Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Lots of love and welcome to your wish fulfilled.
[00:00:07] Hope you're feeling wonderful.
[00:00:11] You are a wonderful being, and you have beautiful wishes in your heart.
[00:00:20] So many wonderful moments that can be experienced in life.
[00:00:25] And the purpose of these sessions really is just to come back to that good feeling, good vibrations, so that we can enjoy now, enjoy our life now. And from enjoying our life now, we can manifest all sorts of magical things that we will then enjoy in the now when we go into that experience.
[00:00:54] Today, we're diving into the importance of play fun and games. Fun and games.
[00:01:03] Yesterday, I did a live session with some of my students in the meditation training, which, if you want to learn how to be a meditation teacher, you can check that out.
[00:01:17] And in that session, what we did is a manifestation method.
[00:01:25] And the method is to first of all come into the feeling of gratitude for all the blessings that you already have.
[00:01:34] Just think about something that you're already grateful for and notice the feeling of gratitude. It's a wonderful feeling, isn't it, Grace? Gratitude.
[00:01:52] And then imagine something that you wish to manifest and pull that into the now.
[00:02:03] It's like putting that feeling of gratitude next to something you want. Because when you manifest something that you want, when you actually manifest it, you have gratitude, right?
[00:02:20] Just tune into it. There's a difference between something that you have now that you're grateful for and something that you don't have that you want. There's a difference. So in manifestation, we want to pull them together so that you feel the same sort of feeling of gratitude for the things that you wish to have as the things that you already have. Because that is the place of peace where you have assumed the feeling of your wish fulfilled.
[00:03:01] Because when you get what you want, you no longer want that, you feel grateful for it.
[00:03:12] A little method you could do to help with this is to write a gratitude list.
[00:03:19] So let's say you're grateful for being alive, right? And then, next line, you could write down something that you want as if you have it now.
[00:03:29] And then you write down something you have. So you write, one line is what you want, one line is what you have, and just notice the difference and see if you can have the same feeling of gratitude all the way down, connecting these two things together again and again and again, because then you're being grateful in advance now for that which you want.
[00:03:57] So anyway, these are. These are fascinating things. We can talk more about this later on. So I was doing this session with our students, and I noticed that if we. If we take this too seriously, right? Oh, Am I doing it right? Oh my God. Then we miss the point. In order for us to have a wonderful life and to create things, we need to have play and fun.
[00:04:22] When we're too serious and too focused on the outcome, the end result, too focused on getting what we want, it actually limits our joy, our good feeling, our contentment, and it also limits our capacity to do things. You've probably seen this if you watch sports.
[00:04:46] When people are too serious, like it's the final and everyone's like really tense, they don't tend to play as well. I've seen this again and again.
[00:04:58] Whereas when it's just fun and games, they, they like more creative, right? Sports people, the same happens for everyone, right? If we're having fun in a project, having fun doing something or having fun, whatever it is, we kind of open up and allow ourselves to enjoy being alive, right? It's like, yay, this is great.
[00:05:19] But when we're, oh, I've got to get it right, I've got to get it right. Oh my God, what happens if it goes wrong? Oh my. Then we super stress out. And from that place, a lot of our energy is locked up inside of us.
[00:05:38] And what is the energy that we have when we're stressed out? Is it an energy of abundance?
[00:05:44] Is it an energy of expansion and freedom?
[00:05:49] Oh, it's, it's the energy of being trapped. And being trapped is going to make us more trapped, right? So when you just tune into the energy of everything, having a sense of fun and play and openness is a very high level vibration.
[00:06:08] So there are different ways of playing and this is something that we're going to dive into today. So you can see what type of play is most natural for you. So According to this, Dr. Stuart Brown, he spent most of his study, most of his career as a clinical psychologist researching the benefits of play, right?
[00:06:37] And basically he discovered after Talking to over 5,000 people from all walks of life, what play meant to them, right? Because the feeling of play, the energy of play leads to this sense of lightness and openness and creativity, which leads to manifestation, to productivity, to success.
