A Quote from Fraser Boa

I was once told that it wasn't important if I understood my dreams. What was important was that the dreams understood me. My attitude toward my dreams would determine their attitude toward me. It's a living dialogue. When we listen to dreams, we change, and when dreams are heard, they change.  

I came across this quote from Fraser Boa's book The Way of the Dream and it resonates with me deeply. Dreams can be hard to interpret, and they all have multiple meanings. But just like listening to a person deeply shows our interest in them, listening to our dreams, exploring what they might mean shows our dreams that we are interested in them. We change because we are paying attention to the subtle. They change because we are paying attention to them and they are being heard.  

Living on the Star-trails of Fantasy

In her wonderfully evocative and imaginative book, What It Is, the multi-talented Lynda Barry maps her own journey as a creative person using drawings and words. She tells us things about her own explorations. She asks us questions about our own journey.

On a page brimming with her drawings -- a little girl crying near the fire with a mouse looking at her, a bear scratching its way out of the page and patterns of birds on branches -- she tells us about the child that she once was.

"There are certain children who are told they are too sensitive, and there are certain adults who believe sensitivity is a problem that can be fixed in the way crooked teeth can be fixed and made straight. And when these two come together, you get a fairy tale, a kind of story with hopelessness in it."

A kind of story with hopelessness. A story that points to where you are in its unfolding. A story that has been played out before and that is spreading its wings in your own life right now. 

Barry tells us how immensely helpful this can be, how recognizing the myths we are living can help us transform our feelings. 

"They can't transform your actual situation, but they can transform your experience of it. We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable."

We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality. We create it to be able to stay. I love that she says this, that imagination can be used not as an escape, but as a way to engage with reality, a way to be in reality without going mad. When we give up our connection to a larger story, when we give up our imagination and just bow down to the clunky reality and rationality, we are crumbling our soul. 

We forget that we bring our own way of looking to the experience. We can think of ourselves as bobbing away helplessly in a sea of experiences or we can bring our own meaning, our own imagination into them and make them liveable. 

Without the essence of the meaning, without the spark that our imagination gives them, our experiences are meaningless, random things happening to us. 

Of course, sometimes we can use our imagination to our detriment. We can become ungrounded. But what Barry is telling us is the positive use of imagination. It gives the golden thread to our life. We don't throw ourselves on the rocks of so-called reality that can sometimes be hard and cold. 

We have this instinct to spin stories and meanings right from the time we are little. 

Think about a child reading books that makes them cry, Barry tells us. Think about what these stories mean. They tell the little child about who he or she is. They hold up a mirror. Something in them connects to their essence. They provide a shelter for their growing self. Remember how as children we curled inside our stories for comfort? 

What would happen to this child if they couldn't imagine, couldn't find their place in the story? 

"It seems that human beings everywhere understand that a child who is never allowed to play will eventually go mad. But how do we know this? And why do we know this? And what happens when we forget?"

What happens when we forget? 

We do forget as we grow up. Maybe, we give up our playing, our pretending, our imagining ourselves into our stories because we think that that is what grown ups do. But maybe we need to make up our own stories, look for stories that seem like our own and settle down in them to be really comfortable with reality. 

We need this to connect to something bigger when things are hard. We need this to steer clear of the harsh edges of things that don't make sense. Our stories lead our way forward through dangerous terrains. They tell us that our answers are made inside of us. We can't find them outside. 

What would happen if you again became friends with your imagination? That is what I am trying to imagine. Maybe things will again seem softer, more fluid. Maybe things again will have a shine in them, a reason for their happening, a reason for our going through them. Maybe, the wild imagination that looks "unreasonable" to others is exactly what clears the way for walking on solid ground. 

Negative Imagination

In Julia Cameron's lovely book Walking in This World, I recently re-read something about worry and negative imagination that stood out to me. If you are a sensitive person who worries a lot and finds themselves tripping over unruly fears, then this might resonate with you too. 

Julia begins by telling us that we need working definitions for the mishmash of fears, anxieties and doubts that ail us. Only when we know what exactly we are dealing with can we start to work through it.

This is what Julia says about worry:  

"Worry has an anxious and unfocused quality. It skitters subject to subject, fixating first on one thing, then on another. Like a noisy vacuum cleaner, its chief function is to distract us from what we really are afraid of. " 

Its chief function is to distract us from what we are really afraid of. Even though it leaches all the fluidity and joy out of our lives, worry serves as a distraction. It leads our eyes away from our spaces of deep discomfort. 

How is worry different from fear?

"Fear is not obsessive like worry and not escalating like panic. Fear is more reality based. It asks us to check something out. Unpleasant as it is, fear is our ally. Ignore it and the fear escalates. A sense of loneliness joins its clamor. At its root, fear is based in a sense of isolation. We feel like David facing Goliath with no help from his cronies and a concern that this time, his trusty slingshot might not work."

Fear is healthy when it points to something that needs to be turned over, needs to be double-checked. But fear is also amorphous. We add to the drama when we let the fear fester. We don't pay attention to the kernel of true concern, and our fear becomes the monster that scares us. 

Unlike fear, worry is obsessive. It's a thought we pick up and smoke at. Today, we are worried about this one thing. Tomorrow, it is something else. We are hooked into this way of behaving. We might have little trust in the world around us. Maybe, we suffered from trauma at an earlier time and now worrying is our way of projecting into the future, trying to control it from hurting us. 

