Welcome to apple pie playground where we serve up slices of healing for the heart. Stay tuned for a journey of transformation back to the divine inner child. Can you come out and play today? Welcome everybody to Apple Pie Playground. I am your host, Valerie, and it is so, so wonderful to be here with you today.

And all of my love to BBS on behalf of our show, we love you so much, BBS. I am thinking a little bit this week about the idea of us as human experiences as it were. And that word kind of brings back to me, the memory of a show that I used to watch, and I loved it so much. It's a comedy TV show, and it's about a counseling group of alien experiences. And it's called people of Earth if you've ever watched it.

Anyway, it's such a good show, and I really, really love it. But they did not call themselves patients or victims or anything like that. They chose the word experiences, and it it helped great importance to everybody in the group there in that in that show. Such a fun fun show. So I'm thinking as humans, we really tend to naturally adapt our identities to our environments.

Like our experiences in that one show did, we adapt our identities to our environments, and we become where we are. Have you ever noticed that? We become where we are, and we become what the rules are in in our environments. Or we move on to new rules, to new environments. Right?

We're we're very adaptive, very resilient, and don't for forget for a minute, friends, how special you are as a person and also as a species, and we don't wanna forget that. And maybe that's why we're so highly controlled right now on a planet of humans because maybe we inevitably do this thing that gets us controlled and puts us into into an opportunity to be so highly controlled, and that is we have learned through our lifetimes of experience to measure ourselves by our limitations. Right? We look for rules. We have to take workshops to help us learn how to think outside the box.

Right? And we're so used to coloring inside the lines that our first inclination about most anything we do is to ask, can I do this? Can I handle this? What if I fail? What if I fail?

And, you know, there's nothing wrong with those questions. It's it's something of a baseline for how we make our decisions. Right? We try to figure out what our capacity for something is. And do we remember all of those aptitude tests we used to take in school?

The ones they measure the degree of our potential for something, aptitude tests. Right? They're used everywhere to find our potential ceiling on any number of things, right, any any any set of skills. And they measure you know, predetermine a way to measure our capacity to perform any number of tasks or professions or talents, that we might undertake so that we can predetermine if we have the capacity to do the things we wanna do. Can you even imagine that we submit to that kind of experience?

But we do. We are a species of aptitude taking test takers. Right? Aptitude taking humans who wanna know exactly what other people think are our limitations. That's that's what we seem to do as strange as it it may seem to us.

Right? But society is training us to find our own limitations. And the idea is if we can do that, we gravitate to the appropriate set of rules for us to use. And quite frankly, friends, it's all a setup. Right?

It's a setup. We're trained to self impose limitations as humans, and it's the whole idea of risk analysis. It's when you do this thing called risk analysis, it's all the rage. It has been for quite a while. It's a highly prioritized process, right, in corporate America.

And and the reason is the real reason for risk analysis is to measure a company's project alignment with its appropriate set of rules and worker aptitudes. Right? That's the real risk analysis going on, and it goes on everywhere. It this business model seeps down into everything we do. It's in the school systems now.

Everything in a school system is measured by project management and risk analysis. It's everywhere in everything we do. Right? And risk analysis actually builds in safeguards against optimism biases. Right?

So if we are overly optimistic about something, then the risk analysis is gonna pull us back, right, and build in safeguards that ensure loss aversion instead. And so let me give you a fun little image. Okay? Let me give you a fun little image. For some of us, down deep in our hearts, we are all worrying that if we made colorful little wristbands and pretty corded fibers with beads sewn into them and put them out on a table, nobody would buy them.

The things we love creating so much, And it is such a joy to make those lovely wristbands. And as soon as they're made, right, we enter into this other world of outcomes, and the activity is attached then to marketing and sales and limitation and outcomes. And the truth is we talk all the time, all the time about releasing our present moments to the perfect opportunity of self creation and manifesting our joy unattached to outcomes. Right? We talk about it all the time.

