For the past couple of months the words “the time is now” have been running through my mind. I think a lot of people are feeling this. The momentum of change in the world nudging us all forward in new ways. The year 2012 feels like a choice point and it seems to be asking us how do we want to create our lives moment by moment. If our lives are the blank page, the white canvas and creativity is an energy that connects us to something beyond our everyday self allowing more of who we really are on the level of our heart and soul, then what do we want to create. This involves bringing creativity into our day to day life.

To start consider all the ways you are already creative in your life including cooking, gardening, decorating, parenting, teaching, work, business and every other area of your life. Often unless we are actively involved in some form of creative or artist expression we tend to dismiss our innate creative tendencies and gifts. We just automatically think, “oh, I’m not creative”. On top of this we have learned to see creative endeavors as frivolous. I work with a lot of creativity coaching clients who, at first, have a hard time showing up to the work of exploring and supporting their creative self because they have been taught from an early age that creativity isn’t valuable. If you can’t make money at it, it’s a waste of time.

Yet our creativity is our greatest strength and gift in times of change. It gives us an ability to see what is possible and discover new ways of getting there. Daydreaming where we allow our minds to wander becomes a valuable tool when we understand that creativity involves a willingness to receive and be open to new ideas. As the French philosopher Joseph Joubert said, “the thoughts that come to you are more valuable than the ones you seek.”

What would it take for you to develop a new relationship with your creativity. Consider giving your creativity a personality. Talk to your creativity. Ask her what she needs. If you have neglected your creativity for a long time you may need to do some coaxing to get her to talk to you. I often suggest to people who are looking to reclaim their connection to creativity to get a box of crayons and start doodling and drawing the way you did as a child. You can ask questions like “what do I need to know right now?” and doodle the answer. And look at the doodles the way you ponder your dreams or messages that are wanting to arise from a deeper part of yourself. Most important. Play. Joy lies at the heart of our creative practice.

The Work Of The Poet Is To Name What Is Holy

The work of the poet
is to name what is holy:

the spring snow
that hides unevenness
but also records
a dog walked at lunchtime,
the hieroglyphs of birds,
pawprints of a life
tiny but resolute;

how, like Russian dolls,
we nest in previous selves;

the lustrous itch
that compels an oyster
to forge a pearl,
or a poet a verse;

the drawing on of evening
belted at the waist;

snowfields of diamond dust;

the cozy monotony
of our days, in which
love appears with a holler;

the way a man’s body
has its own geography––
cliffs, aqueducts, pumice fields,
but a woman’s is the jungle,
hot, steamy, full of song;

the brain’s curiosity shop
filled with quaint mementos
and shadow antiques
hidden away in drawers;

the plain geometry
of you, me, and art––
our angles at rest
among shifting forms.

The work of the poet
is to name what is holy,

and not to mind so much
the pinch of words
to cope with memories
weak as falling buildings,

or render loss, love,
and the penitentiary
of worry where we live.

The work of the poet
is to name what is holy,
a task fit for eternity,
or the small Eden of this hour.

– Diane Ackerman

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination. – Carl Jung

We are living at perhaps the most pivotal time in human history where the changes and challenges in the world are vast. Jean Houston, one of the founders of the human consciousness movement who has worked work with over 40 different cultures and in 100 different countries, has found there are “five different, huge shifts in our understanding of our human nature and the story of our time that are affecting everything we do today, and awakening to these shifts will help you cultivate your sense of compassion and of the infinite possibilities of this moment.”

She has identified the five main shifts to include: 1. Our understanding of who and what we are and what we need to become in order to be able to deal with the complexity of our time; 2. Human societies are in the process of re-patterning. Social constructs are dissolving and whole new stories are trying to emerge, such as the rise of women into a full partnership with men across the globe, and many others; 3. The way we conduct business and commerce is shifting and this impacts almost everything in our lives. 4. The rise and fusion of different cultures, moving towards a planetary civilization that values and accentuates the uniqueness of each culture while blending them together. Think of the great fusions of food and of music and of beliefs; 5. Whole new orders of spirituality are emerging that are not about religion. The new cosmologies are giving us a view of ourselves that we never had before. For the first time ever, we find that we don’t live in the universe, but that the universe lives in us.

When I read her five areas of shifts I thought about the news from around the global over the past year and could see where the change have indeed been called forth from the Arab spring to Occupy Wall Street to the growing connectivity of the internet and social media to the rise in entrepreneurship.