When we worry, what are are effectively doing is channel our creative energies into something that is not constructive. This is what Julia has to stay about an imagination that has gone haywire. 

"The more active--and even more negative--your imagination is, the more it is a sign of creative energy. Think of yourself as a racehorse--all that agitated animation as you prance from paddock to track bodes well for your ability to actually run.

In both my teaching and collaborative experience, I have often found that the most "fearful" and "neurotic" people are actually those with the best imaginations. They have simply channeled their imaginations down the routes of their cultural conditioning."   

Culturally, we are trained to worry about certain things. We are trained to prepare for any negative possibility. And we might have had experiences that cause us to always be on the defensive, that cause us to worry. But worrying about what can't be controlled obviously doesn't help us. It just casts a film on our experience. It muddies our world today. 

As someone who is prone to worrying, I know how insidious worry is, how it curls and hisses around you. It comes cloaked in reasonableness. It takes our energy and warps it into something that doesn't serve us. 

We could take that energy and start doing something with it actively. We could start channeling it by moving it from our bodies. We could distract ourselves by gardening or going for a walk or making something. We can see that the same imagination that brings us our gloom and doom predictions can be channeled so it becomes full and free.    

We can start seeing that worry really is, as Julia calls it, "imagination's negative stepsister." If that is the case, we are just a few steps away from dealing with it. We can have our arsenal of tools ready - our paints or our walking shoes or our camera. We can choose what we do with our attention and our imagination.

What do you think? What are your tools for dealing with negative imagination? How can you step away from worry and into the expansive possibilities on the other side? 

Into the Well of our Dreams

At the beginning of this year, I slipped through the fissures of my changing life and into my dream world. I have always had vivid dreams, especially at times of major changes. When I shifted from India to the States a few years back, my dreams were filled with symbolic images. One of them was of weddings taking place. While I was newly-married myself, these images continued to appear over the next three years. This was a time of change for me, a time when different parts of my psyche were coming together and something new was coming into being.

Then, in the course of the last year and a half, I stumbled upon Dream Work, the process of paying attention to our dreams and working to understand their deeper meaning. An essay that I was writing at that time led me deeper into Carl Jung's work. There they were again -- dreams and their meanings. 

Dreams are extremely important in Jungian psychology. They are the gateway to the unconscious, a space that contains not just our repressed aspects but also the underlying matrix of what it means to be human. It is from this space that sparks of creativity shoot up. The image that comes to my mind is of a deep, dark well. You can't see what's down below. But when you draw the rope and send a bucket down its depths, you can hear the splash of water. When you pull the bucket up, you have something that nourishes you. You still can't map out the depths that lie below, but you have an idea of what they contain. 

One of the dream images that has appeared in my dreams are houses. They look like they are either breaking down or are in the process of being constructed. We could all hazard a guess at what this means. The metaphor is clear. Something new is being built in the psyche. Some new change is afoot. 

Recently, I came across an article by Thomas Moore in the July/Aug issue of Spirituality & Health magazine that instantly interested me because Moore was talking about houses in dreams. Moore is a psychotherapist who is best know for his wonderful book Care of the Soul, and he practices depth psychotherapy that is largely centered on dreams. This means that he knows a lot about them! 

Moore talks of the symbolic meaning of houses under construction in both his own dreams and those of his clients. 

"I remember a dream I had in my late thirties. I was walking through a house in the early stages of construction. I had to be careful because it was so unfinished and fragile. I remember walking on a bouncy two-by-four and knew I could easily fall and get hurt. This was an intense period in my life. I had just been denied tenure at the university where I had hoped to spend my life teaching. I wasn't sure where to go from there and was trying to become a good psychotherapist. I had had considerable training for this work, but it's the kind of profession where the necessary skills are personal. You may have to go through several emotional trials and deep changes to be good at it. It was at this point that I had my house-under-construction dream."  

He tells us that it is helpful to know when something in us is being built. 

"You can then better understand the unusual feelings of being incomplete and going through unintended changes. You may feel your world shifting and not yet ready for projects and developments in your life. You may need to prepare for the arrival of a relatively new self."  
  
He talks of the specific meaning inherent in images of houses as compared to other images that depict change. 

"In similar situations you may have dreams that have general feeling of change: waiting for a train to depart or a plane to take off. But these images are quite different. Construction is the specific condition of something being built. You're not on a journey; you're being remodeled or fabricated." 

Moore talks of how writers on the soul often quote John Keats who said: "Call the world, if you please, "the vale of soul-making." 

"The word is "make," rather than "journey" or "discover." It's in the spirit of Keats to say that our souls are constructed, like a house being built. Piece by piece, nail by nail, the structure of our being goes up and makes a space in which our lives can play out and find meaning."     

We need to have patience during this process. We are under construction. We have to wait to see what's being built. In Moore's dream of the two-by-four, that construction was ongoing. Some things were ending, while a new structure was being created from the ground up. He says that naturally, like any other person, he was more aware of the endings than the beginnings. 

What getting intimate with the inner recesses of our psyches gives us is an understanding of where we are in the process. We realize that these are tender times. These are times when we have to let the forces that are working in us build us. We can be idle for a while "so the crew can do its work." The creative force is moving through us and creating a shape and a form. 

