Creative Mind Fields: Disarming Your Mind’s Dark Corners
For the past four weeks, I’ve been running a tele-course about the creative heart. What is the creative heart? It’s your passion for something. It’s what you love. It’s what gets you out of bed in the morning. It’s what you long for and can’t live without.
It’s Not the Goals
Just a couple of months ago, we started another new year. Seems to me that with each passing year, the sense of longing for what I’ve still not managed to achieve grows stronger. A lot of people set resolutions, make new goals, commit to themselves that this will be the year. And more often than not, by the end of February, it’s becoming clear that this may not be the year either. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
In my experience, most of us hit points in our lives where we just stall. And this occurs more frequently around the thing we really want. What we said we were were committed to doing doesn’t get done again. We run out of fuel. And the fuel is not better goals, less distractions, better time management (though all those things are part of the equation).
It’s the Passion
The fuel the fuel is passion. It’s love. It’s excitement. It’s being in love with your life (at least one aspect of your life) in a way that keeps you showing up not because you have to, but because you just can’t stay away. And the truth is that what we call creativity and what we call art it has this quality. It’s the kind of thing that we just absolutely love and we can’t really live without it.
Passion’s Close Companions
But stuff comes up and gets in the way. Fears. Judgments. Self-censorship. Self-judgment. “I’m not good enough.” ” I don’t have what it takes.” “Who do you think you are?” When we get close to the thing we value the most, these are the voices we hear. I hear them all the time from the people I work with; and yes, I have them too.
Sometimes the voices are internal and sometimes external. They are what I call mind fields. The mind is a nuclear device, whose power is at our disposal if we can learn to manage it. It is also perhaps the most defended place on the human landscape. It arms itself against what it does not know, what it cannot explain or predict, what it fears. It buries its mines deep on the very path to our deepest desires. The more precious the treasure, the more treacherous the path. But it doesn’t need rigid control. It needs love.
Disarming Behavior
So what do you do with a mine field? You have to go in there, locate the mines and disarm them. This is not an easy path and a lot of people would rather just avoid it completely. Where your treasure is, there lies danger also. That which you love the most is the place where you are most vulnerable, the place where you’ll feel pain, the place where you’ll come up against all the reasons your dream is still undone. I can speak from personal experience and say the road is hard and there are mines in the way. But you can disarm them. Your passion, your desire and your commitment to get to the other side will see you through.
Whether it’s a piece of art, a new business, a new wardrobe, a fitter body, or a more loving relationship, you will come out the other side having created what you long for. And the journey to it will have created you. My work is to help you find yourself on the journey, to keep moving and to reach your goal transformed.
Sound like a feasible plan? Then let me invite you to join me this coming Sunday, March 3rd, for a free half-hour teleconference:
Back on Track, Here and Now: Creating Your Best Year Ever
which will introduce my next four week course, starting March 5th:
Love the Life you Live: Romancing the Mind
