The Call to Create

I will bring something new into my world. 

This is the very definition of the creative act.It applies to any field of action, from art to auto repair, from philosophy to childcare. It involves a conscious encounter with our chosen field, which may be as large and loose as whatever is going on around us in everyday life, or as specific as a chosen calling, whether that is golf or metaphysics or cooking. As Rollo May reminds us, memorably, in The Courage to Create: "Creativity is the encounter of the intensely consciously human being with his or her world." 

It demands courage, because you are going to go beyond the limits you have accepted for yourself or taken on from others. It requires you to find your edge, and work from that edge. 

It is a call you do not want to refuse, at this point in your life, with a new year before you. Rollo May, with blazing clarity, tells us why:

If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Also you will have betrayed our community in failing to make your contribution to the whole. 

The universe may or may not be interested in whether you lose twenty pounds. But the animate world is very interested in you - and will support you in unexpected ways - when you dare to make it your game to bring something new to it and join in the ways of creation. 

What's that? You don't think you have anything new to contribute? Reach beyond the little mind that talks that way. Listen to your dreams, and the many voices of the speaking land around you. Open to the possibility that if you will only risk a little more, you will draw forces that will inspire and sustain you. First among those forces is your own creative spirit, who tends to go away when you are repeating yourself, bound to the cycle of samo-samo. 

What have you got to lose by making this your action imperative?. Say the words out loud 

I will bring something new into my world. 

and see what answers, and gives you the power to develop the form for what you will create. Then go to it - do something physical, immediately, to show the universe, and your creative spirit, that you mean it. Pick up the paintbrush, climb the mountain, write the damned book proposal and send it off, sign up for that weird class, make that dish no one would ever expect to see on the table.

 

Note: I dreamed last night that I rediscovered an article I had written, inspired by one of Rollo May's books on the creative act. I saw the cover design of the book very clearly. It was one of several books by May I have on my shelves. I went searching old folders and found this piece, written on New Year's Eve in 2012 in lieu of conventional turn-of-year resolutions. 

 

Journal Drawing: "Baby Basket at My Door" by Robert Moss. From a dream that inspired me to write my book Growing Big Dreams. 

Check Your Inner Soundtrack

Do you check your inner soundtrack, as you wake and at other times during the day? Do you notice how this can set the mood for the day, for good or otherwise? Do certain songs, popping up in your mind, connect you to certain people, life themes or memories? Do you find you sometimes need to change what's playing inside your head?

