Expressive Art Inspirations

Creativity as a Spiritual Path

Express Yourself Through Expressive Art Journaling

Spontaneous creativity as in the various modalites of expressive art, if we let it, can be a relationship to that which is beyond our ordinary consciousness. When we listen deeper inside and let our self-expression lead us into what sometimes can seem like chaotic and random directions, we are led into a larger, more passionate and alive part of ourselves.

Sometimes we need to express things in a picture or a poem that is beyond our normal comprehension. Sometimes we need more than words to describe the multidimensionality of what we are feeling.

Authentic creativity is something that we have not thought of before. It comes a surprise and it moves us in unexplainable and mysterious ways. Pure creation is unlimited. It is a kind of Divine communication. Spontaneous expression is a way to honor and access your intuition and open you up to what you do not know about yourself yet. May your creative spirit bloom through the inspirations on this site.

I offer world-wide online expressive art teaching and counselling services to help you get started on the road to authentic, spontaneous creative self-expression as well as an array of Online Expressive Art courses at:

Expressive Art Workshops

And the Expressive Art Journaling E-Course on Daily OM

Overcoming Creative Blocks

 

Blocked Creativity and Blocked Emotions

If you are a creator, you are likely very sensitive emotionally. You probably feel everything deeply, and often you are the one that goes out front in your family to express and feel what has not been expressed before.

My experience of creative blocks is that usually a feeling is arising to be seen and acknowledged. I find when I am dealing with darker emotions, all of my creativity goes into this something that wants to be known.

If you are feeling blocked creatively, what stands between you and your most spontaneous and joyful creativity is your own unacknowledged emotional pain. There is no shame in this. This is our human condition. Most of us hold layers of emotional pain that we can put no name to.

Many of us can recall no obvious trauma when we were children so as to pinpoint why we suffer so much. Yet we suffer as adults. We so feel often feel unnamable angst, depression, grief, fear and anger as we navigate through our daily life.

Difficult emotions arise frequently in our day to day to be accepted, loved and embraced. Any time you catch yourself holding your breath, you are repressing an emotion. Every time you feel any tightness in your body, you are holding back an uncomfortable feeling.

Every time you become lost in thinking about how you need to change your life, you are likely avoiding something difficult inside. In fear and recoil we can habitually and reflexively reject our uncomfortable feelings over and over again throughout our lives.

Before we can become free, joyful and spontaneous creators in the world we have to allow our creative blocks take us where they want us to go - and that is into our own acceptance and inclusion of our darker and more repressed feelings. When we are not integrated within, the creative process faithfully brings up unknown feelings to be seen, felt and integrated.

To not run away from these unruly feelings is a courageous and creative act. To turn towards our difficult feelings with love and curiosity is to live a powerful and creative life. To include uncomfortable emotions into our conscious awareness is to free up new energy and a creative intelligence that has been stagnant and unused since childhood.

The Inner Child is the Key to our Creative Blocks

As children we emotionally imprint upon our parents and we take on the heaviness of their emotional world. We literally absorb the emotional struggles, and the disowned and repressed feelings of our caregivers. Until we integrate all that we could not feel and accept in childhood we will walk around emotionally as children in our adult bodies - and most of us do - as David Hawkins writes:

"Physical appearance is a great deceiver. Most people look like adults but are not really adults at all. Emotionally, most people are children. The emotions and attitudes that prevail in kindergarten and on the playground continue on into adult life. Within most people is a child who is merely imitating being an adult. The 'inner child' is actually not inner at all, it is actually quite outer."

The simple reason why we stay at the emotional level of children is we rarely examine the childhood beliefs that we filter our perceptions of the world through. We most often stay patterned in the beliefs that we laid down as children, repeating the same kinds of feelings as we did when we were little.

Spiritual teacher Michael Brown explains this process of our inner child inside our adult body so eloquently:

"Experientially it is in the first seven years, any and all uncomfortable experience arising from our entry into the conditional world are imprinted into and affect the condition of our emotional body. Our emotional body is therefore where the record of these occurrences is kept."

Children literally soak up the emotional soup around them. I remember an instance many years ago of sitting on the sofa and noticing the syncronicity of my emotionality with my child's. My four year old daughter was in the next room, in our old claw foot tub taking a bath. The house was silent and suddenly I felt a sharp loneliness strike my heart. Just at that instance, my daughter in the next room cried out, "Mommy! My heart feels like it is falling out of my chest with loneliness!"

In my study of family system therapy I have come to understand that whatever our parents and ancestors cannot deal with emotionally falls upon the next generation's shoulders to feel, process and integrate. This is how we evolve as family groups. We are all an integral part of a larger whole of healing. We do not suffer alone. Everyone suffers in some way. We are not crazy. We are sensitive human beings. We are all part of a larger family group evolving and healing.

I have often felt the pain of my mother and father as if it were my own. We can often feel the unhealed traumas, losses and disappointments of the older generations in our family as if they where our own because we are all joined. So to try to pin our uncomfortable feelings on a specific trauma from childhood, or to always look for some kind of childhood story of abuse is often much too simplistic. As human beings we suffer on a deep level for all of those who have come before us. We suffer for all those in our family who did not know how to handle their emotional pain.

The Search for Unconditional Love

On a deep level we are angry that we were not unconditionally loved and this anger can saliently block our creativity and our forward creative movement. We can feel frustrated that we regularly compromised our truth and our authenticity. We became inauthentic in childhood to belong, but now it is our task and our purpose as mature adults to find out who we really are.

We move through our creative blocks by loving ourselves unconditionally. We do this by feeling deeply. And in that intensely loving fire of attention to all that we have denied inside of us, we come to know ourselves and our purpose profoundly. Loving all that is repressed and rejected in our unconscious mind is evocative of the mother holding her child in the collage at right with such tender awareness. With unwavering attention and determination she vows to never abandon her crying child. We need to treat ourselves in this same reverent way.

It is all to easy when we feel uncomfortable feelings to become the opposite of loving towards ourselves. Usually we put ourselves down and start mentally punishing ourselves for not feeling happy. We wonder what is wrong with us. We tell ourselves that we are no good, or substandard as a human being for feeling the way that we do. We punish our shadow parts that are simply trying to come into the light to be seen and included and learned from.

Perhaps one of the most creative things life accomplishments that we can we can focus on is to learn how to love ourselves unconditionally. To love ourselves means loving what feels hard and painful inside - unconditionally - without thinking or reacting. It does not matter what comes up - we attend to it with tender and exquisite attention. Every feeling holds messages and gifts embedded within it no matter how difficult it feels.

Becoming Strongly Present to Your Emotional Pain

Often inner pain can take over our entire life. It can become so big, we can barely think, function, work, or relate to other people. We think we have to get rid of our pain. But presence to our emotional pain is nothing more than learning to become more largely loving than the pain. Becoming larger and stronger than your pain does not heal your pain - it is still there - but because it is loved and accepted with such inner strength, it integrates into your larger being. This is how we grow up. This is how we mature ourselves into contributive, creative adults.

We do this presence work by touching our inner pain with awareness - tapping it lightly at first - taking breaks when it hurts too unbearably. We then effort to sustain loving attention to our emotional pain for longer periods of time until we learn how to become consistently larger than it. As we grow psychologically stronger, the pain passes through our being at a faster rate and we are no longer mired in it for long periods of time.

The 30 Day Inner Child Challenge

Inner child drawings are a profound way to access aspects the parts of your psyche that you may not normally pay attention to. Most of us, in our efforts to fit into the adult world, pretended to be mature, to share, to be polite, and do anything that would win us the approval of our caregivers. All of us have many inner child parts, that if they remain unconscious, can rule our life.

Doing this process 30 times or more can help you see where you are magical, peaceful, spontaneous, angry, spoiled, or are sacrificing yourself so that other people do not have to feel their own pain.

And under all of these psychical inner child structures are feelings that the inner child is trying to change, feel better about, or heal.

Inner child drawings are typically done with your non-dominant hand. Buy yourself a box of kid's crayons and a special sketchbook. Artist Heather Williams, author of Drawing as a Sacred Activity has an excellent exercise to help access your inner child that I will share with you. It takes 30 days of daily drawing either in the morning or the evening.

Daily Inner Child Exercise

1.Relax and breathe with your paper and crayons in front of you.

2. Close your eyes and see or feel a child near you. Notice the color or her/his hair, notice the height, posture and clothing. Open your heart and feel yourself accepting this child exactly as she/he is, even if the child is angry sad or frightened.

3. Ask the child to play a game with you. The adult in you will ask the child 3 questions. What is your name? What are you feeling right now? What can I do to help you feel really good?

4. Let the child draw a picture of for you and answer the questions using crayons and your non-dominant hand.

5. Thank the child for sharing with you.

Note: I often change this exercise as I find it a profound way to get to know renegade, shadow, inner child parts that made decisions for me a long time ago, that I might not be conscious of. Sometimes we have well-meaning but less mature parts of our minds running the show that are not making the best decisions for our current adult, mature needs. I ask my inner child parts these questions:

What is your name?

How old are you?

What is your purpose?

Keep asking for the purpose that your inner child has for you until the purpose becomes positive. For example, your inner child may say, I want you to be sick." Ask your inner child, "Why do you want me to be sick?" Every part of our inner child has a positive intention, even if it is to make you ill so that you will get the attention that you need.

Feeling Emotional Pain

Feeling what is arising inside of you, without trying to change it, is the most profoundly courageous thing you can do as human being. Feeling difficult feelings can become an art form where you exquisitely attend to your inner state with consistent and continual loving attention. As you do, your attention grows more subtle and creative, and you begin to understand that your inner pain is revealing messages to help you step forward in your life.

"When people change, they show it physically. At first this may not be outwardly noticeable, except in the momentary relaxation and easing of a body shift, the better circulation and deeper breathing. But over a longer period of time, with many shifts on deeper problems, it is definitely noticeable in the carriage, the whole body. And it can be a startling change."  - Eugene Gendlin

Inner focusing goes below thoughts, below feelings to the murky unknown "felt-sense". It is a method of working with holistic information and really it is a guide to reading intuition...to reading what the body knows and that the conscious mind cannot yet interpret. It is a very creative and rapid way to move through physical and emotional problems in a deep and joyful way.

"We all have unclear body senses all of the time. Since our bodies are meant to feel good and flowing and open, if we have any tight spot, it can be something to focus on, something to allow to become clear. This avoids the endless turning over of things in the mind and even the over-indulgence of familiar emotions.

