don Miguel Ruiz Jr. teaches that "playing like a child" means engaging each moment with full presence, wonder, and the capacity to enjoy life without attachment to rigid roles. Childlikeness—singing, dancing, exploring, creating for its own sake—is not regression but the recovery of humanity's natural tendency toward joy. The practice involves recognizing the social "characters" and "masks" we adopt in work and life, performing them fully when needed, then consciously releasing them to return to the simplicity of being ourselves. By approaching challenges with playful engagement and stepping back to witness what we've created, we move through difficulty while maintaining lightness and authenticity.
What Does It Mean to "Play Like a Child"?
don Miguel Ruiz Jr. anchors this teaching in a simple observation: the happiest moments in life occur when we are playing—singing, dancing, exploring, and creating just for fun. Playing like a child is not about literal childishness but about a specific orientation to existence. To be childlike is to be in awe of the world, to approach it with wonder, and to ask the fundamental questions children ask: "What is this? What is that?" To play like a child is to engage directly with sensation and discovery—touching, feeling, listening, seeing—and to explore what we are capable of doing with whatever we encounter.
This childlike quality, Ruiz Jr. emphasizes, is the normal human tendency. It is not an exceptional or fragile trait that emerges only under certain conditions. Rather, it is our baseline orientation toward aliveness and engagement. When we are completely present—fully engaged in singing, dancing, or any creative act—we are being authentically human. The child embodies this presence naturally, before the world teaches otherwise.
How Do We Lose Childlike Presence as We Grow?
Ruiz Jr. illustrates this loss through a vivid memory of childhood role-play. As children, he and his brothers would play at being doctors, lawyers, artists, soldiers, and luchadores (wrestlers). The remarkable thing about this play was its seriousness—when they took on a character, they fully inhabited it. If one brother was the father or the lawyer, he would adopt the gravity and mannerisms of that role completely. Yet when the moment of play ended, they would smile and return to themselves. The mask was a tool they used and set down.
Childhood role-play was actually a kind of rehearsal. The children were mimicking the social characters and protagonists they saw in the world around them—adults with established roles and identities. This is healthy and necessary; through play, children learn to navigate society. But then something shifts. One day, the role becomes not just a game but an identity. The character adopted for work becomes the character we live as. The "serious look" that emerged during role-play returns, but this time we forget to remove it. We forget that it was ever a mask at all.
As Ruiz Jr. describes it: "when the shift ended when the time was up to this engage that character remained all of a sudden we were that character that protagonist that role completely emerged we completely forgot to detach and smile again." The problem is not the role itself—we need roles to function in society—but our forgetting that we are not identical to them. We fuse with the character and lose the ability to step back, acknowledge what we have created through that role, and return to the simplicity of being ourselves.
What Is the Practice of "Detaching and Smiling Again"?
The teaching here has two dimensions: performance and release. To play like a child in adult life means to engage fully with the roles and responsibilities we take on—to put real energy into being the lawyer, the worker, the parent, the partner—while maintaining an inner awareness that these are roles. The mask serves a purpose. It allows us to function, to contribute, to navigate the social world effectively. But it is not who we are.
The critical practice is to "detach and smile again"—to step back when the moment or the shift is complete and consciously release the character. This is not about half-heartedness or lack of commitment. Ruiz Jr. notes that when we are fully engaged in a challenging role or task, we become so absorbed that we forget it is difficult. "It might sound easy from the other side but during it it was difficult but we made it through and here we are because we take off that mask and enjoy being ourselves again but we always were."
The beauty of this practice is its paradox: we were always ourselves, even while wearing the mask. The mask never actually became us; we simply forgot this. By consciously stepping back—by being able to see all that we have created and engaged while in role—we recover our baseline state. We remember that the character is something we do, not something we are.
How Does Childlike Play Help Us Navigate Difficulty?
Ruiz Jr. acknowledges that life is sometimes challenging and hard. The teaching does not deny difficulty or suggest that we can play our way past real obstacles. Rather, it proposes that we can engage difficulty with the same quality of presence and playful engagement that characterizes childhood exploration. When we face a challenge, we bring our full attention to it—we play the role, we do the work, we solve the problem—but we do so without fusing with it, without adopting permanent heaviness.
When the moment passes, we look back. We can see what we created, what we accomplished, what we learned. We can witness the difficulty we moved through. But because we maintained that inner detachment—that memory that we are not identical to the struggle—we emerge lighter. We take off the mask of the struggling self and return to the simple enjoyment of being alive. This is not denial or spiritual bypassing; it is a rhythm of engagement and release, work and rest, seriousness and lightness.
What Does It Mean to "Enjoy Being You"?
The ultimate teaching is radical in its simplicity: to enjoy life is to enjoy being you. To enjoy being you is to enjoy being me. There is no grand project or achievement required. Presence, authenticity, and enjoyment are available in the most ordinary moments—in going to work, in engaging with another person, in doing the tasks in front of us. When Ruiz Jr. tells someone heading to work to "have fun," they often respond with confusion: "I'm going off to work—what do you mean by having fun?" His response cuts through the false separation between duty and joy. "Are you alive? Are you present? Are you engaging that day? Yeah, well enjoy it."
This is a direct invitation to recognize that you are alive right now. This present moment is the only place where life actually occurs. To "play like a child" is to bring this awareness into adult life. Do the things you love to do. Engage your work, your relationships, your challenges with full presence. See these as opportunities to enjoy life, not obstacles to it. The childlike state is not something we achieve in the future or in special circumstances—it is the aliveness available in every moment when we are present enough to notice it.
Where to go from here
This teaching invites immediate experimentation. Notice where you have fused with a role—where you have forgotten to smile and detach at the end of the shift. Observe which characters you habitually inhabit and whether you can practice setting them down consciously. When facing a difficulty, try engaging it with full presence while maintaining an inner awareness that it is not you. And most simply: practice enjoying being alive in this moment, in this day, in this life. The capacity for wonder, play, and presence is not something to cultivate from scratch—it is something to recover. Your task is to remember that it was always yours.
