Saturday, February 1, 2014

Creating Your Masterwork

Your living of this life is your great Masterwork.  You are an artist and every step on your life’s journey is a brush stroke, whether small or large, whether smooth or broken.

As a writer and writing coach, I am often stymied and blocked by not knowing which project to pursue or what topic to pull out of an overflowing bowl; it is sometimes hard to know what deserves my attention, my time, and my labor.  It is exactly the same with the story of your life that you are writing at every moment.  Have you chosen the right path?  Is your daily striving in sync with your soul’s purpose?  How much of your energy do you expend just spinning and swirling?

Many of us get seriously stuck trying to make something right just because we have already invested so much time and thought into the venture, such as a job or a relationship that does not nurture us.  I had produced a sizable amount of written work when I managed to get myself fixated on a project that absolutely shut me down creatively.  My writing block lasted about twenty years because I was so focused on an idea that kept me from doing what was next for my creative expression.  I do now see that being stuck for twenty years was a part of my soul-journey, so I do not regret the experience.  Today, I know how to recognize this trap if it shows up on my path.  If any of us ever choose being stuck over being free, it is because there is often something comfortable and familiar about those stuck-points, or fearful about seeking a change in our circumstances.

Now, when you step out of this lifetime and look at the painting you have created or the book you have written, what does it look like?  Did you put all your attention on one little corner of the canvas and leave the rest blank?  Did you write a brilliant introduction and never get to the meat of your dissertation?  When you look at the sum total of your creative output (all your lives) do you notice a trend toward mastery?

Lately I have noticed that many of us who were trained in traditional Christianity have a very poor understanding of the notion of eternity.  We were told about eternity mainly to scare us into joining the cult-of-belief where we would spend “eternity” in either heaven or hell.  Any belief is just an idea that somebody made up.  Your participation in someone else’s idea is just a choice to remain limited and stuck. 

Even though this truth is “biblical” we were not told that eternity moves both ways.  In truth it moves “every” way.  Our soul-life does not begin with this lifetime.  Eternity is like God; it has no beginning (in time) and no end.  So if we live forward eternally, we also live backward eternally.  In breathwork, I repeatedly witness the journeyer reliving the existential moment of creation; when their soul (not their body) was born.  It almost always involves a feeling of peace from resting in the darkness and the “nothing-ness” and then experiencing the energy shift toward light and motion.

We hold the memory of every lifetime in our blood and our bones; some say within our DNA.  And we are part of a great energetic grid that extends in every direction so we can step into that space in our meditation, in our dreaming, in our trance journey and pull up any memory from any time.  You have unlimited access to that great artistic library.

If this life is your masterpiece, what will you do next?  Even if we move forward with halting steps, we have employed motion and light from the beginning, and so we call on you now for direction and inspiration.