We might feel fragile during these times, but as Moore tells us, this is also a period full of promise and hope. The new is opening up like petals. We are alive, humming with life. We might feel incomplete, but our full possibilities are being drawn out. 

Engaging with our dreams can give us this awareness of  our psyches. We are starting to listen to the language of symbols and images, and in turn, it is giving us signs and guideposts to tell us where we are and where we are headed. 

Does working with dreams interest you? You can start engaging with your dreams by keeping a diary beside your bedside and writing down the dreams as soon as you wake up. Even minutes after waking up, dreams tend to disappear into thin air, so writing them down as soon as possible is essential. 

Originality Versus Authenticity

I read Elizabeth Gilbert's book on the creative process, Big Magic, yesterday. She writes simply and directly, but sparks shoot up at certain points. There is a lightning-quick energy in the book, the energy that belongs to the author and that magically dissolves in the gooey innards of the book. 

The book is like a shaking-up of all the used, rusted beliefs that we might be carrying as creative people. It asks us to lighten up. It talks about how "creativity is sacred, and it is not sacred." It tells us that "what we make matters enormously, and it doesn't matter at all." It tells us to lighten up and to ride the magical steed of creativity, to surrender to its will, to understand that starting a conversation with our creativity has no guarantees except the full aliveness it brings to our lives. 

Gilbert tells us her own unique perspective on that age-old struggle of the artiste: feeling that he or she is just making the same things that have always been made. 

"Maybe you fear that you are not original enough. Maybe that's the problem--you're worried that your ideas are commonplace and pedestrian, and therefore unworthy of creation. Aspiring writers will often tell me, "I have an idea, but I'm afraid it's already been done." 

She goes on to say: "Well, yes, it probably has already been done. Most things have already been done--but they have not yet been done by you.

By the time Shakespeare was finished with his run on life, he'd pretty much covered every story line there is, but that hasn't stopped nearly five centuries of writers from exploring the same story lines all over again. (And remember, many of those stories were already cliches long before even Shakespeare got his hands on them.) When Picasso saw the ancient cave paintings at Lascaux, he reportedly said, "We have learned nothing in twelve thousand years"--which is probably true, but so what?" 

I remember reading this quote by Picasso a long time back, and at that time it had struck me as sad and as if there was nothing left in the world to do. I was a child then who had barely started a conversation with her creativity, and something in the quote had shut me down. Over the years, I think I have often made this excuse to stop myself from wading in the mud to get to the lotus. 

Yes, everything has been done before. Most things, in countless fields, have been done already. But what does that mean if you are a creative person? Elizabeth gives us her answer: 

"So what if we repeat the same themes? So what if we circle around the same ideas, again and again, generation after generation? So what if every new generation feels the same urges and asks the same questions that human beings have been feeling and asking for years? We're all related, after all, so there's going to be some repetition of creative instinct. Everything reminds us of something. But once you put your own expression and passion behind an idea, that idea becomes yours." 

She goes on to say that authenticity impresses her much more than originality as she gets older. 

"Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me. Just say what you want to say, then, and say it with all your heart. Share whatever you are driven to share. If it's authentic enough, believe me--it will feel original." 

So, if you want to make something, make it. If you want to try your hand at something new, whether it is creative with a capital C or a creative expression that feeds the rest of your life, do it. Maybe you want to do something silly or something that others might consider silly.  A silly thing I did some months ago was buy an adult coloring book and color away. Someone made an off-hand comment about it when I shared it. Well actually it was more like an off-hand, non-understanding "I don't get this" look and complete non-interest. Although I continued coloring after that for some time, something in me seemed to curl around this look and loosened its grip on this creative, playful activity. 

I dropped it. I abandoned it. It looked silly, but it was far from silly. It was one of the most heart-nourishing activities I have ever done. In the months previously, my heart had felt curdled. I think it was the creative child in me that was out of sorts. It had checked out. But with the coloring book, I had tools that this little child could play in. It delighted in the choosing of the colors. It knew there was nothing to achieve, just an engagement with the colors blooming on the page. My mind slowed down. In fact, it retreated to the back and stopped its incessant chatter almost as soon as I started coloring. 

For those few weeks, I had a tool to quiet my automatic mind, to drop down from it into my heart. I felt like I was pouring the colors back into my own heart. And yet, I gave it up because of a look. 

We give up such important things because someone else doesn't understand. But I will pick up my coloring book again and color in my lovely mandalas. I have found something, however small, that nourishes my being. It bypasses my mind and goes to my essence, the artiste who loves to play with colors, who likes making lines on the page, who feels like this little task is stringing up the pieces of disjointed time and making it flow smoothly again. 

Why would I give up something that makes me feel alive? Why would you? 

Who am I?

When we think about big questions like Who am I? or What is my purpose, something from our innermost recesses is calling out. We can start figuring out the answers to these questions by exploring our archetypes, those patterns of thoughts and images that are universally present in our individual psyches. I resonate with The Artiste/Creative archetype apart from some others. What's interesting is that there was a time when the word artiste felt like something I did not want to identify with. 

