Yes, work is a four letter word. Yes, being on your path means that work doesn’t feel like work because you enjoy what you do. Yes, it should make you want to get up in the morning rather than make you want to hit the snooze button and hid under the covers. All of that. Work should feel like play, but that’s just it. It should FEEL like it and not actually BE it.
As a practitioner, no matter whether it’s energy work, therapy, physical healing, or coaching, our work should be focused on the needs of the client. Work is about a goal outside ourselves. Play is about us. Again, work can be fun, it can feel like play, it can have secondary benefits for us, it supports our lives away from work, it hopefully supports us in that we want and need to be doing the work, but the work itself is for the clients/patients/recipients, not us. If we make the work about us, about what we want or need, a) we’re doing it wrong b) like running with scissors, someone is going to get hurt and c) this is where the pejorative term “Playing” comes from.
There is a segment of the spiritual community who participate in spiritual practices of all kinds, not because they are called to them or not in the way they are called to them, but for the play factor. Various activities are fun, they are opportunities to socialize, they achieve a similar feeling to being buzzed with a recreational substance but sans the judgement and add in a bit of moral superiority because it’s spiritual. I call it “getting jazzed” because basically these people are going through the motions to get a high. Which is fine. No harm no foul, but it’s playing, not working. Playing at home on your own time with others that know that’s the aim of the game is just fine. But playing at a client’s expense to “find out what will happen” to experience and “see where this goes” can have some neutral to negative effects and is not what being a practitioner is about.
So if it feels like play, great. But if it really is playing, it’s probably better to do it after hours with friends and family rather than with clients in the moment. And in the end, isn’t it more fun that way?