Being serious about play!

Photo: Barbie Robinson. One of those blooper moments from a photoshoot when the Lila of the Goddess dismantled my serious austerity!

The proposition about spiritual practice is that it is a serious thing. We have to have a rigid routine, control the mind, control the senses, control the body, be contemptuous of frivolity and come to stillness. We have had this dominant view of spirituality for centuries across most major traditions. And in these days of chaos and breakdown, we may be able to consider whether these paradigms have served us well to live in a Reality which is complex, ambiguous and sensory.

Lila is the soil of ancient embodied Goddess traditions. The Sanskrit word Lila has many layers of meaning—child-like play, amusement, teasing of a lover, semblance, diversion, elegance and beauty. The doorway practice for most Goddesses is Lila, the state of being of playfulness. This is not the same as childishness. To embody this is to be curious, adventurous, open, joyful, flowing, present, and without an addiction to the importance of one’s idea of oneself and all that we already know. In fact it is one of the ways in which we step outside the “I”, which is the mind’s borrowed or inherited narrative of our likes and dislikes.

Today there is neuroscience research which says that the brain creates new pathways exponentially faster through play than through mechanical repetitions. The challenge is that the mind does not value play because it does not conform to the linear cause-effect framework that is the mind’s nature. Lila in dance practice is a sophisticated constellation of movement, narrative or archetypal content, and specific invitations to states of being—all of which allow for a transformative and hitherto unknown Rasa or expansive sensation.

Lila does not imitate children or the ideas of play. It is not “acting”. Our memory or “knowing” of play is the beginning of Lila but the practice is far beyond that doorway of the known.

When I teach women, I invite them to look at their practice and their lives through Lila. Rather than a mechanical approach of the known and the mapped, I suggest allowing the practice to live, and emerge when it pleases. Lila frees you from the mechanical dominion of the mind, those brutal regimes of repetition and control. For women, these regimes mirror those that have served to restrain us from manifesting our passion, creativity and sensuality. How can they offer unconditional freedom when they are the very same paradigms that serve to enslave us!

My invitation to you—even if you only dance once in your week, let it be playful, passionate, free and revelatory.