There were too many myths about bohemian artistes or starving artistes that made me feel uncomfortable with the idea of calling myself an artiste. But as I have grown older, I have seen that I was rejecting myself because I did not have a real idea of what my own artistic self would look like. There were no real models, and I did not have enough faith in my then brittle self to go and find my real self. 

I have been dipping through the book Archetypes by Caroline Myss in which she talks about the different archetypes that are rising in us. She talks about their gifts, their challenges, the myths that hold us back from realizing our true selves, the traps we can fall into, and the true nature of our individual power. We could be The Intellectual, The Rebel, The Spiritual Seeker, The Caregiver or The Athlete, but if we don't confront our own specific questions, we won't make our way forward. 

For the Artiste, the unique challenge is to overcome the fear of not being original. This is something I find myself struggling with again and again, how to let myself practice enough so that I can become truly original, how to not feel dejected because I can only see the things that need to be corrected and not the level of skill I already have. 

Being aware of our main challenge, the question that comes up for us again and again can help us understand who we are, what we value and what we are really aspiring to. It can help us see that the patterns in our being resonates with a universal, yet specific pattern. Not all of us are The Athlete. Not all of us are The Caregiver. We all have unique questions and challenges that people like us - other athletes, other caregivers, other seekers - have grappled with. Just understanding where we belong can help us understand and frame our own experiences. 

If you a Creative/Artiste like me, this story that Myss tells will resonate with you, like it resonated with me: 

"A woman once told me, "I need to go away and find my Self." I knew when she said it that she didn't mean "find myself ," but "my Self," with a capital S. She had awakened to her inner nature, to that part of her that was more than her personality, more than her daily routines. She had discovered the inner voice that is separate from the ordinary self that organized her life by rules and expectations." 

I asked her, "What do you think you'll find on this quest for your inner Self?" 

"I have always wanted to be an artist," she said. "I know I am an artist. I have never given my Self a chance to do my art because I told "myself" that no one took me seriously, so how could I take me seriously? But I feel as if I am living a false life, a lie. I can't stand it anymore. I don't care if I starve. I would rather live a hungry authentic life than an abundant lie."

In meeting her Self, this woman had encountered her Artist archetype. She could no longer continue to live a life blaming others for her choice not to fulfill her archetypal destiny." 

I can understand this woman's hunger for her true life. I can also understand why it might have taken her so long to find her Self. There are so many injunctions against being an artist that it is understandable that many of us don't want to claim who we are. 

But just as this woman recognized who she was at last, we come to a place where we recognize that the soul-starvation we were feeling was because we had denied ourselves something essential to our very natures. 

What is it that you need? Which universal pattern reverberates inside you? Are you The Advocate looking for a cause that engages your strength? You might find getting trapped in causes that lock into your anger or personal agenda. Are you The Caregiver whose challenge is to become discerning when giving instead of burning out by giving indiscriminately?  

Which image leads you home to yourself?      

This is radical acceptance.

I came across this quote by the British novelist A.S.Byatt recently. It is so honest and true, and it says what is so often unspoken. I haven't read anything by Byatt, but this quote makes me feel like I want to know her better: 

"I think of writing simply in terms of pleasure. It's the most important thing in my life, making things. Much as I love my husband and my children, I can love them only because I am the person who makes these things. I, who I am, is the person who has the project of making a thing. And because that person does that, all the time, that person is able to love all these people." 

For me, this quote gets to the heart of things, the heart of all conversations about the conflict women feel when they spend time nurturing their creativity when they are also wives and mothers. I am a wife, and I am not a mother, and I feel that this is the truth. 

Who is the person doing the loving if they are not also nurturing and affirming their own being? 

If you are not competitive, can you still succeed?

We all have certain beliefs about our sensitivity. Some of them have dripped down to our very core and color everything we look at. Lately, I have been thinking about self-acceptance and feeling that in many ways, I have just gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick. Many things that I think are wrong with me are just faulty beliefs that keep on living because I haven't pulled them right out of the ground. 

One of my unspoken beliefs is about competition, about the fact that you need to be competitive to be successful. I am not competitive and that has always felt like a disadvantage. Maybe you have this belief too. 

Maybe you, like me, come from a culture and were raised in an environment that placed a high value on competition. Maybe, like me, you have felt marginalized because of something else that you are (such as being a creative person), and so it all built up and you thought that everything that you were added up to something less than what was required to succeed.

If you have felt at a disadvantage because you are not competitive, or thought: Why am I not motivated by competition like other people?, then something that has been crystallizing for me might help you. Maybe what's been holding you back is not some quality you lack, but the inner resistance you feel when you push against your own truth. 

Recently, I read Better than Before, New York Times Bestselling Author Gretchen Rubin's latest book (which is another New York Times bestseller), and something she said underlined what I have been feeling. The book is about habit change, and she tells us that successful habits are built on the foundation of our fundamental nature. What works for one person does not work for the other. There is no one-size-fits-all. 

She also says that she is not a competitive person, and so, that cannot be the motivating drive for her. As far as success goes, she has made it. She is both successful and non-competitive. I think what that points to is that we sometimes forget that passion and competition are not always sitting on the same side of the fence. 

You can love something so much that it can be intrinsically satisfying. And what we love to do, we also keep on practicing. It's something we are deeply interested in, something we think about in a nuanced way, something we keep adding layers to. It's also something we can get very good at.

