Excitement is energy moving through us and moving us. It may be sexual excitement, creative excitement, the pure joy of being alive. Exciting news often means something we have been waiting for has arrived. I get excited when I’m inspired and my feet start to move. When energy moves through us we are stirred, aroused, even disturbed. Excitement moves us out of our comfort zone and into the new and unknown. When I worked as a gestalt therapist we had a common understanding that excitement is the fuel for human growth.
Creativity has always been my vehicle for the soul journey. Writing fills me with the breath of inspiration and propels me onto my growing edge. Of course, I always have a choice, I can play safe. But when I choose to follow the inspiration wherever it leads me, when I become a faithful servant of the unfolding and mysterious inspiration laden energy, that has come knocking on the door of my heart, then I am carried on a magical mystery tour.
Creative Tension
Embarking on a new creative project is a blessing which comes with a price tag. It is a relationship which, like any other relationships demands commitment for its full flowering. And commitment always brings us face to face with our personal limitations.
When the creative energy is activated and we receive the new seed of inspiration, the beautiful freedom of empty space and going with the flow we may have recently been experiencing, is replaced by the ecstasy of inspiration flowing through the body and the mind and connecting everything into one glorious whole – very similar to falling in love. As we allow the inspiration, become fascinated by it and follow it, the work begins to take on a form. It commands our attention and absorbs our energy and, in my case, can very quickly become a divine obsession. Now as I become a sleuth on the trail of truth, it appears that freedom has been sacrificed on the altar of form as I search for the right words and grapple with how to express and be true to the emerging meaning.
In any creative process there is always a tension between freedom and commitment, between the limitless and limits. On the one hand we rest in being and know through intuition, or inner knowing, and on the other hand we act to bring intuition into the world of form so that it can be communicated and understood. This is the process of bringing spirit into culture.
Creating can make an exile of you
When I truly follow inspiration and deepen into the exploration of writing, I feel I am being led away from the outer world of culture. There are times when my fingertips are reaching, reaching, like a shoot pushing through the darkness of the earth towards the light. I am reaching towards something new, something that I don’t already know, something that will change the way I think and act. This trembling on the verge of discovery is among the most exciting experiences of life for me.
And yet, it is also disorienting, because the very same quest also uncovers the places in mind/soul/psyche that need healing and I feel the stretch between the inward and backward reach of healing and the upward and outward reach of discovering the new.
I’m at this place right now, as I write. I am trying to describe and communicate something I have experienced in my inner world so that you can feel it too. The reason this is so important to me is, these places of healing and discovery often feel intense and lonely and sometimes crazy-making; being there shakes my world and my world view. Writing from the authentic self takes me far away from culture, into a wilderness where I have often felt like an exile. Do you ever feel this too?
Our ability to navigate and feel at home in the territory of the inner world grows over time and yet, because each experience is new, the journey is also always encountered as if for the first time. When we are moving with inspiration we stand in a never ending stream of new moments – and one of the exciting possibilities of this time, especially now we have easy global connections via the internet, is the opportunity to explore and discover meaning together in community. This possibility excites me.
October 6th 2015
