Creative Play Heals, Part 2: Unpacked in an Orderly, Reasonable Way
Creative Play Heals: Unpacked in an Orderly, Reasonable Way
In the previous post, I stated that what lies at the core of my essence, is a statement which also serves to summarize the upshot of my lived personal experience. That statement is Creative Play Heals.
In this post, I explore this statement in a more structured way. I will first define my terms, then share some sample Creative Play frames, then say a little bit more about Creative Play's healing powers.
After the end of the article, I share an addendum about Children and Creative Play.
Thanks for Being here!
Definition of terms: Creative Play
Making Something
By Creative Play, I mean playing around with materials or just in our own bodies, to create something that wasn't here before.
Creative Play is different from games, which can be fun, but tend not to result in a new, never-been-here-before creations, most of the time.
Creative Play can lead to drawings, paintings, sculptures, songs, poems, theater, improvisations, dances, and so on. The creations can be permanent or momentary; how long they last is irrelevant. The point is, something new is created through the play process.
Flow State
Although it tends to generate joy, excitement, openness and enthusiasm, which may bubble out of us in boisterous, less well-behaved, more authentically expressive ways, I distinguish Creative Play from silliness or jollity per se. Creative Play can be, and often is, quiet, reverent and completely solo. Because it includes creation, it has an aspect of focus and intent that is sometimes more like working than playing.
Creative Play means entering into a gentle, exploratory, curious approach, free from expectation to do, be, or create anything except what's happing already, naturally and organically, all on its own.
For those familiar, Creative Play involves the flow state, or what it's like when we're drawn into a mode in which we get pleasurably absorbed in something. In the flow state we are relaxed and alert, time flies by, and we're led in an easy, effortless way to follow the flow of our own excitement, interest, curiosity and inspiration.
Dual-Realm Awareness
Creative Play includes, but is not limited to, the concept of imagination, and requires dual-realm awareness, in which we are able to perceive both the material realm and the imaginal at the same time.
This is a bridging type of consciousness state, in which we can easily accept the multitudinous, multidimensional qualities of whatever we're playing with. Whether consciously or not, when making something through Creative Play, we work with the symbolic resonances that objects carry for us.
Within our subconscious, the crayon marked "periwinkle" (for example), is not only an object made of compressed wax, but also a bridge to all that is contained within a whole universe of periwinkleness, which can accommodate an infinity of personal (not to mention collective) symbolic associations comfortably (the color of summer sky right in the middle...the smell of rosemary flowers...a word I like the mouth-feel of....etc.)
All objects in the material world, including our own bodies, are fed continuously with the lush waters of the imaginal realm, making every material interaction succulent with meaning. That is, if we are willing and able to take notice, which Creative Play allows us to do.
Creative Play Frames
Creative Play is not the same thing as pure product creation. We can be quite accomplished at all kinds of product creation and manage to miss the potentially healing aspect of creation, which is why I mean Creative Play, not only creation.
In order to get the healing benefits of play, we must be in an open, exploratory, innocent, humble, and childlike state. While I do believe that most original creation-making involves some measure of play powers, not all activities connected to performance and product creation count as Creative Play. Additionally, depending on us, not all creative practices necessarily favor or are particularly conducive to us personally getting into Creative Play mode. The reason is that as we develop mastery, we tend to reduce the amount of vulnerability and curiosity involved in our process.
In the words of Leonard Cohen, the crack is where the light gets in (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN7Hn357M6I), so if we want to be in the mode which is most healing, we need to make sure we still are playing creatively in areas that are tender and undefended enough. The way to do that, I find, is through appropriate play frames, or invitations.
A Creative Play frame defines the what and the how of the Creative Play endeavor.
A sandcastle, for example, is clearly a castle (that's the what), made out of sand (those are the materials). It is often as simple as that.
Creative Play frames helpfully restrict the wider field of possibilities down to something that feels approachable, through making it both small enough and appealing enough to our curiosity. Creative Play frames restrict through delimiting things like materials, time, and/or theme.
Play frames have to be set in a way that stoke our curiosity, and yet also feel approachable. Play frames we have done many times before tend to feel boring, and yet play frames that are too wide feel scary or overwhelming.
Sample Creative Play Frames
Try the following Creative Play frames on in your imagination (or in materials, if so inclined), and see how they affect you:
Draw a quick portrait of an animal you knew as a child
Play a short one time only song on the piano, using only the black keys
Choose a side character from a fairy tale, and write a poem from their point of view
Now imagine the same Creative Play frames, made more restricted:
Draw a quick portrait of an animal you knew as a child, using only your non-dominant hand
Play a short one time only song on the piano, using only three black keys of your choice
Choose a side character from a fairy tale, and write a haiku inspired by them
Now imagine the same Creative Play frames, made more wide:
Make a portrait of an animal you knew as a child, using seven colors you love
Play a short song on the piano, using only six white keys, and two black keys of your choice
Choose a side character from a fairy tale, and write a spin off short story about them
Whether any of these appeal at all, feel too tight, boring, or on the other hand too scary, is largely a reflection of you. Who you are in your nature, how safe you feel playing creatively, how much experience you have in the above creative media, and still other factors, all inform your play experience.
Creative Play's Healing Powers
The main reason I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Creative Play is healing is because of my own, personal, highly idiosyncratic, decades-long experience with healing myself through Creative Play.
That said, here are some explanations of why that might be so, that I find to be reasonable.