That's something important for me to remember as a sensitive person. Just because competitiveness is the ideal in society today does not mean that a different value, a different perspective cannot work. Sometimes, I have internalized the weight given to this outer value and found myself lacking, but the truth is that it is comparisons that drain us of our strengths.

If you are not competitive, bottom line is that it won't motivate you. It is a substitute for what really works with you, and by accepting it, you are laying a false structure on which to build things. Maybe that's what's wrong. Maybe that's what's not working. 

One way of accepting ourselves as sensitive people is accepting that our qualities are a constellation that moves in rhythm. We need to re-examine what we have been telling ourselves and re-frame our trait in the light of what we know now, instead of letting the past echo through our lives.

Of course, the problem of succeeding and even what it means is much larger than correcting this one belief. But this could be a good starting point. When we can honor our own way of being and live from that place, that's already success.

If you were to drop this belief, what would you gain? Where could you see yourself going? How would you feel?

If this resonated with you, please pass this on and share this post with anyone who might enjoy it.    

The Knife of Perfectionism

This morning, I read something on the lovely Brainpickings website by the fierce and kind Pema Chodron. This is what she says: "The problem is that the desire to change is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself. The other problem is that our hangups, unfortunately or fortunately, contain our wealth. Our neurosis and our wisdom are made out of the same material. If you throw out your neurosis, you also throw out your wisdom."

This feels true, although I don't understand it completely. It resonates with this growing part of me that is learning to accept her first tries and is not so hung up on making things perfect. This is also that part of me that is learning to trust herself and her own perceptions. It is learning that my first feelings, my first thoughts and my first hunches are often true.

It is second-guessing that gets me into trouble. It is overthinking that stops me in my tracks. There are times that we need to consider, need to think. But there are also times when our feelings and thoughts swirl up in a cloud and block our view of what it is that we need to do next.

They cause us to doubt whether we are moving in the right direction or what we are doing is indeed enough.

This morning, I read another piece on Brainpickings that talks about Picasso and his thoughts on intuition and how creativity works. Something in it stuck out for me. In the piece, he is quoted talking about Matisse whose work he admired professionally and who was also a personal friend. Matisse followed a painfully methodical creative process, and this is what Picasso thought about it: "Matisse does a drawing, then he recopies it. He recopies it five times, ten times, each time with cleaner lines. He is persuaded that the last one, the most spare, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and yet, usually it’s the first. When it comes to drawing, nothing is better than the first sketch."

Picasso thinks of the first creative intuition as the best. What we are alighting upon is the work of instinct, of our purest senses. When we re-do it to fit some convention, we might be draining the juice right out of it. That's what I am learning about intuition, that the purest intuition is about learning to trust your own perceptions. My research is showing me that just like prolific artistes, successful entrepreneurs and business-people are ones that are most in touch with their original thoughts, with their own nuances of feelings.

What perfectionism does is take a knife to many of our most original, most intuitive ideas. It tells us that we are not enough, that we'll never be enough, that we have to do things over and over again to get to something of value. It tells us that we have little or no talent, that we have to search desperately for answers, that these answers will always remain out of our reach.

My favorite teacher and kindred spirit Julia Cameron tells us that perfectionism is not the pursuit of the best in us, it is the pursuit of the worst. Perfectionism is different from striving for excellence.We can become excellent at what we do only if we are willing to make mistakes, if we are willing to keep trying and learning. But perfectionism blocks this process. It brings everything to a grinding halt. We are stuck when we belabor over something we think needs to be just right before we are allowed to move ahead.

Nothing needs to be perfect. Nothing needs to be won. We need to keep doing, keep moving ahead. The movement does not need to follow some pre-set routine. We are allowed to take two steps forward, one step back. We are allowed to make good things and not-so-good ones. We are allowed to do things because we love them, and not because we need to please anybody by shaping it into some accepted form.

We can choose to live with Julia's heartening motto: "Progress, not perfection."  We can choose that we want to grow, and not be tied with a noose to this idea of never feeling good enough.

If you are on the same path as me, think about how letting go of perfectionism would help you. Would it allow you to move ahead in your work, so you can actually find a new perspective instead of getting stuck at an earlier point? Or maybe it would free up your energy so that you can spend it on things that matter instead of frittering it away? 

You and I, we both need to come to this place, so we can release our hesitation and step inside our work and our lives. We need to stop boxing ourselves in and making ourselves small. We are seeing the rents the knife of perfectionism has made in our lives and we are taking it out now, once and for all.  

Standing in a Fresh Lake, Thirsty

"I disappoint many people, and sometimes myself, by not being more obviously spiritual. I don't go to church and rarely meditate in a formal way. I wear ordinary clothes and eat an ordinary diet. I have an aversion to much of the language I hear and read from today's spiritual sources." Thus begins the poetically-titled piece This Fractured, Heavenly World in a back issue of the Spirituality and Health magazine. 

It is by the wonderful and wise Thomas Moore, one of my most recent writing loves. In this short piece, he first tells us where he gets these wonderfully light attitudes from. Partly, he says, they come from his father. Moore paints an evocative picture of the man. He tells us that his father, who died two months after turning 100 years old, was a deeply religious and spiritual man. 

