How To Make Creativity A Lifestlye

Hello!

We are finally ready to wrap up this series on creativity and connection ?

Before we do, make sure that you’ve read through:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Now onto today!

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The Discipline Was The Thing

This way of approaching life started to leak into my career. It was during this time that I began to really zero in on my creative capacity. 

I began a daily writing practice that looked like writing an entire blog and publishing it - every day - for months on end. It looked like starting to make videos and putting them out on the internet. It looked like writing my own book and not stopping the creation process until it was edited, formatted, designed and up for sale. It looked like writing shorter programs and courses. 

Learning to commit to a project, and to see it all the way through. 

You see, I had a message. I had had all of these INCREDIBLE experiences and I had been able to heal SO much of my pain - and all I wanted was to be able to pass this information onto others in the hopes that it would benefit them, and in the hopes that it would shorten the journey they had to take from pain to love. 

But knowing something and being able to translate that knowledge into usable content for others are two very, very different things. And training myself how to do the latter - THIS is what all that vessel building was about.

Learning to sit and write, to complete a piece, start to finish every day - it was HARD. There were days where it felt like the words were literally stuck in my chest - and it was physically painful to pull them to the surface. There were days when sitting in front of the camera was the last thing I wanted to do, and getting the clarity of mind to transmit something was a herculean effort. 

But the truth was, the more I did it, the more I practiced, the more I showed up every day - the more proficient I became. 

I started with 20 minute videos and 1-2k word posts. This increased and increased over the years to the point where now I can create entire programs from start to finish on my own. I can pretty well ALWAYS find the inspiration to create and I can sit down and get it out in a relatively short amount of time - and I do this on a regular basis. 

It’s become my new normal. It’s become my way of life.

I still have my yoga practice over 15 years later. Every morning, without fail, it’s a way I build my vessel.

I still engage in all of my emotional regulation/emotional mastery/meditative practices on a daily basis. 

I practice creativity every.single.day in the form of writing or speaking.

These practices, these tools for building the vessel - THEY are what have created the conditions for the deep spiritual connection that I’ve experienced as well as for all the content I’ve been able to create over the years.

These practices have been what built my focus, my stamina, my capacity to stick in and get things done even when my mind and body wanted to quit and run away.

These practices have taken me deeper and deeper into ALL aspects of my life - these practices have given me the ability to work through interpersonal issues, health problems, roadblocks in my career, they have helped me slow down and increase my awareness so that I could problem solve in really complex situations and they have given me the ability to find my center over and over again as life has continued to be challenging.

What I’ve learned in the last several years is that the more you do your practices, the more room you make for God and Creativity to show up.

The more I built up my capacity to BE with the energy, the more I built up my capacity to BE with my emotions, the more I built up my capacity to BE with the inspiration flowing through me - the more I could tolerate and the more I received. The more I build up my capacity to see bigger and bigger things, the more I am given to look at and put together.

The more I built up my capacity to push through the desire to walk away, the more I practiced writing just a few hundred more words, explaining something with just an added layer of nuance, the more I dug deep into my ability to find compassion for myself instead of blaming or shaming myself - the more wisdom I was able to bring through. The more awareness I have been able to build. The BIGGER the love I have been able to receive and the bigger the projects I’ve been able to take on and complete.

I’ve found that connection and creativity are much less about magic, inspiration, or being ‘struck.’

Rather, a life of connection, a life of creativity, a life of growth and expansion - they are lives where we practice. We practice showing up, as much as we can. They are lives where we don’t wait for it to flow to us, but rather we prepare for it to flow to us. We increase how much we can handle via continually bringing new integrity to our vessels through practices.

Connection to the Divine and creative works are practices. They are disciplines. 

I can’t control what is going to come through. I can’t control what I will be shown, what I will be asked to create, where the inspiration will come from. I can’t control WHEN the insights come or what the outcomes of the connection will be. There’s still SO much about this mystical/creative path that are a mystery to me.

But I CAN control how READY I am. I can control how MUCH I can take. I can control my own integrity and I can be sure that I never get ‘blown out’ in my relationship with creation. I can make sure that I continue to keep myself grounded with all of these disciplines so that the extra energy always has somewhere to GO. I can make sure that I am living a practical life where my body and my human self are all being taken care of - so again the energy that comes with creativity and Divinity doesn’t overstimulate my nervous system. 

