Last week while teaching, the song Magic( from Xanadu, sung by the fab Olivia Newton John) popped into my head and dropped me into the following memory:

I'm eight years old. I'm with my best friend, Yvonne, and we're holding hands, skating at the roller rink. I'm wearing royal blue terry cloth shorts with yellow piping, a pink t-shirt with a sparkly decal "FOXY" patched across the chest, over -the -knee socks that match my red, white and blue roller skates. My sweaty palm is gripping Yvonne's sweaty palm so tight and we go into a unified skid, squealing with laughter and abandon… as we slide then awkwardly pull each other up, Olivia is belting out the following lyrics:
"You have to believe we are magic
Nothin' can stand in our way
You have to believe we are magic
Don't let your aim ever stray"


Often when I teach, a memory, an image, a voice will pop in. Instead of letting it derail me, I have learned that most of the time, it 's there for a reason... these so-called "interruptions" are really gifts. So on this day, as Magic is playing in me head and I am transported into "my eight year old embodiment, I look out at the class and realize, that the yoga in the room right now is way too intense. So intense, is the focus and effort, that it has hijacked any lightness or joy. Taking my cue from my inner child, I get everybody to abandon their perfectly precise sun salutations. I invite everyone to stand up and start shaking their bodies. I invite them to forget about breathing. I invite them to just feel their feet on the earth and just be moved from within. It took some coaxing, but soon, we were gyrating, bouncing, dancing...we are shaking our arms, shaking our hair, shaking things we never dare to shake. We are a sea of rhythmic beings, smiling, laughing, sometimes screaming with delight as we move around the room like wild horses. All seriousness and control is obliterated. At the end of five minutes of this, we had all finally, dropped in. In a way that only play can. The quality of breathing in the room was amplified. The lightness had returned. The joy was radiating through the room.

When's the last time you actually PLAYED?

Have you been sitting around chewing on an important question regarding work, relationship, a possible change? And if you have, and you feel stuck because there are so many different voices, how do you know which one to listen too? How do you get in touch with the true voice, the inner guru?

Rather than think your way through, what often helps me to access clarity around a specific situation and be more in tune with my intuition, is to simply, play.

In Sanskrit, there is a beautiful word, Lila. Lila means play. Swami Muktananda in his autobiography describes the universe as a Play of Consciousness. The playful nature of the Divine is ancient and pervasive, going back as far as the RgVeda and the Upanishads. The word lila is most often associated with the play of the Divine, who creates freely, merely for the joy of it, out of spontaneous creativity, not by any need, lack or desire.
In Gitanjali, Tagore writes, "there is something in common between the lila of childhood and the works of God” . The notion of lila is also used to explain human suffering. Mysterious and tragic events are viewed as part of the mysterious play of the gods. Lila reflects the spontaneous nature of the Divine, being not entirely predictable. And while this concept could lead to resignation, when it is embraced, it is often regarded as emancipatory.

If we look at archetypes like The Muse, The Inner Child, The Trickster or the Fool, they all point to , this aspect or quality of lila. Its the part of our psyche that is frivolous, that just wants to have fun, that yearns to let the inner child OUT. . It's that part of you that wants to go to a rock concert. Or wants to learn how to surf, even though you're forty-five and never been in the ocean. It's the part of me that always wants to dance.

About ten years ago, while immersed in a weekend yoga retreat, my teacher and friend, Hala Khouri, threw me for a loop when she shared with me an observation she had. In her loving way, she said, "Kim, sweetie, you need to let your inner child be free."
     "But I am free," I protested. "I walked the labrynthe two times, I hiked to the top of the sacred mountain, I've journaled the last two nights, I did everything I was supposed to this weekend to nurture myself."
     She smiled, then I caught myself. We both began laughing. Even my inner child had an agenda! I realized that what I had to do was stop doing, and allow spontaneity to take hold of me. What I had to do was let go and be moved toward activities for just the fun of it. So I ditched the silent hikes and lost hours playing in the river, overturning rocks and seeing how far I could throw them. I hollered like a monkey in the middle of the woods. I stopped journaling and I collected leaves and sticks and made a necklace. I climbed a tree with my stick necklace. I hollered more like a monkey. I banged on a drum and didn't worry about trying to make a song. I hollered like an Indian chief and banged my drum and pretended the tree was my teepee.

The power of play is magical and profound. When we let our inner child come out and play – we immediately tap our RIGHT BRAIN and move into creative, intuitive mind. Neural pathways fire up. Linnear, rational thinking, things that make sense, go out the window. We get to taste, the rasa called Abhuta-that awesome quality of wonder, mystery, and deep penetrating aliveness. Magic.

I am so grateful to be a mother, because having a child doesn't make me more of an adult, it actually makes me more of a child. And I mean this in the best sense of the word. I actually get a chance to play again. To step into my daughter's world and practice letting my inner child out of the cage of reason and adulthood.

Just the other night, for example, she traipses into the kitchen and begs me to go jump on the trampoline with her. I am in the middle of cooking dinner. I'm tired and irritated. It's been one of those days of endless tedious bill paying, bookkeeping, and general painstaking adult b.s. It's 6:30. It's semi-dark. The chicken needs to get on the grill, the green beans have just started to steam, the rice is mid-boil. I almost say no. But I give in to my inner child (and my outer child) and I say to myself, fuck it...I'm going. We end up jumping for nearly 30 minutes and by the time we return home, I have laughed my ass off, I am winded, i am sore, and I am light. The green beans are brown. The rice is raw. And the chicken has yet to be cooked. It's a little past seven and we still haven't eaten or taken a bath. But when I feel my inner smile and see that same smile on my girl's face, how can any of that trump this feeling of bliss and connection?

If you're pondering a big important adult question, instead of trudging down the adult route, skip down the Lila way! Stop making pros and cons lists, stop having conversations with other adults you know gives great advice, stop fantasizing about how this or that decision will impact this or that, just give it a rest and play...

Here's sone suggestions for Lila practice: things that have proven successful for me in the past and in the present. It's just a beginning!
-do an activity that you always wanted to do but never did-for example, if you're like me and a closet dancer, go take an African dance class!
-buy a hula hoop. There's something about hula hoops that are just ridiculously fun. And no, don't go to a hoop class IF there is the corollary thought, "well, at least it will burn some calories, too." That's not Lila.
-Go find your nearest Rollercoaster park and ride one
-Play a kids board game. Candyland. Connect 4. Remember Pick up Sticks?!?
-Get artistic and creative. Visit the art store, pick up some supplies, and make something. If that's too intimidating, by one of those kids kits, like Make Headbands or Make Your own Jewelry.
-Craft stores are amazing Lila enhancers. You can find anything your inner child's heart desires. Look around. Kill, yes, kill an hour simply perusing all the wonderful options for tapping your inner artist.
-Decorate Your body: put on temporary tattoos, body paint, face paint, weird wigs, costumes. Don't wait for Halloween!
-Jump on a trampoline the next time your kid asks you too. In fact, when they ask you to do anything that involves non-adult like fun, DO IT WITH THEM. Don't just send them off on a playdate-be their playdate!

Whenever I'm getting too stressed out, too serious, I engage lila. It is a practice that has helped me understand how powerful play can be in opening up the possibilities for new and fresh understanding. When I play, my Guru shows up even more powerfully. The naive and the wise are really so close, aren't they?