    This is a very effective way of checking your attitude, including thoughts and feelings you may be carrying that have not risen to your full awareness but may condition or even control what you will encounter in the course of the day. You know, don't you, that your attitude walks ahead of you, helping to generate events and encounters around the next corner.This is because you are magnetic. Unfortunately, however, you are often less than fully conscious of what you attract and repel -until and unless you look back carefully on a certain episode and begin to discern its hidden logic.
    Checking your inner soundtrack is an easy way to check your attitude. I do this several times a day. It might start effortlessly because I wake with a snatch of a song in my head. This is may carry a mood from a dream, or part of the soundtrack of a dream movie, or may anticipate the mood of the day. It may connect me to people or places at a distance, or a certain period of my life. 
      When I am lucky, a song from the night may be an original composition. I will then spring into action to try to record it before it is gone. Like the dreamers of many indigenous traditions, I know that a dream-inspired song is one of the great gifts of dreaming. It can be a way to bring through energy and spirit from a deeper place. It can be a wing song that will help you travel from the ordinary world into real worlds beyond it.     
      A Texas woman told me,  “I wake up with different music every day. Today I woke up with "Shake it Off" by Taylor Swift. In the dream I was watching a sad news story on television. I have not heard that song in a long time. I took it as a message to keep a good attitude during the day, focus my attention on positive things and shake off the bad stuff coming though the TV.”      
     A Vancouver dreamer said, “Today I accept the song that was with me when I woke and I will let it play all day. ‘Calling All Angels’.”     
     The song on your inner soundtrack may connect you to another person in your life, maybe someone at a distance. A friend told me that a song she used to sing for her son when he was very small will still pop into her head when he is thinking of her and getting ready to call her or visit her. The song is “He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands.” She smiles when it starts playing on her inner soundtrack, remembering the joy of slapping hands with her little boy as he tried to reproduce the words.     
    When you check your inner soundtrack, don’t just listen to the music, find the words that may or may not come with a tune. Check for voices from the past that may be cheering you on or bringing you down. Catch yourself when you start going over and over old histories of failure or regret, belittling yourself, telling yourself what’s wrong with you in a way that cannot help you to be right. You may notice that an inner voice has been repeating things like, “I’m such an idiot” or, “I’m in so much pain” or “I’ll never be able to face that crowd, or that person”.      
     Your inner soundtrack may include a whole chorus of voices of people who have lifted you up or pulled you down. Don’t let all of them speak! Choose the ones you are willing to hear.         Above all, check your personal mantras. These are codes for connection and manifestation. These are the magic words that can deform your life or open up avenues of bright possibility. You may have borrowed some of your personal mantras from a spiritual teacher, or a favorite book, or one of those oh-so-cute boxes in your Facebook newsfeed. 
    I have nothing against feel-good affirmations and statements of spiritual correctness, as long as they work. This means that they come to mind when you need them, when you need to respond to a challenge or make a choice at a crossroads. It means that they are playing on your inner soundtrack before you hit a select button.     
    When you check your inner soundtrack, you may find that your personal mantras include:     
    “I’m sick.”     
    “I’m fat.”     
    “I’ll never meet the right guy.”    
    “I’ll never have enough money.”    
     There’s no need for me to expand the list. You want to make your own. When you detect a negative mantra of this kind on your inner playlist, you can try to delete it, but may find that it comes back. You can try to override it with happy tunes and feel-good affirmations. I find that sometimes the best tactic is not to try to cancel a long-playing blues number right away, but to trip lightly around it, saying and singing better numbers.     
     Walking my dog in the park one morning, I checked my inner soundtrack and found I was engaged in making an inventory of the complaints in my aging body, all featuring pain. The pain in my dodgy knee, the pain in my shoulder, the pain of inflammation in one of my toes, the possible beginnings of a sore throat.     
     I hit my inner pause button. I did not try to deny that my body was expressing these complaints, and might need to be acknowledged. We don’t want to push away what may be part of our body wisdom, or — in my case — my body crying out for a little TLC. All I did was shift my attention to the dappled light among the beech trees, the gentle breeze stirring the surface of the lake and playing with my hair, the happiness of my little dog as he nosed after new smells and the nether parts of other dogs. And I said to the wind and the sun and the trees, “Thank you. Thank you for the gift of this day, for being able to walk among trees, by water, with a dog who loves me no matter what. Thank you for the gifts and the challenges of this lifetime.”     
    The best answer to inner naysayers and whiners may be to say to the universe: Thank you. 

Text adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss.Published by New World Library.

Action This Day, on the best ever dreamer's wish for the New Year

I have just received the best ever dreamer’s wish for the New Year. It comes from Virginie Pols, a wonderfully gifted dreamer, artist and teacher of Active Dreaming in Switzerland. She offers it in both French and English:

Que cette année, nous soyons dignes de nos plus grands rêves!

This year, may we be worthy of our biggest dreams!

I love this because it reminds us that dreams require action. If we do not take action to honor and embody our biggest dreams in our lives, they may fly away. To lose a big dream is a sad thing. It can even amount to losing a vital piece of our soul.

     Unless we do something with our dreams, we will not dream well. This is indigenous wisdom, and I believe it was understood by all of our ancestors when they lived in cultures that valued dreams, and the dreamer. As my friends of the Six Nations tell it, soul speaks to us in dreams, showing us what it desires in our lives. If we do not take action to honor such dreams, soul becomes disgusted with us and withdraws its energy and vitality from our lives.

     In my Active Dreaming approach, which now guides dream groups and individual dreamers all over the world, we insist that every dreamwork practice must result in an action plan, and we are not content with some nebulous wishy-washy statement of general intention or spiritual correctness. We want specific, practical action of the kind that both entertains the soul and sustains the body.

     Of course, dreams can be mysterious and hard to relate to the issues of everyday life. In one of his seminars on dreams from childhood, Jung remarked that dreams "fall like nuts from the tree of life, and yet they are so hard to crack." So the first action we may need to take is to find the right kind of nutcracker.

     We don't have to seek this alone. Once we learn to share our dreams through the LightningDreamwork method with a partner or a group, we have an excellent recourse both for understanding our dreams and for determining the right action to honor them.

