Giving Space to Your Creations

Giving Space to Your Creations

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

We Don’t Know What We Are

We Don’t Know What We Are

ghosts

Our true nature, who we inherently are, is expressed in all that we do. Yet most of us live without an awareness of this truth, and the practice of expressing who we naturally are becomes difficult to realize.

Instead, we find our selves striving, pushing, giving up; actions driven by our confusion over who we naturally are.

When we express our true nature, we are human beings — we are what we are. When we do not express our nature, we don’t know what we are. We are confused. Deluded.

We don’t know what to call ourselves. In our minds, we are something else other than what we are. We do not exist. We’re ghosts of our self.

We live in this ghost-like state, our true nature eluding us, until we find the courage to know our self (again). Open to being what we are, our true nature resumes itself.

We are found once again, through our own awareness of our self. Now, we know the true value of allowing ourselves to be what we inherently are.

photo credit: Laurent Henschen

See How You’ve Grown

See How You’ve Grown

Grown

It needs to be good. No. It needs to be great. If it isn’t, it’s not worth anything.

My sentiment is, of course, not true. Despite how I may feel, the worth of it, of anything, lies not in its goodness (or lack thereof) but in what is being expressed and shared through it.

After all, “goodness” and “greatness” aren’t real measures of anything. You may feel it’s good, while I may feel it’s not. Who’s right? We both are.

So who really cares what’s good? Why let your fear of not being IT stop you from expressing? If you are doing your best, that is what matters. As creators, what we truly desire is to do our best with the resources we have. Good or not, your expression has value.

As you expand your resources, you’ll find you reach a place where you can do better than you did before. You may find yourself feeling your work from before is not as good as you feel it could be today. This is not a sign of your ineptitude. This is a sign that you have improved and grown. You now have more information, more practice, and more support than you’ve ever had before.

You are better, you have improved, and now you’re seeing how you’ve grown. Resist the temptation to feel upset by your previous expressions, feeling they are not good enough. They are beautiful artifacts of your growth between now and then. Before, you simply weren’t able to see how you would and could express yourself better—and now you are. That’s invaluable stuff.

photo credit: Ana C.

Emotional Self-Abandonment

Emotional Self-Abandonment

photo credit: gingher

We, as humans, have a tendency to use our mind to negate our emotions. We use our mind as a tool to abandon how we feel.

I know, personally, I often use my mind to abandon my negative feelings, especially when they are directed at someone I love. In these moments, I’d rather pretend the feelings aren’t there… than explore why they are. The result of doing this, of locking up my sensitives in my logical mind, is that I disown my feelings and my emotional needs.

For some of us, we negate our feelings or emotional needs because we feel the expression of them is dangerous. Our emotions feel too vulnerable and the sharing of them feels to risky. Rightfully, risks are present when we share our most vulnerable self — but hiding our feelings from others is far more dangerous. For it leads us to mask our feelings, not only for others, but from our self. Rather than feel what we feel, we learn to abandon ourselves emotionally. We learn to negate what we feel and to lock it up in our mind. This lack of emotional self-awareness, and this mental overemphasis, further disconnects us from our self — and others.

We owe it to our emotional self to break our cycle of self-abandonment.

Emotional self-abandonment may feel safer — but it is no less painful than our own emotional truth — and it is all the more detrimental. For in not being present to our selves, we become slightly lost.

However, by acknowledging our logical desire to negate our feelings, we begin to break this cycle. Simply in seeing our abandonment, we cease our pattern of turning our back on our feelings. For recognizing our neglect enables us to be present to our emotional self once again, and within this awareness, we find we no longer need to leave any part of ourselves out again.

photo credit: gingher

Our Words Are Our Resource

Our Words Are Our Resource

photo credit quinnanya

What if our words were thought of as a resource to be conserved and used wisely?

What if we saw the misuse of our words as a waste of precious resources, similar to the misuse of our oceans or another limited resource?

What if we saved our words? Saved them from carelessness, from thoughtless expressions, saved them from being used to harm people and the planet?

What if we learned to respect all our resources? Not just the one’s from the earth and that other posses, but the one’s that are personally our own?

What if we knew our expression as our most valuable resource? How would we change things if we knew the true cost of wasting it carelessly?

photo credit: quinnanya