Thus, if you are looking to create a connection for yourself, if you’re looking to live a ‘creative’ life where you feel like you can tap into inspiration more and more often, if you’re looking to be able to really EXPERIENCE some of these more magical, insight filled, life changing Divine realities - my advice for you is to practice.

Make yourself ready every day. Make yourself a little stronger every day. Fortify your nervous system by processing every day.

Realize that there’s no separation between our emotional/inner worlds and our capacity to feel God and our capacity to be creative on a regular basis. This doesn’t mean you have to perfect yourself on any level, or that you have to be in a clear/positive/’good’ place to connect with God - quite the opposite. What I’ve found is that the more HONEST I am about where I’m at, the more I’m willing to EMBRACE myself JUST AS I AM - in whatever mess or fear or chaos there is - THIS is when I connect to God the MOST. I have come to see that there’s no state we have to be in to feel the love of God, other than just fully showing up as what we are in this moment. It’s not about trying to be anything other than what we are - and in fact it’s about learning how to fully BE what we are and to EMBRACE that that fosters the connection.

The you that exists is the only you that can connect with God. I’ve never come to God in ANY state and been shamed, blamed or yelled at. Rather, again, the deeper I am in my humanity, the more I am willing to ACCEPT the love that exists for WHATEVER version of me exists, the more I feel that connection to God. I no longer perform. I just show up as me, all of me, in my mess, and THAT is where God ALWAYS is.

Building my capacity to release the shame around all aspects of myself was building my capacity to feel the love of God at all times. 

Realize that you taking care of your HUMANITY is the BEST way to connect to Divinity. Realize that there’s no separation between your creative life and your physical life. Realize that the more you practice reading yourself for inspiration - sitting and writing even when you don’t feel like it, painting just to say you did it, feeling your feelings just a little each day so that less and less builds up - the more inspiration is going to come.

The more you strengthen the vessel through working, the more you will be able to hold. The more will be poured into you.

This has been my experience. Hopefully this can offer something to you as well.

YOU are the vessel. Your life is the vessel. Your practices are what give you the strength you need. Your daily habits are what create your readiness. Your ability will increase in direct proportion to your willingness to just show up, day in and day out.

Why We Don’t ‘Actually’ Want More Than We Are Given

Your practices don’t have to be - and I would argue shouldn’t be - extreme. Just enough. Just enough to push your edge a bit, just enough to be slightly uncomfortable but rewarding, just enough that you can show up every day without needing it to be anything specific. Just enough. Just enough. Just enough.

I believe the fact that we tend NOT to receive the intensity/insight/inspiration we WANT when we don’t have the container to hold it, is actually a blessing.

There have been many times on my path where I wanted more, where I wanted to understand deeper, I wanted more inspiration, I wanted to be having BIG and EXPLOSIVE experiences. There were times when I expected that I ‘should’ be having deeper insights, that I should have been breaking through more of my past, more able to have peace with what was, that I should have been able to process more of my emotions. There were times when I felt REALLY frustrated at what looked to me like stagnancy on my path. There have been times when months went by and I didn’t really ‘feel’ anything other than a slight knowing that God was there in the background of my life. 

There have been times when it looked like people around me who were doing MUCH more extreme things like medicine ceremonies, one on one sessions with ‘healers’, long fasts and other modalities to sort of ‘force’ connection/insight/inspiration were going deeper and farther than I was - and I doubted if my slow and steady path was really anything special.

There have been times when writing was just HARD. When being with my emotions felt like the same slog, every day, getting nowhere. There have been times where stepping on the mat felt MIND NUMBINGLY boring and like I would have rather been ANYWHERE else in the world.

It’s not been all connection and flow, I can tell you that.

But again, looking back, I’m grateful for all of this. I’m grateful for what these times of stagnancy and seeming dryness forced me to grow into - one who is there no matter the results, ready and waiting. I’m grateful for the fact that in those times when I really WANTED more it wasn’t given - because I can see now that it would have been too much. It would have been overwhelming. Seeing what I see now, knowing what it all MEANT - knowing the radical changes I had to make to my life over the last 15 years to come to a place of being relatively ‘ok’ - if I had seen any more steps at any point on the path than I had seen - I would have been totally overwhelmed. I would have run ahead and missed treasures along the way. I would have lost my connection to reality.

