Creativity Is All About Building Your Vessel

Hello again!

Before reading this post, I highly recommend you check out:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Now let’s keep this ball rolling, shall we?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In that moment of blown open perspective I realized that if I couldn’t figure out how to just LOVE who I was, LOVE the body I had, right there, I was likely never going to. I knew I still had symptoms and problems - and this wasn’t going to be a ‘fuck it’ attempt where I just let everything fall apart. Rather, I realized that if my body was going to FEEL better, if there was ever any hope of finding a way of life that actually WORKED for me - I was going to have to actually LISTEN to my body. To learn to UNDERSTAND her. I was going to have to totally re-arrange my relationship with her. I realized that there was nothing that was going to change externally enough that was going to give me permission to feel like I was worthy - and THEN I could start listening. I had to start listening NOW. I had to start living as though I mattered and was good enough NOW. I had to stop saying ‘when I fix this or lose this weight or get to this size, THEN I will start being nice to myself. THEN I will start trusting my body. THEN I will start being on my own side. I had to do it now. I had to get myself off of the self hate couch, so to speak. No one was coming for me. No one was going to give me permission to like myself. In fact, it seemed to me that the world was very much set up to make sure that I NEVER liked myself, let alone loved myself. 

But I was done waiting. Done waiting for permission. Done waiting for something to change. Done trying things hoping that they would ‘fix me’.

I wasn’t broken damn it. I wasn’t a failure. My body wasn’t against me. 

I FINALLY saw this truth and it hit me like a tonne of bricks.

At that moment I realized that I needed to change my INTERNAL space. That it wasn’t the external that was driving how I felt, it was all the stories and words and focus I had on the INSIDE that was driving me nuts. 

I stood up from that table and promptly walked myself to the nearest massage place. I laid down on the table, and for the entire hour I apologized to my body. I softened every resistance I could towards her, letting her know that I was, from now on, going to be on her side. I was going to stop fighting with her. As the therapist worked at my knots, I could feel myself connecting with my body in a way I never had before. I was starting to SENSE her not as this horrible thing that was preventing me from having everything I wanted in life, but rather as this precious, innocent, trying SO HARD to help and support me BEING that had been through SO much pain. 

I started to really get the sense for the first time ever that my body wasn’t against me. That it wasn’t doing everything it was doing just to stop me from having the life I wanted. I started to sense that my body was TRYING. Trying to be healthy. Trying to be happy. But *I* was often the one getting in the way. I was denying her what she wanted and needed. I was asking SO much of her and she was just trying to keep up. Again, years later this would go deeper for me to see that I had been TAUGHT to be this way. I wasn’t just ‘choosing’ to be mean to myself or to deny myself - this had been passed down to me in the most honest way I can imagine. I had been TOLD how broken I was. How much I needed to fix and change myself. How much my natural way of being was ‘wrong.’ I had been TRAINED to fight against myself - and while for a while it had been empowering to a degree, it was deeply painful and self destructive in the long run. 

This was a massive paradigm shift for me. To even CONSIDER that my body wasn’t broken/wrong/bad/evil was a massive step. But then to take it even farther and to assume that it was GOOD? That my body was ON MY SIDE? That was a leap so far I almost couldn’t believe it was feeling so REAL to think these things. 

I surrendered and surrendered and surrendered. I had vision after vision after vision of my future self - a self who was comfortable in her own skin. A self who checked in with what her BODY wanted before eating instead of sticking to a diet plan. A self that practiced yoga and stretching instead of pushing through HIIT workouts. A self that was…calm? That wasn’t fighting. That wasn’t pushing. A self that knew that things were going to be ok and that they WERE ok.

I got up from that table with a fully transformed perspective of LIFE. My massage therapist gave me a weird look - as if she could tell that something deep had gone on under her fingers. 

I was finally CONNECTED to this feeling of COMPASSION and LOVE that I’d never been connected to before.

I felt God. I felt a sense of being safe. I felt like, for the first time in my life, I was really ONTO something.

This wasn’t like before where I was waiting on some external shift or on a miracle.

This was something I had control over.

My thoughts.

My actions.

And at the same time I felt like I was being guided. Like I had just been handed my ticket out of hell and into heaven.