A felt sense is not an emotion. We recognize emotions. We know when we are angry or sad or glad. A felt-sense is something you do not at first recognize - it is vague and murky. It feels meaningful, but not known. It is a body sense of meaning. When you learn how to focus, you will discover that the body finding its own way provides the answers to many of your problems. The process brings change."

This is not the familiar getting in touch with feelings, or the content free quiet of meditation. It is sensing further below the painful emotions. Our bodies know far more than our minds can actually organize. Focusing below our standard emotions is about accessing holistic vision.

"If something is feeling wrong in your life, without trying to figure anything out, ask yourself, "What does this whole thing feel like?" You are trying to get down to the single feeling that encompasses "all that about my relationship with"...or "all that about quitting my job." The feeling contains many details, just as a piece of music contains many notes.

A symphony, for instance, may last an hour or more and contain thousands of separate musical tones, sounded by many diverse instruments, in a multitude of combinations and progressions. But you don't need to know all these details of its structure in order to feel it. If it is a symphony you know well that you only need hear its name mentioned and feel the aura of it instantly. That symphony: the feel of it comes to you whole, without details."  - Eugene Gendlin

Integrating Emotional Pain

We grow in power and presence when we are able to feel our emotional pain without spinning off into thinking, doing, blaming and projecting our inner emotions outwards and away from inner inclusion and integration. My experience of not projecting a feeling out of my body is that it starts to seethe and boil in often an intensely uncomfortable way. We can learn how to attend to this intensity with love before we start creating outer drama.

So many of us think that we have to get a feeling "out" of our body and so we live our lives finding ways to finish with our emotional pain, to get it all out, and be done with it forever. In truth any kind of drama to "release" feelings is often unnecessary. All your feelings need is to be accepted, loved and integrated within the larger container of your mature, witnessing, unconditionally loving awareness.

"The instance there is any distance from the immediacy of our feeling, any one of the infinite universes of response/reaction comes into existence. When we respond or react to our feeling with it is born a particular self-image and all that will grow around it. Divine intuition is actually just a more immediate and naked relationship to what is."  - Richard Moss

Integration and Maturity

Growing ourselves into maturity simply means being able to be strongly present and be available to life as it is showing up right now - no matter how uncomfortable it feels. It is from this arising reality that we maturely create our lives. After you integrate a repressed or difficult feeling and after you have accepted and loved a disowned part of yourself, life feels newly whole again. When we recover our lost parts of self, we become more intelligent, more alive and more creative. We realize that the feelings we have been using all of our energy to repress and deny have been blocking a wider perspective on life.

When we can stay open and available to life as it is, we have more insight. New strengths and gifts are birthed to bring to everyday living. The best part of loving what arises inside of you, is you learn to love others maturely, deeply and profoundly. What you accept in yourself, you accept in other people and suddenly your life as it is begins to work better. From this place of self-acceptance, love and trust, a spontaneous and flowing creativity abounds that truly contributes to all of life.

Creativity and Emotional Repression

Committing to Loving Life

How committed are you to living and loving your life exactly as it is?  Most of us do not even notice how shut down and repressed we are in our emotional lives. We might not even notice how we are barely breathing, or that we are tensing and armoring our muscles in a way that can keep so much creative information out of our awareness.

Your availability, presence and full engagement with life and with those you love can be measured by how open your heart is, how much you feel love, and how grateful and at peace you feel in your life. Consider that the degree of emotional repression that you feel lowers the involvement and engagement that you are able to bring to your life.

Emotional Repression

We are meant to feel, accept and love all of our feelings unconditionally, but most of us reflexively avoid this process. It often hurts to feel, and we can spend our energy trying to control and orchestrate our life to avoid what feels difficult and unmanageable inside.

Many of us go through our days feeling a nameless anger, sadness, or anxiety and fear. Much of our emotional life is non-verbal, and if we were to be really honest with ourselves, we often cannot put a finger onto why we feel upset.

This is because as children our emotional patterning was laid down before we had words - from birth to age seven. We find the stories and words for our inner discomfort later when we develop our mental capacities from age seven onwards. Healing through imagery, visual self-expression, and being present for feelings without words is often so profoundly helpful for clearing feelings that cannot be named.

It helps to have a daily creative practice to help us move through our conditioned repression. Creative play helps to express the suppressed feelings and beliefs that we repressed into our psyche and emotional bodies in childhood and adolesence, in our attempt to navigate the adult world. Imagery, symbol, color and pattern are often richer than words and can express and acknowledge feelings in a larger, more all encompassing way. Rather than always trying to verbalize a reason as to why we feel as we do, we can employ the immediacy of present moment attention through the process of visual self-expression.

If we do not have some kind of wordless creative practice, our level of emotional repression can become our defended "comfort zone", where we make every effort to suppress any hint of discomfort from coming into our awareness. This comfort zone of our accustomed repression is the enclosed area that keeps our connection to other people out of our care and awareness. Our comfort zone protects where we hurt inside. This repression takes a considerable amount of life energy that could be freed up for creative and engaged living. Committing to an emotionally healthy life means committing to feeling uncomfortable and allowing ourselves to have compassion for our inner hurt.

Creative Commitment

Suffering with awareness, by witnessing the hurt from a larger, more loving part of ourselves is what true commitment to life is. True creativity involves engaging with your life just as it is arising right now, with unconditional love and present attention, no matter what uncomfortable feelings you feel on the inside, or what challenges are happening on the outside.

True creativity is a profound engagement with life as it is. It is a commitment to the truth that everything that happens to you, and that is arising within you is healing you, and sculpting you into who you are meant to be. Making the uncomfortable - comfortable - is the process of bringing unconscious material to light. My experience is that unconscious emotional material comes up in stages or layers to be accepted, loved, and integrated.

So for a time when a layer of my subconscious/unconscious, unintegrated psychology comes up, I will much feel worse. My heart will ache or feel bitter or sad, or intense anger will come up to be seen in the light of my awareness. I try to stay intensely present when a difficult layer of repressed material comes up.  Repressed feelings and all of the behaviors that constellate around those difficult feelings are like a blind spot where we keep life out. In my experience, after integrating a difficult feeling, a bright feeling of wholeness, vibrant energy and well-being arises. And soon after, I am able to engage with life at a deeper level.

I often track these non-verbal movements of my subconscious into my conscious awareness through spontaneous art making. Because I like to commit to deepening into creative practices, I have explored many expressive art modalites, such as collage journaling, doodling, stream of consciousness drawing, and poetry writing. I usually commit to one modality for a period of a year to see how deeply I can go into the process. I am always profoundly deepened at the end of the year and I have many journals that affirm the truth that we are designed to heal and become conscious.

At present I am drawing a mandala a day and am smilingly calling it my "Carl Jung Challenge." Psychologist Carl Jung drew mandalas everyday for a year. Recently I went to a Mari mandala workshop and the mandalas I drew pulled something deeper out of my subconscious mind. I was inspired to begin a daily practice.

Contemplating Death

Because I work with the people at the end of life, I often feel extra compelled to wake up in my own life and to do my emotional presence work. I do make it a dedicated practice to unconditionally love, or at make every effort to least accept what feels uncomfortable within me. Because I work with people who are often overtly expressive about their emotional and physical discomfort, this practice has deepened my compassion for other people who are in pain.

In my experience, when dementia sets in, and the mental capacities wane, creativity and the emotional life can awaken again. This is increased self-expression is something that few people realize about dementia. People with dementia can be astoundingly creative.

There is a window, I have seen, in the mind, as it diminshes in it's reasoning faculties where a new creative freedom can come back into play. Perhaps this diminishing of mental control is the spiritual reason, and the deeper emotional balancing behind the condition of dementia.  Because we all know when our mental capacities are in place, we can employ great intensity of will and control to deny what hurts inside.

I have seen first hand that as a human family, we are often healing and integrating our uncomfortable emotional patterning right up to the end of life. I have often sat with a person with dementia and watched them instinctively instigate their own emotional healing process through sometimes profound, and sometimes unusual forms of prayer, ritual, poetry, art, song, voice and movement patterns.

Validation Therapist Naomi Feil explains that the elderly, in the final stages of life are trying to resolve unfinished emotional issues so that they can die in peace. Unconditionally accepting the feelings that they express, as a present and loving witness, can help the elderly from descending into further withdrawal and disorientation. My experience is that dementia provides a window for the elderly to express and integrate old, repressed emotional material that they made the choice to suppress when they were more in control of their mental faculties.

The Creative Mirror of Life

The further I go into the depth of my own life, the further I deepen into my life as a creation - a creation that brings me insight into what I am thinking about. We all are given little signs and symbols within each day that can help us to unfold, heal and evolve from unconscious to conscious human beings. We can learn how to invite these daily symbols and be open to their messages. This creative syncronicity is the co-creation of our human life with the Divine.

The day I was contemplating my full engagement with my own life, I intuitively opened one of my favorite books, "The Untethered Soul" by Michael A. Singer and read this:

"It is your attempt to get special experiences from life that makes you miss the actual experience of life. Life is not something you get, it's something you experience. Life exists with or without you. It has been going on for billions of years. You simply get the honor of experiencing a tiny slice of it.

If you're busy trying to get something, you will miss the slice you are actually experiencing. Every one of life's experiences is different, and every experience is worth having. Life is not something to waste. It's truly precious. That's why death is a great teacher. It is death that makes life precious. Look how precious life becomes when you imagine you only have one week to live."

The Art and Creativity of Life

I have been contemplating the hurt areas that I still repress inside of myself. In my mandalas I have been seeing the areas where I enclose myself, and where I turn away from aspects of my life. So often as I sense into the deeper meaning of my inner life, my outer life rises up to create and communicate with me. Recently I went for a walk in a beautiful neighborhood near where I work to try to sort out my inner conflicts and I was gifted with a most amazing sighting.

I was feeling a deep contraction in my being that day. I was struggling with an overwhelming fear and doubt about some growth steps that I have been taking in my life. I was moving out of my comfort zone into a deeper relationship and engagement with my life. And I realized how easy it is to embrace life when we feel good, but when we are in a fearful contraction it feels nearly impossible to love and appreciate life as it unfolds. We can be quick to label what is wrong with our life, and what needs to change on the outside, instead of simply being present for the uneasiness on the inside.

When we open into more love and connection, usually the defense system of fear kicks in and some old hurt needs to be felt and let go of, before we can love more. As I felt my fear, I kept looking out at the beautiful neighborhood I was walking through, the heritage homes, the exquisite gardens, the birds, and the sounds of life arising.

