Divine Creative Flow
March 21st, 2008 by Rose Rosetree
Related to yesterday’s conversation with aura readings of several different databanks on Loreena McKennitt, Tara made a great comment.
To give you context, I had described the songwriter/composer’s creativity this way:
“Mostly, Loreena just writes it down. When she swims through the space in consciousness where the music finds her, Loreena shows the grace of a swan. Just enough of her stays present as an individual for her to notate the music. Otherwise, she is truly out of the way, surrendered to the experience.”
Tara wrote, “I just LOVE the feeling of [that]. Can you tell me, is this something that just “is”, on a gift level, or is this something that can be learned or otherwise acquired?
“That ’swimming through consciousness to where (art) finds you’ is a thing I long for, but find incredibly elusive. I feels like there is a complete disconnect between what I am feeling and wanting to express creatively, and my ability to visualize it or otherwise express it in tangible form.
“It is a constant frustration and I feel like I can’t really progress much further as I’d like to in the realms of art and creativity unless I can get past this…”
THREE PIECES TO THE PUZZLE
The process of creative flow is dear to my heart. Although I don’t have an academic Ph.D. about this topic, I do bring the perspective of Energy Spirituality, plus my own journey. That includes horrible writer’s block in high school and most of college. After I moved to metro D.C., for six years (yes, 6!!!!!! years), my all-consuming project in life was to clear up the massive goop at my throat chakra.
For weeks at a time, I lost my voice completely… and for no medical reason. Bit by bit, I put together the understanding of three pieces to the puzzle that I will share here. I really do believe than anyone willing to pay the price can develop a Divine Creative Flow.
FIRST THINGS FIRST
That first thing is technique. An “artist” — by which I mean illustration or painting or writing or composing, or any other art form that you care about — needs to gain technical skill at the art form. There’s no shortcutting around this. You can’t merely say you’re inspired and that will take care of all other matters.
I remember hearing a conversation once, between Machelle Small-Wright (the founder of Perelandra) and a healer, “Dee-Dee.” As I remember it:
Dee-Dee: I’m just so inspired when I heal. I’m going to use your flower essences and do the other kinds of healing that I channel. Now that I have these boxes of your essences, I’m ready to go hang out my shingle.
Machelle: I wish you wouldn’t, not yet. When people are coming to you with medical problems, it isn’t enough to be inspired. Get a good knowledge of healing first. Study with someone you respect. Otherwise, there you’ll be with someone who is suffering and you’ll just be guessing what to do.
TECHNICAL SKILL INCLUDES AURAS
Remember when I was reading nominees for the Academy Awards? (Detailed readings of how their chakras changed in performance was sent in my monthly e-zine, to which you can subscribe for free by clicking this link. And if you sign up for the zine now, you’ll have access to the archives, so you can find that article. It could change forever how you watch movies.)
When many of the performers, especially the Best Actor nominees, changed so few of their chakras, you might have wondered, “What were they doing, then? How could they be nominated?”
Yet many performers have won by doing an interesting variation on business as usual with their chakras. To get all the technical things right about a performance has been good enough for audiences and the Academy. Most people, knowing zilch about aura readings (so far) will hardly know the difference.
Think of all those outer components to acting. You have to learn your lines. You must hit your marks. You must look right in every way. Then your voice has to sound good. You’ve got to emote.
It’s a long list, just as there would be for every art form. If you were born knowing these things, like Susan Sarandon — who, I’ve heard, never has taken a single acting lesson –you can always do regression therapy. Explore your last few lifetimes and you’ll undoubtedly find plenty of study and striving in just that same line of work. (You also can release frozen blocks of energy related to the past. Regression therapy is mostly about healing, at least the way I do it.)
Tara, I know you have paid your dues in that way, but since we are opening up this conversation to all our Blog-Buddies, this first piece of creativity really needs to be acknowledged.
Blog-Buddies, how many people do you know who are writing books but who have never bothered working in a shorter form? Sure, it’s a big fad now. It also cheapens the art form. Maybe a little blogging will be preparation, or keeping a journal. Now, suddenly, a book-length creation is being attempted.
Sweet ambition! But to go there first without learning about the technical aspects of writing is a big mistake.
No woo-woo practices around energy fields, no prayer, no metaphysical anything can make up for a lack of technical skill if you really aim to excel at the arts.
THE PROJECT
Creativity doesn’t just flow, any more than a body of water does. Which coast will that ocean touch? Which river starts where? Is sourced where? Flows into which welcoming place?
Sometimes a person’s art form is stuck because you have outgrown the old form. To be blunt, you no longer love this particular audience, the form in which you’re working, etc.