Then I started thinking of the important role creativity can play in these shifting times. Everyone has creative abilities and they are not limited to just the arts. The ability to solve problems creatively can help us in every area of our life. And creativity is not the domain of just a few gifted individuals. Everyone is born with the same capacity to be creativity. It just needs to cultivated and encouraged.

Creative thinking and imagination can help us step out of habitual patterns of doing and seeing things and gives us access to new ways of a looking at a problem and finding solutions. It makes us more adaptable. Asking questions can open us to creative solutions. Questions like “What would it take to change this situation? or What would it take to attract more clients to my business? or What would it take for me to find a new job? or How can I be more creative in my life? Then don’t try to figure out the answer with your conscious mind. Just let the question go and then start to pay attention to any hunches, synchronicities, or bright ideas that pop into your head. That’s part of how creativity works. Play with it and see.

EFT combines Eastern medicine, using the main acupuncture points for stress relief, with traditional Western psychotherapy. Rather than needles, in EFT you use your fingertips to tap specific acupuncture points while talking through a range of emotions or traumatic experiences. And science has shown that tapping on the points is as effective as using needles.

Dawson Church, Ph.D., who has been researching the science of EFT since 2002, explains that “tapping on these points sends signals directly to the stress centers of the mid-brain” which are not controlled by our front lobes, the conscious part of our minds we engage in conventional talk therapy. In addition what makes EFT so powerful is that it is able to access the amygdala, an almond-shaped part of our brain that triggers our body’s reaction to fear initiating the “fight, flight or freeze” response.

By reducing stress and reactivity, EFT helps with any problem that is stress related including sports performance, business and finances, as well as most disease.

Church estimates that 10 million people worldwide have used tapping, and what’s so exciting is how incredibly quickly it’s alleviating issues like depression, anxiety, insomnia, physical pain, even serious illness. It has even been shown to be really effective in treating war veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

In a recent study with Dr. David Feinstein, Church has been able to confirm that tapping on specific meridian points has a positive effect on lowering cortisol levels. Known as the “stress hormone,” cortisol is integral to our body’s “fight or flight” response. Originally intended to help early humans survive sudden, short lived danger like an encounter with a lion, regular release of cortisol as we seem to be doing in response to the ongoing stress of modern life is thought have serious impacts on our physical, mental and emotional health and make us more vulnerable to everything from cancer to heart disease.

In the study looking at EFT’s effect on cortisol, 83 participants were separated into three groups. The first group was guided through an hour-long EFT session, the second group received an hour of talk therapy, while the third, the control group, received no treatment. The group that did an hour of EFT demonstrated a 24 percent decrease in cortisol levels, while the other two groups showed no real change. The EFT group also exhibited lower levels of psychological symptoms, including anxiety and depression.

What I especially like about EFT is that it is simple to learn and use on yourself. You can use it immediately in any situation where you feel stressed or anxious to calm yourself and get a clearer perspective on how to best handle the situation that is triggering the stress.

Boredom is a sign that you are not being present. – Eckhart Tolle

As we move more into 2012, I find myself really called on a deep level to live in the moment; letting go of all worry about the future or regret about the past and to trust. Mystics have long encouraged us to be present to each moment, each breath. And now quantum physics tells us that in the moment exists all of time: past, present and future. This explains why the moment or the Now is the only place we are able to create anything, a book, a painting, a solar panel, our life. This is where are are able to create a new world for ourselves on both a personal and global level. The more you practice being in the moment the easier it is to create. Our breath is a greatest tool since it calms our mind and relaxes our body which makes it easier to be present to what is. If we are worried about the future we can take a deep breath and ask is everything okay in the Now. The answer almost always is yes. When we calm our mind we have greater access to the guidance and wisdom of our own deeper knowing and inspiration can flow in.

My two greatest teacher for living in the moment have been creativity and Nature. What I have always loved about being creative is that it automatically makes you present to the moment and something greater than your everyday self. Whether I am dancing, doing photography, singing or writing there is a joy and satisfaction that arises out of showing up and being present to what wants to happen. When you hit the zone or the flow it feels so good. It feels Divine. I have a similar feeling in Nature where everything, rock, plant and animal is clearly in the Now being the essence of what they are meant to be. This helps me to just be.

