Unleash your inner child: Why play is the best way to learn

Cover Image by Michał Bożek.

Play is how we learn. Play is how we connect to our joy. Even as little ones, we related to play so we could understand our world. We asked questions and created games, used our growing imagination with natural abandon.

Play was always there.

And then we stopped playing. We stopped imagining and asking questions. We accepted the rules we were given. We worked hard to climb the ladder to prove our worth in ways that never aligned with our true self.

And, in the midst of this, we forgot that play was what brought out the joy, curiosity and learning about who we are and the world we lived in.

But it’s never too late to come back to play.

Back to your imagination and the new and beautiful possibilities that it holds for you.

To play is to learn about yourself again, to grow in new and evolving ways, and make space for the little you and the big you in one space, as playful companions for life.

Play begins with the intention and openness to engage with life. Play offers us endless possibilities that become available to us when we are present and curious with life.

Instead of falling back on our learned and conditional responses, we can get curious and ask questions.

Play is giving ourselves the permission to use our time to restore and reboot our systems, to laugh out loud and listen to the inner voice that says "I need to disengage with the external and come back to my own sense of peace and balance”.

Play is connecting to your inner child and allowing them to lead, preferably with little or no “shoulds” or rules.

Curious how play can look in your life?

You might be asking: how and where do we start?

You can start small and simple - you can start with a doodle.

Listen to this 5-min meditation on connecting to your inner child in a simple and playful way.

Making time for play, the spontaneous and unscripted silly-time that is not centered on production or efficiency, will help us to reorient ourselves and our well-being as priority. When we center our self-care, we begin to prioritize our needs and begin to learn new ways to process the difficult and uncomfortable situations in our lives.

This is why I created the FREE CREATIVE GUIDE to SELF-LOVE, to offer you a small taste for creative play and to explore simple tools that are available to you as you begin your own creative practice, which is, at it’s core, a self-care practice.

If you find this work resonant for you, you can find other free creative resources via my website or on my YouTube Channel.

P.S. If you find yourself overwhelmed at times by the new terrain that creativity can seem, I invite you to take a short brain. Walk away and make yourself something to drink. Come back in a few minutes or an hour but come back. Every new habit will seem daunting at first but stay with it. This is all part of reconditioning your perception that new things are risky and, therefore, bad. Stick with it and you’ll notice the benefits!