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Creating your own Peaceful Warriors: 5 Ways to Teach Meditation to Children

Lauren
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3
Creating your own Peaceful Warriors: 5 Ways to Teach Meditation to Children

“Breathing in, I know the anger is in me. Breathing out, I will take good care of my anger.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, ‘Is Nothing Something’.

As a society we are becoming increasingly familiar with the agreement that meditation is as beneficial to children as it is to adults, bringing about greater degrees of relaxation and self-reflection from an early age.

But the kind of meditation we might use when teaching our children how to be peaceful warriors will effectively take quite a different shape to the ones we’re familiar with and can require time and wisdom to get the right one for your child.

Traditional Vipassana and ‘breathing’ exercises, though excellent tools to teach, (as, after all, breathing is the one thing we all have in common), can seem a little abstract or hard to grasp for kids under the age of eight.

teach meditation to children

Children, particularly between the ages of three and six, are usually bouncing off the walls and reverberating in that rare but precious energy that should not be squashed or disregarded, but celebrated and used to heighten awareness.

Much like any meditation techniques, the best thing is to find activities that bring awareness to everyday tasks, as we would in retreat setting; combining working, walking, karma yoga… anything and everything we engage in throughout the day can be used to hook the meditation.

If there are three main forms of meditation; breath, chanting and object meditation, then the same goes for the latter two – singing, humming and focusing on an object or sounds can be excellent ways to increase focus for kids, and means that you don’t always have to introduce techniques in a set ‘meditation slot’; instead introducing anchors that would nicely combine with your child’s interests.

My daughter is a great example. Being the most willful and stubborn gem of a girl, teaching meditation has had a few false starts to say the least. In other words – the moment she senses she’s being taught anything, she will resist.

Using movement and animal imitation (something she loves doing on a daily basis), has proven to be the best way to do a creative meditation, whereas color visualization and massage lends itself better to a calming night ritual where another child might prefer listening to sounds and humming.

Whatever your child’s interests and unique personality, you can use it to your advantage and get creative devising different meditations to suit them and you. A bit like spell-making, it just needs a few ingredients and some imagination. Here are 5 ways to teach meditation to children

Focus on what your child is interested in

Just as you would when teaching them counting or reading. If they like making pictures, make it visual. If they like making a noise, make up a song or chose one that is more on the spiritual side than usual. Meditation is often connected to the five senses and can be built around one or two of them.

teaching children meditation using creative ideas

Experiment with objects

Just getting a child to hold an object (chosen by them of course), describe it and feel it slows them down and makes them more aware. As Lorraine E. Murray writes about in Calm Kids, when children are fully awake they are in the Beta state, but when they’re in Alpha state, noticing their surroundings without analyzing or thinking they’re closer to a meditative state that leads on to the Theta/dream state that adults can reach through ‘no thought’, their brains being fully developed neurologically. Favorite objects can be collected on an altar or in a special area of their play tent to help them develop and take control of their own ‘spiritual time’. 

Have a lively ‘wake up’ meditation in the morning involving physical play (swinging arms like monkeys, stomping like elephants, tapping various chakra points on body etc.), and a more calming ritual before bed (chanting simple chants, watching the stars on the balcony, visualizing a color that they’re drawn to for that day and using words you link to that color i.e. orange – ‘you’re feeling warm and confident, happy and sunny’.

Music, candles and particular cushions/areas of the house can be dedicated to meditation, but the more you get kids to look within without these external props the better. Such things can help set the scene or be nice evening ritual to prepare them for bed. 

Involve gratitude

Have a gratitude prayer that you might start to see if they join in, or take turns to say three things you’re grateful for that happened that day.

Becoming aware of emotions

During the day, build up the habit of becoming aware of emotions. For example, if your child is upset, sit with them and get them to link it to one core ‘negative’ emotion (mad, sad, scared). Get them to recognize this emotion, perhaps where they feel it in their bodies, what color it is. Once this habit has been introduced, or if they’re a little older, they can use breath to breathe into/send love to the emotion before cuddling themselves.

OR Do ‘volcano breath’ for angry reactions (a few sharp outtakes, then an ‘explosion’ at the sky rather than another person) or ‘Buddha/cloud’ breathing (slow and deliberate) for scared or sad feelings. Clenching and unclenching fists and asking them to imagine them slowly letting sand trickle through their fingers or blowing things they can do nothing about away like feathers are other ideas.

