Natural Creativity

I think learning to express yourself with freedom and creativity helps in all areas of your life:  physical, energetic, emotional, mental..and the practical side of life is not separate from the rest of it. This is the basis sense that moves me to work with people in ‘The Alchemy of Writing’ workshops and courses.

For things such as job interviews and grant applications, the same thing applies:  very often, the job or the grant will go to the person with the most developed capacity to express in words, who they are, what they are about, what creative intentions and values they are wanting to manifest through their business or project.

That’s the interesting thing for me, about learning to use words and language in a good way--you may be very gifted and talented at what you do, but if you can’t express what your work is about, what the benefits are, and how they actually occur...then it will be much harder for you to find and connect with potential students, clients and anyone else who might appreciate and support you.

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Writing is act of affirmation, of courage, of faith. Writing is good for the soul.

These words come from a posting on my upcoming ‘Alchemy of Writing’ workshop:

Birds sing, wind blows, human beings write. 

Many people long to write, sometimes for their whole lives, and never take the plunge. I encourage anyone who feels the urge to write to jump right into the water. Writing is powerful medicine. It connects us with parts of ourselves that have been lost, hidden, shut away. It can be a form of guidance, deep learning, inquiry, prayer and transformation.

There is nothing academic in this approach to writing. You are inviting the full participation of your heart, your body and your emotions. There is nothing you need to know, nothing you need to strive for. As you learn to let go of your judgments, agendas and expectations, your writing takes on a life of its own. Breath by breath, you learn to trust your authentic voice, and follow where it leads.

Miles Davis, the great jazz musician, used to say to his quartet: “Practice in your rooms if you like, but don’t bring that stuff to this stage. This is about being in the moment.”

Working with these obstacles to our natural creativity is a key part of The Alchemy of Writing process

Obstacles to Creativity

Fear of Failure--learn to bow to failure. It’s inevitable.

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I am sending you this Introduction to the upcoming Alchemy of Writing retreat at Mountain Waters in Nelson. First of all, if you have already done a retreat with me, I want to let you know that every 'Alchemy of Writing' workshop or retreat is different. The process itself is alive, growing, and evolving, and so are you! Writing is like life-unpredictable, wild, and full of mystery.

In order to help you prepare for this retreat, I’d like to make it clear that this way of writing is not at all geared to producing a specific result. That may or may not happen, but it not why we are coming together on retreat. We are going to explore what it is like to open to the unknown, and write from that place, without any idea of preference about where that carries us.

This approach to writing is a spiritual practice, in the sense that we are working, moment to moment, with the nature of our conditioned mind. This mind avoids, judges, manipulates and controls. There is nothing wrong with any of these things, they are just what arise for us as human beings, again and again. At the retreat, we will be resting in the space of presence, and learning how to trust our creative energy to carry us beyond these conditioned impulses.

You can ask yourself these questions, as you prepare for the retreat: Am I willing to receive whatever comes, as I write?  Am I willing to inquire, and then sit without knowing, as something emerges? Am I willing to go below the stream of my thinking, and write from my heart, from my body and from this place of not knowing? Am I willing to let go of the ideas I have about who I am, and listen to new dimensions of my being express themselves?

The more you can rest in this openness, the more the river of creativity, love, and wisdom can flow through you.

Last week I spent a whole day out in the Slocan Valley, sitting and writing with a group of women. We sat on a porch, looking over a pool, fields full of trees and flowers, and the green mountains across the valley. The silence got deeper and deeper. We sat, we wrote, we read out loud, and worked with each other. We walked, stretched, and wrote some more. The whole day passed like this, and it was good. All my life I’ve noticed this—that when we allow ourselves to be creative, a deep contentment fills our being.

The first thing I want to say about creativity is that is belongs to all of us. We are deeply embedded in a relentlessly creative universe. The most natural way we can be is intensely creative. That’s our authentic nature. But we started to believe something else: creativity is for the gifted, for the special, for the other person, not for me.

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I’ve always had a deep sense that presence and creativity are not really luxuries, but an essential part of life. This inner knowing has been confirmed by a great book I’m reading, called, “Deep Survival.” It contains many well- documented tales of survival-in the wilderness, at sea, in prisoner of war camps, and in the twin towers of 9/11.

It turns out that the people who survive are not necessarily the well- trained, experienced ones. The survivors are the ones who are able to deal with the reality right in front of them in a creative, flexible way. The ones who die are holding on to a map inside their minds. They have an idea of what is happening, and the idea stands between them and the truth of what is actually going on. They cannot meet the moment, the situation as it is, and respond to it.

So the more we live life according to our maps, our ideas, the less we are able to be present to our immediate, direct experience. And the more we can respond creatively, flexibly, to the demands of the moment, the more likely it is that we will walk out of the situation alive.

The state of presence, and our capacity to live creatively are essential survival skills. And they are not something we can just pull out of the bag, next time we get into trouble.

It was clear, reading ‘Deep Survival,’ that survivors carry these resources deep in their being. Their ability to be truly present, to let go of their mind maps, was a direct result of the way they had lived their lives. The ones who fought with reality, complained, resisted and denied what was going on, simply did not live to tell the story.

Behind my T.V.
in the bedroom,
are four pots of geraniums,
sleeping through the winter.

Three are pale green,
one has no leaves
at all.

I water them
once in a while,
just enough
to keep them alive
until spring.

I love
that they bloom there
in secret,
behind the T.V.
where nobody sees them
but me.

I wonder about
the quiet plant,
the leafless one.

Will it come
alive again,
under blue sky
and warm rain?

I feel curious about
the secret movement
of life.

Life that sprouts
in silence,
hidden away,
forgotten,
but not dead.

A seed can sit
for a long time,
before it awakens.

Some seeds only sprout
when fire
comes upon them.

What seeds
do we carry,
that wait for fire
to ignite them?