you can’t win if you don’t play
Experiment infusing your meditation time with playful qualities such as curiosity, lightness, awe, and child-like delight in the present moment’s unfolding.
The comedy improv teacher Jimmy Carrane mentioned in a blog post that the Illinois State Lottery once had a slogan that went:
You can’t win if you don’t play.
Although I’m not endorsing gambling here, we can apply this slogan to how we practice mindfulness. If we approach our practice as a grim duty to sit in formal meditation for so many hours per week, or to always be mindful in our daily life, well, it just doesn’t work.
mindfulness as play
But if we view our practice as play, we can experiment infusing our meditation time with playful qualities such as curiosity, lightness, awe, and delight. This can make the journey to enlightenment so much, well, lighter, and more fun.
When we actively encourage these beautiful qualities, supporting them as they arise, our practice deepens. Our life finds more dimensions in which to grow.
Can we infuse our practice with these playful qualities?
As we engage with all the challenging tasks we face in our day to day lives, can we bring in a little curiosity and lightness?
We’re not trying to figure anything out; we’re simply being with whatever is happening, inviting awe and a child-like delight in the present moment’s unfolding.
And keeping the channel open, as Martha Graham once commented:
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action… and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique…You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work.
You have to keep yourself open … Keep the channel open.
Martha Graham on the Life-Force of Creativity
mindfulness as improvisation
I’m reading this week about improv performers and how they train. What goes into training in the improv arts- in jazz, dance and comedy– aligns so well with our approach to our mindfulness as play.
We are all improvisers, right? Whatever prefab scripts we apply to our daily challenges don’t always fit well; we are often going off script, improvising.
And as it is so clear to see in our meditation practice: we don’t know the next thing that’s going to come to our mind, we can’t control our minds, nor should we even try.
The improv performer and Buddhist meditator Martha Lee Turner sums up the core skills of improvisation:
Stay in the present moment, listen carefully, do not get tangled up in your ego, keep letting go of your idea from a second ago, and trust what emerges from the group.
from Half of the Holy Life
trust the present moment
This is big for many of us- to trust what emerges. As the actor and stand-up comedian Brian Posehn has this to say:
Trust in the moment you’re experiencing right now, it will always move you to the next moment.
Sometimes, Brian says, his improv work allows him to step out of familiar routines and scenarios that “impede freedom” as he puts it. A work which I am guessing helps him discover more opportunities for stepping free of entanglements and than he otherwise would see.
Perhaps he would agree he is discovering ever-deepening qualities of curiosity, lightness, awe and delight as he keeps the channel open.
Maybe those who crafted the Illinois State Lottery slogan were sly, secret mindfulness meditators, teaching us from within the belly of the beast- you can’t win if you don’t play.