Work with obstacles

Generally, work with obstacles rather than against them. For example, if your child has difficulty keeping their eyes closed, use a visual tool like following a finger or an instruction like ‘look at the sky, look at the ground.’ Like children’s yoga, it’s often best to keep things moving or involve a story element to hold their interest.

Even things like walking to the bus stop can become a game and meditation in disguise. Count your steps together, march, count the birds you see along the way, walk slowly (you may need to be a bit of an exhibitionist, but let’s face it, who cares what others think!)… Try collecting a certain type of object to add to the altar back home, like stones or leaves.

All these suggestions are simply jumping off points for further ideas that will evolve as your child ages and you become bolder and more experimental. The joy of any children we come into contact with and those in our care is that they often lead the way; down unknown roads we never dreamed of.

Meditation and play will ultimately connect us with our own inner child that looks at the world with wonder. One we might’ve long since left behind.

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Jester Guru Chronicles, Part 4: The Cosmic Joke

Gary Z McGee
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11
Jester Guru Chronicles, Part 4: The Cosmic Joke

“There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities.” ~ Mark Twain

Life is a joke. Reality is a thought in free-fall holographically projected through space. It’s a big fat billowy dream of things seeming to be the case that are not even the case at all. It’s a series of illusory moments bleeding into other illusory moments that are all mocking the “here and now” in a dance of meaning in an otherwise meaningless universe.

Indeed, it’s a terribly absurd clash of meaning against meaninglessness, of finitude against infinity, of light against dark. And here we are: these little descendants of stars in stinky meat sacks trying to make sense of it all. Yes, life is a big joke, and a terribly told one at that.

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But the question is: are you laughing at the joke or are you the butt-end? Are you caught in the throes of absurdity or have you let it all go with a trickster dance and a mighty laugh? Are you a drowning duck or are you the duck that has perfected the art of letting water roll off its back?

The good thing is: there is more than one way to skin Schrödinger’s cat. For example: I’m a quantum-mechanic dissecting the cosmos and exorcising the ghost in the atom with Occam forceps, Zeno skull-clamps, and a Planck-sized scalpel in superpostion with its own cut.

And I’m here to tell you that you’ve been duped. You’ve been bamboozled. You’ve been hoodwinked by political claptrap and religious codswallop. You’ve been overly spoon-fed. But, here’s the real kick in the pants: you’re doing it to yourself.

You’ve swallowed belief and sidestepped thinking for yourself. You’ve blindly revered parochial traditions. You’ve taken to heart too many hand-me-down philosophies. You’ve taken them too seriously. You’ve taken yourself too seriously. In short, you have not questioned things enough. Questioning should only ever be to the nth degree, lest we inadvertently become the playthings of charlatans and snake-oil salesmen.

Question everything. Question even this diatribe about questioning things. It’s the only way to guard against being the butt-end of the joke.

Like Aldous Huxley said, “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”

Truth is not readily evident. Healthy transformation is not a given. It takes massive amounts of discipline, a riot of the heart against preconceived convention. One must be able to transform fear into courage and pain into strength and both into art. And then counterintuitively be able to laugh at it all.

Our small minds drive us toward stability, security, and pacification of the senses. But we need more variability, vulnerability, and provocation. We need bigger minds with simpler urges and the plasticity to handle the vicissitudes of change, because change, the only impermanent permanent, is the slap in the face that follows the cosmic joke.

Anansi

We either honor it with laughter and high humor, or we dishonor it with stagnant ideals and stuck-in-the-muck religiosity. We live in a world of hungry ghosts that should not be fed. Rather, they should be transformed into something of substance, something that can feed itself.

Like Tom Robbins said, “We’re our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.”

This process begins first by admitting how we are victims, and then being proactive about how to become a hero, how to become a person with the capacity to laugh at the cosmic joke instead of a person crippled from being the butt-end of it. Let’s empower the victim. Let’s exorcise the ghost.

Let’s slay the dragon. Better yet, let’s hug the demon and transform it into an ally, a powerful muse that we can use as an inspiration to navigate through the joke. Let’s grow in fits of courage and self-liberation.

