Playful Wisdom

Playful Wisdom
Author: Robert Leigh Davis
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2020-10-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1793626294

Playful Wisdom examines how Henry David Thoreau’s thinking about religious “play” created a theological legacy in American literature—one that includes Emily Dickinson, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Merton, Annie Dillard, and Marilynne Robinson. Although these writers differ in many ways, they share with Thoreau an improvisational “looseness” or “mobility” in their thinking about the sacred, a sense that religious experience unsettles fixed belief and alters the very shape of the perceiving self. From this perspective, Robert Leigh Davis argues, unswerving orthodoxy is not as crucial to a life of faith as a light-handed responsiveness of spirit that constantly revises fixed assumptions in light of new experiences. Dickinson describes this responsiveness as “nimble believing” and Thoreau calls it “holy play.” Scholars of literature, religion, and philosophy will find this book particularly useful.

A Playful Path

A Playful Path
Author: Bernard De Koven
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2013-12-18
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1304351823

A Playful Path, the new book by games guru and fun theorist Bernard De Koven, serves as a collection of ideas and tools to help us bring our playfulness back into the open. When we find ourselves forgetting the life of the game or the game of life, the joy of form or the content, the play of brain or mind, body or spirit, this book can help us return to that which our soul is heir.

A Playful Production Process

A Playful Production Process
Author: Richard Lemarchand
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2021-10-12
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0262045516

How to achieve a happier and healthier game design process by connecting the creative aspects of game design with techniques for effective project management. This book teaches game designers, aspiring game developers, and game design students how to take a digital game project from start to finish—from conceptualizing and designing to building, playtesting, and iterating—while avoiding the uncontrolled overwork known among developers as “crunch.” Written by a legendary game designer, A Playful Production Process outlines a process that connects the creative aspects of game design with proven techniques for effective project management. The book outlines four project phases—ideation, preproduction, full production, and post-production—that give designers and developers the milestones they need to advance from the first glimmerings of an idea to a finished game.

Playful Intelligence

Playful Intelligence
Author: Anthony T. DeBenedet
Publisher: Santa Monica Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2018-05-01
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 1595807934

As adults, we have more responsibilities than we could have ever imagined growing up. Learning the work of marriage. Navigating the bumpy terrain of parenting. Maintaining social relationships. Facing grave hardship. Finding contentment in our career. As the years pass by, we sense how the good things in life are so often eclipsed by stress. We find ourselves doing everything we can just to endure adulthood, all the while wondering whether we are actually enjoying it. This is exactly why Dr. Anthony T. DeBenedet decided to write Playful Intelligence: The Power of Living Lightly in a Serious World, to show readers how playfulness helps us counterbalance the seriousness of adulthood. “Five years ago, my life was becoming more intense and stressful,” DeBenedet says. “My relationships, clinical work as a physician, and basic interactions with the world were blurring into a frazzled mosaic. Going through the motions became my norm, and every day brought busyness and exhaustion. I thought about whether I was depressed. I didn’t think I was. Anxious? Sure, but aren’t we all anxious on some level? I also thought about the lifestyle factors that could be making me feel this way. Was I getting enough sleep? Was I exercising regularly? Was I eating healthy? Was I playing and remembering to be playful?” Today, we live in a taxing world. The endless pressure to keep up with our responsibilities and the daily headlines swarming around us can be overwhelming. DeBenedet’s work comes at a time when stress, uncertainty, and intensity levels are high. Playful Intelligence shows adults that there is a way to live lighter—and smarter—as we navigate the seriousness of adulthood. It’s not about taking life less seriously; it’s about taking ourselves less seriously. The book’s core chapters are devoted to exploring the effects and benefits of five playful qualities: imagination, sociability, humor, spontaneity, and wonder. By examining playfulness as a sum of its parts, readers will gain a working awareness of its power and be able to apply playful principles to their own lives, bringing the magic of childhood back into their day-to-day existence. The book also offers practical suggestions on how to make life more playful in nature.

Playful Mindfulness

Playful Mindfulness
Author: Ted DesMaisons
Publisher:
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2019-03-21
Genre: Creative ability
ISBN: 9781950373000

Playful Mindfulness brings together wisdom from the worlds of mindfulness (paying attention to the present moment with curiosity and kindness) and improvisation (making life up courageously as you go along) so readers can find greater confidence, calm, and connection. CONFIDENCE. CALM. CONNECTION. Do you long to express that creative project or idea but tell yourself you're not good or clever or funny enough, so why even try? Do you dream of a wide-open life filled with moments of wonder, delight and surprise but find yourself trapped in routine and smothered by stress? Do you yearn for deep, meaningful connection with those around you but feel yourself ever more isolated by social media and modern technology? HOPE IS ON THE WAY. In these pages, Ted DesMaisons takes your hand and leads you on a beautiful, surprising and unruly adventure into the lands where mindfulness and improvisation overlap. There, you'll discover the same freedom, ease, and joy that thousands of his students at Stanford and elsewhere have found for themselves.

Delighting in the Feminine Divine

Delighting in the Feminine Divine
Author: Bridget Mary Meehan
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 168
Release: 1994
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9781556126581

In this text the reader is allowed both the freedom to accept and the freedom to affirm those human traits and values that western culture has traditionally identified with woman.