Like many of you I’ve have done a lot of personal growth and healing work seeking to transform old patterns into new more satisfying and abundant ways of being with myself and the world. Recently I’ve felt a real shift in this and have come to the realization that there is nothing to fix. That nothing is wrong. If I embrace and accept everything in the moment free of judgment then things naturally shift and I am more open to new possibilities. Experiences that I deemed challenging are from the vantage point of the moment the experiences my soul needed in order to reach this point of understanding. When we live in the moment we have access to the wisdom and intuition that comes from our hearts.

A few days ago when my mind started to run away with me and the tools I usually use to calm the flame of worry didn’t seem to be working I was guided to simply stop take a few deep breathes, drop into my heart, and claimed being in the moment. Peace immediately washed over me and clear sense of the next right action to take came to me.

We think we have to think through problems, that we have to figure everything out with our minds. Instead if we connect to our own inspiration and guidance in the moment we allow solutions to come intuitively and we experience synchronicities and miracles, little and big. In truth, the moment is the only place we can connect to higher wisdom and knowing. This is true for our creative projects as well as the course of our lives where we find ourselves living in the flow. This can help us be more actively creative on a daily basis.

BECOMING AN ANXIETY EXPERT

Anxiety and fear can prevent us from being creative or living a life we love. To live and create fully be must be willing again and again to step out of our old comfortable life and into unknown territory. This always feels scary. Many years ago I read the self-help book “Feel the Fear, And Do It Anyway” which presents the premise that just because we feel a sense of fear about a project or moving in a new direction in our lives doesn’t mean we are supposed to stop ourselves from proceeding. More recently I’ve been fine tuning my understanding of what this really means and feels like, how to best use it in my life and creative work, and how it fits the idea of following my internal guidance of my intuition and heart to bring my soul and creative gifts into the world. Any time I stretch in a new direction in my writing or my personal and professional life I have to step out of my comfort zone which gives rise to a feeling of anxiety. I’ve found it’s important to learn to distinguish between the kind of anxiety that represents our bodily intuition signaling a real threat (like don’t walk down that dark alley or that new relationship really isn’t good for you or that’s really not the best art project for you to pursue) versus the kind of anxiety we feel when we step out of our comfort zone in a way that stretches our capacities, capabilities and sense of self. The anxiety that is genuinely trying to warn us off feels heavy with fear whereas the anxiety that simply marks stepping out of our comfort zone has a sense of exhilaration to it. When I’m at my desk writing and I start to feel alot of resistance, if I make myself sit in the chair and keep writing, (even when I desperately want to get up and make phone calls or clean the refrigerator), I find that I will usually move through the anxiety into what I really want to say and find myself very excited by the work that results. The same is true every time I do anything new in my life that feels like a stretch. I feel nervous and excited whenever I push past the feeling of fear and take action make the new idea or vision happen. When you are trying to decide what the fear or anxiety is trying to tell you, just take some deep breaths and get clear on the exact quality of the feeling in your body: whether you feel contracted or expanded by the thought of what you desire. If you feel expanded then you need to “feel the fear” that comes with it and begin to take action however small toward achieving your desire.

Beauty arouses our imagination, teaching us to view life poetically: we can see what was previously invisible, the wholeness behind the fragmentation. When we perceive Beauty, our live take on a higher meaning and purpose, for we begin to see a divine order behind our little storylines and dramas; and we start making sense of our lives. – Jacquelyn Small

One spring a few years ago, I was in the middle of reading John O’Donohue’s book Beauty: An Invisible Embrace when I went for a walk out along the bluffs overlooking the ocean near the Russian River in Northern California. The irises were in bloom and O’Donohue’s words inspired me to really look very carefully at the flowers. I wrote the following poem from that experience having found that the question of beauty did indeed speak to my soul.

Beauty

On the bluffs in sight of the Pacific
the first flags of spring rise, startling
blue arching petals patched with white.

I bend down to feel the waxy flowers,
watch the finely etched black veins
spread across a surface dabbed yellow,

and a sigh sweeps through my body
like air exhaled after a deep dive,
opening a door I had forgotten was closed.

By really focusing our full attention on the beauty of a flower, a vista, a waterfall, a child’s face we lift ourselves to a higher level of knowing and open our imagination to expanded ways of being in the world and expressing what we experience. Our creativity becomes a celebration of the Beauty of the world and we intuit a sense of what it means to be in right relationship with the world. It becomes easier to access the sacred powers of the imagination for the purpose of creative problem solving and co-creating new ways of being in the world. It’s also a great ways to practice mindfulness and being in the moment. Try looking for beauty in places you don’t ordinarily think you would find it.

