrowing from memory centers, emotional centers, and sensory processing centers to cover the deficit. In short, we hallucinate.

Sensory deprivation subjects have reported all kinds of fanciful and frightening thoughts, feelings, sights and sensations that feel quite real, and that pull us out of touch and out of synch with ourselves and our world. In a sense we could say that the nervous system taps into our unconscious, looking under any rock it can to find bits of stored data to feed our hungry neurons. Eventually, all sensory deprivation studies have to be ended, for fear of inducing raving madness in the subjects. These studies have dramatically proven that without sufficient input, our nervous systems starve and sicken in ways that are typically associated with mental illness.

On a less dramatic level, we can unconsciously replicate these studies in our daily lives. Projection is a kind of mild hallucination, after all. In projection we are imagining something is outside of us that is actually getting turned over from under our own inner rocks. Given our dual inner and outer sources of data, we can begin to see projection as a state that occurs either when we are withholding interior information from ourselves, when external information is being withheld from us, or we are resisting incoming information. When insufficient information occurs, we will make up the difference until we feel sated. We will create a story about ourselves or the world that fills in the informational gaps, and that story will feel very real.

The key solution to the problem of projection and social repression, both of which are a kind of sensory deprivation, is to reestablish the flow of information, to feed ourselves healthy mind food. It has been long noted that in order for a government to gain more control over its' citizens its' first move is to deprive them of accurate and unconditional information. The same is true of dysfunctional families, which thrive on secrets and withholding. As individuals we withhold by desensitizing ourselves to our own sensory signals, like turning down the volume on the stereo so we can't hear the words to the music. As societies, families, and individuals, we must work to keep all information free, egalitarian, and readily accessible.

We have a constant and profound need to know. If information is being kept from us, or if we are keeping information from ourselves or others, we get sick and crazy. We source our safety and health by being 100% committed to self reflection and the abundant flow of information. This is the essence of mind food. We would sicken and die without it, and in the presence of it, we flourish and prosper. Traditional psychotherapy, when looked at from this perspective, was designed to help us reestablish this flow of data, this ability to feed ourselves and others the rich nutrient of information. In a self reflective life, we take responsibility for being information receivers and senders - food producers, if you will. The experiential therapies are extremely useful in this regard, because their emphasis on learning to perceive the external world in a more penetrating manner cannot help but foster our external information gathering. And experiential therapies emphasis on accessing information from the unconscious (which likes to operate using images, sounds, and feelings anyway) quite naturally develops our abilities to turn inside for our internal mind food.

Let's extend this metaphor a bit further, and talk about body food . We all obviously know about eating actual food; we know that we need air, vitamins and minerals, and water, or none of us would be sitting here. But what other food does the body need? Studies at orphanages have shown that without physical touch, infants and children sicken and often die. It seems that we can live without our sight or our hearing, because we compensate with other senses, but we cannot live without the sense of touch. It is speculated that the reason for this is because knowing our internal world is of primary importance.

Studies have also shown that when we are prevented from physically moving, effects much like the sensory deprivation experiments result. Subjects first tend to calm and relax, similar to the effect of putting on a straight jacket. Reports of a sense of relief and equanimity are common. But after a few hours, panic and sensory distortions begin to set in, as well as harmful physiological changes. Soon after, the experiments must be stopped, before the study transforms into a type of torture.

Interestingly, we have also studied the rare genetic mutation that causes around one in a million people to be born without pain receptors. We would think that a life without pain would be blissful, but in actuality it is rare for any of these people to live to the age of thirty. All live a life full of constant medical problems. The most common cause of death is from complications arising out of not moving, not making tiny little postural adjustments that relieve pressure and restore blood flow, and of not moving away from harm.

Movement is the modus operandi of the universe, life dancing with itself. Our bodies whirl and spin in space, and all bodies in space, celestial or earthbound, pulse, rotate and spiral. Be it the beating of a heart, the squeeze of lung muscles, or the sizzle of electrochemistry across a neural net, life is determined by movement. And movement defines and delivers health. When our thoughts move, and are not fixed, we are said to be mentally healthy. When our emotions move through us, and neither get stopped from coming nor stopped from going, we are said to be healthy.

Touch, along with other sensations, and movement, a type of expressiveness or action, are vital and necessary body foods. They parallel the way we are wired up - a nervous system of sensory nerves and organs that provide and process information, and a system of muscles that create actions in response to our inner state. Here is our primary oscillation, our moment to moment flow that we call being alive. Sensation in, movement out. Sensation in, movement out. This is what we call body food, the rich nutrient of feeling and action that, when withheld, causes us to sicken and often die. Doris Lessing said it poetically: “All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh.”

Somatic therapists tend to believe that talk therapy isn't sufficient for this very reason. Similar to the revolution in education that stresses direct experience as a primary way to learn, the field of psychotherapy is now seeing that talking about it isn't enough; for anything to change, we have to feel it as well, and we have to move it differently in our lives. Somatic therapies, by their nature, are body nourishing. They take us through visual, kinesthetic, and auditory experiences that literally move us into a more perfect union with ourselves. It is my firm belief that healing and growth is never complete without these experiential therapies.

So lets now turn our attention to the central theme of this article - soul food . Where does the metaphor go here? Historically, the soul has resided within the exclusive domain of religion. In recent years, we have come to understand this entity more broadly and inclusively, and speak of soul in spiritual terms. Some psychologists have even ventured into this area. Abraham Maslow, at the end of his life, spoke of the human need for self actualization and transcendence. There is a whole field called Buddhist psychology. Transpersonal psychology is premised on the notion that we sicken and warp ourselves if we don't connect to a larger, more inclusive consciousness.

