Jane Moynihan | Sacred Art | Spiritual Writing | Psychology | Psychotherapy | Shamanism | Shamanic art | Healing Jane Moynihan | Writing | Psychotherapy | Psychotherapist | London
Hungry and howling in mid-winter
this cold, dry, dark place rolls on And I without a hand to hold I flounder on... I cry a little as if tears might thaw the night But they just make day starker. Clarity comes sharp like a gift with teeth that bites my flesh. I get insight at a price - a chunk of me chewed off by the Cold Heart God. I cry some more to make crying stop. Then a voice commands, 'Do it for yourself'. I lift myself from the frozen pool I have cried. There will be no lifeline or flare in the dark though it is said that a sinking heart can emerge with a spark. And what lights in mine is a hope A slim hope without condition or dependence and this hope after all is... ME and it always has been. And with this lit torch I stride to the birches tall and silver ladies of the forest 'I learn my craft from you' I say. I learn to conceive and give birth alone, within. What comes, come from me And a more sacred other As we dance around the fire I've started. And which licks us to eternity where I see stars, and feel snow in my mouth And kiss the Cold Heart God Who slaps our child into life. We breathe. And down comes life to earth! We feed... on small threads, red and white threads. Life. Now as the tundra opens wide To the rising fire of my desire I howl at the moon and walk on.
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I will make words to feed us.
Yes, I will write and write words that drip like honey into the heart; words like nectar feeding life with story, meaning and beauty; words who when gentle fly elegantly and carry Grace on their song, and who can slice through and batter battalions when strong. Yes, I will talk about the pain I've felt and harm I've seen. But I’ll send these vulnerable children of the alphabet into the world with messages of hope under a passion-lit ensign. All creation comes with a chance to heal or harm. Sometimes the artist’s craft is messy and harm weeps from the wound before it can heal. These things are difficult to spell let alone tell. The truth has teeth and clarity claws. Do I dare to write, and you to read, words that will rip us apart and smash through the barricades we've built around our hearts? “The truth will set you free”, it says. You've heard that. We know that. But did you know that Truth has twins? Freedom is only one of them. Because the truth is, the Truth will set you free and Truth will break you. We can't sever this Truth and banish breaking with a “begone!” or a wizard’s curtain. The jig behind that trick is up. No, when we are set free all the children of our fears and pains spill out across the wastelands we've made across our lives and they are hungry, desperate howling creatures trotting at our heels, every second, in every ordinary moment. What can we do? What can we do with such orphans of our missed opportunities, disappointing mistakes and lost dreams? What will you do? I have no idea of a right thing to do. But I know of a writing thing to do. So I'll gather the orphans and children of lost dreams and tragic despairs and tell them a story of twins: Harm and Hope, the children of Truth. I'll light a hearth and gather them even closer. And I'll open my heart and hold their hands - Atone! And I know we’ll write a better ending together Than I ever could alone. My Writing Manifesto, by Jane Moynihan (2018) Have you ever heard of the 'imaginal disks' of the caterpillar? I only read about 'imaginal disks' early this year and just became amazed. I realised I had a story I wanted to paint in a series of pictures for The Art of Transformation exhibition, which I did this Summer with Broken Branches Collective. I quickly made a sketch - a caterpillar crawls into a heart and prepares for change. I thought I knew about the story of the caterpillar. Doesn't everyone? Caterpillar crawls into the chrysalis - changes - and then emerges as the butterfly - just like that, blah, blah, blah! Well, actually no, not just like that! When the caterpillar goes into the chrysalis the story goes something like this: the imaginal disks (a terms coined by biologists) start forming and, like dark creeping shadows, begin their assault on the caterpillar; the caterpillar's immune system goes into overdrive and starts to squash the discs; but they come faster and faster until eventually the immune system is so stressed it fails and the caterpillar literally melts down - literally it physiologically turns into a soupy mess; the only things surviving are the disks which turn into imaginal cells and they eat the soup to form the butterfly. It's such an epic battle. There were several things that stood out to me about this. Firstly, it was how the butterfly 'imaginal disks' would appear dark and alien to start with; the caterpillar literally doesn't recognise itself. Carl Jung often talked about the shadow in the same way - the thing which to our conscious mind appears as an alien other within the self and when it appears a conflict ensues. Something else I realised is how still and motionless things can appear to be on the outside to others, when inside we are being ripped apart by our own personal cataclysms. And then I also thought how, even though we might want change to happen, part of us will always fight it because it means a death to our current form. This is what trans-formation is really about, and carries destruction and