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Comparisons are odious. – Oscar Wilde

Most of us learned from an early age to compare ourselves to others. Competition and comparison are everywhere, in our schools and colleges, in our neighborhoods, in business and the workplace, in the media, in advertising and even among friends and family. Irish philosopher John O’Donohue called advertising “schooling in false desire”. We start to develop an identity based on outer influences and we feel compelled to gauge ourselves against another. Comparison is really the domain of the mind and ego.

I see it in the writing and creativity coaching workshops I do. It’s quite common in a writing workshop for people to compare their own work to others and they always feel that their work inferior. Then they share a piece that we all enjoy. Our creativity is the unique expression of ourselves and that will always touch others.

As Martha Graham, the mother of modern dance, said, “There is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.” Have you considered how unique you are? What gifts, talents and abilities lead you to the unique expression of you? If you tap into the knowing of your heart, you can reacquaint yourself with your uniqueness. Our heart is the seat of our unique expression or gifts that we can offer to this world. Rather than comparison our heart can help us celebrate our uniqueness.

- Oracles: Medicine cards, Tarot, I Ching, Runes, Angel cards, Goddess cards, etc
- Dreams: asking to remember your dreams and keeping a dream journal
- Questions: invite expansion and answers (conclusions limit)
- Knowing your which of your sixth senses is best developed (clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, claircognizance)
- Meditation
- Yoga
- Stretching (opens you up)
- Walking (especially in Nature)
- Whenever your mind is otherwise occupied (driving, doing the dishes, in the shower)
- Asking and paying attention
- Writing (freewriting, mind mapping, dialogue with the Divine)
- Drawing (freedrawing, mandala making)
- Feed your spirit, (do things that make you happy, bring you joy, raise your vibration)
- Paying attention (to signs, synchronicities, hunches, gut senses felt in your body
- Gratitude
- Connecting to your heart
- Connecting to your body and your gut sense

To see the world in a grain of sand
and heaven in a wildflower.
To hold infinite in the palm of your hand
and eternity in an hour. – William Blake

Each month the day before I sit down to write my newsletter I ask the question as I hold the intention of wanting to be of service, “what should I write about?” I ask it silently in my mind and then let it go as I go about my day waiting for the answer to come from my imagination. This month the response came as a line from a favorite poem by Mary Oliver called Spring Azures that ends with the line “a life of the imagination”.

The poem begins with Blue Azures, the small blue butterflies that cluster around mud puddles and ends with William Blake, the 18th century English poet, painter and printmaker. (find full poem below). Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake has since been held in high regard for his expressiveness, creativity and the mystical undercurrents within his work as well as the way he embraced the imagination as “Divine” or as “Human existence itself”.

Creativity and imagination are something that tends to get stomped out of us at an early age. We are taught to conform. Daydreaming is punished. Drawing within the lines rewarded. Yet without imagination we are cut off from insights and ideas of expanded states of awareness and the higher realms of consciousness. And as Einstein so brilliantly put the levels thinking that created the problems we are experiencing won’t get us out of them. This is true in our personal lives as well as on a global scale. We need the gifts of our own creativity and imagination now more than ever. This is not just for art but for business, technology, our workplace and our homes. Accessing our imagination can assist us in every aspect of our lives.

So try this. Ask the question, “What would it take for me to bring more creativity and imagination into my life?” Then let it go and be open to an answer that comes as a song, or a poem fragment or a book that comes to you or an ah…ha that pops into your mind or however you are able to hear your imagination. Keep asking questions to invite your imagination to emerge to help expand the possibilities in your life.

Spring Azures

In spring the blue azures bow down
at the edges of shallow puddles
to drink the black rain water.
Then they rise and float away into the fields.

Sometimes the great bones of my life feel so heavy,
and all the tricks my body knows―
the opposable thumbs, the kneecaps,
and the mind clicking and clicking—

don’t seem enough to carry me through this world
and I think: how I would like

to have wings—
blue ones—
ribbons of flame.

How I would like to open them, and rise
from the black rain water.

And then I think of Blake, in the dirt and sweat of London—a boy
staring through the window, when God came
fluttering up.

Of course, he screamed,
and seeing the bobbin of God’s blue body
leaning on the sill,
and the thousand-faceted eyes.

Well, who knows.
Who knows what hung, fluttering, at the window
between him and the darkness.

Anyway, Blake the hosier’s son stood up
and turned away from the sooty sill and the dark city—
turned away forever
from the factories, the personal strivings,
to a life of the the imagination.

- Mary Oliver