In fact, he was one of the most spiritual people he has ever known. A devout Catholic, he went to Mass at every opportunity, and yet, he was also someone who "wouldn't suffer piousness." Moore tells us of a time that his father went to a church meeting just to stir up some discussion and to represent contrarian views. 

"He loved people, enjoyed the simple things, had a constant curiosity about how the world works, and loved being around children and playing with them. He was also a born teacher who took every opportunity to help others learn. He was a plumber and lived a plumber's spirituality." 

With such a stellar example, how could Moore's spirituality not grow in a similar form? "Years ago, an image from the Sufis struck me and has guided me. Looking for God, they say, is like someone standing in a lake of fresh water and being thirsty. It is foolish to seek the sacred and the divine when we live in a world that is holy and saturated with divinity, if only we had the eyes to see it." 

Moore tells us, "I don't want to be "spiritual," and I don't want to be "worldly." I want whatever results when you thoroughly mix the two." 

We have to recognize that the mundane and the sacred share the same space, he says. That's the profound paradox that we need to touch. The routines of our lives have a sacred thread running right through them. As we look up from watering our plants and see a crane flying above, that is a sacred moment, a communion. When we create a meal for someone we love, that is an offering. When we touch upon the joy of practicing our talents, that is the bursting forth of our joy. 

What we can't quite touch is the reason dancers dance, singers sing, and musicians make music. It's the same reason that architects design buildings, what Goethe called frozen music. It's the spirit we touch on when we do what we love, in work or in play. We are expressing the echoes of some music deep inside us. 

Maybe articulating the notes will help us find where it comes from. And at the very least, going over the notes gives some comfort. They waft up from a place we can't see, and yet, can dimly sense. 

Now, there's this opening to a larger self, to feelings of connection. It feels like such a relief from the frozen, archaic space that often holds us in sway. 

An Exercise for Authenticity

When I was younger, not sure what to wrap myself around and grow, I listened to the cacophony of different voices inside and couldn't figure out how to reconcile them all. They all seemed so different from each other, these different parts of me. I couldn't hold this tension, this feeling that inside me were many different people. I couldn't see how to bring them all together. And so, I flattened parts of me into one. 

Some of this was also because I conformed and gave in to the loud voices outside. But some of it was just to quickly arrive at a solution, to figure out what exactly I was supposed to be. The stress of not knowing, not having that clarity felt terrifying. 

In the past few months, some changes have been afoot. I have started dancing again, something that defines my essence more than anything else. I have been getting in touch with my real feelings beyond the haze of being nice, and started gaining a felt sense of how I used to feel before getting other people's approval became such a driver. 

The word "Authenticity" has been dancing in my consciousness, coming up from the depths of my own self and vibrating in the stories I am finding around me. Dipping through the lovely Julia Cameron's book The Vein of Gold, I chanced upon a little exercise that speaks to me right now. 

It might speak to you as well, if you are feeling some cracks. You are noticing the difference between the official version of who you are and who you really are. Maybe you are feeling fragile too, and just a little crazy. You are changing your moves and that feels uncomfortable and unsafe. 

I hope we both safely land on the shore on the other side. Maybe this exercise can be part of your raft. It goes like this. Number a piece of paper from one to twenty. Then fill out the sentence, "On the one hand, I'd love to ....."; on the other hand, I'd love to ....." twenty times.  

This feels like freedom, a declaration of my different loves, and an invitation to stretch what all encompasses me. Too often, I have said, "I'm not the kind of person to..." "I'm not the kind of person" puts a label on me, puts me into a small box, makes my options limited.  

I'm not the kind of person is also a way of making an excuse, of keeping myself stagnant. I am not the kind of person who questions other people. I'm not the kind of person who changes her definition of giving. I am not the kind of person who says No. I am not the kind of person who can confront and challenge when someone confronts and challenges me. 

But maybe I am. Maybe I can be. On the one hand, I'd love to please everyone. On the other hand, I'd love to say No without feeling guilty. On the one hand, I'd love to give to others. On the other hand, I'd love to claim all my time for myself and give to myself for a change. On the one hand, I'd love to fit in and be harmonious. On the other, I'd love to stand out and reveal who I am. 

On a lighter note, on the one hand, I'd love to experiment with the way I dress. On the other hand, I'd love to hone in on my own style. On the one hand, I'd love to wear high heels. On the other hand, I would love to dress down. 

It's freeing to feel a possibility of different ways of being co-existing. I love heels. I love comfort. I love to please people. But too much pleasing has been killing me. I also love to please myself. This feels like lying beneath a very large expansive fabric, feeling that I can expand the ways in which I respond, that I don't need to stay within some arbitrary lines I drew for myself. 

Here's what my beloved Julia says about the exercise and what it can do. "Do you feel the stretching of your consciousness as you embrace apparent opposites? Can you see that you can encompass more emotional range than you may have realized?" Can you see that? Can you? I have some sense of it. I hope to see it more, to see that I can be nice and good and strong and fierce and militant and peaceful. 

All these different things can live inside me and be accessible to me, and I can be more expansive and less boxed in. I can be a little bigger than I have been till now.  