Fear often arises whenever we cannot accept something inside of ourselves. When we are in emotional pain, our awareness often feels very close to our body. This contraction of life energy most often indicates an inner no, an inner rejection to some aspect of what we are experiencing inside. This is usually an old hurt that has not been healed. This hurt place is where we withdraw our full engagement with life. This inner rejection is an indication that something needs to be felt, accepted and integrated into our experience.

We feel contracted, dense and nearly completely self-involved when we are in emotional pain. At these moments we can choose to open up and integrate something that is denied within. It is hard to notice what is going on outside of our tight and personally embroiled awareness when we are upset. The purpose of such times is clear. Something hidden needs to grow into the light of awareness so that we can unconditionally be present for it, integrate it with love, and move forward towards a deeper engagement with life.

As I contemplated my body tightness and resistance during my lunch time walk, I felt utterly fed up and frustrated with my fear and my contraction away from life. My heart felt tight and closed. I began to contemplate, "What if this was my last day on earth? What if I missed this beauty that is so abundantly sprawling itself out in front of me."  I began to play with my awareness like an accordion, opening and closing my heart. And when I turned the corner, I saw a most profound sight.

I saw a black crow twitching, which had just been killed by a car, in the middle of the road. Above me, fifty or more crows circled and sat on wires cawing loudly, upset by the sudden turn of events. I stopped awestruck and I stood and watched the crow funeral. I was struck by how quickly my inner life decision to open to life, as if it was my last day on earth, was so instantly affirmed. I reflected on how easy it is to stay in our defended comfort zone until it is too late. Life is short. There is no better time to fully engage with life and love than right now.

I felt filled with an intensification of presence and gratitude for the creativity of life. When we integrate the inner pain that we have repressed, we build the energy and capacity to engage with people more fully. Many years ago when my daughter was two, I lost many people in my close family. With all of the death and crisis in my life, I stepped up to a creative engagment with life that I had not touched into before. I was in a visionary creative state that lasted about three months. My experience of the "crow funeral" reminded me to engage at this intense level of presence, commitment and availability more as a way of life instead of temporary state.

"You should be experiencing the life that's happening to you, not the one you wish was happening. Don't waste a moment of life trying to make other things happen; appreciate the moments you are given. Don't you understand that every minute you are closer to death? This is how to live your life. You live as though you are on the verge of death because you are."  - Michael A. Singer

 

Living Into Your Creative Vision

My Personal Creative Vision

Five years ago I wrote a twelve week e-course that detailed my personal creative journey through expressive art journaling. This course has been recently revised and republished on the Daily Om website.

Originally titled "Collage for Self Discovery" the course is now called, Empower Yourself Through Creativity and it is available here.

I deeply love this course. It is my personal story of finding my creative vision. What astounded me about revisiting this course is the realization of how a deeper truth runs under all of our lives. We just have to learn how to see it.

The authentic creative journey does not always turn out the way we think we want it to, but it always takes us where we need to go. What our personality self wants, may not always be what our creative soul needs for it's finest development and growth. My story is about allowing the Creative Muse to guide me in ways that I did not expect.

Connecting With Your Creative Vision

We all have a higher creative vision to live into. We all have inklings that pressure us from the inside, to be lived, and breathed, and created into this world. We all have an inner code that wants to unfold and create something in this world. Micheal Meade speaks of our purpose in life as being our "Opus" or our life work.

Meade writes, "If a person doesn't face their fate, they may never find their deep resources and natural gifts. If a person doesn't risk their destiny, they'll never know who they are intended to be. Fate and destiny are the two agreements the soul must make and are the core issues we struggle with throughout our lives."

Facing our fate involves understanding and growing through the limitations and challenges within the family and cultures we were raised in. Our life's creative work is part of our destiny. It is what we want to learn the most about, and is indeed who we were intended to be. Our Life Opus or Life Purpose is what we feel intensely curious about, what we most want to study in life, and what we are passionate about being good at. Our Life Purpose is what Creator wants to create though us.

Life shows us clues as to what our passions are, and although our creative visions may not always lead to fame and fortune, or may not even be the main source of income, our visions imbue us with a life force and a vitality that keeps us engaged and passionate on a daily basis. Our creative visions provide us something to live into each day, as we attend to the practical requirements of our daily life. Our creative inspirations help us to overcome our shortcomings and struggles. Our visions offer us a window into the Divine.

A Creative Vision Takes Time

Living into our Life Opus takes a great deal patience, and involves many slow, faltering steps. Our life work takes a lifetime. In living into our life work we become what we are meant to become. We create what wants to be created through us. In the process of living into our creative visions, we must chisel away all of our conditioned resistance, and human heaviness to bring our Opus forward into life to heal ourselves, and to help others. 

It is helpful to look back on your life for little clues as to what sparked your curiosity. For myself, from a young age I felt a need to understand art and creativity. My first clue came when I was 4 years old, and an artist came to rent the room in my grandmother's basement while he was in art school. He called me Shella Bella, and he drew quick, poignant sketches of my great grandfather when he came upstairs for tea.

After I met the artist in my grandmother's basement, I started to produce drawings in volumes, and I began selling my drawings for 10 cents around my neighborhood. I wanted to live into the process of creativity. I wanted to understand creativity from the inside out. You could say that wanting to learn about creativity was my Opus. I did not come here as a ready made artist. I had to grow into the idea that I was creative.

As I grew up I understood that I needed to be creative in some way, but I did not get a great deal of encouragement or attention for my early artistic efforts. I did not get accolades from most of my elementary school teachers, that spoke to my having any sort of easy talent in the arts. But I was besotted with my grade two teacher who saw that I was creative. She recognized something deeper in me, and gave me extra creative challenges in class. With her, I became a devoted student, writing and illustrating far more, extra stories than was required for the curriculum.

 

Creative Trials

I remember as a child of 8 years old struggling to draw realistically. I was not considered "talented" as an artist but I was dogged and curious. My only fumbling, grasping idea of my Inner Opus was the vague understanding that creative people understood how to draw. So I put myself on a rigorous drawing program. I remember drawing my grandmother's porcelain figurines, and struggling to get the proportions right. My paper was worn thin from erasing, but I kept at it for hours.

My realistic drawings never really flowed with expression or ease. They always looked a bit stiff and forced, but something inside of me wanted to understand creativity. And with no outside examples other than my early contact with the artist in my grandmother's basement, drawing was the only step I knew how to take.

Intuitive Drawing

It was not until I became pregnant with my daughter that I found a way of drawing that worked for me. I found a way to allow my connection to a Larger Creative Force to come through me. I finally understood that I did not like to draw realistically. I just wanted to express my truth through drawing. And so I began my intuitive way of drawing. My intuitive drawings expressed what I felt on the inside. They started out as simple doodles, and they became more sophisticated and expressive with time and practice. (See above left)

Expressive Drawing

Later on when I took over an art therapy program to facilitate art for the elderly, I learned how to draw from life in an expressive way, from an elderly client. She was a world class sculptor who was wealthy, and never had to work a day in her life. She drew like Van Gough and she imbued each of her drawings with vitality, and then when she was done, she would say, "I drew that?"  I was deeply inspired by her.

Making a Living as Art Therapist

Many women write me to ask for my opinion as to whether it is practically viable or financially secure to embark on a career in art therapy. I am not an art therapist in my formal training. I chose to become registered as a counsellor because it felt more practical to me. But I say if the urge to be an art therapist is coming from the inside of you, start moving towards it a little bit every day. I think it is possible to take care of your practical needs, and live into an art therapy practice, slowly over time.

My personal experience is that art for healing is not commonly understood, or widely embraced by our mainstream culture yet. This does not mean that we should not begin living into our creative visions. When I started teaching expressive art, I worked on a dining room table, in a group home for clients with brain injuries. It was not the fanciest digs, but I was surprisingly inspired to see how my creative ideas could connect to real life, and not just live in my head and in my journals. There is always some place in the world that needs our vision, our voice, and our contribution. As creators we awaken and enliven a weary world with color, music, connection, love, and faith in something more than just surviving, paying the bills, and marching through each day with a sense of practical duty.

In the past few years I have had the chance to meet many people who are living into their creative visions, and into their own creative aliveness and curiosity. Being creatively alive is always a good way to focus your time and efforts. Even if you are still growing into your vision, and are not yet making good full-time money doing it, you are building, connecting, living into, and embodying your vision in the world. You are in harmony with what wants to be created inside and outside of you. When I meet people living into their creativity, it fills me with inspiration to see such aliveness, such engagement in life, and such vision being implemented into the practical world. For it is the visionaries and the people willing to live into their creativity, that bring change, connection, and the Divine to the culture.

The truth is that everyone is creative in some way, and the world needs to see more people expressing themselves in health care, in government, and in private business and non-profit organizations. Creativity warms, inspires, draws forth, ignites, and unites. Working in health care, I have had care and housekeeping staff coming up to me from all walks of life to tell me they are creative, that they knit, paint, sew, weave, draw at home in their spare time. When they come to my art table, they are intrigued that there is more to life. To brings something from your rich inner world into practical life brings joy. It heartens and encourages the world. Your creativity is needed in the workaday life that most people exist in.

Small Steps

I have brought my creative visions into the world, not by grand gestures, but by taking small intuitive steps each day. Sometimes the insights that I get are just ordinary, but I do take some steps each and everyday towards my creative vision, even if it is just adding a sentence to my website, or making a small change in an article I am writing.

Sometimes I just get the direction to spend some time living into a new idea, whether it be sitting in silence, and listening for what wants to come through, or gathering materials or doing research. Often I will mentally set a creative schedule for myself, and my Muse will have a different idea. My Muse will know that I need to take a nap, meditate or walk in the woods. After I do, I feel more connected to something larger, and the creative work pours through with much more vibrancy and strength.

The Creative Soul reveals itself when it is relaxed. We have to find places in our life to let our soul relax, so that our creative ideas can imbue our daily living. Getting to know what our soul feels like when it is creatively inspired, is a feeling state we can learn to court, and invite it to become more fully embodied in our lives.

We can spend years learning about ourselves psychologically, and understanding every aspect of our ego system. But this psychological thought structure is not the whole of ourselves. Birthing something creatively through our souls is a co-creative process between the Creative Muse and our personal lives. My experience of soul creativity is sort of like a readying, or a feathering of my nest so that creative insight can come through.

Art Mother

How do you invite the Muse or the Creative Spirit into your life? How do you tend to your creativity? Do you invite your creativity to express Itself on a daily basis. What name would your give to your Larger Creative Spirit?  Recently one of the radiant, creative elders that I work with in the art studio called me his "Art Mother."