creation to equal degree. In the i-ching, change means both crisis and opportunity. There is something else here too. I remembered that 'psyche' is the Greek word for soul and butterfly. When I sat and really thought about this caterpillar crawling into my own heart I wondered this: have I also fought my deepest soul's dreams, thinking they were my biggest enemy, thinking that they might devour me whole? Have I been going into my own auto-immune overdrive to resist my own soul? My Self? And I was right to fear that, though, wasn't I? I was right to resist... for a while. That meltdown is pretty final, and things will never be the same shape again. Because that is what happens. But that doesn't mean we don't survive it - it just means to begin with we don't recognise who it is who will emerge. Yes, I've learned a lot from the caterpillar story, I think. I've taken it to heart. Gratitutes http://augustocuginotti.com/imaginal-cells-caterpillars-job-to-resist-butterfly/ There is a painting that hangs in my art space. It’s a flower with a child-like face painted on it. I’ve been reflecting today on when I started the Sacred Art Practitioner Training, and this is one of two paintings I’ve returned to. It’s not a piece of work I necessarily intended to show at all, to anyone. I think I was still a little self-conscious about technical ability and feared that people might think it was ‘no better than a child could do’. But the reason I hang it in a special place and return to it again and again is because it’s a reminder of a big breakthrough I had with my creativity. It’s a daily reminder to find the courage to return to the beginning, return to the openness of a child’s mind. As zen master, Shunryu Suzuki, ‘the beginner’s mind is full of possibilities; the expert’s mind has few’. Even so, it is a courageous step because we are indoctrinated into seeing 'starting again' as part of a very bad crowd to get in with, a crowd made up of other 'nothing-but-trouble' words like ‘backwards’, ‘regressive’, ‘primitive’. There were two major things I discovered when I sat painting this, and particularly as I abandoned ‘technique’ completely and painted with my fingers. The first thing was I caught my own inner critic in the act of trying to stop me from being childish. She came across as cruel, saying things like ‘that’s rubbish!’, ‘what will people say?’; but actually what I detected underneath that was fear. I promptly asked my inner critic to sit in the corner of the room and just watch. That was when I really felt that the inner creative child could come out to play. It was the start of a two-year process of reconciling two aspects of myself, the first stage of which was to catch them in the act and separate them. I'll talk about how I started to develop the relationship between the two and reconcile them into a working partnership in some other blogs. Secondly, I realised that it is entirely possible to come across a flower bursting with a smile that looks like smarties. Well, it is, isn't it?! OK - perhaps this does sound very primitive, but I wonder if you've ever thought about the fact that the real meaning of ‘primitive’ is ‘closest to source’. I felt such joy when I was painting those smarties with my fingers and that’s what I remember most every time I look at that painting over my work space. That joy seemed entirely connected to this sense of natural, unadulterated, expression. And that joy is infectious - it moves from the inside out and wants to be shown and shared. I think that's why very small children naturally love to draw pictures for people. It never occurs to them to wonder 'if it looks like that flower', or whether it's technically brilliant. But that changes at some point. Picasso indicated many times that having reached a great level of artistic skill, he would spend the rest of his life learning to paint like a child. That’s why I’m ok with showing this painting. I’m ok with having travelled backwards, having had to start again. I’m proud to show you something I painted with joy. And it’s fine - if you want to tell me that ‘a child could have done that’, then I think I'll take it that I might be getting somewhere. Try it. In Starting Again - Part 2 I'll be sharing the second painting I keep returning to. Gratitudes to: Imelda Almqvist, http://www.shaman-healer-painter.co.uk Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind Beginner's Mind I finished my oil pastel painting inspired by looking at the stars and it just made me think more deeply about how we begin to interact with the absolute vastness of life, and indeed the very vastness of ourselves. Have you ever noticed that when you look at the stars and you attempt to find the constellations, things get dizzying pretty quickly. That's the first thing I'm beginning to notice anyway. One minute I think I know exactly where I am and then it's as if the cosmos just shifts again and I am as lost as I was before, and scrambling not only to find where I am, but to remain upright. That's the thing - the more upright I am, the worse it gets. I was thinking this morning it isn't really unlike trying to navigate our own inner territory. As Walt Whitman once wrote, 'I am large, I contain multitudes'. When we do our inner work, we do become a bit like space explorers, trying to chart our inner cosmos. As we reclaim parts of ourselves that we thought were lost, quite often what happens is that our centre of gravity tilts and the landscape widens. As Carl Jung would always say, the Self is larger