Biological Reasons
There are some simple, biological explanations for the healing powers of creative play, which include that play mode requires being in the nervous system state which is best for physical health. Play mode optimally balances healthy levels of mobilization of the nervous system with the more down-tempo "rest and digest" mode that is used by the body to heal wounds and restore energy.
In my observations, the phases of play naturally take us through a fun process of cycling up during initial spark of inspiration, and back down to an enjoyable phase of replenishing pause, during the contemplative phase of enjoyment that follows after play's completion.
Psychological Reasons
Using the psychotherapeutic lens, we can think of creative play in terms connecting with parts, or sub-personalities. The psyche tends to compartmentalize, keeping wounds in different places within the mind, in order to protect itself and learn ways to survive what has been encoded as threatening in the past.
On the subjective interpersonal plane, this is experienced as having many different clusters of parts, or sides of us, in varying states of vulnerability or armoring, endowed with different roles when it comes to our mental health. Common examples of these sub-personalities include the inner child, the inner critic, the inner task master, or the inner romantic.
Creative play heals because it allows hurts parts of our psyche to express themselves and be heard by our conscious awareness, to be understood and ultimately loved, forgiven, and empathized with, by us (the person whose love we often wait longest to earn).
Creative play allows resourceful parts, such as inner mother, inner father, and inner Self and Magical Helper parts to also play with our inner child parts, which secures a bond of trust and heals many attachment problems (same as real play does between parents and babies in the material world).
This bond allows the process of healing trauma to take place, because the core trauma for most of our inner exiled hurt parts has to do with having been cut off from motherly love (which includes nourishment and safe, pure, unconditional love) as well as fatherly love (which includes helpful structure, guidance, delight in us, and protection from harm).
Spiritual Reasons
Finally, for the mystically inclined, I offer the following: because we are, always, all the time, ultimately originating from source - a place to get fresh pure water from the wellspring of our personal lifestream, by definition - whenever we allow creative flow, it leads to greater connection to the freshest, purest, and most alive truth, now.
Thanks for reading!
Informed by
This post is informed not only by my personal discoveries through Creative Play, but also by the written works of C.G. Jung, Psychosynthesis (Roberto Assaggioli), Process Work (Arnold Mindell), Internal Family Systems (Richard Schwartz), the whole field of Expressive Arts Therapy, the Artist's Way (Julia Cameron), Polyvagal Theory (Steven Porges), Flow (Mihály Csíkszentmihályi), and countless other luminaries and pioneers.
Maybe even more than the above writers, it is informed by art-makers who seared my soul. Too many count, but here are some. Composers Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Song-singers Nina Simone, Otis Redding, Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Adrian Orange, Sufjan Stevens, thanks to all of you. I acknowledge what you gave up to give us the music.
Writers whose words rang through me off the page: Mary Oliver, John Muir, C.S. Lewis, Lao Tzu, Rumi, Michael Cunningham, Denise Levertov. Players who made me laugh til I cried: Peter Sellers, Tina Fey, Jane Krakowski, Eddie Murphy, Key and Peele, and so so many improvisers. Painters of old: Goya, Anguissola, Leonardo, Caravaggio, Vermeer, van Eyck, Botticelli. And less old: Twombly and Rothko. Dancers and choreographers: Toula Limnaois and Bill T. Jones.
Real people I knew and played with. Artist friends, my aunt Hilary, my Uncle Chris, and others.
Last but not least: the kingdom of nature, both outside me and within me. To all here named and unnamed, who gifted me their loving, their beauty, their wisdom and their kindness, I give you my profound thanks and acknowledgement of the lonely, painful joy of creation.
Addendum About Children and Play
People often think of play therapy, expressive arts therapy, and even sometimes the arts in general, as something only for children. I disagree. It is us wounded, messed up adults who need to learn/remember how to play.
It is true that all children play naturally, if they are feeling safe enough to. They do this for a lot of reasons, not least of which to learn how to be a human being. They also play to experience joy, express themselves (tell us who they are on the inside), and bond with caregivers, siblings, and friends. (And just to be clear: play therapy and expressive arts therapy is great for children, too, it's just that adults benefit also).
We can learn a lot from watching the undimmable joy that children radiate when they are in play mode.
Even in 2026, I still come across some people think children are silly, that they need to be taught that their fantasies aren't real. In my experience, this is not at all true. There might be some confusion early on, but I doubt it. I think most children understand perfectly well that when they are making a sand castle, they are not building an actual castle. They are playing around (or working hard, sometimes) with sand, pretending....and also making a real castle. Because for children, they don't need to cut out the imaginal realm altogether the way we adults tend to.
Children are able to sense the imaginal realm better than we are, which means they are in touch with the true, multidimensional castleness, of which their specific sandcastle is a but one specific expression.
Those of us who have grown up and tuned out of the imaginal realm have to learn, sometimes, to tune back into that realm, but children don't have to try hard to do that.
When a child dresses up as a fairy, and plays at being a fairy, and seems to believe that fairies are real, nevertheless I do not believe that even when she says, "look at me, I'm a fairy!", that she really believes that she actually is a fairy. At least, she also understands that she is also a human little girl at the same time of her momentary borrowing of fairyness. Unless this child is saying to me, "No, really. I am a fairy" (as in, I came to planet earth from the fairy people, I remember my birth and why I came here). In which case, I'm inclined to believe her. What do I know?
But assuming the more common case of a little girl enjoying being a fairy temporarily, she is demonstrating to all of us, the simple wonderful art of bridging both worlds, the imaginal and the physical.