Let’s push through existential thresholds sharp enough to cut our souls, and then let’s regroup to lick our wounds, to seek the consolation of our comfort zone so that we can mend. Then we can do it all over again.

Like Anaïs Nin said, “We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”

Indeed, the greatest of all arts is the art of healthy self-transformation. And the greatest method toward perfecting this art is questioning things to the nth degree.

Like the Buddha said, “He who asks a question is a fool for a minute. He who does not remains a fool forever.”

quote-a-serious-and-good-philosophical-work-could-be-written-consisting-entirely-of-jokes-ludwig-wittgenstein-200854So it is that I will continue to be a reminder of the contingency and arbitrariness of the human condition. I will continue to elude your conditioned notions of right and wrong.

I will forever refuse to correspond with your outdated notions of good and evil. I will continue to play pranks on you and laugh at your seriousness, not to make you feel embarrassed or stupid, but to show you ways that you can start being more humorous and less self-serious. There’s no certainty, only opportunity. Vi veri veniversum vivus vici: by the power of truth we, while living, shall conquer the universe.

In the end, your life is your message. Will it be a life of contained ownership, or liberated detachment? Will it be a life of remaining a victim to the violent philosophy of others, or a life of becoming a hero with the courage to create a philosophy of humor and love? Will it be a life of being the butt-end of the joke, or a life of laughing at the joke despite it?

High humor can be your saving grace, but first you must laugh, and laugh hard, at all the false gods and false men you’ve propped up around you to keep yourself safe and contained. Laugh at it all, because I assure you they are laughing at you.

Forget “I think therefore I am.” That’s old hat. Embrace “I think therefore I laugh.” That, my friends, is where the gold’s at.

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Reconnecting with the Wisdom we had as Children

Nikki Sapp
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5
Reconnecting with the Wisdom we had as Children

“We all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls.

We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow path and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.” – Robert R. McCammon

Children seem to be on to something. They experience happiness and joy at the drop of a hat, and don’t seem to cling on to the past or future as much as we adults do. Because their ego isn’t quite fully formed they are more resilient and more likely to be living in the present moment without even trying. This is just their natural state of being.

As we grow up we start adopting the ideas, thoughts and beliefs of our parents and of society. We start looking to our external world to tell us who we “should” or “shouldn’t” be.

We lose the connection with our true selves and start identifying with the image we feel is appropriate for the rest of the world to see.

The more the years pass by, we keep disconnecting from our inner wisdom and intuition that we had as children and instead keep identifying more and more with the illusory self and world.

One day we realize something doesn’t feel right, nothing we thought would make us happy is making us happy and the material possessions we thought would make us fulfilled become replaced by entirely new wants and desires.

Our appetites become insatiable, yet never quite fully satisfied. At this point we must go back to how we were before the world told us who we should be, or what we should have or not have in order to be valuable and worthy.

We must go back to the wisdom we had when we were children, before society stepped in and told us we weren’t “good enough.”

Here are five perspectives about life we had as we were children that we should readopt now:

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1) The world is a mysterious and magical place

Remember when you were a child and every place and everything seemed magical? You could spend hours playing with stuffed animals or toys creating stories about their lives, or find the amazingness in things like flowers, rocks, or even just playing in dirt.

The wonderful world of our imaginations seemed so real and every place we went seemed so new to us that we would be in wonder and awe of everything. Then we started to get used to everything.

We started to take people, places and things for granted and they lost their magic. If we start to look at the world from new eyes, just like the eyes of a child we find that the world really never lost its magic. It was merely us that stopped recognizing it.

2) Life is simple

To a child life is completely uncomplicated. Their entire being is simply about finding joy in that moment. They don’t hang on to conversations or worry about what they’re going to do the next day. They let tomorrow worry about itself, and leave yesterday in the past.

They are only gravitated and motivated by what is giving them pleasure and joy in that instance, without feeling guilty or ashamed about that. As adults we become attached to this idea that life has to be hard and overcomplicated. So we spend so much time worrying about things we can’t change or stressing about the future.

Joy and happiness is always available to us in the present moment, it is only up to us to choose them. Yes there will be situations that seem undesirable or like something we do not want, but if we simply focus on changing the things we can, and accepting the things we can’t, we become completely accepting of the present moment which immediately gives us inner peace.
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3) Preconceived notions have not been formed

Children don’t exist in stereotypes. They don’t buy into belief systems. They don’t care what race you are, what political party you belong to or what God you worship. They simply see another human being, without all the labels attached to it.

