Courage to Play
How can we have the courage to play? Why do we need to try something unusual for us? In this episode of Science of Superpowers, host Tonya Dawn Recla talks about the importance of possessing a willingness to suspend our disbelief just for a moment while engaging in something you don’t typically do. Tonya also emphasizes the significance of trusting in the divine and cutting the idolatry in worldly things like money. Tune in and know how to immerse ourselves in the game to play and participate.
Tonya Dawn Recla:
Hello everybody and welcome back. Thank you for joining us again here at the Science of Superpowers. So excited to have you with us and in today’s episode, we’re talking all about this concept of having the courage to play. It’s so important that we look at this because so much of what is afforded to us in this existence lies just on the other side of our willingness to suspend our disbelief just for a moment while we engage in something maybe that we don’t typically do. Sometimes we can look at that as something scary, something different. How do we step into this space when we’re not really sure what it looks like or we don’t know if it’s safe or we don’t know if we’re right? All of that angst comes from not really, truly knowing where to rest your stability, right? Where you’re founded, what you believe about how the world works. So much of these aftershocks from the pandemic are a byproduct of the fact that people are having to realize that places, where they placed their trust, weren’t really well-founded and the fissures and the fractures are coming to the surface and we need to deal with them. This is just a general consensus at this point. I don’t know that anybody’s really hiding from this fact that perhaps some deeper conversation is required here.
In the Science of Superpowers, that was such a big part of my journey. As I talk about the book here on the show, as it poured out of me in this reflection period that I talk about and how it kind of came through and what that experience was like, and here sitting in reflection on it and all that yummy stuff, the theme in it was really, are you going to play? Are you going to play? That was my conversation with God was, “Are you going to trust me in this? This self, it wants what it wants.” It wants its seemingly secure spaces or the idolization that we give to things like a home and money and all of those things.
It’s such a delicate balance because to suggest that you can just reach states of enlightenment and have the ability to contemplate the universe when those things aren’t being met, while that might be true, it’s also incredibly challenging. There are very real circumstances that a self can certainly supersede, however, when the self has the experience of feeling like the deck might be stacked against them, it alters things. It impacts how we perceive the world.
This idea of the courage to play was something that was really foreign to me because I had matriculated through academia, you know that with my bachelor’s and my master’s degree, I was in honors prep high school. I was in the honors college at ASU and then into the army and military life, and then into counter-intel. There were some really serious structured environments that didn’t really encourage a lot of play if you will. At least that was my interpretation of them, perhaps others have a different experience of it, but for me, it was national security or it was whatever the thing was that I justified to myself that made it worth my time also came with this weighted seriousness to it. I didn’t really understand the sort of ripple effect from that, this sort of negative amplification of insecurity with regard to how we view the world and where we find our peace. It’s something really worthy of looking at because most of you have some level of success in this lifetime, you’ve adjusted pretty well and it’s like, “Okay, now what?”
We were supposed to have the answers, and all of a sudden our kids are looking at it’s like, “You don’t know what’s going on. So why am I going to listen to you?” Or we’re looking at government officials or medical officials or science officials, or whatever the case may be. Those that we feel or used to feel that we could lean into and find that they don’t really know and what happens when we’re faced with circumstances that are beyond anything any of us could have anticipated.
It’s quite an interesting journey for the self and when we come back from our break, I’m going to read a portion of the book that I think you’ll enjoy from the perspective of just a willingness to play at things that perhaps you know you’re not going to do perfectly the first time around. Remember folks, this is a participatory sport. If we look at lives as something that we’re here to engage in and to get the full richness of it, it helps to kind of put that I’m too cool for school kind of feel on the back burner, and we invite you to kind of challenge yourself to step into some spaces that maybe you wouldn’t normally find yourself in, but you’re ready. You’re ready to play a little bit more. Maybe you have a serious job, or you have the serious roles that you play, but there is something in your heart calling you to play a little bit more, to explore some of these ideas, to really find yourself in the richness of life. That’s what our community’s all about, so we encourage you to take a look at that and join us.
We have a community college month, which is beautiful, just this wonderful, yummy container where we get to talk together and say, “This is what we’re seeing. This is what we’re a little afraid of right now,” and how we go about that, plus tons of other gatherings, just so we remember the importance of play and participation. You can find out more about that at superpowerexperts.com, check out the Superpower Universe, plus membership, guarantee you’re going to enjoy that. We will be right back after the break to continue our conversation all about play and having the courage to play. Stay tuned, we’ll be right back.
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