In a way, this is a technical problem. Sometimes the solution is simple. Let’s say you’re working on articles for a series of books. You’ve worked on this series for ages and, although you’ve grown a bit weary of the subject matter, those greenbacks you’re paid still taste mighty fresh to you and your family.
You might find the flow-through limited until you make up your own “back story” or “front story” about a context for that book series. Let the boss trouble herself with what she’s going to do. As far as you’re concerned, that series of books is now about bringing in an age of Enlightenment for humanity. Or there is one particular reader who really, really needs your help. Every day you imagine one such reader. You keep him in mind before you type a single word.
Or maybe you’re doing piece work and you need to tell yourself it is one part of a much longer, significant opus. The opposite might be true, as well. Instead of thinking, “I must complete more pages of this long novel” you could just make today’s scope of work those few pages. Make it your whole world.
As the artist, you always get to choose.
When the context for your art form is, “I’m doing this to show the world what a great job I can do” or something similar, you’re limiting the creative flow. So set the process up right, just for you, just for this one unique opportunity to co-create with God.
PART THREE, MY VERY FAVORITE
Hey, let’s save that for tomorrow. Meanwhile, add your comments and stories here. This thread could change your life!
Thank you for this post. While reading the first paragraph, I was really hoping that you’d say what you did … that the flow of creativity really happens when we have developed the technical knowledge to support that flow. The Muse will give us inspiration, but it’s up to us to have the skill to do something with what she gives.
Just wanted to add one point in support of connecting up to your audience. In an age where people promote “shameless self-promotion,” we tend to think about “audience” as a marketing ploy.
According to this strategy, you find the right demographic, the niche with the need to buy what you’re selling. Then you push the buttons and bam! You get what you want.
Isn’t that the common way that society encourages us treat people? An “audience” like this is really an object.
But you read people deeper. You’re already reading faces or doing aura readings or empathic merges. So you know how to go deeper into the real person. That’s finding your audience.
If we were to take a poll, we might find that if mainstream folks were to do any form of spiritual reading or intuitive reading, it would be considered a frill, a hobby, an indulgence.
Actually, reading people deeper is a necessity if you wish to enter into an “I and Thou” relationship. If you’re an artist, don’t you also choose to create at that level?
ANGELA, thank you so much for writing, especially since this is your first comment here, isn’t it? Would you be willing to share WHY you were hoping I’d write what I did? Some story is on the tip of your typing fingers, I’ll bet.
Oh, I think it’s my second or third post. Thank you for welcoming me, Rose–I love your site! Story behind my post … I am a songwriter and pianist, and I have strong opinions about art and creativity.
I suppose the deeper issue for me is that although I studied piano and voice and songwriting for a long time, it proved amazingly hard to find truly *outstanding* teachers who teach real technique, based on how the body actually works at the keyboard, or how the vocal apparatus really functions, or what simple tools make a song effective or ineffective for really satisfying a listener. The crisis for me came when I badly injured my arm playing piano, largely because I was taught faulty techniques that are still considered correct technique by piano instructors everywhere! I have been relearning how to play piano for a while now, so that I can do the thing I most love doing.
Anyway, I wonder sometimes if we live in a culture that, artistically speaking, has come to value self-expression over technique, or at least split them off from each other. They are really interdependent.
And your points about how reaching an audience is not just about marketing demographics is really important. I know from experience that music is totally different when it not just rehearsed but performed for people live–it changes into something much more powerful. It’s like the difference between talking to yourself and talking to someone else. It’s also like the difference between thinking with the head and thinking with the heart.
ANGELA, it’s great to know more about you.
Valuing self-expression over technique is part of the problem that you described, I think. Really, however, “the problem” you’re describing has to do with quality control also, doesn’t it?
With access to U-Tube, blogging, self-publishing, making one’s own CD’s, etc., there has been a great burst of expression but a strange populist loss of quality control. Whoever becomes most popular, instantly, is presumed to be best.
Another aspect of the quality problem relates to money. Have you noticed the mentality that, because the Internet is more-or-less free, supposedly, all creative expressions should be free?
Otherwise honorable people think nothing of copying somebody’s artistic work and giving it away, downloading songs, sharing files without a thought to compensating the artist, etc.
The sad state of the recording industry bears testimony to the consequences of these thoughtless, bad-karma behaviors.
Within the writing community, it’s similarly outrageous that a store like Amazon could sell “New books” secondhand. If you’ve ever bought from Amazon, you’ve seen them. But did you ever wonder how someone other than the publisher could be selling new editions of a book?
