🎂 🎂 🎂 July is the month for celebrating many of the precious patriarchs in my life – including one of my most playful teachers and fellow peaceseeker and peacemaker Dan Booth Cohen!
Back in 2020, I was searching for better tools to enable organisations and systems to transform and flourish for greater good when I came across Dan’s truly inspirational book about Family Constellations “I Carry Your Heart in My Heart – Family Constellations in Prison”.
I first began training with Dan in Systemic Constellations online during lockdown in 2021 and was very fortunate to train with him and Emily Blefeld in 2023-2024 on their Alchemical Constellations Facilitator training in the spiritual Menla Resort in New York created by the Dalai Lama.
To celebrate Dan and our mutual lifelong pursuit for creating peace, here’s the latest episode from The School of Play Play Alchemy podcast!
🕯️💖 🌎 If you’re looking for hope, magic and peace… Listen to our Play for Peace podcast episode and you might just be inspired to shift for greater good!
Category: Systemic Constellations
I Capture the Castle
Did you know that at the heart of creativity – the kind that enables us to flourish and feel joy – is play without which we would lack the resourcefulness to get started in the first place?
Play is the skeleton key that unlocks our creativity, our infinite potential. When it comes to creativity, we are the creator and the creation as well as the creative process as we transmute and manifest our soul’s expression and deepest desires.
According to the creator of Systemic Constellations Bert Hellinger, “Love equals seeing plus distance minus judgment.” And because we are relational beings, this observation isn’t only poignant in terms of our relationship with others but more vitally when it comes to being in relationship with ourselves. What’s more, love for ourselves is essential when it comes to being in healthy relationship with our creations and our creative process.
Play Alchemy: Exploring Our Roots of Creativity a 3-day course in the art and science of creativity takes place this autumn 11-13 September at the beautiful Ashridge House (aka home-of-magic Hogwarts) in Berkhamsted, UK within a stone’s throw from London (if you’re Hagrid).
If you’re a grownup who longs to remember how to play and have fun – just like children do – be it at work, at home or anywhere you go, you’re invited to join Play Alchemist Portia Tung this September, along with a constellation of other grownups who love life, to rediscover and harness our greatest superpower – play of course!
Among this bright constellation of likehearted and lighthearted playmakers you will experience what being the best version of yourself feels like as we dance in profound partnership and embark on the play adventure of a lifetime.
Isn’t it high time you explored your roots of creativity?
Book a FREE discovery call with Portia to see what magic we can weave together through this Play Alchemy course!
Happy 7th Birthday to The School of Play!
Play isn’t just an act of hope or faith. Play is an aria of consciousness. Play enables us to self-actualise through accompaniment and mutual support. This is why laughter is the sound of play. Laughter is the sound our heart makes when we are having fun.
Having played for the past 30 years – both professionally and personally – for most of my adult life, I’ve discovered the golden key to game-changing transformation is by changing our relationship with play.
When our relationship with play changes, we change, the world around us changes. Play isn’t just good for us. Play is good for everyone.
We hope you’ll join us in celebrating the Feast at the Party of Life as The School of Play turns 7 years old this week!
We made this to share with you. For each and everyone of us who yearns and learns to play the True Play way.
Explore the Healing Power of Play
Playful You and Me
Do you love the moments when you experience spontaneous bubbles of exploration and joy? And are these moments too few and far between?
Are you often holding your breath waiting for the other shoe to drop and for the goodness in your life to disappear?
Delight is one of the most joyful experiences humans can have. From bursts of spontaneous laughter, to genuine smiles shared, to shared exploration of ideas, to goofy and rambunctious expression.
Are you curious to learn how to cultivate the safety and self-care that will allow your nervous system to turn towards playfulness and joy with ease?
Do you long to be surprised, enlivened, and nourished by your healing journey?
Did you know that each of us has a neural circuit and body system dedicated just to play?
Play is our birthright.
The experience of playing lets us and our brains become who we are meant to be.
Playing brings balance into the body’s and the brain’s endocannabinoid system, which is the system that is responsible for our homeostasis. When we play, we balance every tissue in our body.
And it feels so good.
Play–not the shallow, competitive kind, but the deep play that comes with both emotional discovery and surprise, and with truth-telling in safe environments– is spontaneous, emergent, and unexpected.
This form of deepest play can only arise when our nervous systems are fully supported and in the company of people with whom we feel known and understood. Without supported and safe nervous systems, our bodies are unable to experience the absolutely spontaneous and unexpected expressions that come with our PLAY circuit.
Play in its purest form requires the interaction of two or more beings (people, pets, anyone that can be responsive). It also requires safety.
But what do we do if people have not been safe?
How can we support ourselves to have nourishing playful social connections and a sense of belonging even when we have lived through difficult things?
Resonance is the experience of another human understanding what is happening for you, and you being able to say yes to their expression of understanding. It has the transformative capacity to connect and heal us by offering new experiences of safety and acceptance to our nervous systems, which opens the door to play.
With the help of a neuroscience-based understanding of what makes us safe, Resonant Language works directly with the nervous system to restore our birthright of safety so that true delight becomes possible and even frequent.
