Students ask me if creativity can be learned. My answer is– we owe it to ourselves to open the door to our creative urges, honor it and its challenges and by doing so we sustain passion and joy.
We all have our definitions of what it means to be successful with our creativity. All too often, those definitions are based upon the insatiable appetite of the ego, for external recognition.
Not that there is anything wrong with external recognition. Recognition can lead to success and that can be fun, remunerative and reduce, for a while, one's anxiety about –how talented am I really.
Problems arise when we give credence to the ego story that writes external success as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Even if we chance to dip into that pot, its riches are never enough for the insatiable ego; thus any perception of loss acerbates feelings of failure and sends us on a desperate search to redo the success and, should that fail, to give up.
Not that there is anything wrong with external recognition. Recognition can lead to success and that can be fun, remunerative and reduce, for a while, one's anxiety about –how talented am I really.
Problems arise when we give credence to the ego story that writes external success as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Even if we chance to dip into that pot, its riches are never enough for the insatiable ego; thus any perception of loss acerbates feelings of failure and sends us on a desperate search to redo the success and, should that fail, to give up.
When we hand over validation of our creativity to others, we become victims of their judgments.
Creativity in its infinite expression is our most vital experience of life energy and the adventure of life itself. When we answer creativity's call, we give our self one of the greatest gifts that life can offer. We give our self... there is tremendous power in those words. For what we give our self, no one can take away, unless we allow them to. The creative part of you will never give that gift away, but the ego will and does.
Creativity in its infinite expression is our most vital experience of life energy and the adventure of life itself. When we answer creativity's call, we give our self one of the greatest gifts that life can offer. We give our self... there is tremendous power in those words. For what we give our self, no one can take away, unless we allow them to. The creative part of you will never give that gift away, but the ego will and does.
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