On Honoring Our Own Style

There have been times in my life where I have urged myself to “Jump,” “Just jump,” and then fallen back ashamed because I just couldn’t do it. Something was holding me back. What, I couldn’t quite figure out. And so, I stayed suspended in that moment of trying to jump and not jumping, berating myself for not having the nerve to do it.

In the past few years, I have done many things that I thought were “too hard” for me. I have traveled on my own. I have shifted countries. I have broken through a shell and reached out to that me who lay sleeping, and who was lost in the persona.

I have done this not by jumping all of a sudden. But finding what gives me courage and strengthening myself, so when the jump came, it no longer felt like a jump. It felt like something that I could either handle or learn to handle.

As I look back, I see that looking outside for answers slowed me down. Listening to too many different opinions slowed me down. I wasn’t sure of myself, so when I heard someone saying something with a great deal of certainty, I believed them.

But with experience, I see that people who are very certain about the way things work are often wrong. They project a confidence that even they, sometimes, only have for show. We might start feeling that they have all the answers. But they often don’t.

As an HSP, you might value someone’s style of decision-making just because of the confidence it gives them. Yes, they might be wrong in the end. But being so sure seems to make their life easier along the way. They also seem to fit better into a culture where just displaying confidence -- a surety about a certain position -- is looked at favorably.

But doubts and the information that they bring can be invaluable in making a decision. They tell us about the lay of the land for us. We are tuned in to subtleties, and just letting ourselves sift through our perceptions one by one, and either prove or disprove them gives us valuable information.

It makes us more flexible, if we give ourselves time to move slowly yet surely through this process. It increases the odds of our making the right decision.

That’s something to remember when we are besieged by attention-grabbing voices. They might be loud. They might be very sure of themselves. But are they always right?

If you look at the people around you, you might find that you are as capable of making a good decision as anybody else. Your style is different, and honoring that style instead of copying someone else’s might just be the key in this situation.

What if you were to move with your style, and not against it?  

Being an INFP writer

We all struggle with different parts of the writing process. As we write more and more, different tendencies within us stop us in our tracks. Sometimes, it feels like we are trying to move a mountain outside, when the real problem is the way we are relating to our work.

We have to deepen our understanding of the different needs that live inside us.

We have to approach these needs holistically, instead of trying to ram through a perceived block.

I have written before about clarifying my writing process here and here.

One more aspect of my struggle became clear to me as I read this article by Dr. A.J.Drenth that talks about  INFPs' (and INTPs') quest for convergence and certainty. For those of you who are not familiar with personality types and MBTI, this link might be helpful.

Essentially, what the article says is that there is an innate drive in all of us to reconcile our natural way of being in the world with the most undeveloped aspects of our personality. For an INFP like me, this means trying to reconcile my natural preference for engaging with the world (through the lens of my feelings) with a more objective world-view.

I can see this happening inside of me, this struggle to arrive at a concrete conclusion. But what this article says, and what can be so helpful for INFP writers, is that trying too hard to arrive at a final conclusion or identity might be premature for us. One of our natural preferences as INFPs is looking at the outside world and noticing infinite possibilities and patterns. This means that if we try to force a final conclusion, that conclusion is often brittle and changeable.

We are too aware of the infinite possibilities to arrive at the kind of surety that we sometimes see and envy in the people around us. By trying to force a conclusion, we are trying to act like these other people, people who are nothing like us.

One reason why we do this, of course, is because of the deep need inside us to integrate different aspects of our personality. But we stumble when we bypass the process required, and also bypass our natural openness in order to quickly resolve this tension that we feel inside. 

Another reason could be that we have faced uncertainties in our live that have left us scared and wanting to cling to some permanent answer. Our minds are trying to fast-track to an illusive place of certainty and stability.

It could just also be that we discount our natural preferences because they have some down-sides. We envy people who have firm opinions about how the world is because our own nature sees too many possibilities that can leave us feeling paralyzed. We could be going from one option to the other without really following through. 

So, we start feeling that the answer is to act like people who have strong judgments. But trying to do this too fast, too soon means that we fail to use our own strengths. We can only arrive at a stable opinion once we have experimented, asked questions, and meandered this way and that. This process asks us to take our time.

How does this understanding - that our natural strength lies in possibility, in asking questions - help us as INFP writers?

One way it can benefit us is that it makes us realize that we might have been wrongly assumed that the world needs us to provide conclusions in our writing. Because we believed this, we might have been trying to force answers. But what the world really needs from our writing is the willingness to go down the rabbit-hole, to be the explorer of nooks and crannies. We can provide the vision that expands and fortifies conclusions.

This is what Dr A.J. Drenth has to says about INFPs struggling with their own natures: "But these assumptions are merely projections of their own subjectivity. The truth is that the world needs them to ask probing questions, to poke holes in existing theories, and to provide creative or explorative “food for thought.”"

This is a common human problem. We all discount what comes to us most naturally, and try to move to the opposite extreme. INFPs who are spontaneously creative and bursting with ideas wish they could focus on only one idea like INJ personality types and build it into something towering over the course of a lifetime. On the other hand, INTJs and INFJs face their own struggle where they think that the world needs them to make art or combust into spontaneous self-expression, instead of providing the deep analysis that is their strength.

As an INFP who absolutely loves INFJ writers and philosophers, it's hard for me to understand how they could be blind to their own strengths. And yet, I discount the strengths of my own style - the pictures tumbling out of my head, the endless ideas I want to engage with.  