I’ve realized that it’s never worth it to be pushed past our nervous system capacity. That to force insight, or to even receive understanding and energy in extreme ways doesn’t actually take us farther on our path faster.

Rather, it tends to burn us out. It tends to lead to a situation where we have SO MUCH ENERGY running through us - the understanding, the awareness, the inspiration - that the vessel actually gets damaged. We aren’t able to hold it, and it leads to a situation where we have ideas we can’t ground into reality, we have awareness we can’t actually act on, and we have insights our bodies simply aren’t able to follow through with.

This can lead to a LOT of pain, a lot of frustration and a lot of having to STOP and REST instead of being able to slowly move forward.

I have seen SO many people get insights they can’t do anything with because they were too big - and this is SUCH a painful process.

It’s not worth forcing, and you really don’t want to see or be given more than you’re seeing or being given. There are ways to force it, but it always comes at a cost.

I’ve witnessed many others push themselves past where they were really capable of being in terms of connection to God and inspiration - and it certainly does generate a moment of high - but on the other side there ALWAYS seems to be an equal and opposite crash. There always seemed to be a tendency of not being able to SUSTAIN or MAINTAIN the insights/revelation. People struggle with feeling up and down and up and down, and then getting sort of ‘addicted’ to the high of the extreme practices - not realizing that the more you engage in something extreme, the more there is going to be an opposing, balancing experience - which is usually NOT going to feel good. People tend to think that the crashes are a result of them ‘falling off track’ - when really again, it’s them calibrating after a deeply stressful experience. It’s not sustainable. People often find that they are not able to carry the inspiration all the way through to fruition again because there’s no foundation, there was no vessel, there was no plan to do so. They return to ‘normal’ life and the pull of past habits is far, far greater than the insight could ever be - and thus, past habits keep us from shifting anything. There was a lot of flash and pop - but it seemed to cause damage or at the very least leave people with no way of practically DOING anything with what was received.

I really think the slow and steady building path leads to the BIGGEST revelations and the BIGGEST capacity for creativity one can have OVER TIME.

It protects us from the highs and the lows that a spiritual life can often create. 

It protects us from burning out our nervous systems. 

It protects us from the disappointment of seeing where you want to go or what you want to make and not being able to actually DO it or GO there.

Slow and steady means you’re far less likely to get burnt out. It means you’re going to be able to go much, much farther and much much deeper in the long run - and it will protect you from SO much pain along the way. 

The boring slog can be boring and sloggy, but it’s MUCH less painful than the alternative. Forcing things never seems to end well. It only seems to lead to long term disappointment and pain.

How To Build Your Vessel

Taking things back all the way to the beginning of this series - you don’t have to believe in the Divine or God in order to access your creativity and to build up your connection to wisdom, love and support.

Rather, it seems to me that no matter WHAT you believe, the key is to have a practice that falls in each of the following categories:

• Emotional connection
• Physical connection
• Creative connection

With everything I’ve shared, my ‘advice’ can be boiled down into this:

Pick one practice from each category, and commit to doing it every day, for as long as is practical and sustainable for you - allowing your practices to grow and progress over time.

That’s it.

As we work to be with our emotions, as we learn to have more and more self compassion and self love, as we continue to deepen our ability to process what we’re feeling, why we’re feeling it and what we need to feel supported - we clear space for more and more inspiration to come through. We create the conditions for a feeling of SAFETY and WELLNESS within ourselves and this fosters creativity SO much. We create the ability to see ourselves as having ACCESS to hope and information when we’re struggling - and in this we find more and more freedom to EXPRESS. 

Again, this DOESN’T mean we’re striving to get to a place of perfection, where we’re ‘trying’ to be calm and centered, where we feel like we have to ‘clear all of our trauma’ before we can be creative. 

It’s the opposite.

It’s realizing that the more we can be PRESENT with what we feel, the more we can SLOWLY work through what we’re CAPABLE of working through with a perspective of self love and support, the more we can see that ALL parts of ourselves are GOOD and so ending the inner battle we have with ourselves - the more we establish a capacity to connect with our creativity.

