Since I’ve worked in the psychotherapeutic field for a long time, exploring the human condition, up close and in depth with hundreds of people, I know the abuses I’ve suffered have been mild compared with many others. The old paradigm culture is built on and around abuse and it lives on in us and controls us until we choose to heal it.
22 years ago I followed the calling of my heart and soul and wrote the first draft of my first book, “Women and the Creative Process”. It’s a big, ambitious book that weaves together many threads and it turned out to be a book about soul and the history of how soul has been repressed over the centuries.
I am in Ireland as I write this and last night I watched a movie called “Jimmy’s Hall”. The story takes place in the 1930’s and shows how the Catholic Church, the landed gentry and the State, conspired to keep the majority of people impoverished and deprived of the joys of self-expression and creative community. Singing, dancing, art, celebration, having fun, original thinking, overflowings of love, sensuality and sexuality, were denounced from the altar as the anti-Christ and the seedbed of dreaded communism and punished with beating and exile.
As I watched the movie I seethed with rage at the injustice and perverted self-righteousness of the ruling classes, knowing my rage was being stirred deep inside my cellular memory. I experienced a similar, kill-joy, controlling, oppressive mentality from my father and it goes back and back through the generations. It has always been the case that the finest qualities of human nature have been feared, squashed and distorted by those seeking to impose power and control, to keep their wage slaves docile.
One of the things that distinguishes humans from other species is our ability to create. We are creators. Imagination, vision, intuition, rhythm, colour, connection, healing, beauty, joy, a longing to reach into and express the divine…. These are all vital aspects of soul. When soul is repressed, smashed, traumatised, our connection with divine inspiration and the joys of creative life becomes dulled and buried. Or, for some like me, creativity becomes the golden thread, the lifeline that keeps us alive.
For centuries the old culture has systematically maintained control by conditioning us, the people, into forgetting who we truly are. We have been silenced, punished, starved, beaten into forgetting our divine nature and our belonging in the interconnected dance of all living beings on Earth and in Cosmos. Those who have insisted on proclaiming our divine origins and essential freedom have been burned, imprisoned and tortured. When there have been too many mouths to feed the best young men have been shipped off as cannon fodder, taking most of the tress with them, in the name of a holy war. And now after centuries of being stunned, mortified and humiliated, as we begin to awaken, we are offered shiny toys to numb our brains once more.
And the trauma continues of course, all over the world – war, atrocity, inhumanity, destruction of nature, social injustice, genocide, starvation, the extinction of species. And whether we watch “The News” or not, this is part of our world and we are all inter-related. Many of us carry trauma in body and mind, albeit unconsciously, just as the earth is traumatised, and this hidden trauma limits us and prevents us from fully trusting ourselves or the goodness of life. Trauma carries with it a deep sense of unworthiness, of not being ok, being disconnected, not being safe, not belonging. Trauma carries shame and shame is the antithesis of personal empowerment and creative expression. Trauma and shame live on in us as the old oppressive culture continuing to control us from within.
We all make choices about how to relate and respond to these external and internalised horrors. We may deny or pretend it’s not happening, or spiritualise it into all being perfect, or transcend into bliss, or refuse to talk about it, or drink, drug or eat ourselves into stupefaction, or run ourselves ragged in protest, or we may choose to compete for a place amongst the rich and powerful.
I’ve tried a few of these solutions in my time but the only one that has ever really worked for me is dedicating myself to a creative and conscious life. Creating has been a life saver for me. It’s given my life meaning, purpose and direction. It’s given me a way to transform despair, rage, disillusionment and woundedness into excitement, adventure and service to a big, inspiring dream.
When we open to creative inspiration we connect to the intelligence and love of the universe, we become vehicles of evolution. We step into our true divine nature and become the willing hands, feet, voices of a meaningful universe unfolding into ever greater possibility and wonder.
We have the choice in every moment to identify with the part of us that has been conditioned into feeling unworthy or to identify with the essential self which is free, loving and creative.
All you have to do is choose.
October 23rd 2015
[…] Abuse – the impulse to control and dominate others – is passed down from generation to generation and through the culture. At the heart of psycho-spiritual endoctrination during the long patriarchal era has been the myth of Original Sin embedding deep down in the psyche the belief that we are not worthy, that liveliness, autonomy and connection with our inner divinity are “sinful” and will be surely be punished. See: The Biggest and most Common Blocks to Creativity […]