Releasing the Creative Spirit

Dan Wakefield

Description

Come awake to a more creative life—by realizing clarity of mind, body and spirit.

Creativity is basic to the very fiber of our being, and not—as many suspect—solely the privilege of a gifted few. When we silence the voice of creativity that lives within us, we confine our spirit. Award-winning author Dan Wakefield helps us to examine our reasons for not creating—debunking the myths—and shows us the path to a fulfilling, creative life.

Drawing on examples from religion, philosophy, and literature, Wakefield teaches us that the key to unleashing our own inner creativity is in clarity of mind, body, and spirit. Releasing the Creative Spirit gives us practical guidance to demystify the creative process and to help each of us achieve this clarity by:

• Breaking the Myths—Explode the myths that creativity is only for the artistic elite, that creators must suffer, and that science and business can not be creative pursuits.
• Emptying—Learn ways to recognize and move beyond the tired routines in your life that deaden the senses and soul.
• Filling Up—Experience new sensations through simple practices that revive natural perceptions and unlock hidden creative resources.
• Creating—Try hands-on, practical exercises to explore the mystery of creativity in your life from a spiritual perspective.

This passionate, personal guide draws on examples from the experiences of many creative people—Elaine Pagels (professor), Tom Wolfe (novelist), John Coltrane (jazz musician), Harold Kushner (rabbi), Danielle Levi-Alvares (yoga teacher), Stephen Hawking (physicist), and Phil Jackson (basketball coach), just to name a few—who each demonstrate one or more of the characteristics of someone who creates from the spirit. Creative People…

• Develop clarity as the source of creativity
• Take responsibility for their lives and work
• Regard age as an opportunity
• See obstacles as an invitation to create new solutions, techniques, and skills
• Recognize the body/mind/spirit connection
• Find surprising new ways to perform routine tasks
• …and much more

This fresh exploration of the creative spirit includes hands-on exercises to help you unlock your creative powers, inviting you to experience the artistic grace and pleasure that can exist in our everyday lives. You may discover, as many others have, that with creativity comes more joy, more laughter, and more accomplishment than you previously thought possible.

Sujets

• Santé et bien-être
• Développement personnel
• développement personnel
• Inspiration
• Dan Wakefield
• personal Growth

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 31 août 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781594734779
• Langue: English

Extrait

To the memory of my parents, Brucie Ridge Wakefield and Benjamin Harbison Wakefield, who created me, and created a place for me to grow.
And to my wise, kind, and dedicated teachers at wondrous Public School 80 in Indianapolis (like the era itself, the school is no longer extant, the building now a condominium): Roxie Lingle Day, Leta C. Shute, Jane Seal, Grace Grimes, Louise McCarthy, Louise C. Wheeler, and principals Fern Hall and Wallace Montague; and the librarians at the Broad Ripple Branch Library, Miss Hodapp and Mrs. Logan.
With love to them all, and their counterparts today and tomorrow-the parents, librarians, and public school teachers who create the creators-this book is dedicated.
Contents
Acknowledgments
PART ONE: Creation-Works in Progress
1. Creating Our Daily Lives
2. The Creative Spirit
3. Myths of Creativity
PART TWO: The Keys to Creation
4. Evoking the Spirit: The Power of Clarity
5. Emptying
6. Filling Up
PART THREE: Living the Creative Process
7. Creating: Five Exercises for Developing Your Creative Spirit
8. Doing It Day by Day
9. New Models: Creators of the Spirit
Index

