BREAK THE POT.
What is it costing you to avoid doing your art?
How much are you paying to remain limited, rather than expanding to be all of yourself?
Put another way -
what are you not creating, because you’re giving too much to the old patterns that constrict you?
The 13th C sufi poet Rumi phrased it this way:
I would love to kiss you.
“The price of kissing is your life.”
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
“What a bargain, let’s buy it!”
From “The Essential Rumi“, trans. Coleman Barks.
You can also hear Rumi read aloud by a variety of voices in English and Persian.
The nature of creativity is to transform.
Art-making requires you to question, to choose, to uncover, to change: through this you transform yourself as you transform your medium.
Transformation is change.
Change can feel like loss: you may resist it, you may even fear it. Yet change opens you up. Change expands you, enlarging who you are and what you can accomplish.
Creative action is the most powerful force in our world.
Resisting change requires you to increasingly constrict yourself. Imagine a sequoia, growing in a flower-pot. Either it remains potbound because food and water are withheld and constant pruning curtails its growth, or it breaks the pot apart.
Pay for your creativity with courage. Not constriction.
Question the patterns that hold you back. Many try to create yet refuse to let go of old patterns, like the sequoia trying to grow without breaking the flowerpot. Others pay for increasing creative success by negating their work in different ways: they make a bargain to be less than they are.
Conflict is not a prerequisite for real creativity. But self-awareness is.
Pay for your creativity with courage and a love of yourself.
Stop paying for it by buying into old patterns that constrict and harm you.
The cost of increasing creativity is increasing growth. Accept this. Revel in it.
Break the pot.
Create what you are here for. Stop paying the old patterns to hold you back from your life.
Start paying your heart to move you forward.
Join your life.
Doesn’t that feel better?
[...] Today we talked about the necessary practice of keeping the analytical, labeling brain away from our experience in the present moment. Otherwise we give up what we really see for what we assume we see. Art trains me back into experience and away from assumption. There’s no other way to really create. If I agree to get distracted and discouraged, I give up and work from assumptions and judgements instead of my larger experience and intuition. Then I don’t make what I’m here for. That’s paying too much. [...]
So if this post brings tears to my eyes, I must be ready for growth. I love the idea of breaking the pot. So much of this I say so easily to clients, not enough to myself. Thank you for giving me this gift. Will definitely buy the manual after I save up a bit.
[...] The Void, a pregnant space filled with Schrodinger’s cat. The mystic in me emerges now also, breathless from years of constriction. Anyway. You’ll see lots of pictures as I move forward. Older pieces here are from my [...]