Claiming Creative Energy

For several months now, I’ve been swept up in a tidal wave of creative energy, a force that seems to be steadily rising in both power and momentum.   Which is awesome (and super fun!) but also sort of feels like bad timing, mainly because I’m in the middle of moderately concerning health crisis that will presumably, at some point in the near future, require ample doses of rest, slowness, and restoration.  So what am I supposed to do with all this energy that wants to act, build, and expand?  Couldn’t we have saved it all for a more convenient time?

But then a friend helped me see how I was needlessly making this into a mutually exclusive paradox.  Because while creativity often pushes me outward and forward, this is not the only option.  Creativity also pulls me inward.  And channeling my creative energy into my own healing, internal process, and personal catharsis is a perfectly suitable use for it.

I share this because it reflected back to me an important lesson and an obvious truth I was missing.  Basically, I am a worthy recipient of my own best energy, and my creativity is not just for the world; it is for me.

It is entirely okay to give what is most energizing and electric in our lives to ourselves first.  It does not need to be channeled into some external, productive something; it does not need to be for others first (or ever); it does not need to result in a tangible, sensible outcome.

So rest and creativity want to co-exist in my life right now, and that’s brings an interesting set of questions: Like, how can I both rest and create at the same time?  How can I invite creativity into my healing?  What new and unexpected thing will be born of this seemingly paradoxical fusion?

So where are your creative energies taking you, friends?  How is creativity blazing your trail or lighting your way?  What is it calling forth or asking of you?   What unexpected, beautiful, and mysterious spaces it is opening up in your life?

Meditation, Heart, and Self-Trust

About a year ago, I was halfway through my first Vipassana meditation retreat.  Nine days of 4 a.m. wakeup calls and repetitive stretches of motionless perching atop my rotund biscuit of a meditation cushion.  This was basically how all the days went: Oh, let’s see what’s next on the schedule…surprise! More meditation!  Literally the exact same thing I just finished doing!  Also, there was no talking, no reading, no writing (I admit I cheated on this one), no running, no phones, no communication with the outside world.

And it was pretty good actually.

I quickly realized there were infinite layers to the quiet stillness – endless depths of dark intensity and mesmerizing mystery to sink into and explore.  It was quite mystical really, and I was never bored.

But nine days was a lot.

There was also the butt numbness (lord, the butt numbness!)  I couldn’t even look at my meditation cushion for months after, and it took several weeks for full sensation to return to my tailbone-pelvis region.

But through the good and the painful, there were lessons to be had, and this is a brief story of the one that was most impactful:

There was a day, mid-week, when I was doing my daily 30-ish minutes of walking meditation outside and feeling an internal struggle about that. Because even though, yes, this was technically meditation, it was also in violation of the rules. We were supposed to meditate seated and indoors only. And my desire to be a good student and follow the instructions exactly right was beginning to haunt me. But…these blessed minutes outside and moving were one of the few things keeping me tethered to my sanity at that point.

So I had a decision to make: How was I going to do this?  Bend the rules and do what I wanted, or adhere to the clearly outlined authoritative directives?

The answer came in a flash (all that meditation must have opened a portal or something). I remembered that I was in convenient possession of an internal guidance system, and I could find my answers by reading my body.

Basically, my heart is a trustworthy barometer.

And when I thought about it, I saw there was no way around this.  Generally speaking, there are too many voices competing for my allegiance and too much noise demanding my attention to discern the answers from external sources alone.

It was a defining moment, not just for my meditation practice, but also for my understanding of my place in the larger collective moment.  This was November 2016.  The election had just happened, and I spent a lot of the week sitting (literally) with my fear, shock, and uncertainty, feeling flooded and overwhelmed.  There would be so many causes to support and issues to confront, infinite things to say or not say, do or not do, in the months and years ahead.  And I felt completely ill-equipped, lost and unsure how to be in this world that always existed but that I was now seeing for the first time.

So I decided this was what I would take back with me into the noise, commotion, and conflict: a steadfast trust in my own self.

This doesn’t mean I can do it alone.  I need other people – their wisdom, their voice, the truth of their experience.  But rather than conceding to another’s perspective uncritically, I take it in, hold it in my being, filter it through my center, and allow it to change me.  Reliably, good things come through this process of integration and alchemy.

In the case of my meditation conundrum, I kept walking.  It was a beautiful, sort-of warm day (the last one of the year), and my heart knew: that was reason enough.

Allowing Anger

As a sensitive empath, anger (others’ and my own) used to scare me.  It felt too loud, intense, and violent.  But my emotional excavations have revealed anger’s vital – and healing – role in naming wrongs, restoring boundaries, inspiring change, and initiating reparation.