[00:07:02] So here's the different types. I'm going to read this list. This is actually from this book, Feel Good Productivity, which I recently got.
[00:07:13] And here are the eight that this guy, Dr. Stewart came up with. So tune into it. Which one or which ones do you feel good about? Some people it's one, some people it's two, some people it's a few. Most people don't have all of these, but just Tune into which ones you feel best about because that's the starting point for your play.
[00:07:38] All right, so number one is the collector.
[00:07:42] The collector loves to gather and organize, enjoying activities like searching for rare plants, rummaging around in archives, garage sales, right?
[00:07:57] So some people, I love collecting stuff, right? And they have like loads of typewriters or loads of cars or they have a massive record collection or, you know, special fancy little whatever and they find that fun.
[00:08:08] Second one is the competitor. This is the people who love to play games and sports and win games, whether it's, you know, athletic sports or cards or whatever it is, video games.
[00:08:22] And they, they really want to put in their best work and win. They love to win.
[00:08:28] Third type are the explorers. These are the ones who like wandering around, going on adventures, road trips, hiking, discovering things, right? Getting lost, figuring it out, camping, stuff like that. Right? Going on trips.
[00:08:45] So just tune into these. So far, does any of this sound like something that you like to do? Because this is the gateway to play.
[00:08:57] The next one is the creator.
[00:09:00] The creator finds happiness and well, being in making things, creating things. Whether it's art, music, writing books, or doing some sort of creative work, building something.
[00:09:19] The fifth type of play personality is the storyteller who has an active imagination and uses the imagination to entertain others, right? Writing or dance, theater, role playing games.
[00:09:40] The sixth type is the Joker. The Joker wants to make people laugh, likes doing stand up improv, playing pranks. You know, we know the Joker types, right?
[00:09:54] The seventh type is the director, who likes to plan and organize, lead others like it's directing other people and can fit into many different roles from organizing businesses to, you know, movie directors, to various movements.
[00:10:12] And then there's the kinesthet number eight, the last one who finds play in activities like acrobatics, gymnastics, running, you know, physical activity.
[00:10:29] Right. So out of these eight, which one or which ones do you feel are your play, the collector, competitor, the explorer, the creator, storyteller, joker, director or keen, aesthetic, kinesthetic, physical, right.
[00:10:54] Personally, I'm definitely the explorer and the creator. That, I mean, that's what I tend to do as much as I can. I love being out and about, going on road trips, going on hikes, discovering things. I like going on mad missions, right? Fun and games. And I like to create and I do it all the time. So that's for me, that's all play. I try and play all, all the time and if I forget to play, then I get stressed out.
[00:11:19] I'm probably also somewhat of a storyteller, a Little bit of a collector, have a bit of a record collection going on, but not that much of a big deal. I think we all have elements of all these sometimes, you know, we might be the joker, play jokes on people.
[00:11:35] Director. I do a little bit of that and.
[00:11:39] But I'm not that into competitive sports personally. But that's.
[00:11:48] That's just how it is. So everyone's different. So out of all these eight, even one of these is like a gateway into a sense of lightness.
[00:12:04] So when you know this, the reason this is useful for manifestation of having a better life, is that you can ask yourself, how can I make this task that I'm doing, whether it's manifestation or creating something or getting something done, how can I do it with a sense of fun?
[00:12:28] Fun and games. How can this be fun?
[00:12:32] When you instill that, when you infuse that with some of this play energy, it's more interesting, isn't it? Right? We don't have to be so serious all the time, do we?
[00:12:55] So that's the first step to play. And I'm just sharing this from this, this book because I read a lot, so I might as well share a few things. And if you want to get this book, what's it called? Feel Good productivity, by all means, Great book.
[00:13:11] Second experiment. So one is the play, right? How can you instill play, play into what you're doing?
[00:13:24] Next thing is to embrace curiosity. What are you curious about?
[00:13:36] When we're curious, when we're interested in something? Oh, I wonder. I wonder.