Resonance enables us to have the experience of making sense to ourselves and others, sometimes for the first time. Often social safety is the missing piece that allows our bodies to find relaxation and open to joy.
As our nervous systems become fully supported, the movement towards spontaneous emergent play is actually unstoppable: like a bubbling brook cascading down a mountainside after the snows melt.
The Resonance Summit 5-9 April 2024
The fourth annual Resonance Summit, hosted by Sarah Peyton, offers a deep exploration of the latest neuroscience research on play plus wonderful interactive sessions, and an opportunity to immersively experience and learn resonance in community.
Each morning of the Summit features a keynote address by five exciting voices in the field of relational neuroscience, play, and trauma healing. Following keynotes, the days unfold through workshops and practice spaces led by some of the most creative and rigorous resonance practitioners working today.
My session “Play’s Hidden Symmetry: Constellations Through Play Alchemy” will take place on Tuesday, 9 April 10.30 am – 11.55 am PDT. I hope you’ll come to play!
Register here this free five-day experiential learning immersion to begin to change your brain into a kinder and more playful place, discover your own relational self, and catch a glimpse of the rich world of emergence that resonance and play can make possible for you.
What if you can’t make it to the LIVE summit?
In that case, you’re welcome to support this wonderful event by purchasing the summit recordings package available now with a pre-summit discount!
Lead from Your Heart in 2024 with Play Alchemy
If you’re looking to learn how to lead from your heart and have fun doing it, then you’ve come to right play space!
Playful Leadership is a unique, intuitive and deeply resourcing approach to cultivating your own leadership based on the powerful quintuplet of Play Science, neuroscience, psychology, coaching and Systemic Constellations. It is grounded in what Portia Tung, the founder of The School of Play, calls Play Alchemy which is made up of the process, tools and techniques for transmuting the seemingly insurmountable challenges we face into positive outcomes so that we can thrive, have fun and get more of what we want done in a VUCA world.
When asked how best to describe their experience on the Playful Leadership programme, participants unanimously agree with a smile and a cheer, “It’s not a course, it’s a PLAY-cation!” That’s because the word PLAY-cation sums up neatly that wondrous tingling feeling we get after a proper holiday from the routine and mundane and of having achieved a profound transformation that took barely any effort because it was so much fun.
Meet You Second Star to the Right
Dear Playmakers,
As this year draws to an end and we stand together on the cusp of a new year, I’d like to thank you for your warm interest, enthusiasm and commitment in leading more playful lives and enabling transformational change for greater good – be it at work, at home or wherever life finds you.
A Wise Owl Looks Back…
This year has been a rollercoaster ride of fun and growth as the Playful Leadership programme launched two brand new courses in the beautiful play space of Ashridge House, inspiration for Hogwarts, in Berkhamsted, UK.
In spring 2023, we cultivated greater emotional awareness and intelligence on Playful Leadership: Rejuvenation which re-connected us with some of our most powerful inner resources to overcome the challenges we face.
In summer 2023, I splish-splashed with delight with Robert Digings on the subject of play and leadership in his podcast series Highly Relational – that play could not only be an approach to work but a credible and effective leadership approach I call Playful Leadership.
This autumn brought together the highest number of The School of Play’s alumni at a single event, along with new playmakers, as we accompanied one another on our individual journey back to our collective point of origin on Playful Leadership: Origination to increase our creativity by harnessing our passions, skills, wishes and dreams.
This winter we gathered in my home city of Milton Keynes for a 1-day workshop Glow in Prosperity to explore our relationship with giving and taking through techniques for manifesting abundance so it can percolate in different aspects of our lives.
Meet You Second Star to the Right in 2024
To celebrate the new year, we at The School of Play are merrily preparing a whole host of heart-warming and new ways for you to say “Yay!” to more play in 2024.
Keep your eyes peeled for upcoming events by signing up for The School of Play newsletter-blog here.
The Play in Me bows to the Play in You and Those You Are Important To,
Portia
From Christmas Dinner to a Festive Tea Party
Imagine the Christmas dining table as a clockface, where the first one to arrive sits at 12 o’clock. We continue clockwise as the next one to arrive sits on their left. Each of us continues to take our rightful place until the most recent joiner of the system pulls up a chair nearest to 12 o’clock to complete the circle. As you slowly look around the circle, beginning with the first to arrive in this system, how does it feel? How does your place in this system influence who you are and how you act – be it at home, at work, anywhere you go?
Now lean back a little and notice that this system doesn’t exist in isolation, rather it’s part of a greater whole. In the same way you are, being part of your birth family and all those who came before as well as being part of another system among newer loved ones, perhaps a family of your own.
As the Christmas season approaches its pinnacle, how lucky are you feeling this year? What if instead of trying to play our cards right at the Christmas dining table, we have a go at playing our cards better by making the most of the cards we’ve been dealt?
If you celebrate Christmas, I wish you a merry one. If you celebrate in a different way, I wish you a merry one, too. And if you prefer not to celebrate, I wish you joy in the choice you have made.
Wishing you and your loved ones much love, light and laughter this winter season!
THE SCHOOL OF PLAY 