Written by: Anaiis Salles, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
From the moment you agree to play The Game of Loss, you can't win for losing. Yes, that old trope. What powers The Game of Loss? What tempts any one of us into playing? And to keep on playing even though we don’t feel good when we lose?
Years of coaching those who struggle with an unshakeable sense of loss and that something small feels ‘off and painful, the exploration relentlessly looks at what shows up as consistent? Until what is small, painful and consistent in a life becomes obvious: avoidance of challenging, painful, or so-called negative feelings that result in being unwilling to see, hear, feel, and know what’s really going on around us. At home. At work. In relationships that matter the most.
GroundHog Day!
It is gratifying and I appreciate that thousands of women and men are waking up every day to realize that, over time, life on this big blue jewel has sadly morphed into not much more than a losing shell game.
This can be a terrible shock. I remember how it felt when the realization reverberated through my bones while feeling my pockets being picked by an invisible hand.
2023
In the United States, we brace ourselves for daily ‘news’ bulletins covering cross-country volleys of interpersonal violence, multiple mass shootings, suicides, and murder. Added to these waves of stranger-danger loss? And? Families of previously healthy young adults around the world are reeling from inexplicable post-pandemic, sudden ‘excess’ deaths when the hearts of too young sons or daughters simply stop beating.
GroundHog Day. Will Punxatawny Phill see his shadow? Will humanity? Will I? Will you?
Wherever you call home, will you enjoy an early spring or grapple with six more weeks of ice, snow, sub-zero temperatures or variations in cyclical weather patterns that make daily life…harder? Living in Vermont? February meant searching for parking spaces on busy streets decorated with eight feet high plowed snow mixed with ice. While local artists transformed this raw, cold material into sculptures, fanciful figures sporting floppy hats and long scarves to make the best of the annual hassle of shortage of parking spaces, drivers and pedestrians maneuvering intersections with blind spots made life harder when accidents…happened.
Simple, powerful, and chock-full of living lessons, in my humble opinion, the film GroundHog Day is an exceptional teaching film.
Unfamiliar with the film, this grade B ‘rom-com’revolves around a creepy weatherman who bears the same name as a weather predicting groundhog. Phil, a resentful, disgruntled, self-centered weatherman falls into a loveless, mind-numbing, looping journey.
A mystified Phil is stuck in Punxsutawney purgatory and there is no way out. Waking up to every day repeating itself with no escape, Phil eventually surrenders to the only power he has left, a choice of weather or knot (puns intended) to continue playing The Game of Loss.
Stepping away from the entrapment of hellish repetition, day by day after even suicide is impossible – he can’t seem to stay dead – Phil use looping time to take piano lessons, to craft ice sculptures of angels, and to transform himself into a right time, right place hero by changing a stranger’s flat tire or saving a teenage boy too young to understand the consequences of playing the physical risk-taking shell game of loss.
Weatherman Phil eventually learns to love and respect himself, and so meets the perfect woman, a woman he has known for sometime and who loathes him, a woman that his ego has pursued and failed, hundreds of times.
Being neither pessimist or optimist, and grateful to be living a life of ‘feeling the full’ after having been shaped by The Game of Loss game, like many others I’m a former game piece who has endured profound personal loss. Like the protagonist Phil in GroundHog Day, I’m indescribably grateful to have discovered how to opt out of The Game of Loss.
Intention. Commitment. Action. Nourishing Fulfillment (ICAN).
Soul nourishing fulfillment leads to the experience of living a day without longing.
When was the last time that you woke up first thing in the morning feeling wonderful, completely clear, and at peace? Maybe it's been a while. Maybe you can't remember ever waking up in this state of being.
Feel into it!
As a mother and former early childhood educator, I deeply appreciate young children’s intention, commitment, action and fulfillment to what grown-ups call play. All out, full-hearted, children play games they know or make up on the spot. Some games are not about who wins or loses. Completely in surrender to the present moment experience of imaginative, no-practical-purpose creative play, you also hold the key to individual fulfillment, challenged as you are, as we all are, like Phil, to learn the lesson of loving ourselves for our unique creative spark that ego can’t control.
There will never be another you. Seriously? How can ego survive this enormity? Ego can’t, your brain is overwhelmed by it, but ego and brain can and will stop you from dropping into the bliss of how this truth ‒ that there will never be another you ‒ feels to your open, vulnerable body and soul.
Intention. Commitment. Action. Fulfillment – Nourishing fulfillment. (ICAN).
Are you willing to consider a few of my favorite personal growth questions?
Lately, have you been too busy to ask empowering, important and impactful questions on a regular basis? If so, how can you play your way into a new game? If you can’t SEE a game for what it is, how can you play a game that you won't automatically lose simply by agreeing to play?
Intention can be infectious. Commitment incorporates our freedom to choose. Surprisingly, action includes the extraordinary grace of utter stillness. Fulfillment is sheer joy and the intense pleasure of feeling physically spent, a gorgeous body relaxation that follows being in powerful creative or co-creative flow.
Can you feel the energy of intention in your body?