When we start seeing other human beings in terms of the fact that they are more like us than not, we find that everyone wants to be loved, has fears, has goals and dreams.

Yes, the details of their lives may be different than ours, but at the end of the day, we are all more alike than we think. When we truly realize this, we are able to practice empathy and compassion for others, EVEN if their skin color, nationality, or personality is different than ours.

4) All feelings are welcomed with open arms

The whole range of feelings is welcomed with open arms by children. They are sad one minute so they cry. A few minutes later, they feel completely happy again so they are laughing and playing.

No emotion is “resisted”. When we learn to actually feel our emotions, and stop feeling bad about them or denying that they are happening, we start working through them completely. This will prevent blockages, resentments, and grudges from forming.

5) Gratitude can be felt for even the simplest things

Children can be happy about holding a bug, about having a cardboard box to play with, or about having a piece of candy. They can become so excited and appreciative of the tiniest 644092_341791972577160_1074184433_n2and most simple things that we may take for granted.

However, when we start appreciating the small things, we open ourselves up to receive more. Gratitude for what we already have only draws to us more things to be grateful for.

The wisdom that is our innate nature is something that we can start tapping into at any given time.

It doesn’t matter how many years have passed that we started drifting more and more apart from our inner child, this intuition is still inside all of us just waiting to be recognized. Let your inner child come out and play. You may be surprised by the results.

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Finite and Infinite Lovers: Changing the Game of Love

Gary Z McGee
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20
Finite and Infinite Lovers: Changing the Game of Love

“True love is the complete victory of the particular over the general, and the unconditional over the conditional.” ~ Naseem Nicholas Taleb

We are all scientists, trying to make sense of the love inside us. Most things exist along a rollercoaster ride of degrees. So it is also with love. Our definitions of love are not as black and white as we’d like them to be, they’re ambiguously gray and often imprecise.

grunge_road_sign__infinite_love_limit_sjpg3041The border around our idea of love is mostly an illusion, permeable and ever-changing; more like a horizon than a boundary. There are, after all, over seven billion of us on this planet, and we each have our own unique psycho-physiological perception of what love means.

Demanding that the universe adhere to our definition of love is one of our greatest human fallacies. It’s as if we’re asking the universe to stand still so that we can be certain about our love in order to justify our definition of it. But the universe is not designed to match our expectations. Neither should it be pigeonholed into our finite definitions.

Like David Deutsch said: “If you reject the infinite, you are stuck with the finite, and the finite is parochial. The best explanation of anything eventually involves universality, and therefore infinity. The reach of explanations cannot be limited by fiat.” And so our explanations of love should not be limited by fiat, lest it be ruled by the misconception and expectation of others.

This article will introduce a new way of seeing the game of love through the – sometimes contrasting and sometimes overlapping – perception of finite and infinite conceptualization. In the game of love, as within the game of life, we sometimes perceive with big mind (big-picture thinking), and we sometimes perceive with small mind (small-picture thinking).

When we confront love using the former disposition, we are assuming the role of the infinite lover archetype. When we confront love using the latter disposition, we are assuming the role of the finite lover archetype. We all move, through varying degrees, between both extremes. And that’s okay.

There will always be room for improvement and there will always be lessons to glean from them both. Like Shakespeare said, “The course of true love never did run smooth.”

Finite and Infinite Lovers

“Deep inside us there is a self-loathing that prevents us from living wholly in the moment, from living life to the full. We cannot truly love or be loved until the insect-like carapace is cut open by the agonizing process of initiation. Until we reach this point we don’t know what life is meant to be like.” ~ Mark Booth

rubiks-cubeGertrude Stein defined love as “the skillful audacity required to share an inner life.” Indeed, love is both real and faux-ami. Its mysterious hypocrisy and exhilarating bouleversements are a part of its underlying essence, and it’s just not love if it doesn’t act itself out as such.

Like Victor Hugo said, “love is never stronger than when it is completely unreasonable.” Infinite jest aside, in order to be able to share this “inner life” with others one must first come to terms with it for themselves.

One must first discover some reason (some meaning within the meaninglessness) for their unreasonable love.