I would like to propose here that the basic ingredient of soul food is even more inclusive than spirituality - it is creativity itself. The whole huge field of psychotherapy will breathe a lot easier if we just get behind the idea that we all need three square meals a day of creative process. Nothing less than this will do. If we don't lead a creative life, we wither and something inside us dies, as surely as a lack of physical food will kill us. As we well know, we do ourselves a grave injustice to relegate creativity just to artists. Nothing could be more elitist and totalitarian, more toxic, than to feed only some of our population, while starving others whom we deem less worthy. From the construction worker who spontaneously plays with the rhythm of her hammer on a wall, to Einstein, who was willing to throw out the existing laws of physics and construct a more relative universe, we are all deeply and inherently creative.

The soul is a unifying field, and creativity is the substance within it. Creativity builds a bridge between the mind, the body, the heart, and the encompassing soul. And the bridge is built of play. Carl Jung once said: “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”

It is by looking at this play instinct that we can recover our creativity, and understand how to let it inform our lives. After all, children don't wake up and say “I think I'll do something creative right now”, they simply have a deep urge to play. Play comes in two basic forms - it tends to either randomize our experience, or to organize it. Examples of play that organizes us are games with rules, and sports that require skill acquisition. Play that randomizes can be fantasy, koans, and spontaneous goofiness. When we play in a randomizing way, we learn to let go, to relish our curiosity, to break down old systems. When we play in an organized way, we learn technique, and we understand the value of effort.

These two systems of play actually mirror the two requirements of creative process - hard work, followed by playful experimentation. In science, folk wisdom states that new discoveries are an accident meeting a prepared mind. Remarking on this, Louis Pasteur put it well when he said: “Did you ever observe to whom the accidents happen? Chance favors only the prepared mind.” The more we recover and develop our play instinct, the easier it is to lead a creative life. Through adult play, we can find out if our creative instincts lead us towards telling jokes, painting in water color, doing scientific experiments, playing chess, taking a hip hop class, or fooling around with that old guitar in the back of the closet.

Why is creativity so important? What is it about creativity that we can't live without? Let me back up a moment, and tell you again what I think traditional psychotherapy does. In a standard therapy session, we take that hour and focus on ourselves intently - however that is done, this kind of looking inward is the central support structure of therapy, and is, as I said before, an important countermeasure to the effects of toxic or controlling environments. But what do we do with the down sides of this process of self examination? How do we counteract a tendency to slip into paralyzing self consciousness, isolating self centeredness, and addictive self indulgence? For this is the criticism of therapy that we need to take a good look at. Self examination, when overly emphasized, breeds blame, an unwillingness to take responsibility, narcissistic disregard for others, and a tendency to use the victim position to get what we want. It looks like a form of overeating to me.

It is time we own up to the fact that straight therapy is only half the answer. The other half is leading a creative life. Therapy is an important act of self remembering. Creativity is an equally potent act of self forgetting. A creative experience diminishes our sense of self importance, for we are insignificant in comparison to the immensity of life that it exposes. In the midst of a creative process, we are no longer at the center of everything, for infinity has no center. Aaron Copeland expressed this when he commented : “Inspiration may be a form of super consciousness, or perhaps subconsciousness - I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self consciousness.” And isn't it interesting that his word, inspiration, shares the same root as the word breath, and the same origins as the word spirituality.

Beginning with Copernicus, who knocked us out of the center of the solar system, to Darwin, who knocked us off the top of the evolutionary ladder, creative scientists have been decentralizing humans in a way that accelerates our growth and self knowledge. This humbling sense of our place in the scheme of things has been an important counteraction to dogmatic thinking and the abuse of power.

It is not that we are diminished in creativity, but that we are held in a vastly greater context. In this place, we can know ourselves not so much as a human being but as an interbeing, one who exists inter-relatedly with all that is. This is the other face of healing, the quiet twin of our self actualization. Curiously, the creative act is a sure fire way to access our unconscious, an efficient dwelling in our previously untapped potentialities. By sensing ourselves as larger than our current self concept, we can grow towards even more expanded states.

And I have barely begun to talk about the necessity of creativity. When we give ourselves over to it, we also inadvertently rehearse problem solving skills, learn to tolerate changing and unpredictable environments, and feel fascinated by the mysteries of life. There is so much more out there than being well adjusted! In conjunction with self reflection, creativity gestates and births a fully realized human interbeing.

Creativity is our soul food because it parallels the way we are wired - it recapitulates our sensation and movement loop. For in creativity we are taught new and novel ways of paying attention. We learn to sharpen and challenge our senses, and to turn the lights on things that have been living in the dark. And creativity always moves us - we can't escape the yahoos, the deep wails, and the jumping fits it engenders.

In the oscillation of self reflection and creativity, we master what I call self sourcing. What this engenders is our empowerment, our ability not so much to be at the center of everything, but to be at the source of everything. It is through this sense of sourcing that our lives take on a strong purpose, a consistent productivity, and a lasting sense of peace.

As I write this piece, I suspect I am reaching a group of people who have eaten some great soul food. When we gather together, it is a kind of soul food banquet, a place where we can come and sample some fine regional cuisine. Somatic therapists are in a unique position to serve people nutritious meals made up of both self examination and creative exploration. This combination is without parallel in the field of psychotherapy, and I suspect that in 20 years, no ethical therapy will be done without this vital mix of energies. So as we ride what I believe is the crest of the next revolutionary wave in human development, I say to us all, bon appetit!