My new life mantra was ‘what would I do in this moment if I already thought I was good enough?’

THIS was my ticket. 

To God. 

To a life that felt good. 

To the ‘answers’ to all of my problems.

Bringing myself into a state of feeling good enough, a state of feeling like I wasn’t wrong/bad/failing/hopeless. Stopping the fight against myself, and beginning to look for how I could best LISTEN to myself and SUPPORT myself in whatever I was facing.

I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but seeing my body as a friend not an enemy was the gateway to living a LIFE of self love. A life that eventually, would deliver to me the exact connection to God I had been working my whole life to establish.

Feeling good enough inside myself, giving myself PERMISSION to feel good enough - it WAS the answer.

Creating SPACE For Creativity 

What does all of this have to do with creativity you may be wondering?

Well, I’ll tell you 😉

This transition from being in a state of deep self denial/suppression to a state of self acceptance - or at least a state of pursuing self acceptance - was the transition that took me from being someone who was ‘seeking’ a connection to God, to someone who had, what appeared to be, a pretty much abiding connection to God. 

In the sense that I found the more I was able to establish this loving feeling within myself, the more I was able to practice accepting my personality, my body, my desires, the things I hated and didn’t want - the more clarity I found myself having on every issue in my life.

The more I was able to slow down, tune in, and GET those answers I had been looking for all my life.

This wasn’t like before - where I would feel excited about a new diet or new self improvement plan, practice it for a while, get frustrated because I wasn’t getting results and because I was simply growing MORE dissociated from myself, starting a new plan with all that excitement - round and round again. This was TRUE answers - this was me slowly learning things about myself that INFORMED me in LASTING ways, giving me more and more tools to build on.

THIS was actual insight.

Actual awareness.

The more I was in a state of ACCEPTING who and what I was, the more I was able to tune into what was ACTUALLY happening in my reality, and the more I was then able to assess what hurt, what felt good, what to follow and what to walk away from. I was actually looking at my life and myself, instead of looking outside of myself to be told what to do. I was learning about LIFE from life, and I was learning about myself from myself - and THIS, this was changing EVERYTHING.

Safety was creating CONNECTION, not more dissociation like all that fighting had done.

But the connection wasn’t all practicality and problem solving. 

This connection also brought me that sense of love, that sense of safety, that sense of BELONGING I’d never had before. It brought with it a deep sense of knowing that I wasn’t actually broken, bad, shameful or otherwise someone who should be working as hard as possible to change themselves. This connection brought with it so much sweetness, so much profound peace, so much KNOWING that things were going to be ok - even when things REALLY didn’t look like they were going to be ok.

Now again, this isn’t to say that I had this ‘flash’ of insight and then was in this place of peace forever and ever amen. Far from it. Real life was hard, patterns were patterns and my well worn ruts of self hate were just that. The next few years of this journey, for me, were all about PRACTICING the connection I had found. They was all about CHOOSING to return to this place of self acceptance, curiosity, compassion and looking for my innocence and goodness over and over and over again. 

And that took DISCIPLINE. In fact, for the first year or so, I developed a few daily habits of returning to this self love state, of slowing down and asking myself how I FELT and what would feel SUPPORTIVE instead of looking for how to FIX myself and learning to EXPRESS my feelings WITHOUT making them about my body. I was really strict with myself in these connection practices because going back to old habits was easy. It became my new mission to become this person who naturally trusted herself, who naturally felt her emotions, who naturally tuned IN instead of tuning OUT when I was in pain - and again it was HARD. Saying nice things to myself was HARD. Getting on my own side when I felt like I had messed up was HARD. Practicing every day, whether I liked it or felt like it or not, was the way. I showed up for my self love meditation, my emotions, my feelings and my body every day like I was meeting with a friend - and this slowly began to become my new M.O.

Rewiring my habits, learning to exist in this state of self acceptance and curiosity more and more and learning to BE in that state of FEELING the love of something greater than myself was the theme of the next few years of my life. The next few years that involved me moving to Thailand for four months, then to Montreal, then to San Francisco, starting my own company, figuring out how to make a long term relationship work, moving to Mexico, living with roommates for the first time, starting my one on one coaching practice and just generally shaking up my life and going in a TOTALLY different direction than anyone I’d ever known had gone. 