I loved the name "Art Mother" profoundly, and was grateful for his naming of my Opus in the world. It seemed especially poignant as my 17 year old daughter ventures out into the world to find out who she is. As I contemplate this change from a one-on-one mother, to the larger nurturing of an Art Mother in the world, I feel profoundly moved to the core of myself. I am reminded of how I have become the essence of my grade two teacher who saw where and how I was creative. I am touched at how she nurtured my deeper creativity, and how I now offer this same heartfelt service to others.

What part of the Larger Process of your creativity needs to be birthed and expressed in the world? What would you call your place in the Whole of Life?

I leave with you with this fantastic talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love. She talks eloquently about the Creative Muse/Genius as being larger than what we are in our small human selves, and how if we let it come through, we, along with the world is transformed. You can watch it here.

The Golden Shadow

Your Brightest Self

Consider the great truth that God/Creator needs you to be your most vibrant, strong and creative self. Consider the truth that Creator wants to express something unique and powerful through you that will help you, and all those around you.

The question is why do so few of us live a life of creative and spiritual empowerment? Why do so few of us have an abundance of life energy that is available to contribute to life? The answer I feel is in choosing to reclaim the light that we have cut off in ourselves.

The disowned bright qualities that we admire in others are the disowned aspects of our unlimited self. Psychiatrist Carl Jung called our submerged creative potential the "Golden Shadow". Mostly when we speak of the shadow in the psyche we are speaking of the more shameful and frightening aspects of ourselves that we have disowned.

The Golden Shadow however is our submerged greatness. The Golden Shadow is the key to finding out what our unique strengths are - and our strengths wait - hidden in our deepest weaknesses. The Golden Shadow is the soul part of ourselves that is meant to offer love, healing, vibrancy and joy to the sometimes dark world we live in.

Life cycles us through difficult periods in our lives to challenge our soul qualities to emerge into this world. In the journey of our lives, especially in times of strife or trauma we are offered various crossroads or choice points. At such times we can choose the darker choices of the ego, or the more powerful and healing aspects of our Soul. It is most often at times of great difficulty that we can access the unique strengths that is our soul and our healing purpose in this world. This is why it is impossible to predict how any human being will turn out, given their life circumstances, even if they have been severely abused. Because within the greatest traumas and weaknesses are our golden strengths.

Strong Choices or Weak Choices?

In each moment we are either choosing strength or weakness. Some people in our human history have risen out of a childhood of severe pain and neglect to become the helpers and healers of life. And other people who may have experienced lesser forms of neglect go on to make choices to self-destruct through addictions and unhealthy distractions of every kind.

Usually we make a combination of weak choices in our human lives, along with more powerful choices that are guided by the more unlimited power of our souls. The gift of life however, is that we can begin in any moment to build the strength and power of our good choices.  Each strong choice to develop our spiritual, loving and creative nature builds on the next choice. And at some point the light of our Inner Spirit will become a strong and richly developed part of ourselves.

But it takes determination and honesty to be strong enough for self-examination. As you become more self-aware and engage in your own healing you will start to go through passages where you begin to remember the choice points or crossroads in your life where you chose strength or weakness. As you look back on your life you will start to see where you closed down your light in disappointment and anger at the world around you.

You will vividly see where you chose to withdraw from life and shut down your light. You will start to see where you willfully chose to have problems, illnesses, addictions and failure when instead you could have brought great light and strength to the situation at hand. You will start to see where you got scared about how much you could really give and you retreated. You will start to become clearer as to where you still choose to not do well in your life emotionally, physically, relationally or financially.

Core Soul Questions

For the past few years I have been meditating into my "Golden Shadow". Having burned through much of my "pain body" which is my darker, more subconscious aspects of self, I have come upon a deeper layer of unconsciousness. I have come upon a more golden part of myself that is longing for expression. As I start to publish my writings to a wider audience and begin moving into more success in my life, my earliest childhood somatic memories have come to the fore.

Considering moving into more largess as a writer and as a human being has brought up many of my core soul questions this past year. Our core soul questions are what we are here to learn and do again and again with more strength and more light at each crossing point. My core soul questions are: "Am I living fully in my integrity and in my honesty? Am I fully living what I teach?" Am I the same person of integrity in the "back room" - which is with my family, colleagues and friends - as I am in the "front room" - which are the public forums where I work?

I have at pivotal points in my life chosen to move into my greatness of spirit. There are areas of my life where I have chosen to live in integrity, which for me means living with a commitment to my core soul questions.  One example of this was fifteen years ago when five members of my family members died and my marriage ended within the period of a year. I chose at that time in my life to move towards my connection to Spirit and my core soul questions of honest self-expression and integrity.

I moved through the death of my loved ones with a renewed commitment to authentic self-expression and living fully. I followed my inner instincts and impulses and dreams and my life became more honest. Relationships ended and new people came into my life. I fell in love and embraced my spontaneous creativity. I started moving towards a new life from one of passivity and letting others shape my life into becoming a woman of integrity.

The Choice To Not Do Well

What I have come to understand is that on subconscious levels we choose not to do well because we want to hide from the responsibility of living with full strength into our essential life/soul questions. I can remember times and choice points where I chose not to do well in my life in my teens and twenties. And those choices in my life delayed my spiritual and emotional progress for long periods of time.

When we choose not to do well we withdraw from life and from other people out of hurt, anger and vengeance. In my 20's I chose to go down the road of my ego darkness into depression, dependence, and under functioning in my relationships. I chose not to express my honest truth and as a result did not require it from other people in my life.

The decision not to do well in our lives is made early. It is made in childhood and we may not even have specific concrete memories surrounding it. But there are always clues if you look deeply enough. This past year for example, I struggled with mysterious eye infections to such a great degree that I would wake up in the morning and my eyes would be glued shut. I considered the metaphor of my eyes being sealed shut away from the light, and seeing nothing but darkness. As I did my inner work I remembered the severe eye infections that I got as a small child at the age of about three years old and how I would awake in the morning hopeless, scared and trapped in darkness.

I remember that period at age three as a dark time, not in a memory of abuse but as a particular heavy feeling tone reflective of my own family history of mental illness and depression. Perhaps the adults in my life were going through some heavy inner pain at the time and I was picking up feelings of hopelessness. Perhaps I was absorbing my ancestral pain body. Perhaps I sensed that the people around me where not living to their highest potential and therefore I did not feel I could express the fullness of my own spirit. So often not expressing our Golden Soul qualities is a case of "No one else is doing it. Why should I?"

We do not need to access exact literal or concrete memories as we look into our Golden Shadow Selves but we need to sense into an awareness of what we were feeling at the times in our life where we chose to fracture away from Soul and Spirit. This is how our human ego and defense system is formed. The ego splits away from our soul connection to God. I for example remember changing myself at about three into a child who previously was stubborn about my truth, expressive and overt, into a child that was withdrawn, shy and barely shared anything. I remember how the honest, expressive part of myself went into my Golden Shadow.

Your Magnificent Gifts

Usually the Golden Shadow is a unique inner soul quality that is helpful to our particular life story and to the family we live in. For myself my Golden Shadow was my honesty, my self-expression and my full engagement with life. Most often our family will refuse our Golden qualities and in our need to stay connected to our family we refuse the light inside of ourselves as well. We repress the positive and healing aspects of our souls that the family ego and pain body does not want and instead move into sacrifice and diminishment.

On deeper levels we as children make early decisions to not step up in our light that does deep into our subconscious mind. As children we easily and understandably make the decision to diminish ourselves. We mistakenly believe that our greatness and our light does not matter. In our littleness we believe that will never change anything for the better and so we give up. We choose the darkness around us instead of the light within us. We see that everyone else is choosing ego and pain and so we join the club.

Reclaiming your light can bring up anxiety and a fear of not fitting into the ego club. To find your light  you will need to go back to the places in your life where you experienced trauma or felt pain and find the inner gifts that you could have brought to the situation. For example, by closing down my self-expression as a young child I likely protected the egos of the adults who cared for me by becoming passive so that they would not have to change in ways that felt uncomfortable for them.

I did not speak out to challenge the things the things that I knew in my gut were out of integrity and dishonest in other people. This quality of self-protection and the protection of others carried far into my future when I no longer needed it to survive and fit in. And it became destructive. In my twenties it led me to ignore and wash over the dishonesty in myself and in others. By not speaking out the truths that could have healed my life, I allowed myself and others to stay in their safe ego defense systems.

Psychologist Chuck Spezzano talks about the Golden Shadow so eloquently. I will paraphrase it for you here:

"If you have a problem, there is something you could give that would resolve the situation. Any time we experienced trauma, there were soul level gifts that we could have given to prevent it. The trauma was a mistaken choice that led us down the path of the ego...Most people are frightened of the gift that could have given because it was so magnificent. The gift was big enough to change a family pattern, or significantly help a family member, but it seemed too big. It was so glorious that it would have caused them to stand out too much, and they wouldn't have been able to hide. They thought people would expect them to lead or accomplish other great things."

Building the Strength of Your Light

The truth is that there is nothing we need to become one day in the future to reclaim our Golden Shadow. Our strong choices begin now. And moment to moment we can build the strength of our light. We do not have to become other than what we are at the core of ourselves, to change and beautify our corner of the world. But we do need to allow Creator to express through the uniqueness that is our soul. We do need to move through our weaknesses and refuse to indulge them. We do need to live into the specific greatness of who we really are in our daily lives - in our families, in our workplaces and in our world.

We need to allow ourselves to be the beauty of what we are in every situation we encounter even if it seems like we might upset people's egos with the truth of our light. People invested in their own darkness will either be helped by our connection to Soul and Spirit or they will choose to go away and remain in their own darkness. This is the hard part. As adults we need to risk the loss of relationship and the fear of loneliness in order to be true to ourselves.

As a child you shut your light down to fit in and be taken care of. As an adult it takes great courage to live into your light and into the truth of your own core life questions that live underneath all of your weaknesses. Bringing your Golden Shadow to light sometimes brings difficult but needed changes. But more often, living in your brightest light heals and deepens your existing relationships and it helps you to feel more connected and in love with where you already are.

Living Into the Feminine Creative Principle

While I am by nature very feminine and nurturing in my nature I was very dependent in my twenties and unempowered in my feminine aspects of self. So I set out to develop my masculine independent side in my 30s. As I exerted my truth out into the world I felt like I needed to leave my feminine nature behind.

My 40's have been about finding an empowered integration between the feminine and masculine aspects of creation within myself and I wanted to share with you what I have been discovering about the empowered feminine creative principle.