Solving the dependency paradigm is one way to go about doing this, but another way is to use the power of archetypes, like the way James P. Carse did with his concept of Finite and Infinite Players.

The finite & infinite lover concept works within the same paradigm as the finite and infinite player concept: the infinite game of life. Where a finite lover loves conditionally, an Infinite lover loves unconditionally.

Where a finite lover loves in order to keep their comfort zone intact, an infinite lover loves in order to stretch their comfort zone. A finite lover is possessive, obsessive, needy, pleasure-seeking, restricted, and dependent (or codependent). An infinite lover is non-possessive, admiring, not needing, pleasure-giving, free, and independent (or interdependent).

A finite lover succumbs to the preexisting cultural dictates of love, whereas a finite lover liberates themselves from such dictates in order for love to evolve. Where a finite lover is jealous, an infinite lover practices compersion.

For a finite lover love is profane. For an infinite lover love is sacred. Finite love is about possession. Infinite love is about appreciation. Finite love gives into the illusion of satiation, and always requires gratification, which generates anxiety and hostility.

Infinite love is never sated, but doesn’t require gratification, and generates little anxiety or hostility. Infinite lovers are in love with love itself. Finite lovers are in love with the expectation of what love can bring them.

1334504940059_5495633 Self-pity is poison for an infinite lover, while it seems to be the lifeblood of a finite lover. For the infinite lover, love is sacred when it is unconditional; it is profane when it is conditional.

Where a finite lover seeks power and control over love, an infinite lover releases control and seeks the power within love.

Where a finite lover seeks invulnerability through love, an infinite lover seeks vulnerability within love. Where a finite lover loves with ego and expectation, an infinite lover loves with neither ego nor expectation for anything in return.

A finite lover looks for themselves within the love of another, where an infinite lover finds themselves in order to love another. A finite lover seeks to twist love to fit an agenda. An infinite lover twists the love within themselves in order to escape all agendas. Like Thomas Merton said, “The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”

Letting love go

let go or be dragged“Drop the idea that attachment and love is one thing. They are enemies. It is attachment that destroys all love. If you feed, if you nourish attachment, love will be destroyed; if you feed and nourish love, attachment will fall away by itself. They are not one; they are two separate entities, and antagonistic to each other.” ~ Osho

I’ve often said that the key to happiness in this life is the ability to love, the ability to let love, and the ability to let love go. Healthy detachment is similar to letting love go.

It doesn’t mean we let go of Love itself (just like detachment doesn’t mean we abandon attachment itself) – not at all. It means we are letting go of the ego aspect of love (or the ego aspect of attachment).

We are letting go of the codependence, and the need to cling to an agenda. It’s not like we let go of love and then forget about it. Not at all, it’s more like we are saying goodbye to permanence and embracing impermanence.

Like proud parents who are sad that their child has left home, but who are open to the possibility of their return and embrace the inevitability that they will change.

In practicing detachment, love itself is never abandoned, nor is it forgotten. It is, in all ways appreciated and treasured for the learning experience that it provided. Only the needy, codependent, ego side of love – that’s filled with unhealthy expectations and cultural predispositions about the way love should be – is abandoned; so that we can be truly present to the “continual flux” of our emotional states in relation with the similarly changing emotional states of others. Like David McRaney said, “You can’t improve the things you love if you never allow them to be imperfect.”

Finite lovers love with hope. Infinite lovers love despite hope. Finite lovers are hopeful (and sometimes even hopefool) romantics, and thus always displeased. Infinite lovers are hopeless romantics, and thus always enchanted.

Like Walter Benjamin said, “The only way of loving a person is to love them without hope.” Try not to confuse attachment with love like finite lovers do. Attachment is about fear and dependency. Love is about courage and vulnerability. Attachment is about codependence and ego-verification.

Love is about interdependence and soul-authentication. The secret of love is vulnerability, and the secret of vulnerability is courage. Love is not supposed to be something owned and clung to, or even hoped for, but something lived through and then let go of.

An infinite lover makes the art of letting go a daily discipline. Like Siddhārtha Gautama said, “In the end these things matter most: How well did you love? How fully did you live? How deeply did you let go?”

Sacred (agape) love

tumblr_nasbp0MxWJ1rvdwfvo1_1280“The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it’s not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another person–without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other.