2. The Parallels Between Birth, Death, and Creativity:

•  a journey into the unknown

•  a transition

•  an altered state of consciousness

•  an initial sense of "offness" or tension

•  alteration of attention

•  a merging of awareness and actions

•  Features of Creativity from Research:

•  alternating work, rest, and play

•  surplus resources (attention, time, energy, space)

•  disciplined and free flowing attention

•  curiosity and wonder

•  adaptability

•  Birth Imprints Affecting Creativity

•  unresolved trauma that gobbles up attention

•  unfinished fears that inhibit curiosity

•  core organizers that rigidify personality

•  loss of the primal rhythms of contraction, release, and resolution

•  Exercise - Describe Birth to a Martian

•  Death Imprints the Affect Creativity

•  unprocessed losses

•  too many or too early losses

•  fear of referencelessness

•  fear of loss of control

•  right/wrong, black/white thinking

•  Exercise - Describe Death to a Martian

•  Exercise - Circle of Three - Being Born

•  Attentional Practices - The Oscillation of Attention

•  in to out

•  narrow to panoramic

•  free flowing to controlled

•  one sense to another

•  Creative Intentions Exercise - Circle of Three -

Arising from this workshop, my intentions for my creative development are:

Components of Creativity:

•  Attentional Skills –

•  Surplus 6*

•  intense concentration on present moment

•  fluidity – mental meandering

•  action & awareness merged 5*

•  control 7*

•  Felt tension (something not right)

•  Self efficacy – not run by external forces

•  Complexity – full range of traits expressed***

•  Constructive use of solitude (R. May)

•  Self-forgetfulness

•  Meandering – free association, etc 4*

In brain, in flow, most challenging tasks done w minimum of of mental energy - brain in cool state

attention effortlessly held to task - less cortical arousal - cortical efficiency

Most successful artists those that arted for sheer enjoyment when younger ** - & it remains autotelic (done for its own reward)

In the flow of a creative act we don't feel happy – we feel only what is relevant to the activity – happiness is a distraction. Pleasure does not lead to creativity, but soon turns into addiction.

Creative individuals tend to have had either very supportive childhoods or deprived & challenging ones, & tendency to come from either rich or poor backgrounds. They tend to invent their jobs.

J.P. Guilford says there are 2 types of thinking ,

convergent and divergent –

convergent - an answer that's specifically implied by the nature of the information given - like 2 + 2= 4.

Divergent - creating a novel response to the stimuli received. Convergent thinkers tend to enter the sciences more, those entering the arts more divergent.

Characteristics of divergent thinking: (related to creativity): spontaneous flexibility, adaptive flexibility, redefinition, originality, ideational fluidity, word fluency, associational fluency

Howard Gardner –

Usually hi IQ associated with convergent thinking – figuring out the correct response

Creative people tend to come up with many different associations, at least some of which are idiosyncratic & unique

Creative people score high on personality tests in these areas:

Independence

Self-confidence

Unconventionality

Alertness

Ready access to unconscious processes

Ambition

Commitment to work

Brain states in creative processes:

Reward systems active – ie dopamine flowing

mid-level serotonin – neither high or low

What would promote dopamine production?

•  Playing*

•  moving

•  doing fun things

•  being in parasympathetic nervous system – ie relaxed and attentive

Evolution rewards us for discovering something new, regardless of its present usefulness – discovery triggers reward centers of brain

Evolution also rewards the conservation of energy – it gives us pleasure when we relax – this is dopamine mediated

Whole brain use, no hot spots, and cool generally

This means hind, to mid, to frontal – instinct to emotion to thinking

Also, left to right – both words & images, both logical and free associative

What does this mean for us as CAT's?

•  pay attention to attention in our clients

•  oscillating nature

b. in to out

c. free flowing to controlled

d. narrow focus to panoramic

•  balance out convergent/divergent thinking styles

•  encourage playing & moving

•  encourage free/down time – surplus

•  encourage relaxation

MC says:

1. take charge of your schedule

2. make time for reflection & relaxation

3. shape your space

4. find out what you like & what you hate about life

5. start doing more of what you love & less of what you hate

•  Freud – Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him?… The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously- that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion -–while separating it sharply from reality

** Teresa Amabile coined the term intrinsic motivation – shown that creative solutions to problems occur more often when individuals engage in an activity for its sheer pleasure than when they do so for possible external rewards.

*** Having a complex personality means being able to express the full range of traits that are potentially present in the human repertoire but usually atrophy because we think that one or the other pole is good, whereas the other extreme is bad….A complex personality does not imply neutrality, on the average. It is not some position at the midpoint between 2 poles. It does not imply, for instance, being wishy-washy, so that one is never very competitive or very cooperative. Rather, it involves the ability to move from one extreme to the other as the occasion requires. M Cz.

4* - Donald Campbell

One of the values in walking to work is mental meandering. Or, if driving, not to have the car radio on. Now I don't think of myself as necessarily especially creative, but this creativity has to be a profoundly wasteful process. And that mental meandering, mind wandering and so on, is an essential process

5* When ordinary people are signaled with a pager at random times of the day & asked to rate how creative they feel, they tend to report the highest levels of creativity when walking, driving, or swimming; in other words, when involved in semiautomatic activity that takes up a certain amount of attention, while leaving some of it free to make connections among ideas below the threshold of conscious intentionality. Devoting full attention to a problem is not the best recipe for having creative thoughts.

6* - In terms of using our energies creatively, perhaps the most fundamental difference between people consists in how much uncommitted attention they have left over to deal with novelty…And often the obstacles to surplus attention are internal. In a person concerned with protecting his or herself, practically all the attention is invested in monitoring threats to the ego…Another limitation on the free use of energy is an excessive investment of attention in selfish goals. Of course, we all must first & foremost take care of our own needs. But for some people the concept of need is inflated to the point that it becomes an obsession that devours every waking moment…so the first step toward a more creative life is…. the allocation of attention to things for their own sake.

7* - the reason it is not a contradiction to be open & focused at the same time is that these contradictory ways of using psychic energy share a similarity that is more important than their differences…. They are both expressions of your ability to control attention, and it is this, not whether you are open or focused, that matters.

The title of my talk tonight has to do with play and transformation, two subjects that consistently open my heart, tug at my shirt, and disrupt my baby-boomer complacency. But since its been doing this since I was a young girl, I'm starting to get used to it. I began my adult life as an anthropologist, and then took a branching path into psychology and psychotherapy. I developed as a teacher and therapist at Naropa steeped in the healing traditions, and understanding these traditions through the lens of experiential and contemplative practices. But even early on in a career that already veered from the mainstream of traditional psychotherapy, I felt an itch to de-emphasize healing and recovery as central human concerns.