In my own life the necessary balancing of my inner masculine has been marked by outer doing, re-educating, and working full-time and in trying to move ahead in an effortful, strong, masculine principled way. Yet within my efforts I denied the needed nourishment of the feminine aspect of creation. Busyness which is an over-exaggerated masculine and is an avoidance of the deeper, more painful shadow work that we need to do from time to time.  Busyness keeps us from creative vision.

Psychologist Chuck Spezzano writes profoundly on busyness:

"Busyness attempts to protect us from the fear generated by our shadow figures, the unconscious mind, and our pain. It blocks out soul level gifts, our purpose and our destiny. In our busyness we are trying to run away from feelings of guilt, failure and worthlessness. We drive ourselves onward to prove we are useful and valuable. Yet dark feelings float to the surface in any moment of respite, so we keep pushing on. Our busyness keeps us too busy for love and bonding that would bring about the same success with much less effort. Instead of moving forward to a new stage we change by slight degrees."

What Creative Life Principle are you longing to live into in the coming year? This past year after intending with all of my heart to slow down into a deeper more feminine, receptive presence I finally did. It happened after I missed my plane to Toronto en-route to an art therapy conference. I arrived late at the conference with an eye infection in both eyes. I knew that I needed to make some changes in my scheduling when I got home to deepen my creative vision.

I stopped my monthly article writing and extraneous creative activities and went within. This past year has been marked with long solitary walks and simple, extended periods of time spent deepening into my relationships with my partner Ondrea and my daughter Hadley. It has been a profound pulling back on outward creating, while still functioning fully and staying engaged with my practical life.

I have been listening to my dreams and rounding out the neglected parts of myself and with Ondrea's therapeutic help I have been doing some very deep core inner excavating. Instead of creating new things I went back and revisited and nurtured and deepened into what I have already created. I took my journals, paintings and writings in more deeply. As I stopped creating so much and just let everything sink in, I realized that I was living into the feminine creative principle.

After years of strengthening the masculine "doing" principle inside myself, I have found the urge this past year to become, as I recently wrote in my journal "hugely receptive". I saw inner imagery of open vessels and of my arms opening up to the sky. It has felt uncomfortable for me to not do, do, do as I have been prolifically creative for the past 15 years.

I has felt strange just to sit and leave an open space in my heart to receive. And sometimes it felt strange just to receive "nothing" other than the urge to become more present and more accepting of my life as it was unfolding. Yet I have come to realize this feminine stance of creativity is profoundly creative and alive even as it seems to "do nothing". The feminine aspect of creativity waits to see and hear new information from the unseen realms. The feminine aspect of our nature nurtures what has been created and senses into what longs to be created in our tangible world.

Many women develop an over-exaggerated masculine in our culture as it is highly encouraged to strike out independently and make our mark upon the world. Yet the feminine principle is holistic and it considers the entire picture. Life unfolds all in one piece and it is a feminine trait to realize that we all evolve together. We are part of larger systems and they do not all evolve according to our personal agendas. We are a part of a family evolving, we may be part of a working group evolving and we may be part of a partnership or a marriage evolving.

Indeed we are each an individual person evolving and that has it's own timing and we cannot be rushed or pressured to change before it is time. There is a flow to life unfolding that must be accepted and surrendered too. As a human beings we are an each an unfolding creation that has a masculine and a feminine aspect. The inner feminine nurtures and loves our creations in a sustaining way so that we can build the strength of the inner masculine to take take them into the world.

Creations need to be loved and acknowledged, revisited and honored in order to continue living and this incites a revitalized energy and a passion in our inner masculine to do and bring form to new creations from a nourished and revitalized place. This inner feminine nurturing is what strengthens and inspires our inner masculine to exert the energy to bring the creation into tangible form and to make it real in our lives.

The feminine and the masculine creative principle exists in both men and women and regardless of gender we usually have a more dominant leaning and we each have an imperative to balance the two.  I recently for example met a beautiful art therapist online named Giora Carmi who lives into the intuitive flow of the feminine creative principle. I find his work deeply quiet and nurturing. In contrast my partner Ondrea in contrast serves as a catalyst as therapist which incites the masculine principle of action for practical, emotional and spiritual change in her work with people. I find her work exciting and thought provoking.

The feminine does the inner work to excavate what is holding us back from moving forward. This past year I explored many deep creative practices around descending into the basement of the psyche and helping the repressed selves that we tend to try to leave behind. One shadow practice that I highly recommend is the Buddhist practice called Feeding Your Demons by Lama Tsultrim Allione. This practice has been creative, revealing and deeply helpful for me around dialoguing with the darker, more hidden parts of myself that were causing my eye infections and other illnesses. We all have parts of our arrested childhood psyche that made very early decisions about our beliefs about life that unwittingly stop us from living into our biggest selves.

While my past year has not been a time of new creativity, it has been a time of deepening into what I have created. Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn writes, "To learn to live each moment in deep mindfulness and concentration is the practice. The conception and unfolding of a piece of art take place exactly in the moments of our daily life. The time you begin to write down the music or the poems is only the time of delivering the baby. The baby has to be already in you for you to deliver it. We must make good use of every moment of our daily life in order to allow this insight and compassion to bloom."

For the New Year of 2012 I wish you rich, mindful year of inner listening and ask you the question, "What Principle of Creativity are you are longing to live into right now?

Releasing Guilt - Part 2

Healing Guilt with Self-Love

I have had a few letters from my newsletter subscribers about how to release guilt and wanted to post up this ACIM Lesson that explains the roots of guilt in more depth. Guilt is such an interesting feeling. In my own experience I can feel myself moving into guilt when I start to judge life and other people. I can actually feel myself separating away from my core sense of well-being as I begin to judge. I can feel myself hurting myself.

Usually if I can catch myself I can sense that I have moved away from my connection to my spiritual center, from my presence to something Larger. If I do not catch myself, I move away from my presence to the God and the inherent Good of life, and I can feel myself getting frightened and defended and even more self-protective.

When I become self-protective I start to worry about only myself and I stop giving my gifts to life. I stop contributing to life and may even disrupt or disturb other people's lives with my fears and judgments. I used to let this self-protection move me into a full depression or and illness where I would withdraw from life and nurse my inner wounds for days.

Now when I catch myself heading into this downward spiral I stop as soon as I start to feel uneasy, and grouchy and disgruntled. I check to see what I am disowning in myself by seeing what I am judging others for. Perhaps it is an unaccepted quality that I fear in myself. Perhaps it is an unmet need that I am trying to get others to meet for me that stems from an old sadness or hurt. When I am judging others, I know I am projecting my own inner hurt onto the world and it is time to love myself. When I have compassion for myself and my own inner pain, I can find the strength to have compassion for myself and the world again.

I am writing a book called A Course in Miracles for Creative Women that is a simple, non-denominational, creative interpretation of A Course in Miracles. This lesson focuses on the deeper roots of guilt.

Lesson 70

"My salvation comes from me."

Creative Practice

The purpose of this lesson is to understand that nothing outside of you can save you. You create both the sickness and the remedy within yourself. When you are joined with God/Creator within you are inviting all the healing that you need. We can only feel good to the extent that we are connected to God/Creator/Higher Mind. The closer we are to God the better we feel. The further we move into separation away from seeing the Goodness/the God-ness of the world the worse we feel. And it is entirely our choice.

2 times, for 10-15 minutes repeat, "My salvation comes from me," and add a statement to the effect of, "It cannot come from anywhere else."

Close your eyes and think about all the external situations, circumstances, people and self-concepts you have sought to try to make yourself feel better. Think of all the life situations that you thought would "save you". Say, "My salvation cannot come from any of these things (and really sense into the truth that if you had them without a deep connection to your spirit, anything would feel empty). My salvation comes from me and only from me." Your salvation comes from the depth of your connection to God/Creator. The ego mind assumes, "If all of my problems on the outside were changed, I would be ok." However the level of presence to your deeper connection to your Higher Creative Mind is the only thing that can bring you happiness.

Then enter again into meditation, trying once more to travel through the clouds to the light within you. Using the same technique as you did yesterday today, rather than the clouds being your grievances, the clouds are now all of the external things from which you have tried to find salvation - all the outer things you thought would save you from your inner pain.

Frequently remind yourself throughout the day, "My salvation comes from me. Nothing outside of me can hold me back. Within me is the world's salvation and my own." Only your thoughts separate you from joining with God/Creator. You can choose to make room in your mind for this connection.

Spiritual Idea

We are all tempted to lay blame for our problems outside of ourselves. It is part of the human journey to project and blame our our own unprocessed psychological material onto the world.  After the guilt of creating this kind of havoc in the world we might begin to realize that we have the power to feel good in any situation if we choose to take every upset back into ourselves and look at our own inner pain. We stay away from God through the projection of our unfelt feelings and unexamined thoughts onto life and others and then we feel guilty for those thoughts. The Course says, "All guilt is solely an invention of your mind".

It seems devastating and overwhelming at first to take responsibility for all of our problems but if we lay blame outside of ourselves we leave ourselves powerless and victimized. It is very deep work to look inside of our minds and to see our part in everything that happens to us.

If you think of your guilty thoughts as clues to what you are unwilling to feel and own inside of yourself you will start to clear the guilt. Often it feels too painful and we do not think we have the strength to look within so we project it outwards. This makes us feel really guilty and tortured because we have continued to deny our own pain and have continued to avoid ourselves. Letting go of guilt involves asking the higher part of your mind to have compassion for your pain and to gather the strength to feel and process it.

We are free when we know we are solely responsible for our inner well-being and we have to do the inner work of meeting all the parts of ourselves that are in denial of our inner pain. Every time we felt pain in our lives we disassociated from our spiritual selves, we stopped believing in a Spiritual Source. The level of our inner pain is in equal measure to our distance from God and our spiritual, emotional and physical wellness.

Yet nothing outside of ourselves will ever rescue us. We heal the pain to move back towards our Source of Life. When we move into spiritual maturity all that we hoped would saves us begins to fall away. If we are not connected to our deeper Source, no amount of money or good circumstances can make us happy. No one will further our connection to Creator unless we first desire it and say yes to it. We each have tremendous power to move our life towards a deeper connection with God/Creator.

The good news is we are meant to be happy. We become sick with our own unprocessed psychological material and when we do not do our own inner work we contribute to a sick world as well. We can choose to do our inner work and enjoy a life of well-being.

Releasing Guilt

What Do You Need To Learn?

