When you take things too seriously, you miss the point and get in your own way. You do your best when you feel your best, and you feel your best when you are enjoying the game, not fretting over the outcome. When you approach each and every goal and challenge in your life as a game that you play to win for the fun of it, you give yourself the emotional leverage you need to win the game every time.
Worrying about outcomes is the opposite of applying the wisdom of play to win at the game of life. Whatever the outcome, turn your way of dealing with it into a game. Have fun with it. Trust the perfection of the universe. Take it light. Enjoy playing to win instead of relating to your challenge as any kind of serious threat. When you feel threatened in any way you are leaving the reality of universe’s perfection and living in fear-breeding illusion of your own making.
Remember that the game of life is designed for you to win, because you really cannot lose! When you play it in a way that makes it enjoyably challenging you are already winning. As you avoid judging any possibility as wrong, bad or inferior to any other, as you trust in the perfection of every possibility, you stop worrying and begin enjoying the experience of doing your best for the sheer pleasure of it. When you refuse to take the game seriously, you cherish your participation in it.
Our main challenge here is our childhood programming. During our most vulnerable and formative years we were disciplined and reacted to in ways that made us fearful of relating to life as a game. Our parents and other early childhood caregivers were overly serious believers in hard work, danger and the need to be in control. We began to resist or natural tendency to skip, to sing, to giggle at nothing and turn everything into fun. We buried our original wisdom under blankets of sorrow and stress, believing this to be the right, necessary, practical and adult approach to life, as we were taught to do.
Before our innocence and trust was driven out of us, and before we commenced the life-pattern of driving it out of ourselves, we lived as if we lived in a universe where nothing can go wrong. We trusted our parents and caregivers to handle everything, requiring no more of us than what we can do easily and playfully. We related to life as a kind of playground where our primary responsibility is to invent fun activities for ourselves and for our friends. It can be quite challenging for us to return to this in adulthood. We believe so strongly in our tragic view of reality, without realizing that it is just our perspective, and not reality, that we are experiencing. It can seem terrifying to let go of control enough to trust the fact that our life story is all made up. And yet, it’s just a game of make-believe that we are meant to enjoy, not to worry and stress over.
Champions in all fields of athletics and masters of the arts have learned that they do their best “work” when they are having fun and remembering that it is just sport, just a play, that they are engaged in. When they maintain this approach they stay loose, relaxed and happy; they end up performing at the top of their game, and the joy they feel is contagious, uplifting their audience and bringing a more joyful sense of liberation from hardship into the world.
As much as you may now believe that you must take things seriously and treat threats as real, you really don’t have to as long as you are willing to release yourself from this belief. The truth is that playing the game of life is so much more rewarding than making life work. The serious, struggle-mode drains you of energy and joy and it is essentially misaligned with what is really happening. You actually have to work hard to keep up the illusion that your seriousness is based in reality, that anything really serious is going on.
Great musicians play their instruments. Great actors play their role. Happy children and adults play the game of life and win.
Because relating to our life story as serious and real has become so habitual, we need to practice being on the alert to notice when we are about to slip into a tragic or frightening or serious imaginary drama. A part of you may feel like it wants to dive into the troubled emotional waters of serious intensity. If you take the plunge you are bound to feel emotionally pounded, unhappy and finally worn out for no purpose.
There are basically two levels of the game of life. One involves pretending, the other involves trusting in reality. Both are fun, but the second one is the most fun of all. The first level consists of all the made-up elements of our personal life story that we treat as real. The roles you play, your job, your personal and professional relationships, your physical health, your finances, and all of the past episodes that you recall as your personal history make up the first game, the game of pretend. As long as you remember that it is all pretend it remains fun to play this game.
Playing the second game consists of learning to live in the perfection of reality. Learning to trust the way things are, the way things turn out, as perfection, helps you to bring the attitude of light-hearted play into everything you do and go through. Accepting your ever present oneness with the infinite abundance, energy, intelligence, beauty, order and love of the universe constitutes playing the real game. Playing the real game is the most fun of all!
To develop this new, original way of approaching life, watch out for getting lured into any emotionally intense arguments. Avoid working too long and too hard without a break. Make it your goal to stop taking anything anyone says or does or promises or threatens too seriously. Be on the alert to notice when you are about to slip into blaming and criticizing, when you are beginning to lose your patience, when you are starting to feel frustrated, resentful or overwhelmed. When you notice that you are losing your balance in any of these ways, relaxed, rein it in, ease up, try to smile at yourself and remember it’s just a game.
Of course, this can be most challenging when you are facing what you would call a crisis, a disaster or even a catastrophe. It turns out that these are just excuses that we make to justify losing our joy and treating illusion as reality, concealing the perfection of the universe that is the real backdrop of whatever appears to be happening. Repressing our strong feelings during these instances is not recommended and amounts to the antithesis of what using The Method is about. Feel your feelings honestly, and when you feel ready to relieve yourself, go through the rest of the steps of The Method to re-establish your consciousness in the real world of perfection, so you can begin to play and enjoy the real game.
The Method is a means for freeing our energy from the reactionary patterns of taking things too seriously, returning that energy to the joyful innocence of our original nature. When you begin to feel weighed down by life’s burdens, when working becomes stressful, when you relate to dangers as if they are real, use The Method to drop your attachment to the world of make-believe and return to your harmonious inner peace and poise that honors your joyful spirit and lets you have fun playing the game.
Contact me to schedule your demonstration of The Method over the phone to release your limiting beliefs for more joy, love and abundance.