Did you ever notice how certain themes run through your life, rising up and falling away, only to appear again sometime later? For me, over the last while, the theme has been passionate living. As a teacher and coach, I have more and more people asking me about how to live a life that is fully alive and creative.
“ I want to contribute, to participate, to find something that I’m really passionate about,” they say. “How do I do that?”
“I feel something calling me, but I’m not sure what it is. How do I find out? I don’t even know where to start.”
When I allow my heart to open to these questions, I sense a deep longing that seems to be part of our collective consciousness right now. I realize that each one of us was born to discover this way of being, of fully participating in life. I have helped many people open to this passionate way of living through a process of exploration and free expression. If we really allow ourselves to engage in this process of deep inquiry, we begin to experience directly that who we are is not a fixed and static thing, but a flow of energy that is changing, flowing, and dynamic. We discover how to live from a place I call our ‘creative edge.’
I think a great deal of confusion, doubt and despair happen when we equate this creative edge, this place of passion and aliveness, with skill or knowledge. They are not the same. Learning a skill and gathering information are the kinds of things we learn in school. Passion and creativity do not work like this. To connect with this part of our being requires another kind of learning and practice. This is more like unlearning than learning: how to open, to let go, to allow ourselves not to know, to be a complete beginner. The mystic poet Rumi was pointing to this when he said, “The more skill you have, the further you are from what your deepest love wants.”
“You know Rumi is right,” one of my clients said recently, “There are things I really love to do, that I feel called to do, that I’m not very good at. But that doesn’t matter. I can learn, bit by bit, and if the passion is here, then I really have something to sustain me, to keep me going.”
“Yes, “ I replied, “When we find out what we really care about, it’s a very powerful resource. We can move through the obstacles in our way, fall down and get back up again. Failure is just part of the process. It doesn’t defeat us. We just keep going. No-one else told us that we should be doing this. It’s a genuine impulse, connected to our authentic being.”
I heard something very close to this when I was listening to a coach called Michael Bungay Stanier recently. He spoke about the difference between good work and great work. Good work is the work we do when we are inside the area of our competence, functioning consistently, and with confidence and surety.
Great work takes us into another universe. When we do great work we venture out into the unknown. We have no clue how it will turn out. There are no guarantees. We don‘t know what we are doing. There is often fear in this place, and a lot of aliveness and presence. But we keep going, because we have learned to trust something, even if we are not quite sure what it is.
I would describe great work as something that comes when we are living on our creative edge.
What a mysterious thing to consider--that each one of us has a piece of great work to offer into the world, if we can begin to trust that passionate impulse to live fully, to participate in life without holding ourselves back. What would it take for you to begin to trust yourself in that way?
We will be exploring this in depth in ‘The Alchemy of Writing’ workshop this coming weekend.
For info re the workshop, or to register, click here; http://www.barefootjourneys.net/index.php/events/event/the-alchemy-of-writing-workshop/
with love
Shayla