We are in part responsible for everything that happens to us. To heal guilt we need to take total responsibility for out part in things and learn from our mistakes. Consider the truth that we all have many submerged subconscious and unconscious parts of our minds that want things to happen as they do, even if they are negative.

Psychologist Chuck Spezzano teaches that guilt is simply blocked wisdom. It is a way of removing ourself from the lesson to be learned. He says that guilt is "almost wisdom" as it is a way of punishing ourselves for not making a simple correction. In fact our guilt in any area shows us a lesson that we still need to learn.

We never need to be tortured with guilt. We can be responsible for our actions, but not guilty. Once we learn the lesson we are free from guilt. We are innocent again because we know we will not make that mistake again.

Our Unloving Thoughts Torture Us With Guilt

I am writing a book called A Course in Miracles for Creative Women that is a simple, non-denominational, creative interpretation of A Course in Miracles. This lesson focuses on the roots of guilt.

Lesson 39

"My holiness is my salvation."

Creative Practice

You could say that this lesson means in a nutshell, "My wholeness, my oneness with all of life releases me from guilt." When we are focused on our oneness with other people, we are looking for connections, sameness, and we are seeking to meet and join with others. When we look at others through our judgemental ego mind we are separating away from other people and we are judging them. The purpose of this lesson is to get you in touch with your holiness/your divinity, which is your salvation or your release from the hell of ego guilt.

Meditation: 4 times (more are encouraged), for 5 full minutes repeat the idea,  "My holiness is my salvation (from guilt)."  

Close your eyes and slowly search your mind for unloving thoughts.

With each say, "My unloving thoughts about.....are keeping me in hell. My holiness is my salvation." Our unloving thoughts keep us in hell as they produce guilt and guilt feels like hell.

Spiritual Idea

The Course teaches that guilt is at the root of all our problems, and yet at the beginning of our inner journey we don't even suspect guilt as the cause of our pain. We may not understand that unloving thoughts torture us internally with guilt. I sense on an unconscious level we understand the oneness of humanity and can feel how on a deep level we are poisoning and hinder other people with our unloving thoughts. We blame our problems on many things but rarely on our disowned connection to people and our own internal guilt for judging them and condemning them.

The Course teaches that guilt is insane and there is no reason for it. It serves no useful function. If we understood the extent that we manufacture our own guilt through our unloving thoughts and actions we would have no need for the Course.

Unloving thoughts are guilty thoughts. Holiness is wholeness - which is a loving connection to others. Holiness is lovingness. When we realize that our unloving thoughts keep us in our own personal hell, as well as have a very real affect on the well-being of others, we will more easily be able to transform them. We automatically become fearful and guilty when we indulge in our unloving thoughts."

Unloving Thoughts 

One thing I have learned in my own life is that if I think better of people it helps them. If I focus on what is wonderful about them, it always grows and through this practice I have come to enjoy people immensely. Most people I meet have something truly admirable about them. Everyone has a unique gift, a purpose, a strength of character that is waiting to recognized and celebrated. I find if I have an intention to find what is uniquely good about another, they will reveal it quickly to me. I find that it is easy to see the world as a dark and difficult place and indeed I could easily focus on what is wrong with someone's character, but it is much more joyful to focus on the gift, or the good quality that shines  in another.

Living On Purpose

Fear of Our Purpose

We all have a creative vision and a purpose for our life lurking around in the background of our consciousness. Our purpose is a higher quality of being or a heightened attitude or value that we want to live into. It some kind of feeling state that we want to become in our life. If you were to look at all of your dreams and desires, they would have a higher quality of feeling state behind them that you are not fully living into just yet. What feeling state is the most important to you?

The importance of finding the feeling state behind your purpose is so you can begin living into your vision everyday. Creativity, for example is a quality that I feel called to live into and so it becomes a way for me to develop my character and give to the world. Through my creativity I have to learn how to see more deeply into life, to be present, to listen within, to be more spontaneous and patient and trusting and so on. Knowing these feeling qualities that contribute to my purpose helps me start to live into my creative vision.

Perhaps you sense your vision or purpose is coming up and repress it right back down again. Perhaps you think your purpose is too big or too ridiculous to follow through on. Perhaps you tell yourself that you do not have the talents or capacities to live into your purpose. Or maybe you have forgotten your purpose nearly entirely.

We really do have places to fill in life that are uniquely ours to occupy. This may not always involve being famous or even making much money doing it. But our life purpose always involves giving to life and bonding and connecting with other people in some kind and helpful way. You could call your life purpose your unique way of loving life and other people. Ask yourself this question, "How do I uniquely give to life?"

Progressing as a Whole

Having worked in a hospital setting facilitating art for the elderly and interacting with over 700 people including patients and staff, I see that we all have a part to play in the organization of whatever human system that we live and work in. And no one is inessential. Some of the best people I have met are not necessarily the people who are at the top of the organization or who are making the most money. The people who are most on purpose are the one's who are giving to the reality of their day in an authentic, intelligent and mature way that considers the whole of the situation.

African Elder Malidoma Some puts it this way:

"Every person is sent to this outpost called earth to work on a project that is intended to keep the cosmic order healthy. Any person that fails to do what he or she must do energetically stains the cosmic order."

When We Don't Live Into Our Purpose We Become Depressed

Failing to keep the cosmic order healthy in our corner of the world in my sense of it, as a therapist, is the number one cause of depression and anxiety. We are all wired to give to life. What I have found is that we as humans tend to beat ourselves up for not living into some grand looking, far reaching, meaningful purpose that gets us noticed and approved of by others. And so we miss the small essential progressions that must be made in our character and in our practical life so that we can move forward in a daily, incremental way towards a unique way of contribution.

Life essentially requires that we round ourselves out as a whole piece. We are always being called by life situations to grow and to round out our character. We also must progress as a whole regarding other people. This means if we are not moving forward towards our purpose we need to ask, "Who do I most need to give to in my life situation right now? or "What is life waiting for me to give right now so that I can move forward in my growth?" We have to be alert to how we need to change to give meaningfully to the reality of our life as it is right now. This is how we find our place in the fabric of life. This is how we evolve our life, our purpose and the world. We sense into what is required of us in the present moment cosmic order by one small, kind act at a time.

This is how we evolve as families, as work groups, and as larger and evolving systems. Perhaps the biggest mistake people make is thinking that they can progress as an individual entity and that they are not part of a larger network of connection that needs to progress along with the whole.

Living Into Purpose in Increments

I think when we are creative people we often see things years and years in advance and it can take a long time to live into a big vision. Life a human being is often slow moving and we most often progress by increments. For myself, having long been a prolific creator, I have had to often take side steps in other directions to get my family life, my emotional life and my practical life in order before I can take the next step in my creative life.

I have had to take the time to appreciate and celebrate my life the way it is, even though as a visionary thinker, I can see the potentials I have not yet lived into. If you were to look at your life 20 years ago you may see many things that you only dreamed of are now a given, practical reality for you now, so have patience with yourself. Just because your visions are not here now does not mean you cannot live into them everyday and make your life full of meaning.

Lousia May Alcott the writer of Little Women and a "transcendentalist" (early new age spiritualist) - in the earlier part of the century wrote:

" Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead. "

I used to feel discouraged by this quote when I was younger because I expected the life I wanted to manifest instantly. And yet I was also encouraged because I sensed that I needed to have the time to evolve slowly and to make the needed changes in my character and in my family and in my working world, to be able to live the vision and purpose that I have for my life. Living into what is meaningful for us what being "on purpose" means. 

Living into what is meaningful for you could be as simple as making an attitude change even though at the moment you are not seeing your purpose "on the outside" just yet. If your attitude is one of impatience or frustration that you are not living the life you want, perhaps you could see how it would be to live into appreciation for what is right in front of you. What attitude would you change so that you can begin living into your purpose? A good question to ask yourself is to ask is "Who would I have to be to live my vision in the world?" Then start to build your character into that. Change is possible.

Change Is Only Found in Taking Action

Aster Barnwell, writer and spiritual teacher describes how creating deep changes in our being begins by taking action. Action is absolutely necessary for change and it does not have to be grand and sweeping action. It can be a small daily practice of living into who we want to become. As Aster puts it, we start to live into the higher aspects of our nature because they recalibrate our being - we begin to sculpt a "new me".

"Our hormonal and nerve impulses will change to correspond to the new person we are becoming. Once we have achieved this degree of change we are able to do "good deeds" without any expectation of reward. Good deeds are now a natural and spontaneous expression of our beings as a result of our consciousness becoming established at a higher level. We can start by making small changes in our life by focusing on little things."

Understanding Anger

A Psychological Model of Anger

There comes a time in all of our lives when we need to psychologically explore and learn how to express and understand our anger. Our anger has several facets. It can be a protection against our hurt and vulnerable parts, and it can also be a projection onto another of what we do not like about ourselves. Anger can also be a suppression of our essential passion, purpose, and initiatory strength in the world.

It is necessary to build a strong separate/ego self to survive in the practical world. Our psyches are made up of different parts, sometimes called subpersonalities. Each part has it's own perspective, feelings, memories, goals and motivations. Let's explore two of the parts that we all have inside, the inner child and the protector/guard in relationship to anger.

You can also read a good article on anger here for therapists by Jay Earley PhD. I have simplified his understanding here and added my own understandings.

Anger to Protect Against Inner Pain

The inner protector/inner guard's job is to handle the world and protect against the pain of your disowned and suppressed pain from childhood. Your inner guard protects against pain in a variety of ways - closing down feelings, anger, caretaking, pleasing others, avoiding situations that might evoke a trigger of pain, judgment of self and others (projection), and a variety of defense mechanisms.

The inner guard uses anger to defend against and avoid the pain of exiled feelings. The key to working with your protector/guard is to build a relationship with it from the aware, witnessing part of your mind, which you can call your Self or your Higher Mind. The Self/Higher Mind can ask the Protector/Guard what pain it is protecting.

Your higher mind can ask the guard to talk about the childhood incident or family situation where it shut down from the pain and took on the burden of pain and negative beliefs. The Self witnesses the story and the release of feelings around the story. Or it can simply be conscious and feel the pain until it is gone. Stored childhood pain is often the root of depression. Once the original pain is finally released the protector can let go of its anger.

Appreciating your anger as mechanism to protect you from hurt and pain builds an inner compassion. In some cases releasing or unburdening the anger in an expressive way in therapy, in art-making, or with a trusted other can help dissipate the charge that is covering up the inner pain and make room to feel the inner hurt that the anger is masking.