than we can ever imagine. It can be such a confusing time and very difficult to regain that all important centre of gravity. It does feel exactly like the dizzying moment as you look up at the stars and get lost and then realise that not only is the sky moving, but the ground beneath our feet also appears to be. As I thought about how we even start to navigate this journey, it occurred to me that maybe the best place to start might be at the beginning, where we are closest to the ground and where we are a lot smaller. It was staring me in the face in the painting - none-other than climbing on board that magical space-boat, called Child. When we return to that childhood sense of wonder we seem more able to connect to the largeness of life and its 'impossibilities' without being knocked off balance somehow. Even artists seem to know this. It was Picasso who said that once he'd mastered his technique he then wanted to spend the rest of his life learning to paint like a child. In my experience I have found that the moment I could just shrink a bit away from the striving for technical perfection and methodology, suddenly the creative space opened up for me and I could withstand it without being knocked off my feet. It is ironic that we build ivory towers of knowledge and technique to protect us, and they are certainly needed for a while. The vastness of creation can blast us off centre with great force, and is not to be underestimated. We do have to learn to stand first. But it's also worth remembering the old saying from the gnostic gospels, 'Be as children'. Sometimes we must become smaller to open to the largeness of life. If we over inflate with our 'knowledge' and 'technology' and 'greatness' we are seriously in danger of eclipsing our lifeline to not only the magic of the universe, but the artery of creation that feeds us. Returning to what I have come to know as the 'creative child' is not just a Romantic or new age notion, it is entirely practical and necessary to existence. I will share an image that once came to me. It was an image of Plato, the great philosopher. He had a crowd gathered around him and was juggling balls in the air and magically suspending them and moving them around. The incredible thing was that he was a child, and yet also a great wise man, and everyone hung on his every movement. In a way the balls might have been planets, and he was completely connected to them and moved them with ease. This is the paradox. We need to diminish to grow. And in astrological terms, you might even start to get Jupiter (the great benefactor) and Saturn (the great malefactor) mixed up. Saturn, the harsh teacher whose special attention no-one really wants, once he's done making you feel very small indeed, humiliated (or humble) even, you realise something else - he has brought you closer to the real ground and your inner pole star which actually is the only guiding light of any value when you lose everything else. You benefit in the end - it just feels brutal at the time. In an age where we put so much emphasis on growth, from finance to even therapy, perhaps we've missed a very important aspect to the chart of our life. Children know this instinctively - they build towers and then knock them down and take equal pleasure in both actions. This is in essence what really happens when you enter into creative consciousness - there is a cycle of great insight and then a realisation that in order to go any further you must return, metaphorically, to ground zero and start a new curve of insight. To not do this is to see a ceiling instead of the stars. This is the most challenging part of evolution - no body really wants to 'start again', but that's really only a matter of perception because the map of the universe continues to change according to your position. Art is not a pastime but a priesthood - Jean Cocteau I recently came across a profound quote by Jean Cocteau: 'Art is not a pastime but a priesthood'. It's been one of the biggest surprises for me so far in my own creative journey to discover the strange paradox that is surrendering to the carefree play and dreamy nature of the child within, and finding at the same time the seriously mature and care-fully committed craftswoman. This is the side which is dedicated to art, and by consequence to life and my role in it, in a way I haven't experienced before. It has really got me thinking about what has been my own approach to creativity up until now, and the way we traditionally think about art, and its relationship to life. Quite often artistic pursuits can be relegated to the category of 'hobbies' as if they are always secondary to something more important. That something is usually referred to as 'work'. It's something I've struggled with myself and for years cast myself as a 'Sunday painter and writer'. It was really interesting when I came across a little book called 'The Art Spirit' by the artist and teacher Robert Henri (1923), just at the time I was engaged deeply in this changing perspective to my own art. He states most emphatically that when really understood, art is an area of life which concerns everyone; and then he says something else that really struck me: 'An Art student must be a master from the beginning: that is... master of such as he has.' Coming out of the 'hobby' closet is not easy, in the same way that it's not easy to untangle ourselves from all the things that have distracted us so well from being who we really are. Creativity and authenticity are hard won battles that