And then we turn around, and we walk right back into the limitations of society. Right? We get up from our meditation cushion, and we walk right back in to social limitation focused on nothing but outcomes. Right? We're managing outcomes is the only game in town, really.

We are spirits cultivating enlightenment, unattached outcomes who walk right out our door every morning, attached to an entire routine designed for nothing but outcomes. And to be fair, right, to be fair, we are a self ordering species. Right? We gotta eat. We have to eat down here on Earth.

We we have to make peace with their responsibilities of being human, and I get it. I get it. But then there's that super fun and and very refreshing experience that comes along every once in a while where we meet somebody who thinks completely differently in their approach to life. They throw all of that out the window. And how fun it is to run into a person who says, why not do this thing?

Right? Why not do what I wanna do or experience what I want to experience or be what I want to be, that kind of thing? And there they are the why not people, and it is so refreshing and mysterious and intoxicating to meet a person like that. And why not people? You know, they live by a completely different presumption for life, and their presumption is that they they already have all of the permissions needed to experience this human life the way they want to.

They are the risk takers and explorers and adventurers and lovers of our ages. Right? The they're true human experiences, if you will, going back to the to the the TV comedy that I I like so much. The true human experiences. Now I'm I'm bringing all of that up as sort of a preface to our conversation today because it's might be relevant to recognize that children in general are why not people.

Right? Infants are born into this realm, into this reality as why not people. It's why they have to learn so many rules throughout our lifetimes because we all came in without any. Right? Social control starts early to wean us out of our why not with rules.

We come into the world, and there's nothing guiding us, but our why not. Right? Our spiritual, energetic why not. Everybody's born with it. Right?

We are originally why not kids once upon a time, and and then the human experience sort of siphons that away a little at a time. And don't ever forget that rules are for two kinds of people, friends. They are for the people who have reached a point in their human experience where they they can't function without rules. Okay? There's no independence left.

The mechanics of social control have molded them into a need for rules by design. And then they are for weeding out the people who wouldn't follow the rules otherwise and probably still won't even with a set of rules. Right? So let's remember these two two kinds of folks. Anytime we are given a set of rules, any rules, any set of rules, and I'll take a big example because why not?

Right? Like Moses' 10 commandments, for example, A very controversial example. Those rules are the mechanics for siphoning off the why not experiences in the group. Oh, yeah. The freethinkers, the knowers, the testers, the adventurers, the way showers, the way showers, friends, the ones who are gonna push back.

They're gonna push back the curtain. They're the dangerous ones, right, who move through the veil. And imagine if we are all actually unified in a in an energetic space together. Right? And we are echoing off of each other in a flow of truth energy that guides us.

No rules necessary. And knowing flows around us and through us. Our spiritual sonar is communicating to each other like dolphins or whales, and our echolocation communicates everything between us in an ocean of source energy. Isn't that so beautiful? It's so beautiful.

And we care about the collective and its needs, and we care about each other. And I have to ask you, friends, why would we need to have 10 rules to tell us what to do and how to treat each other? Why do we need that? What are rules giving us that our energy can't give us among ourselves? What can't we know naturally about how to treat each other in a family or at work or on the playground?

And why aren't we the ones making our own rules together as what we do collectively? And we can see how social control systems get rid of the way showers, the why notters. Right? The why notters. And then they put into place systems of rules for the rest of us who have essentially lost our energetic connections together.

And social forces of control call it unifying under a code of conduct and such, And it assimilates us and regulates us in every environment we can imagine, every single environment we walk into. And we operate in the status quo expressions of our lives by design. We weren't born that way. Our spirits don't operate that way, but these human bodies in a polarity of experiences have undergone the metamorphosis of social control in a way that undermines all of our sovereignty, and and we end up in a status quo illusion of experiences. And we acclimate to habits of inaction, and we accept a moral divestment of our human responsibilities.

