Last week’s Create Your Restorative Summer workshop was a blast–and inspiring and insightful. I want to share some highlights of all the goodness.

Most of us yearn for the days (even if idealized) of youthful summer breaks with unstructured time available.
Now our summers leave us feeling overwhelmed and torn between the things we want to do and the things we have to do. We’re struggling to find the balance.
We crave deep play, creativity, and restorative activities, but we often don’t know how to make the time or even what to do to tap into those things.

The solution? Deep Play!

Deep play is when you are mind-body fully connected and engrossed into what you’re doing. It doesn’t matter what the activity is. It can feel risky or adventurous - getting you out of your comfort zone.

Deep play is a mood, an embodied emotion. It is soulful. It is creativity. It is spirit.

To play is to cultivate a practice of enchantment.

“Enchantment is a small wonder magnified through meaning…It is the sense that we are joined together in one continuous thread of existence…and that there is a potency trapped in this interconnection.” - Katherine May, Enchantment

Deep play is meaningful to us only when we are in it, fully.

To cultivate creativity is to play.

To be in relationship with nature requires our adult brains to be fully present with a playful curiosity.

Deep play fills out well and leads to feeling restored and rejuvenated.

When we are fully enchanted and engrossed in something, we are deep in play. We are embodied and responding to our body’s signals and needs.

Life without play is just work. Even if you work in your area of passion, play is what keeps that passion alive.

The day of the workshop, this picture from eight years ago popped up on my FB feed as if to show me a visual of deep play.

For my kiddo, deep play continues to be found and experienced with water - too-long showers, mud puddles, wading in the nearby river, swimming, watering the garden with the hose.

Here’s what deep play looked for some of the folks at the workshop. (These are so juicy!)

Gardening at dusk! It’s too hot already here, and there’s something very lovely about being in our yard as the sun is setting.
A day in the barn,taking care of the horses.
Triathlon training and getting dirt under my fingernails.
A day at the beach, reading a novel in the backyard, gardening.
Walking in new places & discovering the environment.

As you read those ideas from workshop participants, feel the energy embedded in them. I feel them as delicious, delightful, peaceful, energizing in a relaxing way. What do you feel?