This isn’t about trying to be anything. It’s about learning to be with what we ARE, making that SAFE, and seeing how the connection flows from that place.

It’s also not to say that if we have a lot of messy emotions we can’t create - again, the more we show up for the mess, the more we find our inspiration. Sometimes in processing our deepest stuff, we find our highest passions. 

There’s no striving for anything in this, rather it’s just about BEING with what we ARE and finding LOVE for that.

There’s no perfection in this either - we’re all going to have limited capacity to process, to see, to be with our emotions. That’s again why it’s a practice. We just do as much as we can at any given time, and know that that is enough.

That’s always enough. 

The emotional part is so much more about our LIVES than it is just about creativity, but it’s going to have a massive effect on your creativity 😉 

Making this a practice can look like: journaling about your feelings and VALIDATING yourself, allowing yourself to take 5-10 minutes every day to check in with how you’re feeling, where you feel it in your body, what it feels like and to establish some dialogue with your feelings. This can look like speaking with a therapist of other emotional support. This can look like moving your emotions through your body via shaking, crying or yelling. This can look like nervous system regulation tools like deep breathing and pressure point work. ANYTHING that helps you tune into how you’re feeling, and most importantly ANYTHING that helps you VALIDATE how you're feeling and takes you OUT of self blame and INTO self compassion is the ‘right’ thing to do.

Just make sure that’s your focus.

Getting out of self blame and deeper and deeper into self acceptance via processing your emotional experience.

A physical practice can be anything that you gravitate towards. Yoga, dance, pilates, running, walking, tai-chi, active breathing practices - anything that gets you into your body, that gets you FEELING your body and gets you moving energy THROUGH your body. If you’re not able to physically get up and move, breathing practices are also PERFECT for this! Even visualizing energy moving through your body is enough.

This is again, all about simply being there for your physical vessel, and allowing there to be circulation of energy through it, in a mindful way. This is about learning to accept and LOVE the vessel for what it IS in this moment, so that we can be IN it. If there is a lot of pain or trauma in your body, again, go SLOW with this. Don’t force anything. Ask for help if you need it. It can be a really tough thing to be in the body after trauma or when dealing with chronic illness, so be mindful of that and go SLOW. No forcing. Just slowly peeling back the layers with lots of support when and where you need it. 

Again, choose something you LIKE. Choose something that you can do with consistency. Choose something that you can do with little distraction and with little requirements. Just be in your body. If being in your body is painful for you, if you have chronic illness or other circumstances that make physicality hard for you - then a great practice for you can be just mindfully doing your best to relax your body from toes to head once a day. That’s it.

Get into your body.

Validate your body.

Make room for your body to be what it is. Move it or relax it in a way that feels good to do.

Every day.

For the amount of time that’s actually sustainable.

Finally, choose a creative practice and show up for it every.single.day. Let it be a new thing you DO now, rather than saying you’ll do it for 30 days or 60 days. Choose any form of expression that you can be consistent with, and be with it.

Again, this is going to be inconvenient. It’s going to be annoying some days. It’s going to require discipline and it’s going to require that we sometimes have to sacrifice other things.

The practice doesn’t have to be long - 5 minutes is enough. Just be sure you connect to your creativity every.single.day in some way.

Let it become something that is a part of your day. Not something you do when ‘inspired’ or not. Inspiration will come, the more you show up. The more you practice, the deeper the connection to what inspires you will be.

Don’t wait for the magic. Show up and show up and show up and watch as the magic builds because of this.

Make these things your new ways of life.

Bring more awareness and compassion into your life via connecting to your emotions and validating yourself. Let this practice and process grow and expand over time - it will. It will deepen. It will evolve. It will take you places you never dreamed of. One step at a time.

Bring awareness to your body and keep the vessel mobile/relaxed/flowing. Let there be a release of stagnancy and be sure that you really pay attention to and honor your vessel. There’s no creativity without a body. Take care of it.

Finally, create every day. No matter what. Make it an identity. See what this does for you.

The more you build your vessel the more is going to flow through you.

Let it be something you grow into. Let it be something you allow to evolve. Let it be something you don’t try to ‘control’ - you just show up.

THESE are my ‘secrets’ to creativity.

<3

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