look like child's play only afterward. I think when we put Cocteau and Henri together we see how art and the pursuit of becoming authentically ourselves are entirely intertwined. Simply put, our task of becoming who we really are is also our greatest work. And if that's the case, then I do think we are asked to look carefully at whether we are just carrying out faithful reproductions with our own lives: following acceptable styles, lines and forms and so on. It also teaches us that art and life are not about being technically successful according to some manipulated criteria of 'Art' and 'Life'. How often do we find ourselves pursing a career or interest or status or partner only to find that it's because it was what was expected of us by those around us, or because it's what we admire in someone else? This is not authenticity but automation. And it's really tiring trying to master what we don't have - all that energy chasing false idols. I'm not sure reproductions are ever cheap - there's a heavy expense paid at missing the real thing. All we need to do, as Henri says, is master such as we have. It's actually liberating. Think about it - you are the only person who can fully be you and succeed in living your life because no body else has such as you have. That rules out ALL the competition instantly... for ALL of us. What would it be like to drop all the other goals and expectations, and discover, explore and develop exactly that unique gift we have inside us, exactly as it is, pure and untouched. Artists search for this thing called 'originality' and here it is. Originality is that place we start from before we were educated into who we 'should' be and out of who we are. I've learned this is the difference between seeing the canvas as blank and in-bud: one needs to be told what picture it will hold, the other will inform us in time of the picture it carries. All very well, I guess, but the difficulty is that we still live in a society that finds the paradox that exists between art and life perplexing; where leisure and work, pleasure and maturity are at odds, and where we are forced to be either child or adult, as if one can only exist at the expense of the other. The truth is one only exists because of the other. The complexity of earning a living is a whole other blog, I think. So, I'll just stick to the one challenge within this that I can change, though, for the time being. The challenge is this - if I cannot take seriously the work of who I am and how I play, then how will anyone else? While I call it a 'hobby', it's exactly that - a hobby. The moment I commit to calling myself 'artist' or 'writer', then something changes. It is as if others can also begin to respect it. The other day someone even waved at me in the street at me trying to get my attention. I thought he wanted directions, so I stopped. He giggled and said, 'no, no - it was just to say hi. You're an artist'. I realised then that he was carrying a canvas... and so was I! Watch a child drawing a picture or writing a story and see how dedicated and determined and fearlessly full of life they are in their play and creativity. Also, watch their delight in sharing it with others, and seeing it bring others delight. They already know a deep secret - that what they DO is simply who they ARE IN MOTION. I want to end with Cocteau's idea of art as priesthood. What comes to my mind is an image of open hands reaching up to the cosmos with open eyes and ears waiting for inspiration - to engage with something other, something transpersonal perhaps. It is a meeting and to that meeting I bring everything I have to offer to the table and with open arms. I talk... and listen. A vocation is as much about finding our song to sing as hearing the music to sing to. It's a conversation that takes devotion. Love is not so different from Art, and the result is usually something new and worth caring about. I don't think the form matters - cooking, gardening, painting, mothering, dancing, being a good friend etc. - it's the approach, the authentic passion that counts. At the mid-point of the path through life, I found myself lost in a dark wood where the straight way was lost. Dante, ‘The Divine Comedy’ ‘The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.’ John Muir One Saturday I went down to the woods to make art and it was the biggest surprise! A surprise which left me mulling over something Charlotte Du Cann writes: that ‘we are born into circumstances which are often the very opposite of our real natures’. She also states it’s in finding this nature that we contribute to transforming the world. As someone who has spent most of life in the mind and imagination, I am an unlikely spokesperson for Mother Earth; in fact it’s as if the words ‘mother’ and ‘earth’ were not on the vocabulary list that taught me sentences. It just wasn’t my language, or mother tongue. But my curiosity perked up when I spent some time in London with geomancer and shamanic teacher, Karmit Evenzur. Something occurred to me that turned my world upside down. I wondered if it wasn't that I was born in London, but that London gave birth to me. It was a new vocabulary and an entirely different sentence. My curiosity led me to the forest to create art. The surprise wasn’t that I went native and got ‘lost in the woods’: it was far more startling. The surprise was I ‘got found in the woods’ and returned to my beginning. I might have known that once entering the forest things are never the same again, I would not be the same. Carl