The Wild Woman's Way

The Wild Woman's Way
Author: Michaela Boehm
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2021-11-09
Genre: FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS
ISBN: 1501179896

"As pragmatic as it is compassionate, this intimate, humorous, and ultimately relaxing invitation to re-wild yourself, stripping away all that is not your true nature, will leave you inspired and curious to discover the wild woman within" (Lissa Rankin, MD, New York Times bestselling author of Mind Over Medicine). For the high-achieving modern woman today, having a successful career, a fulfilling romantic relationship, and a satisfying personal life can feel like opposing goals. It has even become difficult to take the time to enjoy the simple pleasures in lives. We are stuck in "go-mode," damaging our romantic relationships, pleasure, and creativity. But what if there were a way to experience the simplest pleasures of our lives on a deeper level, freeing the body and psyche from these destructive patterns? Beyond our current stereotypes about femininity lies the ancient wisdom of the Wild Woman archetype, a model of building a feminine "body intelligence." By embodying this archetype and using tantra--not just in the bedroom, but also to build intimate connections to our senses and physical movements--we can break harmful psychological patterns. In The Wild Woman's Way, Michaela Boehm shares practical rituals and exercises drawn from years of experience as a celebrity relationship and life counselor and an expert in tantric yoga. She reveals the power of different types of touch, while also training you in forms of meditation and stretching that increase activity and sensual pleasure.

Contemporary Daoism, Organic Relationality, and Curriculum of Integrative Creativity

Contemporary Daoism, Organic Relationality, and Curriculum of Integrative Creativity
Author: Hongyu Wang
Publisher: IAP
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2021-08-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1648025862

Creativity in the West is often perceived as “cutting edge” and “ground-breaking” in a singular act of giving birth to the new. However, to what degree has this model of breaking away from others and the world contributed to the current crisis in education, society, and ecology even before the tragic COVID-19 pandemic and responses to it? How can our reimagining of creativity contribute to the mutual flourishing of humanity and of relations between humans and the planet? Daoist creativity, based upon relationality and interdependence, has much to offer to today’s curriculum as a complicated conversation to sustain life and renew the world. Integrative, emergent, embodied, co-creative, and ecological, Daoist creativity has a built-in opening to difference through the organic relationality of Yin/Yang dynamics. This book focuses on one essential thread in Daoism—integrative creativity through organic relationality—and weaves its interplay with Western thought through multiple and intertwined dimensions of curriculum. Exploring Dao as dynamic and setting creative curriculum in motion, this book juxtaposes the notion of Wuwei and self-organization to conceptualize emergent classroom dynamics, and re-envisions the inner landscape of education through negotiating dialogues between the Jungian psyche and Daoist dynamics. Further, it explores gendered implications of Daoism to interact with feminism and formulates the pursuit of inner and outer peace through creative harmony to inform nonviolence curriculum. Synthesizing cross-cultural insights and wisdom, it provides an in-depth and intuitive understanding of the interactions between Daoist and Western creativity and elaborates a curriculum of integrative creativity for students, teachers, and their educational community. Let us all attend to the urgent call for individual and collective awakenings and for creativity that connects. Praise for Contemporary Daoism, Organic Relationality, and Curriculum of Integrative Creativity: "Hongyu Wang’s book on Daoism is a treasure. It is beautifully written and includes a diverse literature that demonstrates her impressive scholarship. She explores the relevance of Daoism’s ancient wisdom to many current issues including gender, nonviolence, peace education, as well as teaching and learning. This is an important addition to growing literature on Daoism. In a time of division we need Daoism’s cosmic perspective on how we can live peacefully and harmoniously on this earth." ~ Jack Miller The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto "One barrier to meaningful educational reform is our inability to imagine things differently. Wang’s study offers a set of lenses drawn from Chinese Daoism that could stimulate meaningful educational reform by envisioning a curriculum that moves beyond analytical reasoning toward more peaceful, humane, and ecologically sustainable ways of teaching, learning, and knowing. Along the way, Wang explores the links between Daoism and complexity theory and Daoism’s compatibilities and contrasts with aspects of Western philosophy, including recent scholarship on eco-feminism. Educators will be intrigued by this study of Daoism as a form of embodied curriculum that works toward the development of authentic personhood and transformative interconnectedness through an emphasis on lived experience in tandem with intellectual developmentand they will be inspired to examine and rethink their current practice." ~ Gay Garland Reed Professor Emerita, University of Hawaii "Honyu Wang’s book offers us a solution for nowadays crises like social and ecological ones, by pointing out that the integrative creativity and curriculum is the key...Her ideas are accessible and can enrich our perspective as educationists. The novelty and uniqueness of the book is that it makes a bridge between Western culture and East culture, between past and present and it is also a bridge from today to the future of the entire Earth." ~ Maria Butucea, Teacher Training Department, Technical University of Civil Engineering, Bucharest

Playful Learning

Playful Learning
Author: Mariah Bruehl
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011-08-09
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 1590308190

Children are natural scientists, artists, mathematicians, authors, and scholars. From the time they are born they seek out information about the world around them in an effort to construct meaning and further their development. While children have an inherent drive to make sense of their reality, parents have a unique opportunity to harness their children’s curiosity and channel it into a love of learning. Playful learning is the magic that takes place when we meld a child’s sense of joy and wonder with thoughtfully planned learning experiences. Through easy-to-implement, hands-on projects you can engage your child in fun and creative ways that encourage learning and impart the joy of discovery. With a little bit of information and forethought, you can play a pivotal role in the cognitive and creative development of your child Mariah Bruehl has worked in the field of education for over a decade. She has taught in the classroom, developed curriculum in many different subject areas, trained teachers, and implemented programs across many grade levels. She is the mother of two girls and the owner of Playful Learning—a retail space and education center in Sag Harbor. Learn more at www.playfulearning.com.