Ask any independent publisher. When launching a new book, we send out (or at least I USED to send out) review copies. After Amazon opened up this program, reputable reviewers began to take all those free copies and sell them to dealers who now hawk them at Amazon. So Amazon makes a fee, dealers make a fee, and reviewers sneakily supplement their income.
Meanwhile, publishers like me have spent thousands of dollars trying to launch our books in the world only to have those promotional reviewer’s copies now competing against their own books. I can tell you, it is a very weird shock to spend all that money on giving samples to “professionals” in the literary field only to have those “professionals” now making money, selling your merchandise as if it belonged to them.
Creepy! The best analogy I can think of is if you paid to have someone cut your hair and then, without your knowledge or permission, someone took the trimmings, made it into a wig, and sold it. If you talk to writers and publishers, you will learn that behavior like this feels like a very personal form of betrayal.
One practical thing to do to counter this trend, if you’re a person of integrity, is not to buy “New” books online that don’t come from the publisher; don’t share (steal) files from musicians, etc.
When artists of all kinds can be compensated, I’ll bet more teachers will be available to musicians like you, Angela.
Teachers are often performers, and it’s very possible that the very teachers who would best have served you had to give up and choose different careers in fields where people still are willing to pay for services rendered.
ANGELA, about that difference between playing music alone versus before a live audience, that is an interesting one, isn’t it?
This just might influence my choice of our last Loveable reading in our series of three. Stay tuned — and who would appreciate tuning better than a pianist like you?
Hi Angela and Rose,
Sadly, I think this is a phenomenon that affects many industries other than just the music and writing industries.
I see it in counseling and psychiatry as well. People have the impression that anyone can just “talk to people” and it isn’t a valuable skill that requires training and supervision. Like going to see a counselor or a psychiatrist is just like picking up the phone and talking to a friend.
It think it is one of the reasons why psychiatry is one of the lowest-paid specialties in medicine and why I know so many people who think they can just pick up a book, read some psychology, and just start “counseling” people. Some of them have college degrees in psychology, although most don’t. And a college degree does not afford you psychotherapy training, I might add.
However, many of them don’t even go on to get a master’s in social work or get a PsyD, a clinical PhD in psychology, where they would get this valuable training and supervision, much less a medical degree and residency training and licensing in psychiatry. Clinical psychologists must log in a certain number of hours of training and supervision before they are allowed to hang a shingle and go into business.
It is also why the APA has had to fend off so many other para health professionals (social workers, psychologists, etc.) trying to get the right to prescribe medications - as if psychotropic medications are in a separate category from anti-hypertensives or diuretics or other medications for more serious medical conditions.
With our increasing knowledge of the brain and brain chemistry and also in an attempt to fend off the idea that psychiatry is just a “talking” profession, psychiatry has moved more and more toward becoming “biological” and not “psychoanalytic” or “psychoanalytic.”
Unfortunately, the outcome of this is that some people now think that psychiatrists are just a bunch of “pill pushers” or “drug pushers.”
As if!
Psychiatry at its best is both an art as well as a medical specialty. What we do is not what orthopedic surgeons do, but it is also not what case workers do either. We are both physicians as well as valued counselors…
Quality control is an issue that affects ALL professions.
Fortunately, in this day and age, one still cannot earn a medical degree from an online program. And psychiatry, in particular, would especially suffer from that kind of training. It is the most human medical specialty - learning online would make psychiatry the equivalent of downloading a cookbook recipe and then following the instructions.
Regarding publishing, I earn my primary income as a freelance book editor, and I worked for several years at an independent press, and before that at a periodical that received review copies of books. Best practice is to prepare review copies that are not resalable–plain cover, cheap paper inside, only the most bare-bones typography, and a big warning on the outside saying that it’s a review copy only and not for resale. That isn’t a 100 percent guarantee of anything, but most people don’t want to buy something so cheap and ugly. BUT of course, this is a whole separate printing process and may not save self-publishers or small presses any more money than having their review copies misused.
As an excuse for the misusers, in my experience, lots of the younger employees in publishing are *extremely* poorly paid. And when I was an unpaid intern, the managing editor of the magazine I worked at would give me whatever “freebies” he could to try to take the edge off my poverty.
The only thing I can think is that right now we live at a time or in a society that values being a technician - artistic expression is something that is viewed as not requiring as much skill or as much value (especially monetary value)?
And yet, simultaneously, people feel lonelier than ever and find self-expression through YouTube or Facebook or MySpace? It is cheap (mostly free), populist and democratic and affords popularity by numbers and at convenience (you can log onto the Internet at anytime), instead of intimacy or quality relationships that require real care, attention, and nurturing.