Jung prepares us when he says, ‘Whenever we touch nature we get clean’. We know this sounds what we need, but the cost is seeing the water turn black first. The forest is pure, wild and bare, and demands the same of us. I wasn't alone that day: my sister, who is also the artist Dezadie, came with a drum and a camera. When we entered the forest that Saturday we left our baggage at the gate, and our road maps too. The mind can become too much like the city. Or is it the other way around? We constantly stare into mirrors. I think what I left at the gate was my precise city speak, and my sure footed plans. I'm a proficient student of a culture that teachers mastery and mind, preparation and manipulation. Sometimes that can be helpful, no doubt about it – how else would I have brought along my seeds and nuts ready for the inspiration to flow. How else did we know to bring a drum to create ambiance and a camera to capture the image; how else am I recounting this to you in sense? But we shouldn’t mistake the empowerment of the conscious mind for power-over others and a tyranny that goes to great lengths to tell us that nature is wild and primitive and needs our help. But we only fight so hard against things we know have power. The forest's power is that it reflects our true nature back to us, because that’s the only way it knows how to be. To enter its cooling twilight waters we are stripped layer by layer as cultivation and synthetic personas drop away. It already knows armour can’t protect us from the fear we feel when our own nature creeps up on us and stands glaring back at us like a stranger. It shouldn't be so strange. The clues are all there in the fairy tales and other heroic stories we know. The forest is a mysterious and magical place of initiation; it is dark, sometimes dangerous, uncertain, and always transformative. Strange, hybrid creatures and weird (wyrd) women and men live in it. It is the dark route for which heroes leave the well-trodden path and encounter the adventure. Like in the Arthurian legend, where we learn that this is where we search for the grail and our success is dependent on asking the right questions. Bruno Bettelheim emphasizes that the forest is "where uncertainty is resolved about who one is; and where one begins to understand who one wants to be." In J.C. Cooper's description it is the realm of the psyche and "a threshold symbol; the soul entering the perils of the unknown; the realm of death; the secrets of nature, or the spiritual world which man must penetrate to find the meaning." He knowingly observes that "retreat into the forest is symbolic death before initiatory rebirth." This is what transformation entails. Afterwards I think what happens is we inhabit old words in new ways and transform language. When we breathe with trees we are resuscitated with inspiration (spirit within) because trees are the lungs of the earth. As anyone who practices the ancient arts of energy movement (such as tai chi, yoga and qi gong) knows, breath carries life force. Put it like this: it's one thing to breath in the forest air, but another to feel the trees breathe through you and carry you like a seed on the wind and allow yourself to land somewhere and just see what grows. Then it’s something else entirely to feel a heart beat deeper inside you than your own. It sounds a lot like being in the womb of your mother, and it is! Or perhaps it seems like the new life that pulses inside you, and it is that too! These are kaleidoscope moments, where art and life-giving overlap, and then come together in the picture, literally. To be honest it was so quick the way the image happened. I think it was because we thought it was going to rain, but possibly also that’s just the speed at which inspiration works. There was a pressure and an urgency, and then the seeds flowed out like paint. The process and the result was every bit like the art of sustaining life. That’s what I called the piece and the process in the end – The Art of Sustaining Life - and it has transformed the way I see art, the way I want to live life. I used to think art was about stretched canvas and paint, and life was about carefully controlled plans and rationally thought-out decisions; but what I learned was that the canvas is the very ground we walk on every day, nature a rainbow palette, and when we touch our wild nature we can create our lives with every step, and what we create teaches us about who we really are. We are nourished by this art. And we are also instructed in the nature of the life cycle, of the temporality of things. I wish I’d had a video camera to record how the piece of work was slowly destroyed by the very nature that inspired it, how art became just nuts and seeds again in the mouth of the earth. An artist has to learn to let go of their art and give it up, and it’s no different with our lives. The grail question is a good one, I think, for both life and art: and the question is for whom or what does it serve? Gratitude to: Karmit Evenzur, www.inlove.org.uk Dezadie Charlotte du Cann, 52 Flowers That Shook My World J C Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols Bruno Bettleheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales "Break my heart. Oh, break it again, so I can love more fully." -Rumi When love beckons to you follow him, Though his ways are hard and steep. And when his wings enfold you yield to him, Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you. And when he speaks to you believe him, Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden. For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning. Kahlil Gibran Must we break our hearts to find them? I've wondered about this a lot lately and what I think is that my answer would depend a lot on understanding more about what is really meant by the heart or love. The biggies! Maybe the answer is within the riddle itself. In getting to the heart of this matter perhaps we need to first begin the process of breaking what we thought to be true. So, we start by understanding first what is not the heart; what is not love. Take for starters the idea of 'relationship'. The making or breaking of a romantic 'relationship' tends to be messily enmeshed with a particular construct that the words 'heart' and 'love' have come to stand for, so much so that I think we've lost the capacity to see the woods for the trees. People often speak of being in a 'relationship' as if to automatically certify a proficiency of 'I am loved' or 'I love'. But relationship and love are not interchangeable definitions. In fact relationship is not a qualitative definition at all - it's a fact, a given of existence. We are all in relationships all of the time with something other than ourselves - that includes the hidden parts of ourselves that are yet unknown, other people, nature, the world, and even soul and spirit. So the more interesting question is, in what way are we in relationship? What is its quality, its true nature? And if we want to get really reductive, we might ask this: is it motivated by love or fear? When I've thought more about this it seemed to me that there might be two particular polarities of expressing these relationships: the self-possessing and self-surrendering positions. Things get seriously skewed where we stereo-typically assume that the self-surrendered type is better at relationships and the self-possessing type avoids them. Let's break that assumption too. The self-possessed position is still in relationship, but its quality is self-protective and guards its space and time, and it can appear distant or cold (and like the cool colours on the spectrum it appears to recede); it ultimately fears intimacy or losing itself in merging with the other. The self-surrendered type is not better at relationship, but its quality fools us into thinking that because it appears warm and moves towards us (like the warm colours on the spectrum). It may seem that this way of expressing is attentive and caring, and actively seeking out something other that itself, but below the surface we may see a whole bunch of fears about separation and abandonment and a deep yearning to be cared for in fact - it does what it feels it lacks. They are all in relationship, but what underlies their movement either toward or away from another is fear. And though the specific details of each fear may be different, it's quality is still fear... and fear is the opposite of love. So what really can be said about the heartbreak we feel when these relationships break down - with ourselves, others, nature, the world? The pain of loss, disappointment, sadness, and despair, is horrendous when it comes. But if we look really closely, what is it that's really breaking? Is it the heart , or is it a construct that looks heart-like? Be careful - blur your vision a bit and look again. Many things masquerade as the heart, as love. Sometimes our inner Need, Control and Fear turn up with t-shirts with 'I love you' written all over them. And we put on layers and layers of these garments until the real naked vulnerability of the heart and love becomes totally covered. They are our fortress, our camourflage, our templates for existing and survival. It looks good, but like the sheep in wolf's clothing there is something more sinister at work and it's called self-betrayal and it's slowly smothering what is most true and precious in us. And it's this betrayal that often makes, and then breaks, relationships, and yes - even the one we have with our self. So when we say our heart is breaking, is it really the heart which is breaking? Or is this terrible pain we feel actually the ripping and tearing of clothing as the true heart breaks through? Could this be why Rumi says, "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it”? They say the greatest lessons are sometimes the most painful. I have learned this. I've learned that when the fear of losing our selves to the 'other' is dismantled, we can face our vulnerability. In the end it's in our vulnerability that we can uncover our true and precious self. It's a profound moment when you look into your own heart for the first time and find that you are already in possession of that greatest of first loves that can never die. And I learned something more amazing: once the true self is starting to be uncovered true surrender begins to happen from a place of fullness and conscious choice to something 'other'. I mean 'other' in the widest, and wildest, sense - wild as in the free and unconditional encounter with life, nature, and other people, before it's conditioned by 'civilized' ideas about needs and that 'nothing is for free'. It is a riddle, but one worth getting blurred vision for. You can't give up what you haven't yet discovered; neither can you truly possess what you don't yet have. Yet, when you find it, then possession and surrender are one; and it's then that 'relationship' can transform into true union and that impacts every encounter we have. Love can become too easily enmeshed with romance or with some pink