Come back to heart-centre, I heard the soft, warm voice of the yoga-teacher-teacher trainer say, as we knelt on our mats child’s pose. In that childish state we could feel our heart beat. We could feel the other bodies too, and their breaths. Coming out of that sweet surrender-state, we brought our paws together at the chest. Heart centre was mentioned many times during the yoga teacher trainings, and something about it stuck with me — stuck right there, it seems.
I don’t know about you but February has seen more ups and downs than I can count on my fingers and toes. Soaring spirits in the one hand, on the other, being taken to the multiverse every night in sleep and dream. And then we have to wonder are they real? All the dreams? These recent dreams have been more like simulations, exact experiences I’ve had but in the future. Woahh, I’ve been clinging on to reality too tightly. I’m so thankful, sometimes, when I get to wake up again!
Anyway, these dreams they get me thinking about creativity, about where it comes from. I think the kind of creativity that helps us comes from the heart, but I also think it comes into us from the ground, from the earth. I also have the tendency to feel its current like butterflies in the belly. It has been a wild month, so far from ‘home’ in any sense and I’ve found that when we are far away from the ground, it’s so important to tune into our surroundings and fingertips and toes. Mostly toes.
Perhaps creativity comes in tangled roots and trunks, or maybe it comes from the air above (though I think there is enough air and interest in space nowadays to look for anything other than the grass beneath us). Or maybe it’s just natures strange way of exploring what it means to be a human. Beats me.
The other day I got off a video call and had to say sweet see you later to a woman who was kindly helping me with these creative fears and projects. We talked of where creativity comes from. I often feel like when I make art with paintbrush and colour it’s more efficient but I don’t really get to the essence, I mostly feel like I am playing with it. In writing there is this sense like I am exploring, rummaging in my chest. How does it sit for you, or rather, where?
The act of creation is so magical that I almost feel that this world is too fast, too fickle sometimes, for us as humans to create in….
Is creating something that comes through? Or from where? Yoga and other practices are such aids to the practice. Mostly they teach me to create even when I am afraid, and especially then.
The painting below is by Handy Saputra. The work is so full of life, and all of its elements. It is raw and full of the artist.
Perhaps creation is one of the strangest processes to go through. I always try to remind myself that the process itself is sacred.
The process is sacred and you do it scared. It’s actually so wonderfully scary but it also has to happen when it comes. For now I think I’ll leave it there.