[00:13:42] It leads to a sense of playfulness. I wonder what happens if I press this button. I wonder what happens if I do this thing, right?
[00:13:51] When we're so worried about failure, then we won't let ourselves just play around.
[00:14:00] So being curious about something, playfully curious, allows us to enjoy it more.
[00:14:14] It creates dopamine, right? When you're following something. I wonder what happens if I do this. I wonder what happens if I do this.
[00:14:23] The reason we don't become curious all the time is because of failure. We think, oh, if I mess it up, it will all go horribly wrong and that'll be a bad thing. So we become stiff, right?
[00:14:39] But if we are open and curious, then it allows us to play around and discover things. Like, I'm learning the piano and I really don't know what I'm doing. I'm trying to learn jazz. And apparently jazz is quite hard to play. And it is quite hard, right? So I'm like, how does this sound? How does this sound? You know, I can get Some nice sounding chords out of the thing, but I'm just messing around with it. If I was too worried about it, I wouldn't. I wouldn't be able to do anything, right?
[00:15:08] So that the. The sense of curiosity opens things up.
[00:15:18] So you just think, what's going to happen if I try this? When I was teaching this group with my students recently, I had to mention, look, don't be too serious about this, right? This is just like curious. Imagine you could wave a magic wand.
[00:15:34] You could wave a magic wand and all of a sudden everything you want just appears, right? Just curious. What would it feel like if you could wave a magic wand now and everything you want changed to exactly the way you want it?
[00:15:54] How would you feel?
[00:16:05] Right?
[00:16:07] So if we're curious, it allows you to come into that feeling much more easily.
[00:16:18] So cur. Curiosity, embrace it. Like, what happens if I drive a slightly different way to the store? What happens if I talk to this person? You're just interested in something happening, you know, if I just mess around with this thing, it opens you up. And what happens when you're curious and you try things out is you feel more inspired. It opens you up to new possibilities and you might discover things that you wouldn't otherwise discover.
[00:16:52] And most of the most successful people in the world are very curious. What happens if I do this? What happens if I do this? Right?
[00:16:58] So embrace your curiosity. Find the fun in the curiosity.
[00:17:09] There's another wonderful way of having fun, which it would. Which is simply to ask the question, what would this look like if it were fun? So think about a task that might be annoying. In this book, he talks about Mary Poppins, right? Mary Poppins. A Spoonful of Sugar, Mix the Medicine, Go down, right? What a classic tune. We all remember that tune.
[00:17:42] And at the beginning of the song, it says, in every job that must be done, there is an element of fun.
[00:17:52] You find the fun and snap.
[00:17:57] The job's a game.
[00:18:03] So if we want to raise our vibration and feel better, then it's worth asking, what if this were fun? What would this look like if it were fun? How would this feel if it were fun? What would be different if this was fun?
[00:18:22] You can ask that question or something like that and turn things that are otherwise very tedious into more amusement.
[00:18:34] Like, one thing I often do, like if I'm cleaning up after making a juice, right? I've got this juicer and I love my juice. And then I'm like, I've got to clean the juicer. So I have this timer, kitchen timer, And I think, all right, can I clean it in, like, five minutes? And I put it on and I'm like, racing. It's just fun. It makes it more fun. How can I run around the house and tidy everything up in, like, three minutes?
[00:18:59] Just silly little things like that.
[00:19:02] That's just an example. But whether it's a project or cleaning the dishes or, you know, getting your car serviced or whatever, how could this be more fun? What would this look like if it were fun? In his example, he mentions about adding music to what he's doing. This is something I've done for years when I'm working on something to have my headphones on, listen to some music.
[00:19:31] I remember one time when I was living in England, I was working in a gloomy, nasty room on these horrible plastic chairs for eight hours a day, marking exam papers for English foreign language exam papers. Multiple question, multiple choices, hours and hours and hours. I'm like, oh, my God. And then he killed me. So what I did to make it fun, I did two things. The first thing is that in between each question, I would imagine going up into the light, to the spiritual light beyond the body. Like flying away from the world into light and then coming back and then marking a question, then going back into the light, then going down and mark another question and then go beyond. And I remember feeling like I was flying. I was like, this is just incredible. I felt absolutely charged.