Your mind can’t think ‘intention'. Intention is a singular point of conscious full focus that supersedes the mind to blossom in creative flows, dancing with its life partner, imagination. Your imagination!
How often do you weave your internal threads of creative imagination into the fabric of a joyful heart?
Do you give your time and life force to the game of loss by focusing intention and commitment through the fractured lens of ‘work,’ as a game piece that moves you through The Game of Loss, that game where your time equals money?
Do you notice when you slam on some inner brake at the precise moment you begin to feel the pleasure of intention anchoring inside your body as you make a solid commitment?
Commitment leads toward joy before falling into a pit of fear by choosing again and again, dully resigned (like most good and responsible adults like Phil) to play The Game of Loss.
Have you forgotten that there are other games to play? Have you forgotten yourself? Your original, playful and creative self?
What internal and external energies drive your actions? Do you have the inner and outer resources to generate an emotional reset so that your actions flow from your conscious intention?
How does your body feel as your energy centers support breathing into and sharing the energy that is nourishing fulfillment?
What do you feel as you breathe into these questions! Grab your journal and start writing!
How does a person who has been pushed into the experience of profound loss find fulfillment? Past the habitual fear and anxiety of enduring more loss in the future?
How is our human collective, right now, today, last week, the first few weeks of 2023, being pushed into breathing jagged, hot breaths of grief? Turkey? Syria? New Zealand? Australia?
In a state of profound grief, how did you choose, if you have to remain connected to his/her/their authentic Self? By accepting that grief offers an authentic emotional state of being one with Self in the present as one is. No avoidance. These times in my life have evolved into writing poetry that reaches in and grabs the hearts of others.
His, her, their inner playful, innocent child will earnestly shovel grief into a form that either shrinks the soul and closes the heart or into a form that grows the soul into feeling fulfillment that is compassion, empathy, sympathy, expressed through action and words of love: Thank you. I love you. I'm sorry for your loss. May I hug you? How can I be a support or comfort at this time?
Collective surges of grief can overtake you in The Game of Loss as you/I/we attempt to heal or regain what has been damaged through incomplete intention, distraction, unmet commitments, stalled action, and resulting lack of fulfillment with no obvious connection to personal choice.
How do you embrace what we can’t control by tapping into your part of collective intention, commitment, action as you choose to trust that fulfillment must follow as a function of natural law even as you accept that your individual eyes may not see how your individual life will ever be made whole?
Evolution is a collective adventure that begins the moment we take our first breath.
This morning, I gained deeper insight and understanding of a recent dream.
I emerged from deep within the bowels of the earth, astonished by a stunning view of a newly forming earth-like planet with raw, steaming landscates.
Then this dream shifted. Now, I was in the company of a man I didn't know. I was his only passenger. As he drove on the right hand side of the road, he explained that the big white bus just passing us was conveying a group of murderers to the realm where murderers end up, whether or not they are found, arrested, charged, and regardless of jury or courtroom verdict.
A few days later, I woke up in a second, seemingly related dream. This time, I was in the company of two people with whom I share important nearly lifelong emotional connections. In a fluid geometric relationship, we bobbed about in a huge, expanding body of water. In my dream language, big water equals big love.
Together, we three somehow balanced a powerful emotionally creative, fluid communal space: Intention. Commitment. Action. Fulfillment.
Noting this dream to my journal and asking and answering clarifying questions, a few days later I intuitively knew exactly who the deceased individual was that through unjustifiable violence, the group of men on that white bus dispatched from his life through unjustifiable violence.
So, GroundHog Day 2023? Current events lead to thoughts of Trayvon Martin and George Floyd… and; Brianna Taylor. Names. Long, repetitive looping lists of loss. Each name represents one fallen pawn in The Game of Loss, the shadowy playground that is one version of planet Earth. Turkey, Syria, Ukraine, Lebanon, New Zealand.
Indigenous People on every continent, I am sorry for your loss. Falling, fallen, gone.
Intention? Commitment? Action? The Game of Loss was designed long, long ago and it doesn’t need you to continue to play. Is it time for you to opt-out of The Game of Loss and opt-in for welcoming nourishing fulfillment and days without longing?
You can find within you the path to reset your intention, commitment, action and fulfillment so that you bring to your outer world creative play and contribution to abundance by design.
You can’t lose this game. Just ask the best question ever: What’s really going on here?
Let me know what you discover.
Follow me on LinkedIn, Youtube, and visit my website for more info!
Anaiis Salles, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Anaiis Salles is a mother, an ordained minister, a certified EMT, hypnotherapist, beekeeper, and author. A co-creative catalyst on the cutting edge of energy medicine since 1991, Anaiis Salles’ energy healing results involve minimal use of hardware/technology. Why? Her expertise has biohacked the proven premise that activated DNA and the 15 chakra human energy field can supply 85% of all healing technology healthy humans require. Salles’ radically effective energy healing skills/results were first medically verified in 1991. Highlights of Salles’ international collaborations are shared in the documentary "Heart to Heart" focusing on the value of hands-on healing team members in clinical settings.