and fluffy new-age approaches to healing. I'm not knocking pink and fluffy, and I've certainly had my fair share of flirtation with the New Age in the early days of my spiritual path. Things have a place and time and we encounter what we're ready for. Love and healing are certainly entwined. I always find it so profound that when Chiyoko Yamaguchi was asked by Frank Arjava Petter what Reiki meant to her she simply answers 'Love'. The thing is, just like healing, love can break us because it wants us to be the best we can be; it wants us to be true to ourselves. It seeks the first intimacy which is 'know thy Self'. And it is prepared to shatter everything in its way - all the pretenders, the facades, the fears - to get to the heart of us. The real heart, I don't believe now, can ever break; and real love is what you know you really felt when its the only thing left when everything else breaks apart because of it. Where you stumble there lies your treasure - Joesph Campbell
Very recently I stumbled down deep in to a full-on life review - the kind they say you do as you lay dying or after death. Many factors can bring this on. In my case there were quite a few pieces interwoven - it's a cliche but it was classic midlife stuff combined with an intense Jungian analysis, shamanic death and dismemberment, the onset of a dark night... It's hard to confront yourself and your life, and this was a moment where I felt defeated by my self, by my life, mortality and limitation. You name it! The pride of the high achiever falls quite hard when it does come down. And the last nail is always the most brutally unexpected - it's the one that kills the secret dream you never realised you had, but was really the most precious after all. It was then that my defeat felt complete. It was then I think I died. It was then that I had one last defiant thought: 'I would not have written it like this!' Let's just quickly re-wind a week or so to a conversation I was having with someone about a character they were writing for a screenplay. He mentioned that in order for this particular character to be doing the high calling work she was doing she would need to have had a difficult life. I laughed, 'that can be arranged'. Although I knew we'd encountered something important about story-telling in that moment, I hadn't realised quite then what very personal significance it was going to have for me a week later. In fact the importance of crisis and story was already something I knew about technically- speaking. I was doing a creative writing class a few years ago and we learnt that one of the first rules of story-telling is that something needs to happen to create movement. What propels the character fully into their story is usually some point of crisis. This is what Joseph Campbell in The hero with a thousand faces refers to as the initiation or the call, where the hero must leave the world he or she knows in order to defeat the monster and retrieve the treasure. It's the archetypal call to adventure. Interestingly the word crisis in the i-ching means both danger and opportunity, and in the story it's this tension that grips us and compels us to read further. We know this story! We've been listening to it and watching it since we knew language! It's logical - In stasis nothing happens. So why is it that in our own lives are we seduced by the need for things to stay the same? And how often are we caught in an illusion of movement when really we might be just going through the motions - going 'around in circles'? We can exist and survive physically like this, but is this really living? I think it was quite apt that it was this same creative writing course that gave me my first unsettling experience of what it feels like to be truly alive, or what Campbell calls following our 'bliss'. Thinking back, I would describe it as a spark and an awakeness, but most of all what it had was movement - an inner movement - and something had come unstuck. It was as if the anaesthetic had worn off and the big sleep was beginning to break. It was unsettling because it was right then I wondered, if I'm alive now, then what am I the rest of the time? It's amazing how we try to run from this movement when it comes to us. For anyone who has ever had a tarot reading, it is usually the appearance of The Tower, Death, or Devil cards which causes us great dread and we tend to think of them negatively when really they are the great catalytic powers of transformation. I've wondered about this a lot recently, and really we only have to look to what we know about stories to understand why. It's dangerous! We have monsters to battle with; we are pushed to our limits in order that we may find our potential; we and our lives are changed forever; we may be rejected and cast out; and yes we may face death in order to live. That's exactly why so often the hero or heroine often refuses the call early on, as Campbell describes. And that's exactly why when we're on the run from the call that we stumble hardest. The danger is very real and not to be under-estimated. We take a risk every time we leave the well-trodden path into the dark forest of the unknown, but what we perhaps need to ask is what we really have to lose. According to most spiritual teaches what we have to lose is life itself. Carl Jung once said that if we stick to the safe road we're 'dead already'. It's something of a legend that when a client reached the worst point of crisis in their life Jung would crack open a bottle of wine and cry, 'Now we're getting somewhere'! 