Psychology seemed able to describe in exquisite detail what can and does go wrong with us, but it seems to stumble when we ask what we are doing when things go right. I felt called to assert that we are not here just to “get better” from the viewpoint of recovering from trauma, abuse or neglect, but that we are endowed with a siren call to “get better” evolutionarily. In other words, we can see our imperfect childhoods as not so much a time of neurotic and damaging influences, but simply as an older, more primitive life strategy that we now feel impelled to improve on.

Healing may be too narrow a focus, too small a view for us to generate lasting happiness. We could say that it's a necessary but insufficient instrument to take the measure of human affairs. True happiness may lie in knowing how to consciously evolve, and I suspect that the delivery system, the subversive element in conscious evolution lies in the unexpected and unpretentious nature of play.

Tonight, I want to talk about play and conscious evolution.

Evolution is classically defined as the slow process of species change as a result of changes in the environment that exert pressure on a population of organisms. This pressure causes some individuals to survive and others not, depending on how well they “fit” into the new environment. This classic view of evolution rests on the implicit idea that we only change as a result of pressure - that evolution is a reactive force - it doesn't fix what isn't broken. I think we can all relate to and appreciate this - who would want to relearn how to brush their teeth every night? Habits and stability can be crucial. It's nice having a body that will essentially be the same when we wake up each morning.

As a psychotherapist, I've seen this mechanism in my office for over 20 years - many clients come in to therapy because their environment pushes them in - their breakups and troubles are shoving them into changing old ill-fitting life strategies.

But this pressure idea never seemed sufficient to completely explain why people change. People also came in wanting to simply be happier, to experience more pleasure. It began to occur to me that we can change in the wake of pleasurable experiences as well. We move and grow towards what feels good as well as trying to get away from what feels bad. Recent research bears this out - people who have love and fun in their lives tend to live longer and happier than folks who live alone or work too much. To allow change to occur via this force of pleasure can be a great leap forward for many of us - the idea that we can trust ourselves to go towards what we love, and to let love and other positive feelings change us can be a huge breakthrough in our lives.

Happiness may be elusive for some people not because they are wounded, but because they don't understand how to reach forward, explore the unknown, work with creative impulses, have fun with themselves and others, enjoy the flow of events, have simple pleasures, and locate their passion to be creative.

As a species, we have experimented with happiness as arising from having lots of material resources, of happiness located in the heart of a great romance, happiness dwelling in deep spiritual commitment, and certainly a great deal of happiness and fulfillment can be found in each. Perhaps underneath all of these lies a common denominator, and we can go to it directly - in the act of play. Play provides the warp & weft of how we can explore this arena - it is our navigational instrument.

This idea of pleasure and happiness is where we first see what I call ordinary play entering the scene - we play because it feels good, and for no other reason. Letting more play into our lives seems to help us rehearse a pleasure-laden method of change. We may not need the school of hard knocks to teach us things - we may be able to enroll in playschool and learn just as much, with much less wear and tear on the system.

The poet Mary Oliver expressed it well in her poem Wild Geese -

Ordinary play permeates our lives, adding color and vibrancy to what would otherwise be a shades-of-gray existence. Try to imagine what our world would be like if ordinary play was never allowed to occur - there would be no spontaneous or frivolous movement, no goofy faces, no amusement parks, no teasing, no humor, no games, no art, no jokes, no tricks, no laughing, no wild speculations, no day dreaming, no playgrounds, no puzzles, no theaters, no pretending, no costumes, no toys of any kind - could you live in this world? Do you think any child would make it into adulthood in this world? Do you think any adult would want to go on living? Ordinary play may be akin to such human needs as the need for love, attention, and belonging, and in that sense could be as necessary as they are ordinary.

This idle activity we call play could be a common denominator in learning, creativity, intelligence, physical and psychological health, spiritual development, and happiness. Quite a pay off for just messing around! It suggests that rather than being a peripheral pleasure, ordinary play can form the matrix of a happy life.

However, changing as a result of pleasure is still a reactive mechanism, albiet a more pleasant one. And its reactiveness may create a downside as well - it may encourage a shallow participation with life - one of flitting from pleasure to pleasure, and not facing challenging realities. I began to look for evidence of another type of change, one that didn't even require pleasure as an inducement and reinforcement.

This next realm seems to be best articulated by spiritual traditions, and has to do with awakeness, conscious intent, conscious movement. In this system we don't even need the reinforcement of pleasure, of that surge of endorphins our bodies bring. We find fulfillment in simply being attentive, awake, alive, and we find these states through what I call conscious movement. On a nuts and bolts level, conscious movement involves being attentive to the flow of motion in our bodies, in our emotions, and in our minds. We learn to pay more attention to this experience of flow than we do to the content of the thoughts, sensations, and emotions that float by. We simply play in the moment to moment flow of movement. This can be a challenging process, because it flummoxes all our fixed notions of who we think we are. Conscious movement's closest relatives reside in the spiritual traditions, especially those that value meditative or contemplative practices.

Spiritual traditions may miss the mark with conscious movement in two ways, however - they may emphasize the need for an external being or teacher who knows the way, and who knows, there may be one, or many. But this work is done in the true house of the lord, our bodies. The other mark-missing derives from our species-long love affair with our minds, and our assuming that it's through our minds that we will achieve an awakened state. It's my belief that an awakened state more centrally involves movement, all kinds of conscious, intentional movement.

Evidence for this third type of conscious change can show up when we notice our tendency to want to “get out ahead” of things, to change proactively rather than reactively. Changing proactively implies that it would be done consciously, in anticipation. It also means that we can exert positive influences on our environment, rather than simply waiting for it to do something that we then react to. It also means that we change in the face of not knowing what will come, similar to any explorer who has sailed off into the unknown. Sounds pretty exciting, and pretty scary.

Because of the influence of working and teaching at Naropa, I was naturally exposed to this third form of change - the power of consciousness, of high quality attention, to alter us in very fundamental ways. The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh put it like this: Conscious attention is like sunlight and water to a plant - what ever we pay attention to will grow. Could it be possible that we could actually become gardeners - cultivating and being more at choice about what grows within us? Can we truly choose to be happy by consciously watering the seeds of it in our own hearts?