Yeah. That's what we're doing. We lose our uniqueness. We lose our edge, our indomitable spirit of the way of the why not presumption. And I would wish for all of us to feel why nots as much as we can in our lives.

Right? The next time somebody asks you why, right, they ask you a why question, reply with a why not and see what happens. Right? Just a thought. It might be that the best way of living in the present moment is doing it as a why not experience, friends.

I'm just saying. And so speaking of why not, let's let's do something we didn't get to do very much last week, and that is play a little bit. You wanna play? And so I'm hoping I I hear you say, sure. Why not?

So let's share a little expressive art together for a few minutes. You wanna do that? I will provide the play, and you do the self reflection. Right? So what we do is grab something to write with and something to write on.

Get your notebooks out if you use them. We don't wanna leave anybody behind, so take a moment. Grab something to write with, something to write on. Grab your notebooks, and we will work together on this super fun little expressive exercise. And in this exercise, we are going to draw a personality statue, a personality statue.

And I hope everybody's had some time to grab something to write with and something to write on, and we're gonna draw a personality statue. And here are our instructions. So visualize in your mind a tall block of marble. In your mind, visualize a tall block of marble. And on your paper, you can see it as a large rectangle on your paper.

Right? So just envision a a large rectangle that you are going to use on your piece of paper as you imagine this block of marble in your mind. Okay? Do you see it? We're gonna sculpt our blocks with a few different forms as we go along, and we will draw those forms into our rectangle on our page as as a sculpture that we're creating in our mind.

So keep in mind, this is a personality statue of you. Okay? Are we ready? So we are imagining a rectangular block on our papers as we sculpt. And so let's begin.

The first thing we wanna do is create a foundation for our sculpture. So at the bottom of your block, of your rectangle on your piece of paper, depict a form in the bottom part of your marble that represents your foundation, the foundation of who you are? It could be any image you wanna use. Okay? What makes you who you are?

And is there a way to capture that by drawing a form around the bottom of your statue as we build this statue together and shape it? How would you like your statue's foundation to look? And think about why you might want it to look that way. So let's take a minute and draw in at the bottom of our block imagery into our statue that captures who we are at our foundation or at our core. You got it?

And once you have created the the foundation imagery of your statue, let's move to the middle part of your marble block, the rectangle on your paper. Let's draw a representation of your talents or your skills, your creativity, what you love to do, what gives you joy. So think about what forms you can sculpt into your block to represent your joy, your talents, your skills, the creative essence of who you are. Take a minute to build that imagery into your statue, right, by drawing those forms onto your paper. Got it?

So now we are gonna top off our statue with its most visually striking element at the very top. And at the top of your block, the rectangle on your paper at the very top, sculpt a form that illustrates your true self. Your true self. What imagery would you use to capture your true self at the very top of your beautiful statue? And we think about this statue as an idea that completes us in many different kinds of ways, don't we?

Do you have it? Do we have our sculpture created on our paper as we think about it in our mind? So now maybe let's do an artistic artistic analysis of our statue. You wanna do that? It's what artists like to do.

Right? So let's just walk through an artistic analysis of the statue we just created. And the first thing we will do is we're gonna observe our statue. Right? We're not gonna analyze it.

We're not gonna think about it. We're we're just gonna look at it. What is what is on that paper? Take a minute and observe your work in its entirety. How does it flow among the imagery?

And we're just gonna observe what's on our paper. Right? How beautiful this is, your creativity that you've just captured. You've allowed yourself to play a little bit in your creativity. That creation inspiration is very powerful.

So now let's take a minute and analyze their composition. Okay? Let's analyze. What are you seeing on the paper? Are there dramatic shapes?

How do your forms flow together? What kind of analysis can you make on the way that you put your imagery together in your statue? Let's analyze. Okay? Let's analyze.

