The moodle and the creative process

Listening to the tingle, listening to ourselves on a deeper level

Hello, dear Moodlers!

"When we allow ourselves to be led by our creativity rather than by a predefined idea, we are listening to ourselves on a deep level"

I wrote this on Instagram a few months ago and at the time, I wondered exactly what it meant. I didn’t think about it, the words just came out of me! Like the researcher I am, I was curious to explore it further, dig deeper, unpack it.

When I started writing this post months ago, I wrote "I have no idea what I want to say here!". And I abandoned this particular piece of writing.

Yet, a few months later, I have come back to it, because now a new idea has emerged!

Recently, I was chatting to a friend about how I kick start a new project, or the creative process, with brainstorming, to get high-level ideas down on paper and then being able to see the threads connections between the ideas. I said something like this:

"Find the moment when you tingle with excitement, when you get goosebumps, and maximise on that feeling to move forward. Stay with the tingle, even if its only for 10 minutes."

To me, noticing and paying attention to that tingle, IS listening to myself on a deep level...

How hard it is to start listening to ourselves and to trust the messages we get?

Part of “listening” is letting go of

• what we "should" do - expectation

• what we are afraid of doing - fear and shame

• not knowing what we're doing - perfectionism and procrastination

And embracing

• Play

• Courage

• Trust

• Surrender

• Making mistakes

For me, this "listening" to ourselves and maybe to something bigger than ourselves (God, the Universe, Spirit, a Higher Power, your Inner Intuition, the Muse, your Higher Self, whatever or whoever you connect to) on a deep level, is a moodle through the incubation stage of the creative process that many people write about.

Incubation: a germination period. This stage works best when we step away from the problem and daydream, walk or meditate. Chop wood as the Zen masters say.

Here's something I wrote many moons ago about this softer, gentler part of the creative process:

The key to this stage is detachment from a particular outcome, from anything further happening. Julia Cameron writes that in her experience, the creative process is a process of surrender, not control.

Anne Wilson Schaef points out: “we have to give ourselves time. We have to give our ideas time. Otherwise we cannot hear the voice of our inner process speaking to us”. Brenda Ueland says in that “creative instant of getting it” it feels like she is “adding it unto myself forever.”

In this downtime, in this space, the things we already know are re-organised or transformed and our mental structures are changed by new, incoming information.

This is the time when what we have learnt begins to become part of who we are, in our mind, body and spirit. But it is the part that we want to rush through in our world driven by doing, performance measures and getting instant results.

[Debbie Stott, 2018]

Have you developed the ability to listen to yourself? How do you know that you are listening - how does it manifest in your body? Let us know your experiences in the comments below.

"The creative process is a spiritual path. This adventure is about us, about the deep self, the composer in all of us, about originality, meaning not that which is all new, but that which is fully and originally ourselves." [Nachmanovitch]

The card art

Card number 19 from the pack of 50, “look for treasures within myself”. The words come from Elizabeth Gilbert’s book about Big Magic. The art is a collage of old book papers, which I’ve then stained with colour.

Debs
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