But just the awareness that our drive to integrate different parts of ourselves comes from somewhere deep inside can help us be more compassionate with our struggles. We start understanding what this tension is all about. We start channeling our strengths, instead of getting our foot caught up in the knots in our psyche. We can acknowledge that there is a push and a pull inside us, and that it can only really be resolved when we act authentically and struggle with the challenges that our gifts bring us.  

If you are an INFP writer, honor your creativity and value your style. Be who you are, and stay with the questions instead of forcing the answers. The world needs your unique expression, it needs you to keep asking so that the answers can crystallize in their own time.  

On being creative and cracking an egg

Here's an exercise to practice for breaking through resistance. Whenever I have done it, I have felt slightly heretical, as if I am doing something that I don't have permission for. It is from Eric Maisel's book Creativity for Life. All you need to do, before you start your creative work for the day -- your writing or painting or software designing -- is to crack an egg!

Just break it in a bowl, egg shells and all. Then, get up and go do your work.

Here's how Maisel describes this small act of power. "If you want to crack an egg because you are baking a cake, you whack it (carefully) on the side of your bowl, it breaks, and you drop the contents of the egg into the bowl full of flour. There's nothing simpler (though it takes a little skill to break the egg so that egg shells don't get into the batter). Your grandmother did it a million times; your young daughter can do it after a few minutes of false starts and small accidents. In the service of cooking, we are not reluctant to break that egg.

But if you are not baking a cake, an egg's shell feels remarkably formidable. There is something scary about cracking an egg for no good reason, something that makes us squeamish, something that feels like a violation of the egg. Trying to crack an egg for no good reason elicits the same sort of feeling that chalk scratching on a blackboard does. It is a physical reaction, rooted in some primitive fear and anxiety."

This feeling of resistance to actually begin is a part of the creative process, Maisel says. What can also be normal are the experiences where there is no hard shell to crack. This happens when we are really working on something. Everything becomes easy then, and we crack right through the beginnings of things.

But when we are stuck in an infinite loop -- feeling bad about not creating and yet not doing it -- cracking an egg can help us. "Experience the cracking of that egg as the cracking through of your resistance. Feel yourself exhale as you crack it, as if you had just survived something dangerous, then proceed directly to your creative work."    

What exactly is this resistance? What are we cracking through? Some of this resistance to beginning comes from our most primitive parts, where there is fear lurking in the shadows. Some of it is our rational mind telling us how difficult it will be to succeed. The dread we feel is these things and many other things besides.  

Try cracking an egg for a week and see what comes up for you. Does it feel like a subversive act? Does it make you feel powerful, as if you are naming resistance as a normal part of the creative process and using your will to crack through it? Do you feel like you don't have permission to act on your own behalf? Or do you, like me, sometimes feel you just can't waste an egg in the name of letting myself be more creative? If we can't even do this, how much permission do we then have to experiment, to be ourselves, to be an artiste?

Try cracking an egg, and observe how that makes you feel.  

On Writing Better

As creative people, we struggle with doubts and misgivings on an almost daily basis. We are trying to do something that feels inherently risky to us, that feels like taking a leap of faith. At the same time, we are not really sure whether we'll ever be able to get beyond our current level of skill. Will we become as good as we imagine ourselves to be? Or will we fall short? That will surely hurt.

And so we cringe, trying to get out of this moment of not being quite there yet. Intellectually, we know that we need to keep working at it, honing our craft till our understanding seeps into our very bones. But right now, the vision of that glorious future seems far away, and we are wrestling with the mud, trying to pick diamonds.

But in this space with which we are uncomfortable, when we admit that we are not proficient yet, is also the challenge of learning how to become better. And that's half the fun of the journey. We can teach ourselves things we need to learn. We can figure things out for ourselves or find resources that can help us. Making ourselves, adding to who we are makes the struggle worthwhile.

How do we get better at writers? By asking questions, by practicing answers, by refining our process. Do we need to start reading aloud what we've written to figure out how our words will sound to someone else? Do we need to practice writing in scenes, instead of just narrating what's happened.

In Lee Gutkind's book on writing creative non-fiction, You Can't Make This Stuff Up, he talks about the process of editing. Since writing is mostly re-writing, this is important information to keep in mind. In the hundreds of writing workshops that Gutkind has been involved in, he has listened to people praise others by saying things like "That's a great image!" or "That's a wonderful metaphor!"

But Gutkind says that when we first hear something, we need to look at it as a whole. Feedback like this can be premature. "Editing takes place in several phases, but it almost never starts with the line of prose, the sentence, or word choice." So, we may write beautiful, lyrical sentences, but if the entire piece is not structured well, we won't be able to take the readers to a place where they can appreciate our particular talents.

"So consider the blueprint, the structure and shape of your piece of writing first. You'll see that the words, images, and ideas will change as you reshape the structure of your piece, so there's no point in addressing them early on in the revision process."

Only once we know the overall form of our piece, can we sculpt it with greater precision, and add more depth and specificity. Thinking in these broad strokes helps us clarify our process. Then, we won't get stuck in trying to perfect what we've written. Instead, we'll think about what's important to do first. This will help us move ahead.

What part of your writing process can you refine? What will help you become a better writer?