They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.” ~ Osho

Love shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s ability to let it be free. Free love is agape love. Agape love is the ability to love unconditionally, treating all things, including relationships, in a sacred way. It’s both a tending to, as well as a letting go of, love itself. Tending to love and leaving love alone are not contradictory strategies.

They both work fine, and they blend well. In any relationship, indeed in life itself, it’s a good idea to try some of both, in different areas, so that each is a control for the other. Love must not obsessively attach and it must not obsessively detach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

For infinite lovers it is not enough to just be (finite love), they must will themselves into a disclosure of being (infinite love). From this existential unveiling unfolds the transition from just being (and thinking you deserve love) to truly living (and learning to be Love).

In the bigger picture, war is two “rights” obliterating their rights; Love is two “wrongs” obliging their wrongs. A finite lover is stuck in a paradigm of “what love should be” to the extent that they cannot oblige the “wrongs” of others, which leads inevitably to an obliteration of equal rights.

An infinite lover, on the other hand, always practices the counterintuitive ability of obliging the “wrongs” of others through compassion and understanding so as to maintain equal rights. If love is a battlefield, then the infinite lover is the one telling everyone to put their guns down.
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Finite lovers cannot put their guns down because they are wrapped up in their love to such an extent that they cannot see the love of others.

An infinite lover consciously practices amor fati: love of fate. While a finite lover unconsciously fumbles around with ignes fatui: fool’s fire. For the infinite lover, life is about coming back to what one has as their bedrock, their own unique capacity to love.

From this place one can transcend any amount of pain, anger, hate, and rage, and even transform it into a gift for others to learn from.

Where the finite lover fears honest communication, the infinite lover embraces it. Like Khalil Gibran said, “Between what is said and not meant and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost.”

At the end of the day, we all have the energy of infinite love inside us. Some of us are simply more aware of it than others. Those who are more aware, tend to be purer infinite lovers. Those who are less aware, tend to be merely finite lovers. As with all things awareness is the key, and nothing is certain.

But infinite lovers want to know, as David Whyte did, “if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat. I have read, in that fierce embrace, even the gods speak of God.”

The place where the gods speak of God is the House of Love. It is there where the greatest sages of history wish to guide you. Indeed, it’s the place where Rumi advised, “Close your eyes. Fall in love. Stay there.”

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Love limit: infinite
It’s Okay To Be Smart by Tom Colbie
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Zen Proverb
Frida Kahlo Astronaut by Tom Colbie
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Supernatural Lovers

Unleashing the Beast: Six Tips for Inspiring Creativity from the Source

Lauren
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0
Unleashing the Beast: Six Tips for Inspiring Creativity from the Source

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.” ~ Herman Melville.

The much sought-after and revered word ‘creativity’ has been propelled into super-star status by our elite and money-crazy society. In this day and age winning a slot on television to prove you’ve ‘got what it takes’ has reduced creativity to a caterwauling capitalist market place; with a machine spitting out the next imitation of what was once popular in the hope that investment comes up tops.

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Throughout the ages, story has been used as a tool to explain how we deal with the world, obscured beneath layer upon layer of metaphor and symbolism, stories contain guidelines for life, and can be the best way to teach children basic morals through the challenges a character will face.

In fact, if done correctly, the empathy we might feel for certain characters in certain life situations (in each case, those we can relate to; the death of a parent, feeling lost, losing our riches…) is often how we navigate our way through the more complex examples of life’s challenges.

It even has the power to make a huge influence on the way our childhood is shaped, and how we go about pinning down and expressing those feelings and the chaotic webs of ‘fate’ as they weave their way through the years.

In this way then, it is the writer’s job – no, their responsibility – not only to master the more apparent forms of shaping story; of plot, brushstroke and melody, but to also tap into something inexplicable.

It is the difference between creating that empathy, and not – a threadbare story with no believability or a song with no heart has no influence or anything to offer at all – so how does one achieve such heights?

‘Capturing life’ is a job worthy of the Gods, for who are we mere mortals to think we can ever begin to get our heads around such complexity? As wonderful as words are, they are also limited. How the mind creates meaning will never be pinned down in a text book or understood by a movie producer… it can only be handed down from the heavens.