[00:20:27] It was absolutely fascinating.
[00:20:33] And then the other thing I did is after we did a pack of exams, we had to put them in this plastic envelope and seal it and then put a number on it, right? Like 27 or whatever. It was 66 or 126 or whatever. So what I would do is I would spend about 10 minutes doing, writing the letters really big, and then, like, making a whole background and little faces on the letters and like, a whole scene. It's like a little piece of art.
[00:21:05] I got told off for it, but it was fun, right? I'm like, I don't have to just write 27. I can create this whole landscape with the sun with a big smile on it and little people walking up and down the letters and little ladders.
[00:21:23] I was studying at art college, right? So I was doing a lot of drawing.
[00:21:27] So stuff like that, right? How can it be fun? The thing that you're doing?
[00:21:36] The next thing is to enjoy the process, not the outcome.
[00:21:42] Intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. That means that if we are focused on the result, the outcome. I want to finish this thing. I want to make this Much money. I want to get this, you know, review. I want to blah, blah, blah.
[00:22:02] When we focus on the outcome, we're not enjoying the process and we're also stressed about the outcome. May, may, maybe it work, maybe it won't work. When we focus on the process like in the now, then we in enjoy, we can enjoy this experience rather than getting the thing at the end. Like if someone enjoys writing for its own sake, it's going to be a better end result than if they're thinking, I need my best selling book. Because you can't force, you can't force people to like your work, right? So I enjoy doing these sessions, these podcasts, these audios for their own sake.
[00:22:56] If you happen to like it as well, then I'm very happy about that. But that's, that's a bonus because if I'm thinking I need to do something that I get certain outcome, then it stresses me out. But if I enjoy doing it because I enjoy doing it, then I'm focused on the process. So think about how you can apply that to your own life.
[00:23:19] How can you enjoy the process, not the outcome, in many different contexts in your life, like making the food rather than eating the food. Not that you, you can also enjoy eating the food, but why not enjoy making it alongside eating it?
[00:23:43] How can you enjoy driving, not just getting somewhere? Because driving itself was at one point fascinating to us, wasn't it? Remember when you first learned how to drive a car, you're like, whoa, there's this big metal thing, I'm going down the street. I remember thinking, this is so dangerous when you first start driving and you don't know what you're doing, right? It's incredible. So we forget that, but that was at one point fascinating to us.
[00:24:10] So how can you enjoy the process?
[00:24:14] And the next thing is to lower the stakes.
[00:24:19] Like the more we're worried about the outcome, the more stressed we are and the less we can enjoy the process.
[00:24:27] So if you need to manifest something, if you have to have it, if you really want becomes stressful, right? When you lower the stakes, when there's nothing to lose, then it doesn't matter.
[00:24:43] I'll give you a great example of this from the book.
[00:24:48] So in 2016, a NASA trained engineer named Mark Rober recruited 50,000 people to try out a new computer challenge. He wanted to prove that anyone could learn how to code. He told them. So he set them off on a series of relatively easy coding challenges. Now, of course, like many of these studies, that wasn't really the point. Of it. The real point of the challenge was to see how people responded to failure. So he split them into two groups of 25,000 each. One group, when they made a mistake in the coding, right? They're trying to learn how to code. When it didn't work out, they got a message that said, you have failed. Please try again.
[00:25:36] The other group got a slightly different message that said, you have failed.
[00:25:42] You've lost five points.
[00:25:44] You now have 195 points. Please try again.
[00:25:50] Right? So there was a consequence. And remember, this is an arbitrary experiment, right? It said, like, what do. The points don't even mean anything, really?
[00:25:59] So then what was the result of that? After these two groups ran the program, right, and they tried to learn this stuff, what was the outcome?