What are the primary processes we need to develop in order to advance our evolution from its traditonal Darwinian reactive roots to a newer more proactive process of conscious intent? When we garden our interior landscape with conscious intent, what good foods grow?

With these questions in mind, lets look at this food metaphor , and talk about soul food, mind food and body food. The pioneers of modern western psychotherapy advocated a vital kind of cognitive processing I call self reflection. Why is self reflection so important? Why does living a revealed and examined life carry such value for us? If we look at self reflection in a cultural context, we see that it crafts a check and balance system to the power and influence exerted by social institutions. An individual who can know him or herself, who can locate and support a sense of personal worth and identity, can stand up for themselves in the face of social control. In a family system, self examination can help to deconstruct dehumanizing childrearing practices, and promote bonds built on care and respect rather than coercion and repression. But purely in an individual context, I would like to propose that self reflection provides us with what I call mind food .

As we look at what constitutes mind food, lets begin by paying attention to its handmaidens, the brain and nervous system.Our nervous systems are designed to operate within a stream of constant informational input. This input comes from sense receptors for taste, touch, smell, sight, hearing, balance & tone embedded throughout the tissues in our bodies. Mind food begins in the body. Our sense receptors are like periscopes, peeking out from the surface of our bodies, sentinels alerting us to the comings and goings of the external world. They also peer inward, plunging into the dark recesses of our bodies, attentive to our inner pulsing, rumbling, and metabolizing.

Because of this set up, our attention naturally oscillates, pointing itself alternately outside, then inside in a wavelike manner, each wave bathing us in the basic nutrient of information. It is from these physiological surges that we construct a sense of individual identity.

If we deprive ourselves of this constant flow of data from the senses, a curious sequence begins. Sensory deprivation studies have shown that for the first few minutes to hours of no sight, no sound, no smell, no feel, no touch, we tend to experience a quality of profound quiet, which can be quite ineffable, expansive and relaxing. This state may parallel what can be achieved in meditation. If we keep this up, however, in the next hours our nervous system begins to starve, as if for lack of food. Just like our bodies cannot be deprived of food for very long, so our minds cannot long tolerate a deprivation of information. If not enough information is forthcoming, the nervous system copes by literally making some up, borrowing from memory centers, emotional centers, and sensory processing centers to cover the deficit. In short, we hallucinate.

Sensory deprivation subjects have reported all kinds of fanciful and frightening thoughts, feelings, sights and sensations that feel quite real, and that pull us out of touch and out of synch with ourselves and our world. In a sense we could say that the nervous system taps into our unconscious, looking under any rock it can to find bits of stored data to feed our hungry neurons. These studies have shown that without sufficient input, our nervous systems starve and sicken in ways that are typically associated with mental illness.

We have a constant and profound need to know. If information is being kept from us, or if we are keeping information from ourselves or others, we get sick and crazy. We source our safety and health by being 100% committed to self reflection and the abundant flow of information. This is the essence of mind food. We would sicken and die without it, and in the presence of it, we flourish and prosper. Traditional psychotherapy, when looked at from this perspective, was designed to help us reestablish this flow of data, this ability to feed ourselves and others the rich nutrient of information. In a self reflective life, we take responsibility for being information receivers and senders - food producers, if you will. Ordinary play can also be extremely useful in this regard, because when we engage in it we learn to perceive the external world in a more penetrating manner, a manner that cannot help but foster our information gathering.

Play also accesses information from the world around us and from the unconscious. Without this access to unconscious material, we wouldn't be able to do some of the essential features of play - such as imagining, fantasizing, and pretending. Playing from our unconscious quite naturally develops our abilities to turn inside for our internal mind food.

Let's extend this metaphor a bit further, and talk about body food . We all obviously know about eating actual food; we know that we need air, vitamins and minerals, and water, or none of us would be sitting here. But what other food does the body need? Studies at orphanages have shown that without physical touch, infants and children sicken and often die. From infants to old people, regular touch from others assists in illness recovery, promotes new growth, facilitates social bonding, and seems to help prevent depression and chronic illness. It seems that we can live without our sight or our hearing, because we compensate with other senses, but we cannot live without the sense of touch. Touch imbeds itself in most forms of play, from the almost universal rough and tumble play we see in most mammalian young, to social dance forms, and many games and sports.

Studies have also shown that when we are prevented from physically moving, effects much like the sensory deprivation experiments result. Subjects first tend to calm and relax, similar to the effect of putting on a straight jacket. Reports of a sense of relief and equanimity are common. But after a few hours, panic and sensory distortions begin to set in, as well as harmful physiological changes. Soon after, the experiments must be stopped, before the study transforms into a type of torture.

Movement is the modus operandi of the universe, life dancing with itself. Our bodies whirl and spin in space, and all bodies in space, celestial or earthbound, pulse, rotate and spiral. Be it the beating of a heart, the squeeze of lung muscles, or the sizzle of electrochemistry across a neural net, life is determined by movement. And movement defines and delivers health. When our thoughts move, and are not fixed, we are said to be mentally healthy. When our emotions move through us, and neither get stopped from coming nor stopped from going, we are said to be healthy. Again, we also see movement as an essential feature of most play, from sand boxes to stadiums, from dance floors to basketball courts. Play moves us, and we would not move well without it.

Touch, along with other sensations, and movement, a type of expressiveness or action, are vital and necessary body foods. They parallel the way we are wired up - a nervous system of sensory nerves and organs that provide and process information, and a system of muscles that create actions in response to our inner state. Here is our primary oscillation, our moment to moment flow that we call being alive. Sensation in, movement out. Sensation in, movement out. This is what we call body food, the rich nutrient of feeling and action that, when withheld, causes us to sicken and often die. Doris Lessing said it poetically: “All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh.”

