Six Stages to Developing and Deepening Your Relationship with Creativity

Many of us are conscious of the fact that humanity is going through a shift. Yet, not so many of us recognize that this shift is driven by the creative energy – the energy that has been with us since the beginning of Creation and continues to create this moment, right here and now.

As you and I and the rest of humanity crosses the threshold into a new realm of being, consider the six stages to developing and deepening your relationship with Creativity.

Stage One: You Are Empty

The truth is, the Creator is always expressing Herself. The sun is always shining. The waves are always crashing on the shore. Somewhere, the wind is always blowing, and the planets are forever orbiting the sun. Right now, in this moment, the ocean is swaying, clouds are forming, grass is growing, rain is falling, and the galaxy expanding. Creation is always unfolding.

Yet, our worries, our complaints, our doubts, our judgments, and all our obsessive thinking keep us from the glorious expression of God. In order to wake up to the beauty of God's Creation, in order to see the magnificence, we need to empty ourselves. We need to put down on paper or canvas, what has stuck with us, and the little things that take up room in the mind. We need to get empty.

Once we are empty, then we can receive. And then with awe, we can return to the holy present moment and what it is delivering in the now.

Stage Two: You Are a Conduit

Once you are empty, once you've dropped your worries, your complaints, your doubts, your judgments, and all your obsessive thinking, then you can find that great space within.

When you are empty, you open yourself to a wide and vast field, a space that is purely potential and gives birth to a fountain of new life. It is this space which allows things to move, take form, and come into being. When you are receptive to it, this space illuminates your hands with light, brightens your mind with ideas, and showers your heart with new love. Connected to this emotional, creative, and universal space, you are conduit for all that is born.

Stage Three: You are in Union

When you're really flowing with creativity, when the creative flow is alive in you and you're receptive to one idea after the other, one creative image after the other, that's when you've stepped out of clock time and through the threshold of universal time. In this expansive place of pure potentiality, there's no YOU to speak of, just the alive and flowing river of all CREATION.

Natalie Goldberg, author of "Wild Mind and Writing Down the Bones", described it best when she compared writing to running:

"There's little resistance when the run is good. All of you is moving; there's no you separate from the runner. In writing, when you are truly on, there's no writer, no paper, no pen, no thoughts. Only writing does writing – everything else is gone."

And when you are gone, it is more like you are home – one with Creation, one with Nature, one with your true nature, and one with all that is.

Stage Four: You are Nothing

Imagine having an experience of union with Creation on a regular basis, making it a spiritual practice until more and more of you dissolves, until more and more of your inner boundaries melt, until more and more of the idea of who you think you are disappears.

That's when the thought of who you are, the ego, reduces to nothing. The attachment you've hung onto for so long – whether good or bad, shameful or prideful, worthy or unworthy – has dissolved into the Source of all opposites. You – that mere idea, that mere thought – has melted, no longer existing, and becoming no-thing.

Stage Five: You are Whole

In truth, Stage Four – You are Nothing – is the dark night of the soul. Your awareness opens up to light and dark, pain and pleasure, ego and shadow, heaven and hell. It is painful because there is no foundation upon which an idea of "you" can stand.

Yet, the long, dark night does not last forever. At some point, the sun begins to rise and the birds begin to sing. Inwardly, the opposites that were once split in you are one, the shadow you once rejected you welcome, the inner child you've forgotten you continue to embrace.

This is wholeness. Your identity is no longer founded upon the split of two opposites – ego and shadow – but instead upon the inclusion of all opposites. It is here, in stage five, you recognize, you are the universe!

Stage Six: You are Eternal

When your identity is no longer founded upon the split of two but instead upon the inclusion of all, then the psyche becomes whole again. And it is only then, it is only through the eyes of wholeness that you can see the One. It is only from the place of inner union that you can feel the union of ALL.

But even deeper that, even more incredible….once you feel wholeness both inwardly and outwardly, well, another awakening occurs. You see, another exquisite name for this last stage is You are Creation. And I don't mean that in a trite sort of way, as in you are the son or daughter of God. I mean the creative/sexual energy, what God created and is creating right now, the evolutionary impulse that brings this physical reality into existence AND the Source of this existence is precisely who you are. Yet, more accurately, what you think to be “you” and what you believe to be "your life" is not yours, but the marvelous expression of the Divine. I encourage you, drop the attachment to "your life" and let it be what it is – the impersonal, creative expression of God.

I’ve just outlined the kind of experiences that could take place as you build a relationship with the power and energy of the creative force within. That energy is the driving force, the animating principle of this entire existence. When we connect with it, when we open ourselves to it, it’s as though we’re standing right in the Tao, the powerful and energetic River of Life, and doing that on a regular basis can bring healing, wholeness and awakening.

© Copyright 2010 Adriana Attento. All Rights Reserved.