The experience of life can be incredibly joyful, exhilarating and filled with unlimited encounters that touch our heart. They are unique just as every individual human being is unique and there are no guidelines or lists that can define them for the individual. Our self is creative, playful and savours the endless varieties of experience. The self is referred to by different names, some call it a soul, a spirit. Others refer to the living from the heart. Each of us has known this place of home with self, the place of childlike wonder and delight in exploration of all the new potentials that can arise in a day. We can continually surprise ourselves in just how many ways life can be satisfying when the creativity, which lives in each of us, is unbound and free to express. Every day can be new and we can be born anew within it.
When I speak of creativity I refer to a way of living that comes from the self, the soul that you are. It does not necessarily mean the activities which are traditionally connected with the arts like painting, playing an instrument, writing poetry and the like. These are very enjoyable and recommended as they develop the awareness, the senses, the depth of perceptions and allow the journey into the creative process which includes many different stages, both light and dark, and calls upon the self to be involved. Arts, the appreciation and creation of beauty naturally become more important as we journey back to self. As we allow more of self to be part of our lives again, our own unique creativity becomes infused into everything we do, in how we live each day. Everyday situations become filled with the thrill of being alive rather than being a burden. Our interactions with our own world become enriched and satisfying because we are whole.
The society was not built to encourage the experience of life in this way, but quite the opposite. The structures work to stifle the authentic and free expression of self, allowing a very limited space within which the self can be authentically creative. By the time we become an adult, our own individual self was most likely driven from our lives to various degrees, creating a void and emptiness which nothing else can fill in the long run.
The ways of society demand the structured and pre-prescribed behaviour, the 'nice and controllable person' syndrome, which ensures and continues this separation. We are encouraged and coerced to keep making ourselves into pre-defined roles, we have to keep striving, by forcing and disciplining ourselves to fit in and be like everybody else. Or rather, to try to be better than everybody else by striving to make the pre-defined standards of success. We internalise and identify with the messages which tell us what we should think and feel, what should be important to us and how we should experience our life. None of this leaves much room for our own individual creativity which knows no bounds and does not allow itself to be coerced into repetitive, painful and boring experiences. Instead, the self leaves our conscious daily lives and our 'world' gets smaller and smaller. We never quite make the impossible standards and feel disempowered in turn, and yet we keep busy and keep striving because the society does not have any real solutions to our dilemma.
But the yearnings and the nudges remain, coming through in our dreams, in the feelings we don't want to acknowledge. That there is something missing in our lives, something very important. We may try to cover these nudges and uncomfortable feelings by addictions and medications. Our bodies may develop chronic diseases which reflect this uneasiness and blocked energy.
The journey back to self begins when we start realising that looking to others to make us happy and expecting products to fill the void created by the evicted self is no longer working. When the striving to achieve the pre-defined goals of success is no longer satisfying nor does it work to silence the nudges which get louder and louder. In the quiet times, we may even acknowledge the uneasy empty feelings which accompany this way of being.
Has the striving worked for you in filling this void?
Or have you, like so many others, started the sacred journey back to yourself? To being self-full, creative, authentic, self empowered, autonomous and self-determined and to live your life as you would want it to be. This requires taking off the 'nice person' image and the embracement of the whole self, the light and the dark. It requires the courage to accept the whole you. There are many people today living in just this way.
The journey is full of discoveries and has many twists and turns. Issues, situations and blockages arise to be accepted, cleared and resolved, and you can benefit from the experience and the assistance of others who have walked this path. A sacred path.
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