by sublimity-001-main | Jan 14, 2013 | 2013, Post, Purpose, Spiritual Growth
“Each word before leaving my lips seemed to have passed through all the warmth of my blood. There was no fibre in me which did not give forth an harmonious sound. Ah, grace! The state of grace! Each time it is given me to touch the summit of my art, I recover that unspeakable abandonment.”
— Eleonora Duse
If you fancy yourself a “creative type,” you might feel like you have to fight a never-ending battle for your art, whether against the “system” or against the daily minutiae that threaten to suck the life out of your creative soul. But the only enemy we ever have to face is “the enemy within our own household” — in other words, within us.
We fight daily skirmishes. Mapping the terrain we want to conquer. “Humping it” through the jungle of our mind, where voices echo from behind every tree. Trudging through the thicket of our heart, where a firefight of unresolved emotions threatens to cut us down at every turn. Slugging through the swampland of our psyche, where strange and terrifying creatures stir just beneath the murky depths.
And this is just to get out of bed!
The path to our creative potential seems riddled with land mines. Resistance. Procrastination. Competition. Fear. Doubt. Desire. Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk! These are just some of the combatants we confront as we sneak behind enemy lines, secure the bridge and try to claim that frickin’ hill!
But claim it we must — whatever that creative hill is.
Ironically, though, to win “the war of art,” we must give up the fight and surrender.
Perhaps you’ve experienced so much negative conditioning around your creativity — or its potential to find a place in the world — that you suffer from a “broken art.” The object of your artistic affection brings up emotions akin to a jilted lover. You feel anxious, unsure, angry, depressed. You procrastinate making a connection to the object of your art. It’s an approach-avoidance relationship — an aching to be in its warm embrace, and a fear of getting burned by it.
When it comes to your creativity, you’re just not yourself lately.
Maybe you get involved in addictive, self-destructive habits like eating or drinking too much, compulsively cleaning your office, mindlessly surfing the Internet, or watching infomercials all the way through! You think something’s wrong with you: you’re lazy, stubborn, chemically imbalanced, creatively impaired, karmically challenged. Maybe you’re not meant to do this after all; maybe you’ve been lying to yourself all along — maybe your dad was right and you should get a “real job”!
But that’s not the problem. You have a broken art.
Your art is aching. It has Coronary Artistry Disease! It hasn’t been given the love, attention, and recognition it needs to feel nurtured. It feels abandoned, stepped on, even betrayed. And there’s only one way to reverse this hardening of the art-eries (I couldn’t resist): Take off the protective armor. Open your art. And risk breaking it all over again.
Feed the “Starving Artist”
If you believe you have to be starving in some hovel to create great art, you’ll set up a personal law — through the power of your belief — that manifests as limitation: either living in a shack while you slave away at your craft, living a more abundant but uninspired life or “selling out” for security.
It’s an either-or mindset, based on a false concept of how life works. Instead, try thinking “this and that,” instead of “this or that.” You can be rich and brilliant, successful and spiritual. There are many wealthy, award-winning creators of all types. At the height of Picasso’s career, he could doodle on a napkin and pay for anything.
Now that’s owning your artistic power!
There are also artists happily and abundantly plying their craft below the radar. So it’s not about the size of your lifestyle; it’s about the quality of your life.
But feeding the starving artist goes beyond merely the monetary aspects. If you harbor a withholding consciousness toward your creativity, you’re likely to be depriving yourself in other ways. Just as some spiritual ascetics think the only way to God is by fasting, isolating and sleeping on a bed of nails, there’s a prevalent belief that in order to create great art you have to suffer, as well.
Tom Petty would supposedly get himself into bad relationships that ended horribly just so his heart would be sufficiently shredded to write a great love song. Van Gogh is hailed as the archetype for the idea that suffering equals great art. But you don’t need to be in insane relationships that end in bloody betrayal and heartbreak to write passionate love songs; you don’t need to be a tortured soul at all to create something worthy.
Pain is natural. Suffering is optional.
You can have great art and happiness. You can create great work and be highly functional. You can get your act together — and still be inspired to write that second act!
Are you willing to be whole? Are you willing to be a healthy, happy person who also happens to create great art? Are you willing to “adopt a life of luxury,” as Deepak Chopra says — an abundant life of variety and adventure, free from both the drama that saps the spirit and the monotony that dulls the senses?
To heal your broken art, you must deeply love the inner artist — which means romancing the muse, not starving and torturing it.
Feed your inner artist with rich living, deep feeling and expansive thinking, and it will burst forth with a creative strength, stamina and vision that not only transforms your life but has the potential to change the world.
by sublimity-001-main | Jan 14, 2013 | 2013, Post, Spiritual Growth
“My husband and I can’t say two words to each other without drawing blood,” a woman cried to her therapist. “The second he walks through the door, we’re at each other’s throats. Deep down, I know the love’s still there, but it seems hopelessly buried.”
Listening intently, the therapist reached into his drawer, pulled out a bottle, and handed it to her. “This is holy water, blessed by a swami from India,” he said. “For the next week, whenever your husband’s about to enter the room, take a drink, hold some on your tongue and look into his eyes. After a couple of seconds, swallow it. You should notice an improvement in your interactions right away.”
The woman went home and waited eagerly for her other half to return. When he walked in, she took a swig of the blessed water and silently held his gaze. He gave her a suspicious look then grinned curiously. She swallowed the water and asked how his day went.
Amazingly, they didn’t argue.
In fact, they had one of their most intimate talks in recent memory.
The next night before he came to bed, she snuck another jolt of the powerful liquid, performing the same ritual. Suddenly, as if a veil was lifted, she saw him in a whole new light, saw him for the first time again, saw the man she fell in love with.
And of course, the predictable fight never came.