Suppressed and Disowned Anger

Often however, even our anger gets suppressed by another protector/guard, especially if anger was not allowed in our families when we were growing up. Often we have type of guard that manages our expression of anger and suppresses it. So now we have 3 layers - a managing guard, an angry guard and an exiled child part of our mind that is holding onto our suppressed pain. If a managing part of ourselves habitually suppresses our anger it is helpful to find a conscious and healthy outlet.

Years ago for example when I was going through my divorce found that going for long runs helped me work through my anger on a physical and emotional level. Often in therapy anger can be exerted in a controlled way to help a release, such as punching or yelling into a pillow. We can express anger without danger and often when we do, the original pain that the anger was protecting, will also release, often with tears and a sense of relief.

When to Express Anger and When to Witness It:

Sometimes anger needs to be witnessed and in some cases discharged.

1. Witnessing Anger - Your protector/guard serves a defensive purpose and needs to be listened to and understood. Encouraging the protector/guard to express anger will simply encourage its defense system. Your protector/guard needs to learn how to express anger constructively and learn to delve into the roots of the hurt, heartbreak and pain that the anger is protecting. Feeling and releasing the original pain disassembles the guard’s defenses, as there becomes less of a need for protective anger.

2. Expressing Anger - Exiled anger, such as anger originating in harmful childhood situations, may need to be witnessed by the Higher Mind and a trained therapist or trusted other, and spoken by the child self that originally shut down it's anger. When intense anger has been suppressed for a lifetime, often it is helpful to free up and give permission for the expression of anger in a safe therapeutic environment while your Higher Mind witnesses the process. This reduces the intense charge of your anger and allows the therapeutic work to continue with more ease. Disowned anger needs to be reclaimed and expressed outwardly as a way of accessing inner strength, passion for life and healthy and necessary assertiveness to get through the vissitudes of life in a healthy way.

A Spiritual Model of Anger

I have been writing a book called A Course in Miracles for Creative Women and these particular lessons explore the spiritual roots of anger. On a deep and spiritual level anger is a form of projection and through deep inner accountability we can often heal our anger at its root. When we are angry we are burying the things we do not like about ourselves and then project them out onto the world around us.

Psychologist Chuck Session writes it this way:

"What we see in another is what we have projected, what we think we are. The negative things we see in people are what we actually believe about you. We know this because when we can forgive those things within you, they no longer seem to bother us. What we see in another is what we think about you. If we do not change our judgment on another person, we will be stuck with what we see in them."

When you are feeling angry these two lessons may help deepen your understanding of anger.

Lesson 21

"I am determined to see things differently."

Creative Practice

5 times, for 1 full minute each - repeat the idea, "I am determined to see things differently." Then close your eyes and search your mind deeply for any situation at any time that arouses anger in you, no matter how mild.

Hold each person or situation in you mind and say, "I am determined to see - specify person or situation - differently." Be very specific, even to the point of naming specific attributes in specific people that anger you.

The degree that we feel anger does not matter. Whether it is mild irritation or intense anger that you feel - nothing is too small to include in this practice. This exercise is meant to get underneath the small irritations and see the truth that there is no small anger. Anger is anger.

The Course says,  "You will become increasingly aware that a slight twinge of annoyance is nothing but a veil drawn over intense fury."

Spiritual Idea

All forms of anger arise from the same source within the psyche. Allen Watson points out about how some schools of psychology maintain that everyone carries around a deeply suppressed, primal anger. Underneath our subconscious lies an intense and violent fury. The Course metaphysically views anger as a deep, primal self-hatred that is buried and denied. The self-protective ego that was born in fear and separation cannot love itself and this makes it endlessly angry. Only when we turn to the Source of our own unique souls can we find the love that is ours.

The displacement of anger onto others is called projection. We are enraged at ourselves for separating from the Divine Source and we feel a submerged, salient anger at ourselves that we in our ego selves want to project outwardly. We are endlessly trying to prove that the anger we feel is caused by something outside of ourselves but it is really the roots of own disconnection from Creator and our own creative souls that fills us with unjustified fury.

Lesson 33

"There is another way of looking at the world."

Creative Practice

2 times, morning and evening, for 5 full minutes go back and forth from glancing around your outer world to closing your eyes and observing your inner world. While doing so repeat the idea unhurriedly” There is another way of looking at the world." Regard both inner and outer worlds with equal casualness, and detachment.

The instant any situation disturbs you apply the idea specifically, saying, "There is another way of looking at this." Do so immediately, rather than waiting until you have tried to fix things on the outside. If your feelings do not clear up right away, don't give up. Spend a minute or more repeating the sentence over and over, closing your eyes and concentrating on the words you are saying.

Spiritual Idea

We can consider with this lesson that do not need to view life through our defense system. Indeed when we do, we actually create the very thing we are trying to avoid. People feel our defenses and ultimately we unconsciously put out the vibe, "stay away from my sore spots - and so we continually feel separate. When we look at life "my way" we miss the Larger Picture and actually miss the creativity of seeing life in a myriad of different ways. If we took the time to look at a life event from the point of view from each person involved we would begin to experience life as more multidimensional.

If we saw the world from a friendly perspective and understood that everyone flourishes with love and kind attention and we could extend that love, we can shift how we see the world - and indeed affect the outcome of any situation. Our attitudes and perspectives make a very really contribution to outcomes in our daily life. We can assert that love is here and it is up to us to extend it. And it is this way of looking at the world that creates a New World.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness requires that we delve deeply into our own minds instead of trying to change somebody else's mind. I have been reflecting a great deal on forgiveness this past while because as I have healed and integrated many apects of my psyche I find forgiveness has become much easier and more natural. Whereas in the past I have struggled a great deal to forgive those who I believed had "wronged me".

Consider the following quote by psychologist Chuck Spezzano:

"Everyone we have grievances with, reflects self-concepts within ourselves that we are attacking. They are parts of our own mind - what we think of ourselves in a subconscious or even unconscious part of our mind."

If we were to look into the deepest recesses of our mind we would find where we are actually doing what we are blaming the other person for. This is how the psyche projects and creates havoc in our outer world. We project onto others what we feel guily for in the deepest, most hidden parts of our own mind.

Finding and reconciling with the hidden parts of our psyche is the work of psychological and spiritual growth. There is a level of consciousness that we can reach that is problem free. I often have moments in my day, usually when I am walking in the woods where I suddenly say to myself in a burst of clarity, "I have no problems!" This is not to say that I don't have issues that need to be dealt with but I no longer treasure and create my problems so that I can preoocupy myself away from what I need to offer to life. Consider that we create problems so we can withdraw and so we do not have to make the effort to give the strength of our gifts to life.

When we don't forgive the people that we have grievances with we get to use another person's behavior to distance and separate and not make an effort to give to the situation. We get to remain a victim. As psychologist Chuck Spezzano describes it - being a victim and not forgiving allows us to do what we want to do, or not do something we do not want to do, instead of offering the strength of our gifts that are needed in each situation.

For the past year I have been writing an ambitious and devoted non-denominational tome called A Course in Miracles for Creative Women which is a simple version of the daily lessons for the creative mind.

The following is my simple and creative interpretation of one of the ACIM lessons for creative women.

Lesson 62

"Forgiveness is my function as the light of the world."

Creative Practice

Meditation: as frequently as possible (suggestion: every hour on the hour),

for 1-2 minutes tell yourself (with eyes closed if the situation permits): "Forgiveness is my function as the light of the world. I would fulfill my function that I may be happy."

If your mind wanders, repeat the idea and add: "I would remember this because I want to be happy."

We practice these higher ideas so we can have a happier day. And this is not a selfish practice. When we forgive we bring peace and happiness to everyone around us.

 

Spiritual Idea

If you were the light of the world, what would you do? You would forgive everyone in your life. Forgiveness simply means not judging people for their "small" behaviors - their fearful, survival, selfish acts and instead sensing into what is great about them.

 

We forgive others so that we can remember the truth of ourselves. When we remember the truth about ourselves, we remember the truth about everyone. If we see something that we cannot forgive in another we are really seeing what we cannot accept and love within ourselves.

 

From our egos we do not know how to forgive. Forgiveness is antithetical to maintaining a separate self. Forgiveness is spiritual process that simply says, "I love you and I see what is beautiful about you. Whether you change or not is up to you."

 

Forgiveness is releasing all judgment. When we forgive, we call upon on our own inner greatness. When we see, focus on and judge weakness in other people, we automatically make our own weakness larger and more acute in our own life.

 

Forgiveness is really a refined sense of acceptance. As the light of the world - as the embodiment of our own personal greatness - we are not here to teach, fix or even help. We are here to see the particular goodness of each individual and celebrate that and invite it to become stronger through our love of it. The Course says so aptly, "Forgiveness is the demonstration that you are the light of the world. Through your forgiveness does the truth about yourself return to your memory." In forgiving others, you find your own greatness.

Light of the World

For the past year I have been writing a book called A Course in Miracles for Creative Women which is a simple version of the daily lessons for the creative brain.

The following lesson moves me to no end and I have contemplated it deeply for many years and only now am able to live into this idea much more of the time. It speaks to the magnitude of soul light that we each carry inside. As we discover the distinct qualities of our unique gifts - what we are here to bring to the world we realize that our inner light is not generic.

Our light is specific to us and if we do not express it - the world misses out. When we quiet our outer personality we will see that we each carry a particular principle of life that is expressing itself through us.

If you delve into your psyche deeply enough you will be able to locate the time when as a child you decided to not give your unique light to life. As children we do decide at certain point to not give our gifts, usually because we see the adults in our lives withholding theirs and because we are afraid to be that big. Usually when the urge to live in more grace and magnitude arises in adult life you will be able to see when you shut your power down.

You may embody the soul quality of Beauty for example, or Creativity or Love, or Compassion. Being a cook I like to say that each soul I meet has a unique "flavor" and the more I work with people the more I can see that the mistaken beliefs and darkness of each individual sits "on top" of their unique essence and gifts.

Joel Goldsmith writes it this way:

"God Consciousness is forever expressing Itself and Its qualities. Consciousness, Life, Spirit, can never fail. Our task is to relax and let our soul express itself." Egotism is the attempt to be or do something through our personal, physical, or mental effort. To "take no thought" is to refrain from conscious thinking and to let the divine ideas fill our consciousness. Since we are individual spiritual Consciousness, we can always trust Consciousness to fulfill Itself and Its mission. We are the spectator or witness to this divine activity of Life expressing and fulfilling Itself through us."

The following is my simple and creative interpretation of one of the ACIM lessons for creative women - a  work in progress.

Lesson 61

"I am the light of the world."