All of this was happening within the context of me learning to accept, embrace and listen to my BODY. 

Again, I had been sick my whole life. I had been in the business of denying, forcing, pushing and generally rejecting my body for a good decade. Learning to LISTEN to her was opening up a whole new WORLD of information for me.

It started with being able to figure out ways of eating and moving that actually WORKED to make me feel BETTER. Which was a miracle. I had been doing SO much forcing of programs and wanting things to work, following so many external rules and trying to find the perfect combination of ‘should’s’ that I had gotten myself into a state where I didn’t even know WHY I was doing so many of the things I was doing. Letting go of all the rules and actually FEELING what FELT good and what FELT bad in my body started to become not just something I was doing to help me figure out what I was going to eat for dinner - it became something I did to help me figure out what I was going to do in EVERY situation.

I started to realize that there was a MASSIVE connection between the body and intuition. I started to realize that the more I followed my body cues, the more I was able to almost predict what was going to happen in my world around me. 

This led me to really seeing how deeply my EMOTIONS and my BODY were connected. I started to realize that there was a lot of WISDOM in my body and my emotions, but there was also a lot of TRAUMA there too. I started to realize the connection between my THOUGHTS and the stories I was telling myself and the FEELINGS I was feeling. I started to realize that the WORSE a thought pattern felt, the more likely it was to be untrue in REAL reality. I started to learn that breaking free of old patterns STARTED with learning how to question my perception and all the ways I’d been trained to view myself and the world. I started to realize that so much of what I had been doing was coming from what I had been taught I ‘should’ do, vs coming from what actually seemed to WORK. 

From there, I started to recognize that just because my MIND could understand something, didn’t mean that my BODY was going to be on board. I started to see as I began to get deeper and deeper into self love and compassion that ALL of my seemingly ‘bad’ habits, like people pleasing, suppressing my emotions until they eventually exploded out of control, hyper fixating on my body, letting others walk all over me - these were COPING strategies I was using to help myself survive in the world the only way I knew how. I started to see that so many of the things I’d faced growing up had been really unsafe for me, really painful, and all of these habits I had were my way of trying to survive within those harsh realities.

I realized that changing how I was living was about more than just moving to a new place or getting a new job. Changing how I was living was all about returning to this place of compassion over and over again, returning to curiosity, discovering how I was getting my needs met and how everything that I was doing was serving me, and then SLOWLY giving myself permission to WANT and NEED the things I wanted and needed, to not want and not need the things I didn’t, and to begin shaping habits around those wants and needs - which eventually led to needing to cope and numb, scapegoat and self sabotage less and less and less.

Which freed up room in my vessel.

The Vessel

Gabrielle Cousins is a spiritual seeker who does a lot of his work in the realm of raw foods and how what we feed ourselves connects to our spirituality.

With this, he teaches about the idea of ‘the vessel.’ Having been around the spiritual block quite a few times, he’s seen and experienced a lot of different people attempting to establish a connection to God in a lot of different ways. He explains that to him, the ‘secret’ to being able to have the spiritual connection/experiences we long to have, is in taking good care of that which is going to be the conduit for this connection.

He teaches that if we had a ceramic vase with which we were hoping to collect water to nourish ourselves with that was all full of cracks, holes and weak spots - it wouldn’t matter how pure the water was that we put in, it wouldn’t matter how much time we spent filling that vase, it wouldn’t matter how devoted we were to walking to the source of water, collecting that water and walking it back to our homes - we would ALWAYS find that the water leaked out and that we weren’t able to benefit from it how we wanted/needed to.

He explained that in a lot of ways, we don’t have control over the water. We don’t have control over the flow.

We don’t have control over the place the water is going to be found, how far it is from our home, how much effort it’s going to take for us to get to the water. We can’t control the speed at which the water is flowing or the quality of the water. We can’t control WHEN and WHERE we are going to find the water - that is all in the hands of the Divine. 

The thing WE can control is the strength, integrity and durability of the vessel. 

The thing WE have control over is how much we are preparing to be able to CONTAIN the water when it’s ready to flow.

We can prepare the vessel. We can make that vase strong via our practices. We can clear out that which is crowding and taking up space in the vessel. We can work to make sure that the vessel is prepared and ready to receive the water we’re looking for.