I find that many of the things that were once taken care of by family and friends are now “services” rendered for hire, for a fee… In some ways, this has certainly made life much more convenient - any service you could possibly imagine or need, there is someone who is willing to provide it if hired… On the other hand, I can’t help but feel sad that there are things in life that once were so valued that they were considered priceless, invaluable - “free” but only in the sense that no monetary value could be placed on them because their value was so high…
Friendship, to me, falls into that domain. Friendship “for a fee” becomes a business transaction, not a sacred gift.
Even a trusted nanny or babysitter falls into that domain - they earn an hourly rate, but the trust of placing the care of your child in someone else’s hands - that is priceless, it has no monetary value high enough that could be compensated.
There is ample evidence to show that people go to the ER because they are lonely… It is one place they can get human contact.
Wow, ladies, this thread has a lot of energy attached to it! Thanks for all your comments.
Two of my closest friends from college both worked for publishing houses - and had the same experience as Angela.
The larger issue at stake here is that in our society, we say we want certain things, but we do not put our energy and financial backing behind those things… We say we want better teachers, for example, but we don’t pay teachers very much.
I’m not saying or advocating that everything in life has to be about money - making money or paying people money - but it’s hard to live on just idealism alone.
For as hard as I have worked in medical school and all the school loans I have taken on, people ask me why I picked psychiatry. People have the image that all physicians are wealthy. We earn a comfortable living, but then again, many of us have taken on over $200,000 in debt and don’t start earning an income until much later than others do. And the pressure and temptation to pick a more lucrative specialty is extreme - with the same education and an easier residency, a dermatologist will easily earn 5 times as much as what a psychiatrist does, for fewer hours of work per day/per week.
We all have to make tough choices about the work we want to do, the sacrifices we are going to make, and how far we are willing to stick our necks out or inconvenience ourselves for the things and causes in which we believe.
I’m not without tremendous idealism (look at my right eye and you will find it is extremely up angled), but I’m also realistic about what I expect from others and now increasingly more realistic about how much I am willing to put myself on the line.
Incidentally, after that CD incident with my friend, my life eye is just about even in angle now.
It’s true that not everything in society is for sale. But it’s also equally true that if you don’t want the furniture at my university to get stolen, it’s also best to bolt it down or chain it. Not bad people, per se, just young souls - the karmic consequences are not as huge for them, as they don’t know or feel that they are doing anything wrong. In their eyes, the university invited them to take the furniture - after all, they didn’t bolt it down or chain it, right?
Sorry my response about publishing didn’t take Anita’s comment about psychiatry; looks like we cross-posted. For me, the common denominator in this discussion–which on the surface appears to range pretty widely–is the structure of our society.
There’s this idea called the “threefold social order,” which describes what a healthy Western society in our era would be like. I’m not an expert on it, so I may not describe it optimally. You can read about it on the Net, like here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Threefolding
The idea is that there are three social realms: the state (government, legal); cultural (arts, education, religion); and economic. For a society to be in a state of health, these three realms must not exert undue influence on each other. For example, it’s okay for music to be sold as a product, but it should be art first, product second. I guess that medicine and the psychiatric specialty fall under the cultural heading, as well. And we all know what a mess our the United States is in because economic factors currently loom so large in the medical field. Anita has described people feeling pressured to choose a specialty other than psychiatry because of money. This is a shame. There’s such a huge need for skilled psychiatrists!
Over the years, I’ve found that pretty much every social ill I’m bothered by can be better understood by the idea of social threefolding. Hope you don’t mind me mentioning it here.
ANITA, faces really do change, don’t they? And it’s fascinating how sometimes you can experience a particuarly painful incident and, as a face reader,see the consequences right in the mirror.
Good call. And, though painful, good lesson.
ANGELA, thank you so much for introducing the idea of social threefolding. What do you think the role of deeper perception could be with that?
In the course of this thread which is about Divine Creative Flow we seemed to go to Quality Control, (not a bad thing),and the idea of social threefolding…I love it!
This thread has brought up other things that are not necessarily related, but has got me thinking….what next?
Rose, I’ve been thinking about this all week. I totally agree - and continue to work on #1 as an ongoing part of my discipline. #2 certainly applies to my current ‘for hire’ projects and is a great way to think about those kinds of assignments that are maybe not what I would choose to do long term.
I’m still blocked in my *own* projects - maybe even more so than in commissioned ones…. Will comment more on your follow-up post.
(Thanks again, so much, for doing this btw).