Week 5 : Recovering a Sense of Possibility

Checking in.

Last week, the Fourth Week. Recovering a sense of Integrity.

The fourth week may find you grappling with changing self-definition. The essays, tasks and exercises are designed to catapult yo into productive introspection and integration of new self awareness. This may be both very difficult and extremely exciting for you. Warning: Do not skip the tool of reading deprivation!

How many days this week did you complete the Morning Pages? Tantrums often show up as skipping the morning pages. How was that experience for you?

Did you do your artist date this week? (Does your artist get to do more than rent movies after all?) What did you do? How did it feel?

Did you experience any synchronicity this week? (Magical coincidences that supported your stated aim?)

How was it being deprived of all that input? What surprised you? What was hardest?

Were there any other issues this week that you felt had to do with recovering a sense of integrity? Why do you think she uses the word integrity for this week?

Week 5:

Recovering a Sense of Possibility

Remember: Creativity is the natural order of life. Life is energy: pure, creative energy. There is an underlying, in-dwelling creative force infusing all of life — including ourselves. It is safe to open ourselves up to greater and greater creativity. Our creative dreams and yearnings come from a divine source. As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our divinity.

It's hard to talk about the spiritual part of this work without triggering cultural stuff about God. If it triggers you or if you are atheist and it just leaves you numb, think of it, when we use the term God, as meaning a powerful subconscious source. Jung thought that human beings share a collective subconscious. Certainly our subconscious mind is more powerful than our conscious mind. We can't explain it, and we can't understand it because it is subconscious — it exists in a level below the mind, which is what understands and explains.

Expect your every need to be met, expect the answer to every problem, expect abundance on every level, expect to grow spiritually.
Eileen Caddy

Look and you will find it — what goes unsought will go undetected..”
Sophocles

The Fifth Week. Recovering a sense of Possibility
This week you are being asked to examine your pay-offs in remaining stuck. You will explore how you curtail your own possibilities by placing limits on the good you can receive. You will examine the cost of settling for appearing good instead of being authentic. You may find yourself thinking about radical changes, no longer ruling out your growth by making others the cause of your constriction.

Limits.

One of the chief barriers to accepting the incredible generosity of life is our limited notion of what we can accomplish. We may tune in to the creative force within us, and hear a message — then immediately discount it as crazy. On the one hand, we don't want to look like idiots or egomaniacs pursuing some grandiose scheme. On the other we don't take ourselves, or our lives, seriously enough and so may dismiss as “grandiose” ideas and goals that are well within our grasp.

Remembering that this creative magical river is our source, we are in the spiritual position of having an unlimited bank account. Most of us never consider how powerful the creator is. We unconsciously set a limit on how much help God, or that synchronous magic, will give us. We are stingy with ourselves, and when we receive a gift beyond our imagining, we often send it back.

This doesn't mean we have a magic wand and all of a sudden we're in hog heaven. What it means is we enter into a conscious partnership with that magic, call it God or call it life energy or whatever, and we slowly clear away the wreckage of our negativity, rage, grief, and shame. At the same time, we clarify the vision of what we want, and accept small pieces of it as it arrives from whatever source — then one day, hey presto! The vision is in place.

Permission to succeed:
For this to happen first we have to accept that we're entitled to have, and to attain our vision. It helps to really get it that this magical ally is equally available to all people, we don't have to feel any guilt about our own success. Think about becoming successful as a way of saying thank you to life, an act of karma yoga, if you hold it this way, think of it that accepting and delighting in the gifts we are given, taking the path that is opened to us, is an act of worship.

Scarcity thinking:
We are sometimes miserly with ourselves because we don't want our luck to run out, We think there are only so many opportunities in life and we don't want to blow it by accepting the wrong ones. “I can't go to Hawaii — what if I go to the wrong island, pick the wrong motel, and miss the real experience I should have had?” We need to orient our selves to the thought that we're tapping into an energy source that LIKES to extend itself.

God has lots of money. Life has unlimited ideas, jobs, opportunities, loves, friends, places to live. By listening to the inner voice that keeps our creative juices flowing, we are led to the right path and opportunities will arise. We limit ourselves by thinking opportunities have to arise in exactly the predicted form — we have to learn to recognize them coming in sideways, from unexpected sources.

It's seductive to think there's only one path to success. A writer represented by a well known but very abusive agent finally gets so weary of the abuse that she fires him. That afternoon her husband comes home to find her in tears, she's sure she's sabotaged her career. He tells her that just last week a friend has asked if she had a good agent, and gave him the business card for a person the friend thought might do a better job. The new agent and the writer “click” and the writer's career takes off.

The desire to be worldly, sophisticated and smart often blocks our creative flow. If this still sounds “airy fairy” to you, ask yourself bluntly what next step you are avoiding. What dream are you discounting as being beyond your resources? What pay off are you getting from staying unable to attain your wildest dreams?

Doing the Spiritual Two-Step: An Exercise.

One method of reaching that creative spirit is through the morning pages. This week, at night before falling asleep, pick up your morning pages journal and list areas that you would like guidance. In the morning, write on these same areas. Experiment with this two step process: ask for help at night, listen for answers in your writing in the morning.

Finding the River:

For four weeks now we have been excavating our consciousness. We've seen how often we think negatively and how frightening it is to begin to believe there might be a right place for us that we could attain by listening to our creative voice, and following its guidance. We have begun to hope, and we have feared that hope.