Right? And now let's think about, is there a story there in your statue? Is there a story that you have told of yourself in the forms that you've sculpted? What is the story behind the forms that you have captured in your sculpture? Take a second and think about the story that has unfolded in this beautiful sculpture that might be standing in a beautiful square somewhere for everybody to see.

Right? What is the story that you have told? And so the last thing we can do is let's interpret our statue subject matter. Let's interpret it. Let's title it.

What does the story mean to you? How do you interpret what you're seeing, what you've created, the whole of what's on your statue? Right? What's a title for your your statue? The subject matter.

If you entitled it, what would it be? And you can write that on your page if you want. Write your title on your page, and you can be as creative as you want to. And so that's just a little bit of analysis for our statue. I hope that was fun.

I think that was super fun. And I wanna thank you so much for playing along this afternoon. It's so fun to allow our spirits to do what they love to do most, and that is to create that energy is so alive and magnificent, and and the energy is it always serves us when we can be in a space of creativity. It always serves us friends. So I wanna share some thoughts on a debate that I heard a few days ago, and it's actually an ongoing debate.

It's something that folks, especially in spiritual communities, really, they they like to talk about, and sometimes they hate to talk about it, but they feel like they have to. And we all sort of engage ideas just to try to create an understanding, but it's about the differences between unity and unified consciousness, right, and the partner ideas of oneness and singularity and all of these things that float around in how we try to identify our place and space, in source energy and our relationship with source energy. And we're gonna get maybe a little metaphysical here about things. And, really, it's just brains trying to do what brains do. Right?

The mind trying to understand ideas the way that minds do. So we're just really getting super philosophical about probably things we can't even prove in human bodies right now. Right? But, you know, who knows what the conversation might reveal? And I'm I am going somewhere with the idea, and I'm hoping you can come along with me and that it it will make sense for us.

So these debates are fairly instructive to me when I hear folks talking about the differences between unity and unified consciousness and the ideas of oneness and singularity and, oh my, we're confused, and and it's frustrating. And how do we pull apart these ideas? And and it's instructive because for me, I'm looking at the degree of responsibility that we have in our own journey, that degree of duty that we have as spirits here in this journey we're taking, this human journey. Right? That really is the question of interest to me is how, aware and cognizant are we of what we're doing here as spirits and human bodies?

And, I think about it as we might measure it by how we see our connection to source and to others using these ideas. Right? It's my reference point, to childhood, really. And I always go back to to this idea of childhood and to children. When we were children, we were very much into our own experience of self.

Okay? Psychology calls that egocentrism or self absorption or unconsciousness, but I call it something a little different. I I like to think of it in terms of the glow of selfness. Right? Selfness.

Children have selfness. They are authentically who they are. And psychology, in large part, defines young children with singular thinking. Right? That everybody sees the world the way they do.

That's how children believe their world works, according to psychology at least. Children are focused on fully appreciating their own point of reference. They are still operating outside of time and space when you really think about it. Right? And so psychology sees children as having limitations in their cognitive abilities, and they do.

They do have quite a bit of limitation. And for me, I that's that's that's not a bad thing because they haven't developed into the brain yet. Right? It happens very, very quickly, but but not immediately. And so there's there's space to experience, you know, the spirit as children before the brain takes over.

Very small opportunity there, but it is there, and it is nurturing and informative for the the way that we live the rest of our lives if we don't forget. If we don't forget, many of us do. So children are super authentic and super why not beings. Right? They just act.

Why not? Right? Before the brain kicks in, they're why not beings. And so psychology tells us that early childhood plays a critical part in the way children develop a self identity. Right?

And, actually, that's important work because every interaction that a child has is either gonna promote their self identity or erode it. Okay? One or the other. And here's the thing. Self love develops or fails to develop through this nexus of all of these early interactions as children are developing self identity.

Right? So the spirit is moving through this process of self identity, of of self limitation. Right? And the brain is gonna move it right on into even more limitation when it takes over. So young children experience every experience fully as themselves.