Play, by its very nature, is body nourishing. It takes us through visual, kinesthetic, and auditory experiences that literally move us into a more perfect union with ourselves. It is my firm belief that healing and growth is never complete without play, and that these simple pleasures, attentively fostered through play, are the basis of our learning about conscious evolution.

So lets now turn our attention to soul food - and here I want to talk about how ordinary play can become extraordinary through conscious movement. Where does the metaphor go here? Historically, the soul has resided within the exclusive domain of religion. In recent years, we have come to understand this entity more broadly and inclusively, and speak of soul in spiritual terms. Some psychologists have even ventured into this area. Abraham Maslow, at the end of his life, spoke of the human need for self actualization and transcendence. Both transpersonal and Buddhist psychology are premised on the notion that we sicken and warp ourselves if we don't connect to a larger, more inclusive consciousness.

I would like to propose here that the basic ingredient of soul food is even more inclusive than spirituality - it is playing in conscious movement. The whole huge field of psychotherapy will breathe a lot easier if we just get behind the idea that we all need three square meals a day of conscious playfulness. Nothing less than this will do. If we don't lead a playful life, we wither and something inside us dies, as surely as a lack of physical food will kill us. As we well know, we do ourselves a grave injustice to relegate play and its handmaiden, creativity, just to artists. Nothing could be more elitist and totalitarian, more toxic, than to feed only some of our population, while starving others whom we deem less worthy. From the construction worker who spontaneously plays with the rhythm of her hammer on a wall, to Einstein, who was willing to throw out the existing laws of physics and construct a more relative universe, we are all deeply and inherently creative.

The soul is a unifying field, and play may be the substance within it. Creativity builds a bridge between the mind, the body, the heart, and the encompassing soul. And the bridge is built of play. Carl Jung once said: “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”

It's by looking at our play instinct that we can recover our creativity, and understand how to let it inform our lives. After all, children don't wake up and say “I think I'll do something creative right now”, they simply have a deep urge to play. Play comes in two basic forms - it tends to either randomize our experience, or to organize it. Examples of play that organizes us are games with rules, and sports that require skill acquisition. Play that randomizes can be fantasy, koans, and spontaneous goofiness. When we play in a randomizing way, we learn to let go, to relish our curiosity, to break down old systems. When we play in an organized way, we learn technique, and we understand the value of effort.

These two systems of play actually mirror the two requirements of creative process - hard work, followed by playful experimentation. In science, folk wisdom states that new discoveries are an accident meeting a prepared mind. Remarking on this, Louis Pasteur put it well when he said: “Did you ever observe to whom the accidents happen? Chance favors only the prepared mind.” The more we recover and develop our play instinct, the easier it is to lead a creative life. Through adult play, we can find out if our creative instincts lead us towards telling jokes, painting in water color, doing scientific experiments, playing chess, taking a hip hop class, or fooling around with that old guitar in the back of the closet.

Why is all this so important? What is it about creativity that we can't live without? Let's back up a moment, and look at what traditional psychotherapy does. In a standard therapy session, we take that hour and focus on ourselves intently - however that is done, this kind of looking inward is the central support structure of therapy, and is, as I said before, an important countermeasure to the effects of toxic or controlling environments. But what do we do with the down sides of this process of self examination? How do we counteract a tendency to slip into paralyzing self consciousness, isolating self centeredness, and addictive self indulgence? For this is the criticism of therapy that we need to take a good look at. Self examination, when overly emphasized, breeds blame, an unwillingness to take responsibility, narcissistic disregard for others, and a tendency to use the victim position to get what we want. It looks like a form of overeating to me.

It is time we own up to the fact that straight therapy is only half the answer. The other half is leading a consciously playful life. Therapy is an important act of self remembering. Play is an equally potent act of self forgetting. A creative experience diminishes our sense of self importance, for we are insignificant in comparison to the immensity of life that it exposes. In the midst of playing, we are no longer at the center of everything, for infinity has no center. Aaron Copeland expressed this when he commented : “Inspiration may be a form of super consciousness, or perhaps subconsciousness - I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self consciousness.” And isn't it interesting that his word, inspiration, shares the same root as the word breath, and the same origins as the word spirituality.

Beginning with Copernicus, who knocked us out of the center of the solar system, to Darwin, who knocked us off the top of the evolutionary ladder, creative scientists have been decentralizing humans in a way that accelerates our growth and self knowledge. This humbling sense of our place in the scheme of things has been an important counteraction to dogmatic thinking and the abuse of power.

It is not that we are diminished in creativity, but that we are held in a vastly greater context. In this place, we can know ourselves not so much as a human being but as an interbeing, one who exists inter-relatedly with all that is. This is the other face of healing, the quiet twin of our self actualization. By sensing ourselves as larger than our current self concept, we can grow towards even more expanded states.

And we have barely begun to tap the power of ordinary play. When we give ourselves over to it, we also inadvertently rehearse problem solving skills, learn to tolerate changing and unpredictable environments, and feel fascinated by the mysteries of life. There is so much more out there than being well adjusted! In conjunction with self reflection, play gestates and births a fully realized human interbeing.

Extraordinary play can be our soul food because it parallels the way we are wired - it recapitulates our sensation and movement loop. In this type of play we learn new and novel ways of paying attention. We sharpen and challenge our senses, and to turn the lights on things that have been living in the dark. And this play always moves us - we can't escape the yahoos, the deep wails, and the jumping fits it engenders.

In the alternation of self reflection and self forgetting, we master what I call self sourcing. What this engenders is our empowerment, our ability not so much to be at the center of everything, but to be at the source of everything. It is through this sense of sourcing that our lives take on a strong purpose, a consistent productivity, and a lasting sense of peace.

These primal alternations - that of becoming more random, oscillating with becoming more organized, and that of alternating self remembering with self forgetting - have some parallels in our bodies that I'd like to speak a little bit about, because it is paying conscious attention to body alternations that fosters conscious evolution.

All movement exists on a continuum from highly patterned to impulsive. ........