We find now that we are more able to tell our truths, we are not free of our old patterns, but we have a taste of a new possibility. How did this begin to occur? The morning pages, and the ongoing exploration of delight that is the artists date, both loosen our hold on fixed opinions and shortsighted views. We see that our moods, insights and views are transitory. We begin to have a sense of flow, a current of change in our lives. This current, or river, is the flow of grace moving us to our right livelihood, right companions: to our destiny.

Developing a dependency on the inner voice, the creator within, frees us from other dependencies. Paradoxically it also frees us to have real intimacy with other people. Because we are freed from fears of abandonment we can live more spontaneously and put less pressure on our loved ones for approval and acceptance. We can just love them, and accept their love back.

Recovery is the process of finding the river and saying yes to it, rapids and all. We startle ourselves by saying yes to opportunities, and find ourselves anew engaging in adventures we had not foreseen.

This new positive attitude is the beginning of trust. We begin to trust the creative spirit within us, and as we develop that trust and learn to rely on it, we lose our fear of intimacy with other people because we no longer confuse our intimate others with the inner higher power we are coming to rely on.

Now, note, this is not a linear process. We do need to keep going out and shaking the trees looking for opportunities. We just need to recognize that when we shake the apple tree and oranges fall out, that's an opportunity. Pick them up and give them a squeeze, trust the river.

The Virtue Trap.

An artist, a creative person, must have down time. Time to do nothing. Time to be alone. If we don't get that time, we get crabby, we grow distant from ourselves and we shut down. But, the world demands our attention. Work, school, our families, our friends, all that draws us out. Just when you most need time to recoup, your friend calls needing to talk. The umteenth time this happens, you finally think “I'm going to kill her.” The umpty-Umpteenth time it happens, you think “I'm going to kill myself.” What's the use? Replaces our feelings of joy and satisfaction. We may continue to create, but there is no joy and no juice in it. We are vampirizing ourselves.

We are caught in the virtue trap.

There are many pay offs for this behavior. Taking care of others to the exclusion of ourselves distances us from our selves, takes away the responsibility to succeed, doesn't bring us into the company of our inner critic. We make a virtue out of self deprivation. We feel superior, because we are of service to those around us. We strive to be good, kind, generous — but all we want is to be left alone. When we can't get others to leave us alone, we eventually abandon our selves. We may look and act to others as though we're still home, but spiritually we've gone to ground. Our empty shell stays because it must. Like a listless circus animal, it goes through its routines. But any accolades fall on deaf ears. Our artist is not merely out of sorts, our artist has checked out. Life is now an out of body experience. A clinician will call this disassociating. I call it leaving the scene of the crime.

Afraid to appear selfish we lose ourselves. We are self destructive, we are destroying our true nature.

The true self is a disturbing character who knows how to say not to others and “yes” to itself. Creatives caught in the virtue trap cannot let themselves approve of this new self. If you always give up your own needs for others, you never have to confront your own needs, your own life… it's a safer spot, says your inner critic. But in fact, it's a living death, you have chosen to bury yourself alive. There is nothing safe about it, the game is over before it's begun.

To cast a little light on your virtue trap:

Ask yourself: what 5 things would I try if it weren't crazy?
Maybe scuba diving, becoming a mechanic, climbing mount everest, taking up drumming.

If your list looks pretty exciting, you're on the right track. These crazy notions are messages from your true self.

Now make a second list, what would I do if it weren't too selfish?
Take scuba diving lessons, enroll in a community college course on auto mechanics, take climbing lessons, buy a drum.

The Virtue Trap Quiz:

1. The biggest lack in my life is ___________________
2. The greatest joy in my life is ___________________
3. My largest time commitment is _________________
4. As I play more, I work _______________________
5. I feel guilty that I am ________________________
6. I worry that ______________________________
7. If my dreams come true, my family will ___________
8. I sabotage myself so that people will _____________
9. If I let myself feel it, I'm angry that I _____________
10. One reason I get sad sometimes is _______________

Does your life serve you, or only others? Are you self destructive?

List ten things that you love to do but are not allowed to do. Post your list where you can see it.

Wish list:

SPEED WRITING. Wishes are allowed to be frivolous. Write the numbers from one to twenty, and write “I wish…” after each number. Now as quickly as you can, list 20 things you wish. End with “I most especially wish…”

Tasks.

The Fifth Week.

Morning pages and Artist's date — remember, it's supposed to delight you.

List your questions at night, listen to your answers in the morning pages.

1. The reason I can't believe in a supportive spirit, or God, is… list five grievances.
2. If I had either faith or money I would try… List five desires. For the next week, be alert for images of these desires. When you spot them, clip them out and keep them in a file. Add to this list and to these images continuously for the rest of this course.
3. Five imaginary lives. Have they changed any? Add images to your image file.
4. If I were twenty and had money I would… five adventures, images for the image file.
5. If I were 65 and had money I would… five adventures, and watch for images for the image file.
6. 10 ways I am mean to myself are… making the negative explicit tends to exorcise it.
7. 10 items I would like to own but I don't are… again, you may want to image file these.
8. Honestly my favorite creative block is… TV, taking care of others, reading, rescuing others, whatever. You name it. Even if you can't draw cartoons, draw a cartoon of yourself engaging in your favorite block.
9. My payoff for staying blocked is… explore this in your morning pages.
10. The person I blame for being blocked is… explore this also in your morning pages.

I’ll be posting my check-in notes to the comments. Please share your experiences from Week Four’s exercises, if you need support in an area you’re struggling with reach out for encouragement.