'Getting somewhere' and movement are exactly the point! This is where our emotions and feelings, channeled correctly, can become healthy navigators. There is a fascinating relationship between our inner emotions and how our stories unfold. It's what we all talk about, but perhaps have never fully considered, as being 'moved'. If we allow ourselves to speak and act according to this state of feeling moved, in a purposeful way, we can really travel. This is when we can intervene in the broken record and going-around-in-circles with authorship; this is the difference between being the sleeping passenger in someone else's story and waking at the wheel of our own role. We're no longer written but writing; not created but co-creating. So right in that moment as I lay 'dying' it was actually the story-teller in me who saved me; and just when I really believed I wouldn't have written it like this, I did a double-think and thought: Or would I... ? The smart-ass writer within, who a week ago understood that this character was going no-where without a hard time and apparently knew exactly how to arrange that, turned out to also be the author of my own life. The treasure I stumbled on while crawling around in the dark was the gift of seeing my life as story. And after all, I might have written it like this because it's just starting to get interesting and things might well now be moving!! Anything can happen once you answer the call... "Every act of creation is first an act of destruction" Picasso I thought I knew what creativity was. Like most people I assumed that in order to be creative I had to engage in certain activities, like painting or music, or writing for example. Then something extraordinary happened. I found myself on an introductory course in Making Sacred Art. It was two days immersed in shamanic journeying and creativity. What I learned most was that creativity is less about what we are doing and more about the approach we take. It is an approach in which the artist opens herself to encounter something other - to allow herself to become inspired and from that something new is created. Creativity is an organic process, where the the artist is midwife to the canvas or blank page and facilitates emergence. In contrast I discovered the words 'manufacture' and 'artifice' were probably a better description of what I had been doing up to that point. My rational mind had been fully in control and what I had called creative was really only technique. After that I started working very differently. And this had two profound effects. Firstly I started to trust more that I could engage with and express my imagination, something I assumed I wasn't able to do - for so long I thought I could only copy and be technically acceptable. Then, I began to invert what I had known before - that practical application might be in service to in-spiration and that's what allows us to be truly creative. Secondly, I made a really shocking discovery and that was about life itself. I mean suddenly it occurs that my life is perhaps the greatest piece of work of all and I have to question how exactly I have been approaching this. Let's start off with the basics - who hasn't asked the question, what do I want to do with my life? But the real problem is how we've come to our answers. What if I've just been creating a copy of something else all this time? I've leaned the usual life practicalities and skills; grown up, left home, made relationships, found work... blah, blah, blah. Me and the entire population, though. This doesn't really tell me anything about me, my inspiration, my origins in the true sense of the word. Put it another way, if I was a canvas, I wonder who and with what medium, has been painting on to me up until now. What if I, the canvas, could speak for myself? What would I be? So then maybe, just maybe, the real crux of the problem is actually the question itself. Perhaps it isn't about what I want to do with my life. What if it's more like the question Parker Palmer suggests in his brilliant book about vocations - 'what is the life that wants to live through me?' Now, that's a courageous leap. More recently I read Rollo May's The Courage to Create, and I've thought a lot about courage in the context of creativity and what I learned about it. Being creative and living creatively require us to firstly uncover all the things within us which are manufactured and perhaps artificial first. We more likely find what we are not, before finding what we are. The search for the authentic quite often leads to the destruction of what we have known to be 'true' until now. There is always a stripping away, a dismemberment, a death, before birth. We unlearn what we have learned before, let go of control and encounter the terror of free-fall and the unknown. If we're really daring, we may drop into absolute trust that what will emerge will be as it was meant to be, whether anyone else approves it or not. What Jung called the individuation process, which is really about becoming our original selves, is very similar, and he said the encounter with the true self is always a defeat for the ego. None of this is easy, and sometimes the awareness it engenders is really painful, and the changes incurred are problematic to just about every relationship we've had, and mostly the one we have with ourselves. Emergence throws us into emergency. That's why it takes courage. It takes great courage to get to the heart of our true creative self, it takes courage to create. |