Sometimes, I get angry with my clients at work, and lately, I’ve been trying to give myself full and intentional permission to do that.  Yes, these are people who have experienced domestic violence (and often a myriad of other traumas pertaining to abuse and oppression).  And yes, while I know that anger and frustration are common and understandable features of direct service work with folks in high-stress, crisis situations, this is still super uncomfortable.

Which is why I never used to allow it.  Also, because I believed anger was callous and cruel, a violent force wanting to take possession of my body and turn me into an abominable, havoc-wreaking monster of epic proportions.

But no, anger is just a thing we feel.

It’s a powerful energy, sure, but it need not be channeled into explosive action or hurtful judgment.  And it does have to mean wishing someone ill, making them wrong, or denying their worthiness.

Allowing anger in the context of my DV work is important because if I’m going to honor and allow the fullness of others’ humanity, I need to honor and allow my own.  Pushing away anger is really just a feeble attempt at transcendence and emotional bypassing that separates me from the people I’m with and distances me from our shared experience of messy real life.

None of this means I turn to aggression (or passive aggression, the greater temptation being that I’m from the Midwest) to express myself.  Instead, anger is my ally in forming a grounded, assertive space from which to respond and proceed.

This happened recently.  I was angry with a client and was stuck in the same room with them for over an hour.  So I poured that anger into my energetic boundary (Karla McLaren writes about this practice in her book The Language of Emotions – highly recommended) and put my focus there, which allowed me to speak and act from my soft, true center, since it was grounded in and protected by my anger-fortified boundary.

And this is usually all my anger wants from me: a stronger boundary, safe space and comfortable distance, personal power and sovereignty.  But even before any of that, I think my anger, like any feeling, just wants to be felt – and recognized as the valid (and quite ordinary) human emotion that it is.

Castles and Post-Vacation Blues

I recently returned from a vacation that was absolute perfection – nothing fancy, but a couple days in the paradise that is autumn in Door County, the luxury of a hotel stay, and a plate of cheesy nachos paired with cheesy reality TV – filled my soul and restored my body in ways that felt downright miraculous.

And now, having returned to the Grim Reality of Life, I am suffering from a classic case of post-vacation blues – lamenting the fact that tomorrow, I will be spending 8 hours in a windowless office instead of an enchanted forest.

Thankfully, I know that despairing moods like these are my reliable cues to take my own medicine and do some self-coaching.

So I looked more closely at what I was feeling: dread – and noticed how that was showing up in my body: as sharp ice cubes in my throat. Then, because I believe all emotions and feelings have benevolent, useful messages, I imagined myself stepping into and “becoming” the ice cubes to see what they might have to say and how they might answer questions like: why are you here, what’s your purpose, and how are you trying to help?

As I was channeling the consciousness of these metaphorical, imaginary ice cubes (as one does), I suddenly flashed on the ice castles built each winter near the town I grew up in Minnesota.

The ice cubes wanted to be building blocks and tools of creation, apparently, and they wanted me to build a (metaphorical) castle. They didn’t want to be swallowed or shoved down, and they didn’t want to cause pain. They just wanted to be put to good use, in service of my imagination.

So, what if instead of dreading my return to ordinary life, I brought the magic, joy, and freedom of my vacation back with me tenaciously, intentionally, and imaginatively? What if I found a way to fold that goodness into the whole of my life?

It’s so easy to believe that what I most want can only exist in perfect circumstances far from the messy realness of daily life – that I need to escape to find what I’m truly looking for. But I have a hunch that allowing the good stuff to be present and alive in the here and now, along with my yearning for more of it, in whatever form that takes, opens the way for creativity, ingenuity, and all kinds of magic.

The Both-And Space

For a while now, and especially since the election last year, I’ve felt pulled between two divergent understandings of reality:

1. Times are dire, and things are profoundly not okay. People are being hurt. Oppression continues to roar in old and new and imaginatively reinvented ways. And also: we’re heading toward ecological collapse that will mark the end of humanity on planet earth.
2. Everything will be okay and is already okay. There are deeper forces at work. We can heal. We will turn this around.

I’ve vacillated between the two, trying to figure out which story is most true, effective, and helpful, and to be honest, I’ve not been particularly impressed with either. When I step into the not okay version of reality, I quickly descend into manic despair, despondent self-loathing, and/or fatigued paralysis, all the while torturing myself with visions of apocalyptic hellscapes I’m convinced loom imminently and ominously on the horizon. Exhausted and overwhelmed, I turn to the everything-is-okay story, which feels better until I begin to look away from truths that ask something of me, slip into spiritual bypass, and run from pain (mine and others), none of which is in my integrity.

