Welcome to the Black Girl Burnout Podcast. Kelly here. And today I want to talk all about play. This episode is about how you can opt into play in your life. Playing is not

something that we talk about a lot in our community and in our life, particularly as adults.

I don't think anyone understands the power of play past the age of like 10, where it's still acceptable to pretend to be a superhero

or to have an imaginary friend or to have recess even baked into your school day. We understand how

powerful play can be for kids, but we don't talk enough about how play factors into

longevity in adult life and more importantly, is a key way to opt out of struggle. Now, I will

freely say that the concept of play is something that I have struggled with as an adult.

I'm a lot better at it now, but I'm someone who just was one of those people that people

would say, you need to relax, go have fun.

And it wasn't that I didn't have a sense of humor.

I wasn't fun to be around, but I often thought

that play was silly or getting in the way of me being productive or excellent or achieving a goal.

So today I want to talk about how to opt into play in your daily life, how to define what that means,

particularly as adults, what are the benefits of play, what types of thinking and behaviors

can become barriers to us engaging in play, and then of course how to do that, how to incorporate

play in our daily life.

And as always, I will close with a daily practice, a play practice in this case, that you can do right away or at least in the next couple days to ensure that you have more play time in your life.

Before we get into what play is and what the barriers are, it's really important that we talk about why we're discussing play and how that relates to us as black women.

We cannot avoid the elephant in the room that our historical past has been filled with

racial trauma and that we have learned that play is not for black people.

That play leads to punishment.

And that play is not for people whose legacy may be filled with slavery, civil rights disruptions,

...