[00:26:11] The first group that got the message, you fail, please try again, on average, made 12 attempts to solve the coding puzzle.
[00:26:21] And at a success rate of 68%.
[00:26:27] The second group made just five attempts with a success rate of 52%.
[00:26:39] Right? So they, the second group, when they thought they were going to lose something, they tried less than half the amount of times.
[00:26:52] Isn't that fascinating? So if we think failing or losing has all these terrible consequences, then we stop trying, right? Fear of failure is this major, major problem in our.
[00:27:16] Now, in this exercise, imagine something else happened. Imagine when you tried something out and when you failed, you gained five points.
[00:27:32] What would happen if someone cheered you on and said, well done for trying, well done. If every time you failed, you actually got special blessings and rewards and all sorts of gifts. Gifts. Every time you tried and failed, you got gifts and rewards, what would you do? How would it feel, right? If we got rewarded for our failures, we would be way more open to trying things out, right? But we're not. We're. We're. We have this absolute terror, most people, of failure.
[00:28:11] So we hold ourselves back and we restrict our play and our joy, right? This applies to everything, whether it's relationships, like, can I say this thing to this person? Or what about meeting new people or what about this project? Is it going to work out if I put this thing out there?
[00:28:30] If we're afraid of failing, we won't try very hard. We will give up quickly. And the thing is, we have to learn from our own experiences. And you can't get everything right first time round. It's just not possible. Anyone who's good at anything in life, anything at all, whether it's playing the piano or making food or connecting with people or setting up a business or eating well or exercise or anything Right.
[00:29:03] They have to try it out, make a mess of it, learn from it, try it out again. So failure isn't this awful thing. It's a data point, it's just a part of the learning process.
[00:29:18] Like many people, they try to learn meditation and they say, oh, I couldn't stop my thoughts. Well, no one can stop their thoughts, right? That's. Thoughts are supposed to keep coming, that's what they're for. But they think, oh, I failed and then they give up.
[00:29:33] But that doesn't mean they actually failed. It just meant that they noticed their thoughts, which is success, right? So in order to have much more fun and play, it's so important to embrace failure and not to even call it failure, to call it learning.
[00:30:02] Mastery comes from loads of different things that we do over time. Some of them work out, some of them don't work out the way we want. But that doesn't matter. It's part of the process. You can't remove so called failure from the process of living life.
[00:30:20] Imagine if little kids who are trying to walk, right? Little babies, they're trying to walk. Imagine if they said, oh, it didn't work out for me, do you know what I mean? I fell over. This is not for me. Maybe I'm supposed to crawl for the whole rest of my life. Imagine if they did that.
[00:30:35] We'd still be crawling now, wouldn't we? Can you imagine all these adults crawling around on the floor, do you know what I mean? Crawling into the office.
[00:30:44] It would be absurd, but because we were willing to fall over and stand up, fall over, stand up, we gradually learn how to walk.
[00:30:57] So these are just some thoughts I could go on and on to help you take yourself a little bit less seriously.
[00:31:07] Have more fun. Be sincere, not serious. Do it from your heart.
[00:31:15] Do the best you can with a sense of lightness.
[00:31:21] How can you have more fun, more play, more ease, Enjoying the now, enjoying things for its own sake.
[00:31:41] What the world needs is more play, more lightness, you know, because at the end of the day, from a deeper perspective, we are spiritual beings. We've come down here temporarily. This is all really, honestly is all a game. It's a big game and there's games within the game, within the game. So we have multiple levels of a game playing out all the time.
[00:32:10] So we might as well enjoy, enjoy the game.
[00:32:15] Wishing you lots of fun, lots of ease.
[00:32:20] Try things out, see which type of adventures you like. Out of those eight things we talked about, find the play that is most natural for you because it's good to start with what's natural. You don't need to become different. Whatever it is that you find fun, that's the way to start it and to keep going in that direction.
[00:32:40] So enjoy, enjoy, enjoy. Lots of love. Thanks for being here. Talk to you soon.
