by Tara Joyce | May 19, 2017 | Innerpreneurship
There is immense value in leaving, and then returning to, your creations. With a little bit of space, your expressions feel all the less personal. They no longer feels so fully created by ‘YOU.’ Giving space to them leaves you feeling less like they’re ‘YOURS’ and more like they are a living breathing thing on their own. Like a child, you can only do what you can to birth them into the world and to nurture them, yet once they’re here, they are their own creation to grow.
Try to recall the value of space the next time you’re creating something. Pay attention to how much it benefits you—and your creation. Make your thing, let it be born, and then return to it—a day, a week, a month—later. Give it time to grow. Notice how time and space support you in detaching from it and the ‘YOU-ness’ of what you’ve made.
The act of creation is highly subjective. It needs to be in order to get you so deeply entranced in its action. Once your initial expression has been birthed however, being more objective it is of greater value. Moving into a space that is more neutral, things open up for you more. You can see the value and the limits of what you’ve created more clearly. You can be fair. Giving space to what you create, supports you in supporting it to expand more skillfully in the world. Letting them go, they grow.
photo credit: Diego Hernandez
by Tara Joyce | May 4, 2017 | Cultural Creativity, Featured, Self/Business Growth
Every relationship you develop, from the most casual to the most intimate, serves to help you become more conscious.
We are taught to honour others, yet often this is one of the most difficult acts we can perform. For not only does it require us, first and foremost, to honour ourselves, it also requires us to come to know our Self. In a larger sense, your relationships are spiritual messengers, they bring into your life revelations about your own strengths and weaknesses.
Some of your relationships may be particularly painful (and necessarily so) as they’re here to help you to learn about yourself and your limitations. You may not be so enthusiastic to explore these “less attractive” aspects of self, yet recognizing your power to make choices and how they affect your world is the power of relationships. Your painful relationships help you to understand that every choice you make contributes to what you create. Choice is the process of creation itself.
Every choice you make is a creative act of spiritual power for which you are held responsible. Managing this power of choice, with all its spiritual and creative implications, is the essence of human experience. Yet you can’t know the full outcome of any choice you make, and so you may find yourself trying to control your life, and the life of others. Disappointment inevitably ensues since, try as you might, the physical world (and the people you are in relationship with) cannot be controlled. Your desires and whims are not for life to serve you on a silver platter.
Which returns you to the place where the greatest power you have is how you choose to behave in your relationships. Your relationships (especially the painful ones) help you to master your inner responses to the external world. They teach that you get to choose your thoughts and emotions.
The power and challenge of your relationships is to learn what motivates you to make the choices you do. In learning about what motivates you, you learn about the essence of your Self. Sex, power, and money are the currencies of relationships and your fear and/or faith is the energy you put behind this currency. This dynamic of choice, of fear and faith, guarantees you cannot run away from yourself or your decisions. For every outcome in some extent reflects this faith and/or fear.
To discover your personal motivations and your “false gods,” how you use and misuse the currencies of the physical world, you need relationships. So much of the way you respond to external challenges is how you respond to yourself. To guide you in developing a healthy and loving relationship with yourself, you have your relationships as a mirror. They are awakening you to your true personal power.
photo credit: Toa Heftiba
by Tara Joyce | Apr 26, 2016 | My Journey | What's On My Mind
Here’s a bit of my garbage… I have a tendency to attach to other people’s garbage.
I magnetize to the parts of people that they have decided have no value and have thrown away.
I can’t stand how their not responsible to these parts, and I determine someone needs to be.
And now their garbage has become mine. I’ve attached to it.
Except, I have my own garbage to manage. So, why do I think I have room to take on theirs? Being responsible to theirs, I can’t fully be responsible to mine.
I need the emotional space.
Other times with garbage, I like to think other people are responsible for the garbage in my life. I like to think I’m a victim of their littering and ignorance, their garbage creations.
When I’m not being responsible to the garbage in my life, when I’m blaming it on others, this action holds me back from being the complete person I am.
Taking responsibility for both the things I’ve made and the things I’ve wasted—my creations and my garbage—I change myself, and the world around me.
In owning my complete experience, I am free to be whole in my tragedy and in my joy. I can now acknowledge both my waste and my creations without shame.
In creating space for own my handiwork, both its darkness and light, I create space for others to own theirs. Magically, my garbage problem disappears.
photo credit: habeebee
by Tara Joyce | May 21, 2014 | Cultural Creativity
Each day that I am blessed with, I’m faced with a variety of choices. Some are small, others are not. The choices I make define me and my world.
Each day I work on my resistance to creating and to sharing. For creating and sharing are choices I make that, ultimately, I am not comfortable with, though I consistently work to choose them.
To create exposes me to my own judgements, and to share exposes me to yours. And for me, both are equally terrifying.
My history had taught me that to create was not only a waste of myself, but a sure way to ensure — internal and external — criticism. The expression of me was not safe. History’s lesson, it seemed, was that my wisest choice was to hide me, to bury it by pushing it down deep and out of site.
Yet despite these learned efforts at hiding, I just can’t deny my need to create or to share. I’ve tried and I’ve failed. I’ve tried to be who I thought I needed to be, a quieter version of myself, but I can’t keep it up. I can’t be what I’m not.
No matter how I’ve tried to fight it, my need to create and my fearful choice not to affects my entire world.
With time and practice, I’ve reached a new place with my fear. I’ve now accepted it. I no longer pretend that I am bravely ignoring it, or that I can sleuth-ily avoid it, or that it’s unreasonable and untrue. My fears about creating and sharing are neither true nor false. They simply are what they are. Attaching to them won’t help or protect me.
What I need to do with my fear is use it, to allow it to support me and my heroic heart in choosing to practice the art I am so afraid of creating, and sharing.
I could do one without the other — share without creating, or create without sharing — but I know they both need to live in harmony and balance within me if I truly want to thrive.
photo credit: Funkyah
by Tara Joyce | Nov 13, 2012 | Cultural Creativity
Everyone around me is a character.
I can experience the characters of my world in the same way I experience characters in fiction. I can care for them, perhaps even love them, but in the end, I can only be a watcher of their story. I am a viewer of their narrative, their plot line, and the archetypes they have chosen to embrace and act out.
The only character within my power is my own.
I do not have to allow anything or anyone outside of me to dictate my reality. I have a choice as to what character I play, and the type of story I reside in. I get to create this. In my story, I get to be in choice, deciding who I want to be and what I want to do, but like when I am watching TV or reading a book, the other characters that live in my story are not mine to control. I only get to decide what the hero does, I only get to decide what I do.
I am the hero of this story.
This means I do not need to be saved, nor do I need to save anyone else. For each and every character has the chance and the choice to be the hero of their story.
