Creative Energy

There’s this funny thing that happened when I started to release all the junk that had been swarming around inside my mind for most of my life. You know – all those sensations we’re unaware of but feel so deeply throughout our day – the jealousy, the shame, the envy, the anger, the comparison, the grief, the sadness, the fatigue. I was completely unaware these so-called “sensations” in my body stemmed from bundles of unconscious thoughts I’d been replaying over and over again like an old record player day in and day out.

As I started to witness these thoughts and their connection to the uncomfortable sensations they so lovingly provided me (I think we all know feeling our feelings can certainly feel awful), I started getting really uncomfortable and needed to spend more time alone. More solitude. More quiet. Less phone. Less computer. Less technology. Less everything. More time with myself, getting quiet enough to actually hear what was going on up there inside my head that always seemed to be so busy – too busy for “me” to really get to know myself.

As I did this, I started to notice teeny tiny shifts in my life. Now, this didn’t happen overnight – it took a whole lotta time – as all good things do. But, it felt like I was sitting on my couch with a big old rusty fishing net trying to catch all the thoughts flying around and attempting to grab ahold of them wondering what they were doing keeping me in such an anxious, overwhelmed, paranoid state (this pretty much has been my baseline since I was a child). The more I sat with myself and “fished” (watching the thoughts I was thinking or letting them come to me), the more I shifted in all aspects of my life and the more I could start to see so much of what had been keeping me in my own way – keeping me from expressing myself fully as the creative old soul I am.

This whole “self-discovery” thing is deep and profound. I’ve been on this journey for over a decade and the deeper I go, the more “me” I become and the more my outer reality matches me with new people, places and experiences that greet me at this new state of consciousness.

Something seems to magically open up the deeper I go, the more I excavate the pain that’s been inside of me since I was a young girl.

It’s wild.

And, it’s also made me wonder…

Why wasn’t I ever taught how to do this?

I read hundreds of books in my 20’s and 30’s when I was unwell trying to figure out the why behind the unbearable pain ricocheting inside me. These weren’t your everyday books – I had read all the traditional health books years prior and didn’t find anything helpful – but these books were more about how the mind and body were so intrinsically connected. While they were written by authors from all over the world at various times – some dated back the 70’s, others from the 80’s and 90’s and so forth – they all seemed to drop these bits of wisdom in regards to cleaning out the mind so the channel of creative energy could flow in.

This made me roll my eyes a few times trying to wrap my head around what the heck they were talking about. Channel of creative energy? What did that even mean?

Well, lo and behold, that’s what I started to experience very slowly – like tortoise slow – almost so slow I didn’t realize what was happening. I felt myself being drawn to colors everywhere I went, wanting to visit museums, excited to spend hours upon hours rummaging through fabric stores, laying outside on the plush grassy NYC piers looking at the water and feeling inspired by everything around me, going for long walks up to Central Park and getting lost on the rocky trails and so much more. I started to realize this felt a lot like “me” before I became unwell but there was something different here – it was as though I was even more full of juicy juice.

I’ll be sharing more about this as time goes on because spilling all the beans here in one long article can be a lot to take in and I know everyone’s short on time these days. But it’s important for me to share the magic that comes out of healing the mind and body. In our society, we’re taught to put a quick fix on anything that causes us pain, push ourselves to extremes and tough it out. That’s “normal”. While I was definitely on that “normal” route for many years because that’s how we’re programmed, it’s not the route that brought me into healing, into joy and deeper into myself.

I know all of this probably sounds funny because we’re taught that healing the body is about fixing ourselves and we get an eye roll from anyone when we ask if x is connected to y:

Could the fatigue and headaches be connected to my self hatred?
Could the back pain be connected to my anger?
Could the awful PMS be connected to my unprocessed grief?

But, if there’s anything I’ve learned from my healing journey, it’s that everything is connected and it takes time, consciousness, patience and a heck of a lot of dedication to yourself to figure it out.

However, once the storm passes and we start to see the light at the end of the tunnel, what opens up feels like a magical new world because all the space in the mind and body that was clogged up with physical, emotional and energetic pain, is now open, flowing and free – able to receive a fire hydrant of creative energy and inspiration to bring us into the next level of ourselves.

It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing to look forward to.

(Check out my Creative Living section for more about creative energy).