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Dalton
Roberts |
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One sleepless night around two in the morning I drove to the children’s playground at the Tennessee Riverpark and swung on a swing for a while. The cool river breeze felt so good. By the time I had all I wanted, I was completely relaxed and quickly went to sleep when I got home. Such is the power of playfulness. I have been playing with the concept of playfulness for over two decades. I think it started in the Jaycees when Bob Elmore taught me about brainstorming. I discovered that ideas flowed better when I brainstormed in an attitude of playful abandon. When I took up the study of meditation I saw why playfulness turns your mind into a powerful idea machine -- so powerful that it often feels like true magic. It is really not magic. It is so explainable that it is boring. It is all related to brain waves. The kind of brain waves you experience at any given time determines your ability to produce ideas. So don’t let my boring explanation blind you to the excitement of becoming the master of your brain waves. In learning meditation from Catholic and Buddhist monks as well as brain scientists, I discovered that there are four kinds of brain waves. Beta waves (14 or more cycles per second) are useful for logic and things like balancing your checkbook. Alpha waves (7-14 cycles) bring happy faces and hearts and creativity. Theta waves (4-7 cycles per second) are more trancelike and put you into contact with your subconscious but in my experience they are not as useful for creativity. For certain, your creativity is more under your conscious control in alpha than in theta. Delta waves (0-4 cycles) mean you are asleep or mighty close to it. Why be aware of all this? Because ideas equal success and power in all walks of life. Notice how employers have idea boxes and reward the best ideas? Learning to control your brain waves is your ticket to ideas and, therefore, your passport to power. I speak not of power over people but power over your own self and your destiny. One way to enter playfulness is to return to your childhood awareness. For a while, author John Bradshaw wrote a flood of books and articles on “the inner child.” Maybe he overdid it but sometimes that is the only way to get a new idea through the concrete skull bone of society. As the bumper sticker says, “It is never to late to have a happy childhood.” To have your happy childhood, return often to the happiest times of your young life. Relive them. Expand the feelings. As you do, playfulness will spring up like an artesian well in the core of your being. Never let anyone cheat you out of anyone you have ever been. We become better alpha-riders when we associate with other alpha-riders. Keep some playful friends around. While it is not often useful to categorize people, it really is true that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who want to control you and those who want you to be playful and free. To avoid falling into the chokehold of controllers, image them in your mind in humorous ways. See them as little Hitlers with little silly mustaches, swinging their arms and ranting. Or see them as pontificating Jim Joneses trying to give you a cup of Kool-Aid. Never see a controlling person as anything but laughable. A courageous, creative Vietnam veteran who has had enough mental and physical pain to kill ten weaker men wrote me that “playfulness is much more vital to our existence than most people realize. It has saved my life.” It is the world’s best painkiller. Norman Cousins proved that in The Anatomy of An Illness. It will get you high on your own serotonin. Now that’s cool, when you can train your own brain to get you high.
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