Impulse movement classically tends to be thought of as of no particular use - it's seen as recreational. And of course play is, by its' nature, recreational. It re-creates. This points to the need that we all have to engage in non-productive activities. When we recreate, we disengage from the momentum of our working lives, and this discreation of work allows us to re-create the primal nourishment that occurs when we give our energies free rein. We reaffirm our creative natures by resting away from pattern for a time and opening up to impulse.

Our contemporary culture has trouble with this concept. The idea that we need to do things that are not immediately useful or productive is usually equated with laziness or sloth. And in turn, in many sub cultures, recreation has increasingly been associated with drugs (we call them recreational drugs), passive entertainment, and mindless consumption. Impulse then perverts into oblivious actions (we often chide ourselves for being impulsive, which we equate with mindless disregard). This perversion of impulse may be the origin of addictions and much of the violent behavior in our a society.

Not understanding the true nature of work and play begets both rigid fundamentalist ethics and wasteful indulgence. Rigid work ethics are very expensive to all human systems, as evidenced by the cancerous proliferation of stress related disorders in our society. Mindless indulgence also has tremendous social costs, as evidenced by the billions of dollars we spend treating addictions and their social fall out. Both are phenomena of control. When we enter the system of control, our two choices are to be in control or to be out of control. We equate 'in control' with work, productivity, and pattern, and we equate 'out of control' with impulsiveness, with being juvenile (ie playing all the time and not doing anything useful), and with being a productive drain on society. In the system of control, which distorts both work and play, we suppress the natural nourishment that pattern and impulse provide.

By engaging in the extraordinary play of conscious movement, we can remember what it is like to be out of the system of control and into an experience of creative process, of the natural oscillation of pattern and impulse, of creation and discreation. We can renourish ourselves and our world in a primal manner. We can welcome endings, because they presage beginnings. We can ride the energies that move our bodies, and boldly go where we have not been before, into the creative center of life. From here, we locate the ability to consciously evolve, to transform ourselves into the life forms that we envision, to change ourselves proactively into the species we have chosen.

Thank you for inviting me.

I am a clinical psychologist, specializing in how mental and emotional states manifest in physical symptoms. I work using the body's natural resources as a way to promote emotional and mental health. I'd like to talk with you tonight about one of our strongest resources for healing on any levels, and that is play.

Both Psychology and Medicine seem to be able to describe in exquisite detail what can and does go wrong with us, filling volumes of books with exquisite detail on how we get sick and what to do about it. But both these disciplines seem to stumble a bit when we ask ourselves what we're doing when things go right.

What if we are not here on this earth just to avoid illness, or to “get better”, but we are all endowed with a siren call to be joyful. What if our childhoods and our genetic makeups are not something we have to recover from, but simply improve on?

Healing, which implies recovering from illness, may be too narrow a focus for those of us working in this field. It may be too small a view for us to generate lasting happiness in ourselves and in the people we care for. True happiness may lie in knowing how to consciously develop our capacity for simple and natural pleasures, how to court and cultivate them. And I suspect that our best means of doing this lies in the unexpected and unpretentious nature of play.

Tonight, I want to talk about play and health, and I want to see if we can engage in some playfulness ourselves as a way to find a lighthearted and creative beginning to this conference.

The first issue I'd like to talk about is change, therapeutic change. In other words, how and why and what do we change so that things get better for us? It may be that we change our minds, it may be we change the way we feel, or it may be that we change a physical habit, but in the end when we change we do something differently and we hope that the difference improves our lives.

I'd like to assert that there are 3 ways we can change. The first is through pressure. This is the school-of-hard-knocks method of change, and we've all been there and done that. Most of the time, when a patient comes to see me in my private practice, it's because they are getting some negative result in their lives. Their wife may be leaving them because the relationship feels loveless. They may be getting constant migraines, or they may have had their first coronary. One way to look at this is that life snuck up behind them and whacked them in the head with a two by four to get their attention, and to FORCE them to change, to stop eating so much fat, to stop working so much, to stop repressing their feelings. Most of us, at some time or another, have been dragged kicking and screaming into making lifestyle changes. We could also call this the "Don't fix anything until it breaks" school of change, and it can get pretty expensive to health care systems.

But this pressure idea never seemed sufficient to me in completely explaining why people change. People also come into my office simply wanting to be happier, to experience more pleasure. They want to get more out of life. It began to occur to me that we can also change in the wake of pleasurable experiences as well. We move and grow towards what feels good as well as trying to get away from what feels bad. Recent research bears this out - people who have love and fun in their lives tend to live longer and be happier than folks who live alone or work too much. To allow change to occur through this force of pleasure can be a great leap forward for many of us - the idea that we can trust ourselves to go towards what we love, and to allow love and other positive feelings to change us can be a huge breakthrough in our lives. I call this the "Do what feels good" school of change.

Happiness may be elusive for some people not because they are wounded or ill, but because they don't understand how to reach forward, how to explore the unknown, how to work with creative impulses, have fun with themselves and others, enjoy the flow of events, engage in simple pleasures, and locate their passion to be creative.

As a species, we have experimented with happiness as arising from having lots of material resources, of happiness located in the heat of a great romance, or happiness dwelling in a deep spiritual commitment, and certainly a great deal of happiness and fulfillment can be found in each. Perhaps underneath all of these lies a common denominator, and we can go to it directly - in the act of play. Play provides the warp & weft of how we can explore this arena - it is our navigational instrument for finding what feels good.

This idea of pleasure and happiness is where we first see what I call ordinary play entering the scene - we play because it feels good, and for no other reason. Letting more play into our lives seems to help us rehearse a pleasure-laden method of change. We may not need the school of hard knocks to teach us everything - we may be able to enroll in playschool and learn just as much, with much less wear and tear on the system.