Here are some of the things a dream may inspire us to do:

RESEARCH 

Dreams can prompt us to do detailed research on content, ranging from an obscure word to the natural habits of an animal that appeared or a way of fixing a fuse box. This can go far beyond simply clarifying the initial information. Dream clues can put us on the trail of very important discoveries, ranging from our connection to a spiritual tradition that is calling us, to a new book idea, to what's going on behind closed doors in Washington.

 DREAM REENTRY 

 The best way to understand a dream is to recover more of the dream experience. If we can stick our heads back inside our dreams, we can immediately settle many things, including whether the dream is literal or symbolic or an experience of a separate reality. 

 WALKING WITH THE DREAM 

 We may need to walk with a dream over time, and see how its message unfolds. For all our best efforts, dreams don't yield all their meaning and mystery all at once. We need to let some of them ripen like fruit on the tree, and be ready to catch when the fruit is ready to fall.

 CREATIVE EXPRESSION 

 Many dreams invite us to create from them and with them, through our favorite media and also through media with which we may be less familiar or less confident. Write, sculpt, draw, dance, paint, move with the dream, and if you have friends or family who'll play, turn it into performance or theater. 

 MAKE A DREAM TALISMAN 

 Make or select a physical object that can embody the energy of a powerful dream so you can carry it with you or have it in front of your eyes. 

NAVIGATE LIFE WITH YOUR DREAM RADAR 

 In dreams, we scout the future and bring back advisories that can keep us safe and put us on better roads than we might otherwise be on. We want to be alert to what is coming up on our dream radar screen and apply the information. 

 USE DREAM INFORMATION TO HELP OTHERS 

 We get dream information for others as well as ourselves. Working with such dreams requires care and practice, especially if a dream contains a glimpse of possible problems for another person. 

 I can think of another half-dozen suggestions, and you'll come up with your own. Let's be super-aware of this: Taking right action from dreams goes to the heart of real magic, which is the art of bringing gifts from a deeper world into this one.

So this year, may we be worthy of our biggest dreams.

Not content with giving us this amazing wish, Virginie has produced a powerful image to ensure that we don't forget the action imperative. Inspired by a dream, she made a picture of the fellow shown above. She calls him "the dream warrior who makes sure we take action".

     I want to call this dream enforcer Action This Day. Throughout World War II, Winston Churchill employed red stickers he designed himself, labeled: "Action This Day," that he affixed to memos and documents demanding the immediate attention of his staff. Honoring a big dream requires Action This Day.

Art: Dream Warrior by Virginie Pols

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Affirming

I am in favor of affirmations. At a certain period in my life, I did not think much of some of the self-help gurus who were pushing them. I still have major reservations about affirmations that seem to be pitched from the head instead of the heart, and either project ego-driven "gimme" agendas or , alternatively, are shackled by received notions of what is spiritually correct. 

    But I am greatly in favor of starting the day with a statement to the universe that affirms the intention to live as fully and creatively as possible, and return thanks for the gifts of life, especially when life seems hard. 

   To affirm is literally "to make firm", or strong. To make a conscious affirmation, on any given day, is to firm up our whole approach to life. Whether we know it or not, everything is listening, in our conscious universe.
    If an affirmation is going to work good in the world, it must enlist the support of the body and draw the approval of higher powers, especially the one that is no stranger: the Higher Self. As you shape your words, test them in your gut and in your heart. Feel what is stirring or stagnant around you. Let your thoughts become charged with natural energy.
    It is good to put an affirmation in the present tense. Not, "I will create something new" but, "I am a creator."
    Sometimes you can come to a good affirmation by listening to those negative mantras you have been playing in your mind, and even speaking out loud, for far too long. Like, "I can't speak in public." Go to your heart and your gut and ask what they want you to express. You may find you can then say, with conviction, "I speak my truth."

    I like to come up with fresh affirmations as often as possible. But I also find it good to voice "default" affirmations on any day they feel right, including those on which "fresh words" are lacking. I think of the stump of a great red cedar from which a new tree is growing and I say, "I grow again".

    Here's a simple affirmation that came to me long ago, when my dreams and visions drew me into the Earth-centered wisdom and the imaginal realm of a Native American people - the Onkwehonwe, or Iroquois - for whom returning thanks is part of what keeps the world turning: 

I return thanks for the gifts of this lifetime
and for its challenges
I seek to walk in balance between earth and sky
affirming

Photo of great stump (c) Robert Moss