This is the concept that I believe is the underpinning of ALL of my capacity to create everything I’ve ever created - as well as being the thing that has given me the ability to have the spiritual experiences I’ve had.

Basically, in learning how to trust my body, in learning how to read my emotions, in learning how to question my thoughts and perceptions, in learning how to find compassion and curiosity, in learning how to SUPPORT myself in changing my life so that I felt more and more peace in my every day, in learning how to make all of this a DAILY discipline that I engaged in when I was tired, triggered, when it was literally the HARDEST thing to do - I was really strengthening my vessel. I was preparing myself and giving myself the most powerful opportunity to be able to receive inspiration, instruction, guidance and wisdom AND I was giving myself the ability to actually DO something with all the living water I was receiving through my seeking. 

You see through the years of doing all of this work, I spent a LOT of time developing discipline. I spent a LOT of time learning how to be with my feelings and not run from them, so that I could figure out what they were saying to me. I learned how to persevere even when everything inside of myself was screaming to give up. I learned how to be on my own side even as the self hate voice was telling me all sorts of horrifying stories about what would happen if I didn’t fix myself and fast. 

This process of learning to be on my own side was excruciating a lot of the time. There were SO many times when all I wanted to do was complain about my body and make all my pain her fault. So many times when I was feeling rejected or insecure and trying to be nice to myself felt like it was going to ruin my life. So many times where the pain that came up as I was working to see THROUGH my coping and numbing was so hard to deal with that the pain felt like it was going to consume me.

I learned to show up anyway. This ability to stick it out WAS the thing that opened the door to being able to stick it out with my creativity - especially when it was deeply uncomfortable to stick with it.

Also, all of this inner work was leading me to making changes to my life that while in the beginning were hard and scary, overall freed up time, space and energy for other things.

I learned that the more I was suppressing my emotions, the more I was forcing myself to tolerate circumstances that didn’t feel good, the more I was ignoring having tough conversations and instead trying to ‘be’ what others wanted me to be - the harder time I had CREATING. The harder time I had HEARING. The harder time I had CONNECTING to God. I found that the more I was willing to set boundaries in my relationships that needed to be set, the more I was willing to say no when I meant no, the more I was willing to check out of certain expectations like having kids or working a normal 9-5 - the more ROOM I had in my life to create yes, but also the more room I had in MYSELF to not NEED distraction.

Which led me to being ABLE to develop DISCIPLINE.

I had always been a seeker, but just like most people I had never really been taught how to be steadfast and committed to something. I had never been taught how to be dedicated to a practice for the long term - I knew how to jump on programs and how to do things in the SHORT TERM looking for some specific outcome - but I didn’t know how to just DO something, day in and day out, and allowing that discipline to flourish over time in all sorts of unexpected ways.

It was during this time that I re-dedicated myself to my yoga practice - and made it a rule. This is what I was doing. Every day. No matter what. It was my new thing and it was no longer about doing it to feel a certain way or to achieve a certain pose. It was about letting the practice take me where it was going to take me, and it was about developing that capacity to show up no.matter.what.

I was doing this with my mind as well - practicing that self love and self compassion, the curiosity, the feeling my emotions, the ACKNOWLEDGING what I wanted and needed and pursuing it instead of trying to fix or change myself. I had let go of the idea that there was ‘somewhere to get’ with this self love work, and had embraced that this was WHO I WAS NOW. This was my new METHOD of life. It wasn’t a means to an end - although it was giving me results in my life - it was all about making it a LIFESTYLE that I was going to stick to, forever. 

This dedication to a method had been something I had WANTED to have for a long time, but I’d never been able to find anything I resonated with enough to actually stick to in this way.

The self love, the compassion, the curiosity, the emotional exploration, the thought work, the yoga - THIS was all stuff I could really get behind, and it was stuff that was strengthening me. It was changing my capacity to persevere through things. It was giving me the ability to cope less and less, and to CREATE more and more. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Alright, let’s take one more break, and come back next week to finish this thing up!

<3

Want to go deeper with me? Then check out the Aliyah Mystery School where you get access to over 300 exclusive videos and lectures, a private group and exclusive monthly meetings to help you get off the self improvement path and into a life that actually works for you.

You can find out more about the school here!