Did play turn my hair white?

On choice, freedom, and hard journeys

Welcome if you are new to The Dancing Center, especially Kelsey Blackwell’s followers over at the Drinking Ghourd! And, thanks to all of you for your curiosity and readership. It means a lot to me to play in this way. Bowing!

Some hard journeys are chosen for us.
Some we choose.
Some we have to learn to choose.

My hair went white at 35. Did life do it, or did I fry my own hair roots by dancing with fire, playing, studying, and learning to improvise with body and soul IN PUBLIC?

All I know is this.

To Choose Life, Choose Play. It changes everything because that’s its biological imperative. Dr. Fred Stuart says so.

I got to thinking about my hardest journeys and play when I was recently interviewed by Aiswarya, host of Finally Feel Free’s 25-Day Virtual Retreat that starts May 25th. I shared my crazy expertise on How to Love Your Body, Free Your Soul, and Unlock the Power of Your Inner Playground. If you are an empath, sensitive, change-maker, activist, or pioneer looking for support around purpose, health, money, and service, do register for this premium experience, offered absolutely free. My interview airs June 16th.

The kind of play I research is a lot more than those haha and he-he moments. It’s evolutionary and transformative.

I’ve found that one of the crucial components of play is exploring our ability to find and make a choice. Toggle your magical glow-in-the-dark light switch of choice, and even hard things will play.

No choice? No play.

Anytime I feel stuck, I squirm out of my supposed to’s and look for a bigger or sideways view. I get into my soul-eyes and start to play with whatever feels blocked or locked in me. I often use a creative art form like movement, art, or voice. Then I see what shows up to shift my experience. Take Lindsay Braman’s Play Style Quiz for clues on how to find your play state.

Given a little psychic wiggle room, I know play is near. As Soyinka Rahim's song reminds us, Love Has the Power to conjure up our life if we literally wiggle and grow.

Rather than work hard on hard things, I crack open reality with creativity’s beating heart.

Or, maybe it’s just that I play hard.

Play is a wisdom path. Ancient people and contemporary guides point to it. D.W. Winnicott says, “It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.” Rudolph Steiner said, “We are fully human only while playing, and we play only when we are human in the truest sense of the word."

Play ignites the inner flame, the light, and the power needed for navigating hard realities. As a sensitive person who tends to feel swamped and depressed, play is my medicine way. It helps me stay curious, flexible, artful, and resilient.

For me, play might be easier to find with someone than love or forgiveness.

I do wish play was as easy as it sounds. Sometimes it is. I begin my book What the Body Wants with “Everyone has to be told get back to work, but no one has to be told get back to play.”

Alas, in our production-heavy world, even Aiswarya, Soul Goddess, had to check in on her play-o-meter. Me, too.

Today, play, like love, is one of our biggest teachers. And guess what? Play has probably been here all the time. Looking back at my own hard journeys, choice has certainly been at play. I am free. I’m not stuck in trauma. I mess around with it all.

Birth. My first hard journey was to grow in my mom’s dancing womb. Her gut was so heavy with unprocessed grief that my body still memorializes her sorrow each year on my birthday. Life sang me into being using minor chords and I am glad it did. I chose it.

At 12, I followed Dad into the High Sierras on a red Honda 90 motorcycle laden with sleeping bags and gear. I wanted that adventure with him, even though there were snowstorms, stalling out in rocky stream crossings, bears, fish to clean, and angst when he left me behind so he could “go further.” It was hard, good, awesome, and chosen.

At 14, my younger brother had a stroke. None of us chose that journey, and we didn’t know how to. My whole family went numb and somatized stroke symptoms for decades until Jill Bolte-Taylor opened my eyes to the Abiding Love she experienced during her stroke. Once I learned that strokes are not the end of the world, I could begin to play with them!

At 20, the stars aligned, and I traveled to Taiama, Sierra Leone, where dance, drum, and soul were still part of village life. Alongside fellow Africans and Americans, hoping to build a cultural history museum, we were instead overcome with malaria, food insecurity, a lack of materials, the destabilizing impacts of the West on the dancing people, bugs the size of animals, and, hardest on me, the otherness I felt as a white woman among grieving, angry African Americans. It took a decade to metabolize this hard, holy, LIFE-ALTERING JOURNEY that I chose!

In my 50’s and 60’s, I did an all-out tango with family addiction, a dance you literally don’t choose. The toll on mental health and stamina? Horrendous! But dance, art, InterPlay, writing, a higher power, and Alanon showed me that one can play with addiction, and it really helps. Choices abound

How do we get to joy? Play hard?

Don’t stop playing when things are hard. Brain science shows that we need to choose hard things. Too much reliance on pleasure and the brain actually loses its pleasure-making ability. But, do something hard alongside pleasure, and it balances us. We feel better. Read Dr. Anna Lembke’s brilliant book, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, on our pervasive addiction to comfort and how to find freedom. Also, listen to Glennon, Abby, and Amanda’s podcast, We Can Do Hard Things, “where they drop the fake and talk honestly about hard things, including sex, gender, parenting, blended families, bodies, anxiety, addiction, justice, boundaries, fun, quitting, overwhelm . . . all of it.”

The Trick is to play, to make something out of the muck.

I now know I can not take a journey, especially a hard one, without a loving spirit team, creative practices, my sense of purpose, and my willingness to dance with suffering. That’s why these are the first four wisdom arts in the Art of Ensoulment Playbook. I regularly activate all four to maintain freedom and joy.

Do you have

A Loving Spirit Team
Creative Artful Practices
A Sense of Purpose
Dancing with Suffering

Keep these front and center for hard journeys ahead.

This summer, I’m taking several journeys. I’d love to have your company.

June 20th, I’m hosting a once-a-month Pageant of Hags journey! Getting Old ain’t easy. I need to play with it! Do you? Join this monthly book circle playing with Hagitude: Women Reimagining the Second Half of Life. Author Sharon Blackie, psychologist, and folklorist, sparks the conversation. We’ll use creativity to explore ways our identity is restructuring, our dance with wildness, mystery, death, grief, newfound freedom, and the challenges of discerning when and where to share our wisdom. Learn more here about this monthly Zoom gathering starting in June 2oth

I’ll take a Journey into The Common Good on pilgrimage to Patmos, Greece, with Krista Tippett and Pádraig Ó Tuama and send daily reflections via Substack that will include a side trip to Delphi, an 8-hour ferry ride, Greek culture, and a salon that asks, “How can we speak to each other in a way that moves us all, individually and collectively, to growth, learning, creativity, and change?

If you’d like my Patmos Journal, I’m sending it to paid subscribers starting June 21st. Let me know and I will carry a prayer for you.

In July, some soulful folk will make an awesome journey to explore The Art of Ensoument at Holden Village with Marla Durden in the Western Cascades. Again, it requires a plane, bus, ferry, and van. O Holy Space. O Wild Mother! Oh My! Camping with the Cosmos! July 27 - August 1, Holden Village in Eastern Washington. Week 8 of Holden’s Summer Program. Marla and I will prayerfully model earth-based spirituality as we explore ways to Honor Our Spirit Team, Center Our Creative Birthrights, Divine Our Purpose, Dance with Suffering, Bow to Limits, and Come Home to Beauty. Get The Art of Ensoulment Playbook now to begin nurturing a stronger connection between body and soul.

Are you on a hard journey? I’d love to honor and dance on your behalf in the Monday Dance Chapel. That space is a balm for me. You are always invited.

From the Dancing Center,

Cynthia