To live a surrendered life is to be present moment to moment with our experience, to accept our experience without judging it. Or if we judge it, to forgive ourselves for defending, for pushing away. To be with our experience does not mean that we do not space out, detach, disappear emotionally. It means that we become increasingly aware of when we dissociate and gently bring ourselves back. This "bringing ourselves back" is the essence of meditation. To meditate, it is not necessary to stop thinking. But it is necessary to become aware of the thoughts as they happen, to see how they take us out of the silence. To see how they prevent us from being wholly present.
Play is our contact with our love for life. It brings us back into our joy at being alive and shows us where our freedom is. Play moves us out of our fixed mindsets: it offers freedom from the tyranny of habit, freedom from the mundane and ordinary, from the rational and need to know and be in control. It is freedom from rigid identification with race, class, gender, and even species.
