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Theme of the month

Theme of the Month: Play

By: Nathalie Ho-Kang-You

At the end of 2021, we asked our students to share their intentions, questions, and needs for the upcoming year with us. Out of these intentions, we shaped 12 themes to guide our community throughout 2022. Each month, a member of the Delight community will share their thoughts on this theme from the heart. We invite you to join our online Monthly Satsang and online Ayurveda Sangha for more inspiration, connection, and spiritual direction.

Please enjoy this month's theme, 'Play', written by Nathalie Ho-Kang-You.

Playfulness with the love for creation

Playfulness comes into action when we seek room for liberation. The architecture of the conditioned mind is like a sandcastle, yet we identify ourselves with it.

When we suffer from being burned out isn’t it that we might have forgotten how to liberate ourselves from who we think we are and who we truly are?

We lose our sense of authenticity when we identify ourselves with the materialistic ideal society holds within our capitalist system. We become addicted to wealth, recognition, social media, and perfect appearances. We lose our sense of safety (re-) experiencing fear, trauma, guilt, shame, and unworthiness.

With the given wisdom of self-realization, we learn to define the objectified mental structures, reframing the way we think and untangling fictitious beliefs. It takes a huge amount of courage, discipline, and self-knowledge to confront the perception of ‘I-am-ness’ and the sense of ‘I’ in its dualistic form. Within this exploration, we can remind ourselves to integrate playfulness with the love for creation, discovering the undiscovered.

When we are born our brain is too small with few instincts on how to move the body. It is through the movements of the caregiver that the infant learns to stand, walk and talk. Our voluntary acts are thus due to neural connections which support our sensory, motor, and cognitive skills, and regulate all of our behaviours. It takes the infant an enormous amount of imitation, experimentation, and repetition in learning how to move. This makes movement highly adaptable within us humans.

So if we can make changes within our cognitive behaviours through movement, why not give more importance to exploring, reinventing new ways of walking, new ways of moving your muscles, new ways of breathing, new ways of repetitive habits, making them playful and joyous. Leave room for your imagination to spark the intelligence of not knowing.

We can unlearn thinking beliefs that are harmful to our well-being.

It’s like we are our own seed for the tree we want to become and every day we water the seed while discovering new roots, new leaves, new branches, and new connections which allow the wonder of our nature to grow in its full capacity. And then we realize that in every human being lays an eternal seed that is always growing whether they are aware of it or not. We then stop pretending we are any better, yet we do understand that we have to take care of our own seed in order for it to blossom.

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