I've been healing so long I forgot how to play
A decade of serious inner work can quietly crowd out the part of us that wants to play. When healing becomes the primary focus, seriousness becomes the water we swim in, and we stop noticing our deeper, simpler desires. The shift back toward delight is what the work was always pointing toward.
I was out with my best friend when she pulled up an Instagram page for an interior designer. The page was light. Fresh. Color and texture and beauty arranged just so. You could feel the joy in every post.
When I looked at it, I thought about my own work. The articles. The framework. The coaching. The somatic experiences. The brown palette. All of it serious. All of it heavy with meaning and depth and purpose.
That contrast didn't sit well with me. It was an aha moment.
At my core, I am a light being. Life is beautiful and blissful. And somewhere along the way, the serious side took over so completely that the light got dimmed.
What a decade of healing actually does to us
My entire 30s were dedicated to deep inner work. It started around 30 when I realized how disconnected I had been from myself throughout my later teenage years and into my 20s. I didn't know who I was. I had been suppressing myself for so long that meeting myself felt like meeting a stranger.
So I went looking. Self-knowledge tools. Ancestral trauma work. Understanding history from a generational context. Therapy. Then deeper still: ketamine therapy, ayahuasca ceremonies, 5-MeO-DMT callings, holotropic breathwork. Understanding and improving every layer that needed healing.
The work was heavy. Sure, it would also come with a form of lightness. Every session, every ceremony, every breakthrough brought relief. It was all necessary. Not a single bit of it is regretted.
But it put a veil of seriousness over life.
When the primary focus for a decade is healing, going deeper, and understanding wounds, patterns, and origin stories, seriousness becomes the default mode. It becomes the water we swim in. We stop noticing we're in it.
Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory shows that positive emotions literally expand our attention and open us to new possibilities, while sustained focus on difficulty narrows what we can perceive. A decade of fixing, seeking, and healing calibrates the system accordingly. We get very good at finding what needs repair. We get less good at receiving what simply feels good.
What the mind does when it runs the healing show
Most deep work happens almost entirely through the mind. Understanding. Analyzing. Seeking. Trying to comprehend the wound so the wound could be healed. Even the medicine work was approached with a seeking energy. A "let me go in and fix this" energy.
When the mind runs everything (including healing) it turns everything into something serious. Something to be understood. Something to be worked on. Something to optimize.
Delight doesn't live there. Delight lives in the body. In sensation. In color and texture and sound and movement. In creating something because it makes you happy.
Clinician Deb Dana describes these small moments of safety and pleasure as "glimmers"—micro-moments that gently shift the nervous system toward calm and regulation. The nervous system heals through processing difficulty and through receiving what simply feels good. Delight is part of the healing, not the reward for finishing it.
What does it mean to actually play again
Here's what I've been sitting with: there is a little girl in me who just wants to have fun with no explanations, to-do's, or agenda. She just wants to be, without the need to constantly see what needs improving. She seeks delight. She doodles. She picks up a pen and lets it go wherever it wants to go, following color and shape and pure impulse with no agenda. She makes beaded bracelets for friends by feel, by energy, by what the person’s vibe is calling for. She jokes. She laughs. She is who the spirit has been trying to reach. The mind, busy with its decade of seeking and fixing, was the one standing in the way.
Many of us who have committed to serious inner work find that we have to relearn permission. Permission to follow something simply because it brings joy, with no healing objective attached.
Psychologist Stuart Brown's research on play describes play as a biological drive, as necessary to wellbeing as sleep. We don't outgrow the need for it. We just learn to deprioritize it in favor of things that feel more productive or serious.
The shift I am in right now: from the mind and its decade of seeking, to giving the body and spirit permission to lead. Delight is what happens when that permission is granted and actually honored.
A note on that word—spirit. It's one I've resisted for a long time. I'm someone who leads with science, who wants research to back the lived experience, who has kept a careful distance from language that feels ungrounded or mystical. I still feel that way. And something is emerging that the word "mind" doesn't cover and the word "body" only partially covers. I'm still defining it. What I know so far is that it arrives through sensation and impulse and recognition—the kind that happens before the mind has a chance to weigh in. That's what I'm calling spirit for now. A knowing that lives somewhere the analysis can't reach.
What this shift looks like in practice
It looks like art. Beauty. It looks like following an impulse toward something purely because it feels good to hold or make or experience.
The interior designer's page stopped me mid-scroll because something in me recognized it. That recognition was the signal. Delight knows itself when it sees itself.
Frequently asked questions
Can inner work make us too serious? Sustained focus on healing can narrow our attention toward what needs fixing and away from what simply feels good. This is a natural consequence of depth and focus over time. Recognizing it is the first step toward rebalancing.
What does it mean to let the spirit lead? Allowing the spirit to lead means following impulses that come from sensation, joy, and inner knowing rather than analysis and optimization. It shifts us towards intuition and flow instead of logic and understanding. It means creating, choosing, and moving from what feels alive rather than what makes sense on paper.
How do we know when we're ready to shift from healing to playing? The signal tends to be an aha-like recognition. Something catches our attention that feels lighter, more alive, more joyful than our current mode, and something in us responds before the mind can explain why. That response is the signal. Trust it.
