When Healing Gets Too Serious – The Missing Medicine of Play
Updated: Feb 2
Written by Rasha AlShaar, Mind-Body Coach, PCC
Rasha AlShaar, PCC, is a Mind-Body Coach with an integrative approach to healing and self-development. By merging modalities that range from mindset and somatic tools, she's on a mission to facilitate full-body healing and head-to-toe awakenings to help people embody their authentic truth and innate power.
We’ve been conditioned into a healing trap, that growth requires grief, and that “the work” only counts in the dark. But what if our giggles were just as transformative as our tears?
When we mistake darkness for depth
I’m a strong advocate of various healing modalities, therapeutic approaches, and spiritual practices. I receive them, and I offer them, and yet I have found that some of my most profound realizations and shifts didn’t happen on a meditation cushion or in session, but during the time in between. In integration through uncontrollable laughter with friends, a conversation with a stranger at a gathering, or silly dancing with cousins at a wedding after-party.
Lately, as the healing space has moved more into the mainstream, I’ve noticed a subtle but significant shift. These spaces have become increasingly legitimized and, with that, increasingly serious. There is now an unspoken assumption that depth only lives in the darkness, that transformation has to be extracted from pain, and that play is merely a “break” from the real work.
The myth of the “serious” seeker
I recently sat down with a close friend and colleague, also in the wellness world, and we found ourselves reflecting on how often people walk into a healing space and instinctively put on a “healing persona.” A version of themselves that is serious, stoic, and somehow braced to do “the work.” In conversation, we connected over the fact that our primary role isn’t just to facilitate an experience, it’s to ensure people know that not only are all of them welcome, but all of them are necessary for the healing work to actually work.
The reality is that this healing persona is another subtle form of performance that both facilitators embody and, as a result, their community adopts. It’s the idea that a “good” client or a “conscious” person must seem a certain way.
This usually shows up when I begin working with a new client who has had some form of support in the past and is seemingly programmed to believe they need to excuse their very real pain as not being traumatic enough. Or they cancel a session because “everything is actually going great,” as if joy doesn’t deserve the same level of inquiry as trauma. It also appears in ceremonies and circles as the one who gets the giggles and feels the need to excuse themselves, fearing they are disrupting the sanctity of the moment.
When we decide that only the heavy stuff is worthy of transformation, we inadvertently create a new kind of armor and another internal barrier that then requires its own processing. By only welcoming our pain, we miss the medicine of play.
Why the body needs play
There are biological reasons why our nervous systems actually require moments of aliveness and ease to integrate big change. According to Polyvagal Theory, developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, play exists in a unique physiological state where our safety system, the Ventral Vagal, is active alongside our energy system, the Sympathetic. This hybrid state allows us to experience high energy and intensity without the body slipping into fight or flight defense. When we laugh or play in a healing space, we are effectively exercising our nervous system’s ability to handle big emotions while remaining safely connected.
Research also suggests that experiencing joy and humor, what scientists call positive affect, broadens our thought-action repertoires. While seriousness and fear narrow our focus to surviving a problem, joy expands our peripheral vision, allowing us to see solutions and new ways of being that were invisible when we were purely in processing mode.
Life as a healing playground
Beyond structured sessions and soulful ceremonies, there is a third healing space, life itself. There is profound medicine in simply living, in unstructured and unfacilitated moments of connection, curiosity, and exploration, agenda-free. It might be cooking a meal and savoring each step, noticing the rhythm of a walk through the neighborhood, dancing alone to a favorite song, tending to plants, or laughing with a pet. These moments, seemingly ordinary, are deeply regenerative.
These everyday experiences of ease provide the necessary rest for the soul to integrate the heavy lifting we do elsewhere. Without these pauses, the work can become a grind, leading to fatigue rather than true expansion. Life itself, in its spontaneous and unstructured ways, becomes the quiet container where integration, play, and aliveness meet.
The radical welcoming of wholeness
Structure and intention in healing and self-development are essential. They create the safety that allows the nervous system to lean in. But we need to be mindful not to let structure become a cage that keeps out our humanity. When we allow humor into the room, we become more honest because we aren’t trying to say the right thing. When we allow movement and play, we allow emotions to complete their cycles naturally.
If you are arriving with deep-seated pain, bring it. If you are arriving with a ridiculous story and a need to laugh, bring that too. Because the most sacred healing spaces are not the ones that are the most intense, but the ones where you are allowed and encouraged to welcome all of yourself.
And if this approach to healing and self-development resonates, you can book a free consultation call to meet exactly as you are and explore how working together through mindset and trauma-informed somatics can support your return to wholeness.
P.S. While this article champions joy, my practice is rooted in trauma-informed safety. For nervous systems patterned for survival, play can feel threatening rather than relieving. Our work follows your physiological pacing, aiming to restore wholeness by integrating what is truly present, not what we think is.
Read more from Rasha AlShaar
Rasha AlShaar, Mind-Body Coach, PCC
With over a decade of experience in healing practices and self-growth tools, Rasha AlShaar founded her coaching practice in 2020, shaping her integrative approach through ongoing personal growth and rigorous training, blending subconscious, emotional, somatic, behavioral, and energetic modalities to best serve her clients.
Rooted in her curiosity, driven by her commitment to service, and grounded in her PCC accreditation from the International Coaching Federation with 700+ hours of 1:1 coaching experience, Rasha is on a mission to help others on their transformative journeys as a Mind-Body Coach, guiding them to reconnect with their inherent wisdom and worth through insightful dialogue, embodied experience, and tangible action steps.