The following week, with her water supply depleted and her love life nearly replenished, the woman returned to the therapist, proclaiming that the treatment had healed her marriage, and she needed to get a hold of more holy water… fast.
The therapist smiled and revealed that the potent elixir was nothing but store-bought Mountain Spring.
So what happened here?
Was it the woman’s expectation and/or intention that created the outcome? Certainly these are important. But maybe it simply resulted from breaking a habit. In choosing silence over her conditioned response, she, in effect, pressed the pause button on her inner-movie projector that had been replaying old conflicts.
There’s a set of Zen tenets that serve as a good model for addressing your partner, or anyone else:
Speak only when:
- (a) It’s the truth
- (b) It’s spoken in love
- (c) It adds to the silence
And what does “adds to the silence” mean?
When you refuse to react to the story going on in your head, and instead just witness it quietly, you create the still, silent space out of which all creation comes, and make room for something new, more authentic and more loving to emerge.
You also create the space for your partner to do the same.
Although you may not always achieve such lofty heights of communication, the sincere attempt to be more conscious of your conversations (inner and outer) can go a long way in creating more harmonious interactions.
So the next time you find yourself about to open your mouth and stick both feet in, grab the nearest bottle of “holy water” and stick that in instead.
If one isn’t handy, just listen quietly until you have nothing left to say… then start talking.
***Derek Rydall is currently working on the book, “Tongue Shui: Harnessing the Energy of Your Words to Transform Your World.”
by sublimity-001-main | Jan 14, 2013 | 2013, Emergence, Post
There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.
— Victor Hugo
The impulse for freedom seems to be sweeping the planet, from the Midwest to the Middle East. And no matter how hard people resist, nothing can hold these evolutionary energies back for long. Of course, this emergent impulse is obvious in popular uprisings against repressive rule. But the breakdown of our major systems — economic, educational, political, environmental — is also a sign of something larger trying to unfold, personally and globally. The crises we face today are not simply the result of mistakes we’ve made; they’re evolutionary catalysts, calling us to make deep changes to our vision and values, so that our next stage of potential can unfold.
Unfortunately, what often accounts for change is merely a cosmetic make-over — a stopgap solution that’s more about maintaining a false sense of safety and security. In other words, we try to change the world but stay the same. And it never works for long. It’s like holding a beach ball under water: Eventually, you let go and it pops up — often hitting you in the face. Or worse, like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, denying the deeper problem until the whole ship goes down. As Einstein said, “You cannot solve a problem from the same level of thinking that caused it.” We must, as Gandhi said, “become the change we want to see in the world.”
There’s always something trying to be born. The universe isn’t neutral; it has a plan, a pattern — a Big Idea seeking willing places for Its ever-expanding expression. The good news is that It’s conspiring for our freedom. But to benefit, we must become what W. Clement Stone called “inverse paranoids,” believing life is plotting for us. This is rarely how we live. We often resist this “urge to emerge” because we’re afraid of change. To the ego, change is equivalent to death. But change isn’t the problem. Problems aren’t even the problem. Holding onto old forms instead of yielding to this evolutionary impulse is the problem, and the cause of our suffering.
This emerging energy always finds expression. When we deny it, it doesn’t disappear; it creates an inner pressure that must release, sometimes in destructive ways. Globally, it can erupt as political uprisings, wars or environmental disasters. Personally, it can break out as disease, financial collapse or relationship meltdown. But the meaning of these events isn’t that we’re being punished, or that someone’s to blame; it’s that we’re living in a world too small, and we must open up to a larger vision. As the Gospel of Thomas says, “If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you.” To use an analogy in nature, just as certain seeds require a forest fire to crack open their shells, crises burn away our limited self-concepts, allowing our deeper nature to come forth.
I’ve experienced this many times. It took a brush with death while doing a movie to crack open my actor’s ego and hear the call of my soul — a message that not only changed the course of my life, but saved it by taking me out of a world of substance abuse. After that, I prayed to have greater faith. But not until I burned through my savings, exhausted all external support, and was literally living on a prayer did I get humble enough to rely on a Power greater than myself. Out of those ashes, not only did I land a two-day job that earned me a year’s salary, but I learned to live more by insight than eyesight, which has led to a more abundant and empowered life.
It was the pain of waiting by the phone as an actor that motivated me to write scripts for myself; the struggle to survive as a screenwriter that inspired a six-figure script consulting business; and the agony of trying to fix other people’s scripts that made me a strong enough writer to sell my own. It was the collapse of yet another movie deal that gave birth to my first book, which not only led to more movie deals but another book that wove my writing and spiritual work into the path I’m now on. And it was the breakdown of my relationships and body that brought the emotional and spiritual breakthroughs which inspire everything I do today.
It could have gone very differently. My knock at death’s door could have accelerated my downward spiral into addiction. My money troubles could have led to a “secure” job that stifled my creativity. My career failings could have caused me to give up on my dream, and my deeper personal challenges could have made me give up on my whole life. Believe me, I had my moments of “It’s not fair” and “Why me?” and I still do. But I started asking better questions, like, “What larger life is trying to emerge?” and, “What do I have to become to allow it?” Then I listened and — as best I could — obeyed.
Your life, like the planet, might seem precariously perched on the edge of destruction. But whatever problem you’re facing, it contains the seed of your evolution, and will take your life to the next level if you’ll let it. It requires you to release the familiar, maybe even what seems safe, and become the change you want to see by asking better questions like the ones above, as well as, “Where am I playing safe, resisting the call to be more?” and “If I believed life supported me, that I had what it takes, what would I do?”
Then, do it.
Because the truth is, you do have what it takes, but you have to take what you have and use it. Then you’re given more. As Emerson said, “God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.” But to realize your potential, you must live on this emerging edge.
After all, if you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space.