About the Author
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Acknowledgments
FIRST AND FOREMOST I THANK CHERYL WOODRUFF, THE EDITOR OF THIS BOOK , who pushed me far beyond its original conception; whose greater vision led me to many creative revisions and resulted in a far richer, more useful book than I had originally imagined, and which I am especially proud to send out into the world.
Thanks to Clare Ferraro, for important encouragement, communication, and moral support.
To Reverend Carl Scovel, of King s Chapel in Boston, who taught me how to teach, as well as how to keep the faith.
To the people who have enabled me to offer and develop the workshop on creativity in their own institutions: Reverend Florence Pert and Reverend Ann Benefield of Marble Collegiate Church in New York City; Reverend Roger Cowan of the First Unitarian Church of Palm Beach, Florida; Reverend William Tulley of St. Bartholomew s Church in New York City; Reverend Forrest Church of All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City; Paul Valenti of the Omega Institute; Nancy Lunney of the Esalen Institute; Roger Paine of Interface; Reverend John Buchanan of the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago; Robert Reber, dean of Auburn Theological Seminary; Phyllis Pilgrim and Victoria Larrea of Rancho La Puerta, in Tecate, Mexico; as well as those others who have graciously hosted my workshops in Spiritual Autobiography and Expecting Miracles throughout the country, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and at Sing Sing prison.
To Les Standiford, and my colleagues and students at Florida International University in Miami, for giving me a base and a home.
To Lynn Nesbit, most creative agent and friend, and Tina Bennett, whose creativity and spirit brought me into the audio world for the first time.
To my old and always growing circle of friends, who are family.
PART 1
C reation- W orks in P rogress
1
Creating Our Daily Lives
NOT ONLY ARE WE ALL CREATED, WE ALL CREATE. WE CREATE OUR LIVES, AND then create stories to explain them, and make art, music, and drama to make sense of our experience and our world. In our creating, we ask questions, pose answers, and celebrate our humanity. We often forget that every day is a creation-not only for us, but by us. We wake to it, step into it, and take our part in creating it by what we think and say and do. We don t regard our daily activities as creation or being creative, it s just what we do, it s just life. We take our days for granted, as if they were not moment-by-moment miracles.
To enhance our lives, to give them meaning and color, rhythm and narrative, form and beauty, we engage in activities we call creative-writing, painting, singing, dancing, playing a musical instrument-and we seal them up in a special compartment and keep them isolated from the rest of our experience. We re not alone. Even though professional writers, artists, and musicians think of their work as creative, they usually view that work as a separate realm of doing and being apart from their daily, or real lives; so do many creative people in business, medicine, science, and technology.
Do you gulp down good food while you talk, read the paper, or watch television without even noticing the taste of what you re eating? Do you go on automatic, move in a kind of waking coma through the rituals of the day? I know how easy it is to fall into these routinized bad habits because I do it myself, unless I pay attention, bring myself back to wakefulness. Most of us dismiss as boring the nitty-gritty of waking, eating, washing the dishes, carrying on relationships with loved ones, paying the bills, answering the phone, solving problems, mowing the grass, tending the garden, feeding the cat, walking the dog, going to bed and to sleep again, waking anew each morning.
Seeing these ordinary activities as part of our creative lives, related to everything else we do, and seeing all we do as creation, infuses us with power. If we realize that we create our very reality, then we have a new relationship to it, and we can take more control of our lives. We can alter them and refine them as we would a work of art, like adding more color to a painting; or adding more characters to a story, or changing the end, or perhaps the setting; singing a song in a new key; doing a dance with a different rhythm.
Unlocking Creativity
Just as we sometimes feel blocked and shut off from the flow or animating principle in our officially creative activities, we also sometimes get stuck in our lives, our relationships. We seem stale, in a rut, burned out, locked up. When it comes to artistic creative activities, we know techniques to help us loosen up, refresh, and unblock, but we seldom think to apply those methods to other parts of our experience. Looking upon the whole of our experience as creative frees us from such restrictive, compartmentalized thinking. If we see our lives as art, as story, as dance, and as song, we can apply the techniques of the creative arts to make all our activities more creative, more enlivened by our own spirit-that force which animates each of us and makes us vital.
When we recognize that all aspects of our lives are open to creation, the creative spirit is no longer confined and is free to flow into new and unexpected areas, bringing change, making us aware, waking us from the numbing sleep of rote behavior, the mechanism of addiction.
The whole secret of the spiritual life, wrote the English author Gerald Heard, in The Human Venture , is just this painful struggle to come awake, to become really conscious. And, conversely, the whole process and technique of evil is to do just the reverse to us; to lull us to sleep, to distract us.
This book is based on that premise, that coming awake is a necessary and essential human struggle. Life is filled with spiritually sleep-inducing distractions and diversions. They account for our sometimes frustrating inattentiveness and impatience; they may lead some of us into a reliance on drugs and alcohol, sexual promiscuity, overeating, anorexia, bulimia, and other attitudes and behaviors that deaden our senses and stifle our spirit, the source of our creativity.
Making Creative Choices
Every act is a choice, and our choices determine the path we take. I used to scoff at the warning that soft drugs like marijuana lead to hard drugs like cocaine or heroin, laughing it off with my friends (we thought we were hip) as square propaganda put out by the Establishment. I d forgotten that back in college I d quickly progressed from beer to bourbon. It did not dawn on me for a long time that after a while one form of stimulation grew stale and I was ready for bigger, more dangerous nirvanas. One thing really does lead to another; none of our decisions is an isolated act, enclosed in some airtight chamber.
I m a slow learner. Even after I finally recognized the truth of my experience with steps that led me progressively downward, I didn t see that the same principle operates in the other direction. Just as marijuana may lead to the search for a new high with cocaine or heroin, and beer may be the prelude to bourbon or vodka, so a little exercise leads to a desire for greater use of the body. Once I started using an Exercycle, I found myself getting interested in t ai chi and yoga. After attending church for a while, I wanted to go on a retreat for prayer and meditation. A little exercise may lead to one of the martial arts, or running so many miles a day; a little prayer naturally leads to a thirst for deeper spiritual exploration, or involvement in a faith community. Once we get a taste of something powerful, we want more. Just as some paths lead to oblivion, other paths lead to an awakened spirit. That is the way of creativity.
All of us are endowed with spirit-which means that all of us are naturally creative. Yet you ve heard people say, with frustration or despair, sometimes with perverse pride or in other cases false modesty, Oh, I m not creative. That s like proclaiming, Oh, I m really not human-I may look human, but it s just a costume.
A woman in one of my workshops in Spiritual Autobiography sat with her hands folded in her lap while everyone else was busy with crayons drawing a picture of a room from their childhood home. I went over to her and asked if there was some reason that she couldn t or didn t want to draw.
Oh, she said, I m not visual.
At first I thought she meant something was wrong with her eyesight, but that was not the case. Her eyesight was fine, but her I-sight-the vision she had constructed of herself-needed refocusing. Maybe someone long ago had told her she was not visual, or maybe someone had criticized a childhood drawing, so she had decided she couldn t-wouldn t-try to draw anything ever again. She decided she