Right? They are truly authentic. They can't not be authentic until they start growing up, and then a lot of cognitive control systems kick in. Right? And our spirits are going through this.

Our spirits are going through all of this. And our brains learn then, right, to work from a couple of biases to maintain something of a status quo of behavior supported thinking. This is what starts occurring as soon as our brains begin to kick in and take over our bodies, and they do. They do. Our brains perform what's called a default effect where it actually prefers normalizing decisions so that they become a default for the brain.

Right? It's easier on the brain when you can create a system of defaults. Right? You normalize function, and that lessens a lot of synaptic effort on the part of the brain. And so the brain says, don't change this chemical or this thought pattern or this perception, Right?

Because it's already locked in, so let's let's just go with it. Let's let's go with what's going on. Right? So when you think about it, when you really think about it, the brain supports our inaction. It's easier.

It's more manageable to support our inaction, to support what doesn't change. Right? And there's also something called a status quo bias in the mind. Okay? And it's a cognitive preference to keep the mechanics from chemical changes in the brain.

Whatever state the brain is in, it prefers maintaining that stasis, over changing it, if you will. Right? If you can imagine that. So let's let's just think about this. The social construction of reality is run on the cognitive ideas of maintaining mental status quo.

Right? Mental status quo and prescribes an avoidance to change. Right? Reinforces inaction. So let's think about this.

What do rules do? Any list of rules, any process of rulemaking, what does it do? It creates a status quo preference and prescribes an avoidance to change and reinforces inaction. Follow the rules. Follow the rules.

And as humans, we do this every single day in almost everything that we do when we think about it by design. Right? And so change and the idea of change is an undesired element of any status quo construct, and it starts in the brain. It starts in the brain. And when we follow a handful of right, we're being set up to habituate status quo, to avoid change, to prefer inaction.

Right? Do we see why the are so special now? Right? Folks who can step out of that and say, why not? And we see why that is such a beautiful space for a human experience.

And children are why not ers. They're so very different from the adult human being in this very particular way. Can we see that? The experience of the young child and her spirit is a visceral experience of beingness. Right?

And it's hosting her spirit with her own frequency, fully operational. The spirit comes into the body with our own frequency. We are fully operational, and then it just it has to deal with the body that is gonna lose the relationship that spirit has with the child as the big brain takes over the human experience. Right? And we can delay that kind of mental takeover with things that we do, that we choose to do, and that's why play is so important, friends.

Play is so important. Exploration, adventure, anything that is creative, that is creation energy, all the things that why not people like to do, which is why play is so important at all ages, by the way. Right? It's why we like to do it here because it is such a creative energetic. It changes the way that we approach our spiritual connection just by sitting down and doing a little play.

It changes everything about us even just for a moment. Right? It keeps us in greater creative contact with our spirits, spirits that value a state of sovereign beingness, and it probably misses that from childhood. Can you imagine what the spirits might miss from us and their childhood? Right?

When we think about it, if you wanna get, you know, emotional about it, that's an emotional way to look at it. So when we're creative and spontaneous and joyful, we're actually integrating with spirit at high levels and reinforcing our energetic relationship. We don't have to be a child to do that. We can remember what that's like. Right?

And we're doing what spirit loves to do then. When we choose to leave the experience and go back to suffering and problem solving and mental tasks, we don't realize how debilitating work, work, work is to the creative energies of a spirit. Right? Unless it's creative work, of course. But make no mistake.

Our spirits are our own unique blueprints, our responsibility of care. We are our own evolutions. We are our own celestial experience, and knowledge building is unique as who we are, right, and how we choose to create. Time to head home, friends. Thanks for being a part of today's journey.

We'll see you back on the playground next Sunday at 1PM central time on pbsradio.com. Make sure to subscribe if you enjoyed the show. Find us on Telegram and X to share your insights on topics today. Your input heals the child in us all.