But in the rhythm of this back and forth, I began to notice brief flickers of peace. I realized they existed in the transitory moment when the pendulum passed through the middle on its way to the other side.

And the more I saw this, the more I felt pulled back to that middle, the space in-between my stories, to the very center of…something – the both/and space, where two or more things are true at the same time. Paradox. And this is the only way I know how to be in the world right now.

So life has sort of become a journey of descending deeper into: “wow, the world is really fucked-up, beyond what I ever imagined. How do we even bear it?” But also and at the same time: “wow, the world is a truly magical place, beyond anything I ever hoped for or imagined. How do we even stand it!?” Both may be true, but either by themselves feels like a lie.

I’m convinced we are living in a both/and time, a time in which we are being called to expand to hold more pain, more truth, more mystery, more paradox, and more magic – to make space for the multiplicities calling our names.

So I’m going in, looking hard at the world and letting the pain of it swallow me up, reaching, at the same time, for a loving stillness I don’t quite understand that meets me there and asks me to move in generative cycles of blended contradiction rather than in straight-lined, back-and-forth pendulums. And sometimes, in this quiet space stilled by paradox, I can almost feel something like hope, an unknown yet familiar thing, stirring under the surface.

Care vs. Comfort

I’ve been thinking a lot about self-care lately: what it means, where it’s found, how to do it well. As I’m figuring this out (sort of), I’ve been contemplating the distinction between care and comfort – one I picked up a couple years ago at a mindfulness workshop.  At the mid-morning break, our instructor encouraged us to use the time for care rather than comfort – to really consider, in other words, what would give us actual nourishment, as opposed to a temporary hit of pleasure or distraction.

This seemed really wise and everything, but even as I nodded earnestly in agreement, I felt the magnetic pull of my iphone, gleaming in the corner of my eye, as it drew me toward the sugary comfort of exciting new emails and facebook notifications.  I felt a sudden surge of rebellion.  Hey, what’s so bad about comfort anyway?  Sometimes I just want the easy and unwholesome thing, dammit!  Is that so wrong!?

Not wrong, I decided – just something other than care.  As I’ve come to understand it, the essential difference between the two is this: care is the leaning into the thing, and comfort is the leaning away from the thing.

When I choose comfort over care, I’m likely distracting myself and checking out of the work I need to do to be okay over the long-haul (work that will still be there waiting for me after I’ve done the comforting thing).

Not that this is necessarily always bad.  Things like the Netflix binge, the hours surfing the web, or the slow-paced doing of nothing in particular may not seem especially enriching, but they also sort of are, sometimes, (and for God’s sake I’m only human!)  There are times when comfort is exactly what I want and need, times when the intentional choosing of comfort eases my reentry into home life after too much time in civilization or clears space and energy enough so that I can unwind and get to real rest.

So comfort isn’t a problem – unless your comfort is something really destructive (like there’s really no place for, say, heroin in the spectrum of health and wellness) – but at the same time, I’m attentive to its dark side: how it can morph into patterns of numbing and addiction; how it can take me out of myself in high doses; how it can make what I actually need feel even more strenuous and out of reach.

When I choose care, on the other hand, I’m engaging the work (or play!) of healing, restoring, and mending.  I’m moving trauma, emotion, and energy, flushing it out of my system.  I’m burrowing into truth and filling my tank.   For me, care specifically looks like moving my body (preferably in densely wooded areas where the bird to human ratio is approximately 200,000 to 1), sitting on my meditation cushion, stepping into creative flow, and (perhaps most challenging of all) going to bed at a decent hour – the things that when I don’t do them, my sweetheart notices right away and kindly asks me to return to (immediately, if possible, for all our sakes).  Care feels good, but sometimes it takes effort, discipline, or physical exertion to get it moving; sometimes it means going into pain or facing exhaustion and dealing with what’s real inside.

I’ve found that even though comfort can seem slow and lethargic, it often moves at a manic tempo and lightening speed – especially when I ask it to fix or fill (not its job).  But care is a slow thing, and this is how I recognize it.  While comfort asks me to grasp, spin, click, and consume faster, care asks me to tune in to the energy of my body, the earth, the quiet – all of which hum at a slower vibration than my thinking mind and day-to-day responsibilities.   It kindly asks me to feel, sit, listen, and breathe (to not outrun my humanness, in other words) because, as I’m beginning to learn, that’s where all the good, true stuff waits to be found.