Making Playtime

Making Playtime

How do you play? What entertains you? What engages your attention?

Being active is one of the fun things about being a grownup. Now, that doesn’t mean entering kick-boxing tournaments, although thats good for some people, it means finding things to do in the world that you love doing.

This is one of those things for me, writing to you every day. I also love to create things. I’m knitting socks right now. Sometimes it’s art, sometimes it’s soup. Sometimes, it’s hours of conversation with a brilliant friend. Lately, I’ve also been on a jigsaw puzzle kick.

I like to do stuff.

Didn’t always be that way. There was a time in my life, a dark time, when what I did was hate, get high, sleep a lot. Stopped crafting, stopped cooking, stopped moving my body, stopped reading. If you know me, you know that last one was a major alarm bell. It’s the one that finally got my attention.

Being engaged with the joys life offers us is one of the ways we feel alive, lively, and happy. Finding big things, and small things, to take joy in, helps us savor our existence, and feel connected with our world.

Why do I have fun? How do I play? What makes me adventurous?

At the very least, we have imagination. Now, I’ve known a bunch of people who claim to have no imagination. These claims were false. They just needed to redefine what imagination means.

If you can worry, you have imagination, you are just aren’t using your powers for good. If you are jealous, or have envy, you have imagination. If you can plan a day, you have imagination.

Now, take that awesome superpower and turn it to good use, coming up with fun stuff that lightens your heart. Maybe you like to play games, cards, or arcade games. Maybe you like tromping around in the woods. Maybe you like to mess with clay, or paints, or chalk. Maybe you like to take classes, or try new restaurants, or watch old movies. The point is less about what you are doing and more about engaging.

When we actively and positively engage with our world, we keep things loose and light. When we actively have fun, we stay cheerier, and are spreading joy.

What makes me connect? Why do I enjoy myself? How am I entertained?

When I was learning how to have fun, I discovered that a lot of how I entertained myself made me feel awful. I was a news junkie, for one things, I watched depressing movies, I hung out in dark bars on sunny days. As I chose to lighted up my life, I started unchoosing things like that, things that made me blue, or feel grim, or hate people. These things do not move me forward. When I have feelings about slavery or animal abuse, I address them, do what I can in the moment, and go back to the light. I do no one any good by wallowing in that kind of entertainment, and I do damage to my self.

How have I changed from hanging back to engaging with my world?

(c) Pam Guthrie all rights reserved 03042014

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Dumping the Zings

Dumping the Zings

So part of this “Why am I happy” campaign of mine includes finding better ways of dealing with stress than a fifth of bad scotch before bed.

One really great way I’ve found is to avoid it. Yeah, it’s kind of obvious, but just bear with me.

Think about your morning time. Do you love it? Is it time for you? Are you spending some of that morning time on something that really matters to you personally?

When we start our day in chaos, we set ourselves up for the rest of the day. By noticing where we get rushed or stress, and changing that, we can start our day with our peace on.

I raced around in the morning trying to find the stuff I needed to take with me, trying to figure out what I was going to wear, and the other sock. And suddenly, there wasn’t enough time to dry my hair, and I couldn’t find my bus card or my keys. And now I am going to be late. Again. ARRRGGGGG!!!

Now, ten minutes in the evening and I’ve laid my clothes out, with socks, packed my bag, and keys and bus card are where they are supposed to be. And if I wash my hair tonight, my morning is peaceful.

When we take a step back and see where we create our own stresses, we can start finding resolutions for those stressors.

Why am I so creative? How do I see solutions? Why do resolutions come easily to me?

I stop stressing over traffic when I think of it as an opportunity to be alert and patient at the same time, like a weird video game.

Knowing where I am on that scale of one to ten with one being relaxed and ten being stressed can be useful. The more I let myself go to stressed the more yelly and sweary I get. Now, I think being yelly can be really fun, and I love Halloween as my personal Holiday of Screams. Screaming is also mega fun, and I will, from time to time, scream into pillows so’s not to scare the neighbors. But I digress.

Yelly isn’t fun when I’m mad. And I get to mad faster when I’m feeling stressed.

So what else can I do to ease my stress? I’ve learned to handle tasks that will only take a couple minutes as they come up. Did you know that it takes nine seconds to change a roll of toilet paper? Two minutes to clean the cat box. Two minutes to take out the trash and recycling. Thirty seconds to wash my cup, and that includes waiting for the water to get hot.

Little things don’t build up into overwhelming things. I like that.

I also look for pockets of time where I can stop for a few minutes in the middle of things. It’s like a quicky body-scan meditation. I notice my feet, become aware of my toes, notice up my legs, notice my breath. Sometimes, I will take a few moments, cover my eyes, and block my ears and just listen to my insides. It reminds me that I am not my stress. I am a being with resources.

How have I changed from feeling tight as a violin string ready to snap to feeling relaxed, peaceful, and centered?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 11202013

Rewards, Glory, and Honor

Rewards, Glory, and Honor

I love to have adventures. I put the responsibility squarely on my dear dad who read me adventure stories for years before I went to sleep, Jules Verne, H. Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe.

Adventure! The lure of discovery! The discovery of hidden treasure! Clues! Surprises! Excitement! Rewards! Glory! Honor!

So how did a girl with a love of adventure, but with a tendency to depression and anxiety satisfy that urge for adventure?

By going inside.

Indiana Jones ain’t got nuthin’ on me.

Inside, into the labyrinth of our minds. Infinite possibilities for exploration, the discovery of who we are deep inside, the recovery of treasured memories buried under incomplete junk experiences, the completion, and therefore elimination, of traumatic experiences. The clearing out of subconscious material can that make living easily and well so challenging. Coming to understand just how deep and complex and amazing we are. Learning to value our own selves, to feel self-respect for what we’ve come through. Oh, yeah, that’s my kind of adventure!

One of the marvelous things about going inside is that, on some level, I know I have already survived everything in there. Unlike Allan Quatermain, or the Jules Verne characters, I’m not facing unknown monsters. I may have forgotten, but never completely.

And, while I am the only one who can dive into the depths of my mind, I can always have a person whom I respect and trust topside,  on the surface, holding a safety line for me.

Sometimes, when I go inside, I discover an incomplete traumatic experience that involves someone else. In the outside world, that person has moved on, changed in ways I may know nothing about, but inside, they are frozen in time. And I am often stuck there with them, locked into that moment in our relationship, replaying the experience again and again, retraumatizing myself again and again when the memory, often out of my awareness, gets triggered by a smell, or a random thought, a snip of a song, or something else.

Definitely Jules Verne territory, so very SciFi.

As the intrepid explorer, I grasp that slippery thought, and follow it in, safety line clipped to my utility belt. I observe the thought, I have emotions and feelings about the thought, and now, because I am living in the present, I can feel all the way to the end of the experience and let it go, sweeping the ashes into the dustbin of oblivion. Ahh.

Now, when the trigger fires, the memory may flare for a bit, but the punch is gone, and it’s just story. I have reclaimed part of my soul. I am freer than I was, and I have more room for joy. Talk about rewards. Talk about glory. Talk about honor.

And I have changed my attachment to that person, clean it up, released resentment or fear or anger, and made room for more clean love. Talk about rewards. Talk about glory. Talk about honor.

How have I changed from ignoring my past to recognizing it as the key to my best life?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 10172013