The poet Mary Oliver expressed it well in her poem Wild Geese -

Ordinary play needs to permeate our lives, adding color and vibrancy to what would otherwise be a shades-of-gray existence. Try to imagine what our world would be like if ordinary play was never allowed to occur - there would be no spontaneous or frivolous movement, no goofy faces, no amusement parks, no teasing, no humor, no games, no art, no jokes, no tricks, no laughing, no wild speculations, no day dreaming, no playgrounds, no puzzles, no theaters, no pretending, no costumes, no toys of any kind - could you live in this world? Do you think any child would make it into adulthood in this world? Do you think any adult would want to go on living? Ordinary play may be akin to such human needs as the need for love, attention, and belonging, and in that sense could be as necessary as it is ordinary. And I'd like to suggest that most of us here are overworked and underplayed.

This idle activity we call play could be a common denominator in learning, creativity, intelligence, physical and psychological health, spiritual development, and happiness. Quite a pay off for just messing around! It suggests that rather than being a peripheral pleasure, ordinary play can form the building blocks of a happy life.

•  Let's take a pause right now, and do a bit of ordinary playing *

Groups of four - one sentence story

3 person hand slap

All my relations

I'd like to make a case for ordinary play in our lives. Play makes us happy, it enhances our adaptability and problem solving skills, it keeps couples & families together (U of Denver study of 2000+ couples - amount of fun they had was greatest predictor of marital happiness), it tones the body, helps it heal (as we know from Norman Cousins and other physicians), & prevents disease. Dr William Fry at Stanford noted that laughter can boost cardiovascular fitness by lowering blood pressure and heart rate. It also reduces pain perception, stimulates blood flow, strengthens the immune system, and reduces levels of hormones that create stress. The rules we learn & follow while playing games teach us boundaries and personal integrity. Play also enhances our creativity. It increases communication skills, and it encourages active engagement in life rather than passive entertainment. There is so much more out there for us than just being well adjusted! If you take nothing else away from this talk, take this: GO HOME AND PLAY!

But let's get back to this change idea. I have to admit, changing as a result of pleasure can be a tricky thing, albiet a more pleasant and probably less expensive one. It may have a downside as well - it may encourage a shallow participation with life - one of flitting from pleasure to pleasure, and not facing challenging realities. If overused it may even promote an addictive character strategy. If we view everything through the lens of "If it feels good, do it," it may be hard for us to manage frustration, deal with pain, or tolerate conflict and work to resolve it.

I think there is a 3 rd type of change, one that doesn't even require pleasure as an inducement and reinforcement.

This next type of change seems to be best articulated by spiritual traditions, and has to do with awakeness, conscious intent, and conscious action. In this system we don't even need the reinforcement of pleasure, of that surge of endorphins our bodies so love. In this method of change we find fulfillment in simply being attentive, awake, and alive, and I believe we find these states through what I call conscious action. On a nuts and bolts level, conscious action involves being attentive to the flow of movement in our bodies, in our emotions, and in our minds. We learn to pay more attention to this experience of flow than we do to the content of our thoughts, sensations, and emotions that float by. We simply play in the moment to moment flow of life. This can be a challenging process, because it flummoxes all our fixed notions of who we think we are. Conscious action's closest relatives reside in the spiritual traditions, especially those that value meditative or contemplative practices, and I call it the "Boldly going where no-one has gone before" school of change.

Evidence for this third type of conscious change can show up when we notice our tendency to want to “get out ahead” of things, to change proactively rather than reactively. Changing proactively implies that it would be done consciously, in anticipation, or even for no reason at all. We climb the mountain because it is there, not because it would feel good or make us look good. We have a human need to extend ourselves, to take on challenges, and to step into the unknown.

It also means that we can exert positive influences on our environment, rather than simply waiting for it to do something that we then react to. It also means that we change in the face of not knowing what will come, similar to any explorer who has sailed off into the unknown. Sounds pretty exciting, and pretty scary. And I believe we can also achieve this state through play - through what I can extraordinary play.

Extrtaordinary play follows the flow concept I mentioned earlier. The idea is that we participate with, and cooperate with whatever live brings us, even if it is death and loss, even if there is suffering. Extraordinary play functions like sunlight and water do for a plant - it grows us. What we pay attention to will grow.

Perhaps it's possible for us all to become gardeners - cultivating and being more at choice about what grows within us Can we truly choose to be happy by consciously watering the seeds of it in our own hearts? I sincerely hope so.

The whole huge fields of psychotherapy and medicine will breathe a lot easier if we just get behind the idea that we all need daily servings of conscious playfulness. Nothing less than this will do. If we don't lead a playful life, we wither and something inside us dies, as surely as a lack of physical food will kill us. I'd like to propose an RDA minimum of play, found on the backs of toy boxes and theatre tickets. We should all follow this guideline.

Psychotherapy and medicine were never meant to do it all. Spirituality doesn't even cover all the bases. Work is not all that we live for. What else is there that makes up the whole and happy human? People who play throughout their lives report the most sense of personal meaning, depth, and contentment. Having fun and exploring new frontiers can be the missing ingredient in many of our lives.

In childhood, play is a basic need, helping us develop sophisticated body skills, emotional intelligence, and to learn complex social signals that help keep us clear and safe in relationships. Childhood play accelerates our intelligence, raises our capacity for relational intimacy, and rehearses problem-solving abilities. As adults, we have a continuing need to play, though plays' purpose changes - it now functions as stress relief, grounding and centering, sexual signaling, creativity enhancement, and as a spiritual path.

As adults, we engage in what I call the WORK/REST/PLAY Triangle. Our ability to alternate between meaningful work, relaxing rest, and creative, playful pursuits seems to balance us, heal us, and encourage us to keep growing. If we take out any one of these elements we tend to get sick, and to feel dissatisfied with ourselves and with life in general.

As this week unfolds and this conference proceeds, I encourage you to play hard, as play is often sacrificed at the altar of expediency. Remember that play takes many forms, from a goofy face with a co-worker, to email jokes, to baseball games, to museum trips, to square dancing, to sex, to day dreaming, to a crossword puzzle. The great thing about play is that here are no rules other than to keep it safe and to have fun. Particularly when you begin to deal with difficult health issues, your need for play increases. Remember to take time to play. And remember, play for your life. Nothing less will do.