Creative Practice

The purpose of this lesson is to begin to embrace the large thought of your real purpose and truth here on earth.

Meditation: as many as possible every hour for 1 or 2 minutes, tell yourself, "I am the light of the world. That is my only function. That is why I am here." Then let related thoughts come. Intuit into the idea, how does it feel in your body? Creatively make it your own.

Spiritual Idea:

 

This is my personal favorite of all of the lessons in the Course because it speaks a truth that we often do not let ourselves acknowledge. Being the light of the world does not refer to any characteristics that you have to overlay or affirm on top of your daily personality. It refers to the unique greatness of your soul. It is refers to the unique greatness in which you were created and it refers to how you can choose to conduct yourself in each and every moment.

 

To say, "I am the light of the world" can feel like a great stretch and even arrogant and egotistical to our diminished and defensive egos but in truth our greatness is our birthright. We find our divine greatness when we are when we are present in the core center of ourselves. When we are present deeply within and are giving to each moment with wholeheartedness, we are the light of the world.

 

We are meant to give love to ourselves, and to love other people and not live our lives drowning in our own limitations and fears. The more light and love we give to ourselves and others, the larger our sense of ourselves as a loving being grows. We can say to ourselves "I am the loving light of the world" and sense into and practice that sense of increasing largess in our own bodies. We can build an endurance and a joy towards loving everyone and offering kindness to everyone we meet. We can live each day with greatness.

Spiritual Centering

Gathering Life Force
There is a reason why spiritual teachers speak about "getting centered". Centering means gathering all of your scattered energies into your core - into the center of your body. This is how we gather energy and concentrate our life force so that we can evolve and grow forward in our life.

When your energies are "out" of your body you are usually trying to "get something" or fulfill a need. We all have many psychological parts of self - of our mind - that need to express themselves - that need to be integrated, accepted and healed.

Your Center is Your True Self

The center of yourself is who you really are. It is where you can feel the unique flavor of your authentic self. You can start to move towards you core by gathering your energy inwards and becoming sensitive and present to the moment. We all have different ways of feeling integrated - of feeling all in one piece. Getting centered usually involves some way of concentrating your energy. For myself, it would be time spent in water and nature, engaging in the expressive arts and meditation. What do you do to gather or raise your spiritual energy?

Dissipating Energy Keeps you Small

How do you dissipate your energy? Each day we are either building our energy or dissipating our energy. Dissipating can include any way we try to "discharge" excess spiritual energy because it feels beyond our comfort zone. We can do this by engaging in behaviors such as eating too much, or judging and separating from others - such as gossiping and talking negatively about other people behind their backs. We can play our emotional patterns of negativity over and over because it feels familiar and comfortable, even if it is painful.

Releasing the Defenses to Openness in the Body

We also can literally close up our bodies physically to spiritual connection and openess. We unconsciously keep ourselves the defended and the same because it feels familiar. We all hold defensive attitudes in our bodies that block our connection to our core, authentic self such as cringing, defiance, hypervigilance ect. Psychotherapist Judith Blackstone author of The Enlightenment Process offers a way of releasing habitual body tension:

"Let your body move into the bound attitude. Really experience yourself in this attitude. You may find that parts of your body that you did not know were involved in the attitude move into the pattern of tension. Because the whole body is connected through the fascia, our bound patterns often involve a line of tension throughout our whole body.

"When you feel the whole pattern of tension, try to attune to the consciousness that is holding that tension. Originally all of our binding was volitional, even though unconscious. The same part of your childhood mind that organized the contraction in your body is still preserved in the contraction. Try to experience the childhood mind that is holding the attitude that you experience in your body. You may experience the age that you were when you first formed this pattern. You may also experience the emotional content of the pattern.

As that childhood consciousness, you will be able to feel and discharge the bound emotion. The emotional release may occur as tears, or as the movement of energy through and out of your body. The emotion with have the quality of your age when it was bound in your body. For example the rage of a two year old will have a different quality than the age of the a six year old, or the age of an adult. You will also be able as the childhood consciousness, to let go of the physical tension, as simply as you relax you hand after making a fist.

This is not a method of regression in the usual sense of experiencing oneself entirely as a child. Our present day consciousness remains alert and witnesses the fragmented part of our consciousness, energy and body that is bound in the childhood memory."

Holding More Energy Builds Joy

As we grow in spiritually - as we improve our attitudes and behavior and release the body armoring - we can learn to hold more energy in our bodies, more pleasure, more joy, more gratitude, more self-esteem, more abundance. Spiritual energy and all of these joys of life feel good and yet we have to become aware of how we block and turn the energy away and willfully dissipate our birthright. We can learn to turn our will to open to the spiritual and loving energy that is always available to us and learn to hold and sustain more of it. When we do our life changes for the better and moves forward.

Blessings

An Excerpt from
The Gentle Art of Blessing

by
Pierre Pradervand

How to incorporate blessing into your life.
On awakening, bless this day, for it is already full of unseen good
which your blessings will call forth, for to bless is to acknowledge
the unlimited good that is embedded in the texture of the universe
and awaiting each and all.
——
On passing people in the street, on the bus, in places of work and
play, bless them. The peace of your blessing will companion them
on their way, and its aura will be a light on their path.
——
On meeting people and talking to them, bless them in their health,
their work, their joy, their relationship to the universe, themselves
and others. Bless them in their abundance and their finances, bless
them in every conceivable way, for such blessings not only sow
seeds of healing but one day will spring forth as flowers in the
waste places of your own life.
——
As you walk, bless the city in which you live, its government and
teachers, its nurses and street sweepers, its children and bankers,
its priests and prostitutes. The minute anyone expresses the least
aggression or unkindness to you, respond with a blessing. Bless
them totally, sincerely, joyfully—for such blessings are a shield that
protects them from the ignorance of their misdeed and deflects the
arrow that was aimed at you.
——
To bless means to wish, unconditionally and from the deepest
chamber of your heart, unrestricted good for others and events;
it means to hallow, to hold in reverence, to behold with awe that
which is always a gift from the Creator. He who is hallowed by
your blessing is set aside, consecrated, holy, whole. To bless is to
invoke divine care upon, to speak or think gratefully for, to confer
happiness upon, although we ourselves are never the bestower,
but simply the joyful witnesses of life’s abundance.

When something goes completely askew in your day, when some
unexpected event upsets your plans—and you—burst into blessing.
For life is teaching you a lesson, and the very event you believe to
be unwanted, you yourself called forth, so as to learn the lesson
you might balk against were you not to bless it. Trials are blessings
in disguise, and hosts of angels follow in their path.
——
To bless is to acknowledge the omnipresent, universal beauty
hidden from material eyes; it is to activate that law of attraction
which, from the furthest reaches of the universe, will bring into
your life exactly what you need to experience and enjoy.
——
When you pass a prison, mentally bless its inmates in their
innocence and freedom, their gentleness, pure essence and
unconditional forgiveness; for one can only be a prisoner of one’s
self-image, and a free man can walk unshackled in jail, just as
citizens of a free country may be prisoners of the fear lurking
within their thoughts.
——
When you pass a hospital, bless its patients in their present
wholeness, for even in their suffering, their wholeness awaits
discovery within them. When your eyes behold a man in tears
or seemingly broken by life, bless him in his vitality and joy, for
the material senses present but the inverted image of the ultimate
splendor and perfection that only the inner eye beholds.
——
It is impossible to bless and judge at the same time. So hold
constantly as a deep, hallowed, intoned thought the desire to bless,
for truly then shall you become a peacemaker, and one day you
shall behold, everywhere, the very face of God.

P.S.
And of course, above all, do not forget to bless the utterly beautiful
person YOU are.

Inner Child Drawings

The 30 Day Inner Child Challenge

Inner child drawings are a profound way to access aspects of your psyche that you may not normally pay attention to.

Inner child drawings are typically done with your non-dominant hand. Buy yourself a box of kid's crayons and a special sketchbook. Artist Heather Williams, author of Drawing as a Sacred Activity has an excellent exercise to help access your inner child that I will share with you. It takes 30 days of daily drawing either in the morning or the evening.

Daily Inner Child Exercise

1.Relax and breathe with your paper and crayons in front of you.

2. Close your eyes and see or feel a child near you. Notice the color or her/his hair, notice the height, posture, clothing. Open your heart and feel yourself accepting this child exactly as she/he is, even if the chid is angry sad or frightened.

3. Ask the child to play a game with you. The adult in you will ask the child 3 questions. What is your name? What are you feeling right now? What can I do to help you feel really good?

4. Let the child draw a picture of for you and answer the questions using crayons and your non-dominant hand.

5. Thank the child for sharing with you.

For more 30 day drawing challenges visit Expressive Art Workshops.

Depth Journaling

Keeping a daily log of your inner life can be a deepening experience. As you start to take note of what felt meaningful to you each day, you invite new self-awarenesses and bring the edges of your unconscious mind into detail and clarity in your writing. Detailed in the classic book, At A Journal Workshop by Ira Progroff here are a few suggestions for keeping a daily log of the meaningful inner and outer events of your life.

At the end of your day, sit in stillness. Let yourself feel the inner movement of your life. In silence with your eyes closed, let yourself go back in memory for a day. Prod yourself to remember as many specific details as you can. If you remember you dreams or fragments of thoughts as you were waking write them down. How did you feel when you woke up? Recording the fragments of your night before in dreams, feelings and thoughts, helps you to see how your night moves into day.

As you begin your day what emotions, desires, anxieties, hopes and plans began your day? Was there a basic emotional tone or body feeling? As you began the tasks of the day what where the thoughts that came unbidden to your mind? What feelings and fantasies moved through you without you wanting them to be there?

What kinds of relationships came about in the course of the day? Were they loving or frustrating? Do not judge your emotions. As you describe your emotions, you will find that the external movement of events fit around them, and the pattern of the day takes shape around your feelings.

"To follow the movement of our emotions allows us to retrace the formation of our lives from the inside. Thus you will begin to recognize how your day unfolded from within yourself." Ira Progoff.

Do not censor or edit the content of your day. Do not exclude the things that you feel ashamed of or emphasize the things you feel proud of. It is important to stay strongly neutral as you record your day. The aim is to record an un-edited expression of your inner experience. Let the words flow with no editing or censorship. As you record each 24 hour block of your life experience you start to sense into how the movement of each day forms the movement of your life.

Once you have finished writing, close your eyes, breathe deeply and let your whole being absorb your day. Write any additional thoughts our memories that come to you. Let yourself absorb the movement of your day as an integral piece of your life.