In mythology, the nine muses were experts of knowledge and aesthetics and the daughters of Zeus, invoked throughout time to inspire and aid the poet in periods of creative despair… otherwise known as writer’s block. They often came in the form of beautiful women that might frequent the author’s bed, supposedly a Goddess incarnate, or at least a worthy excuse to sleep around in the name of art.

But what does this ancient practice actually tell us about the nature of creativity? The final ingredient, the missing link between the mundane and the divine in works of art has always been that leap from formula and foundation to capturing a slice of truth; integrity and all.

An appeal to God, the angels or the muses, though perhaps voiced in a slightly different fashion still goes on today. Delving into the Source, manifesting the right intention or simply swimming in the true nature of reality could be other ways of explaining this ‘phenomenon’.

For anyone who has ever experienced even a few minutes of complete involvement in a task is familiar with the sensation, the level of sophistication and quality of what they manage to produce is another matter. A decision made by energies we can’t see or communicate directly with? Or simply chance and creative ‘luck’?

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In this way, could the nature of story – a distraction from the present moment – actually be an unhealthy or outdated form of understanding life? Has the time come to put aside the coveted forms of storytelling to lessen the distance and close the gap between ourselves and God? Perhaps we need to remember, as we evolve as a human race, that there is not so much difference between us and the writer.

That we in fact hold more ‘power’ and control over life than we have been led to believe. That simple twists of fate are not at the root of the inexplicable, but plausible, easy-to-understand intuitive visions of inner knowledge. The external and internal reunited. The voice from within and the Source speaking in harmony.

Making life an expression of personal, if not communal creativity is the root of all ritual and religious fortitude. “Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.” According to John W. Gardner. So why don’t artists use this as a means to squeeze out the darkest utricles of their creative sponge; that which soaks up every last drop of observation and transforms it into pure gold.

The act of being in the moment, as Eckhart Tolle points out in The Power of Now, can actually lead to greater creativity and purer expression of the inner voice, having uncovered it in the first place through meditation and living in truth.

Tips for finding your muse

1. Have a noble reason for creating. Lost in desire; status, money, influence… OK so you may get lucky, but actually sustaining and building up a solid body of work that makes you proud will first require a good long hard look in the mirror.

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Why do you really want to create? To please your parents expectations of you or to help others who are struggling to understand something you’ve already gone through? As Buddha included in the Noble Eightfold Path – right livelihood should in no way harm.

2. Steam of consciousness. Watch your dreams. Keep a dream diary. Be off the wall and drum out some old karma/patterns for a while to cleanse your quill.

Dynamic meditation may be the way forward. Speaking gibberish to cleanse yourself of cliché and chaos. This may take years. The act of becoming a writer may take ten years of regular writing to wade through all the excess sludge floating around your subconscious. It’s dedication, not a day job!

3. Become aware. Inner voice/inner monologue. Analyze your self and uncover your weaknesses. See yourself as a character in a story. Make it an ongoing practice. Strengths of your ‘beast’ – what is it that makes you unique? Are you funny? Honest?

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4. Scare yourself, push yourself to the boundaries, in life and in your quest for the Source (do something that scares you everyday and it will reflect itself in your art)

5. Get into the habit of playing. A child at play becomes an adult at work. Do what you love.

6. Ask the universe. Be sincere and trust that if you clearly state your purpose that something will move through you. Respect it but see it as plentiful, never-ending. Lend it the reverence it deserves.

In these ways, we can make art more and more about building a dialogue with each other. Rather than the artist being revered and the ‘winning ticket’ coveted, we can use our creativity to become closer to the Whole, therefore detaching from the ego and the rat race that is leaving our world in tatters.

In this way we may also soften the curve as we experience a new paradigm and build bridges between continents, viewing creative expression as something of equality, rather than money. The East and West divide still rings in our music, film and fiction and are still so firmly attached to making the artist into a star rather than a visionary, or a poet with dignity.

The ego’s fear of death means that we want to ‘make an impact’ and create a legacy in our work; the vessel where we express our uniqueness, yet the point of art is surely to heal and create bonds where there were none before.

As long as this is done with detachment from wealth and status, then surely there will be an endless supply of it, accessible for all to tap into and a way to get on a global wavelength, rather than the narrative our governments want us to believe.

“He who binds to himself a Joy, Does the winged life destroy; He who kisses the Joy as it flies, Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.” ~ William Blake

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