Guiding your creative self home
Two practical exercises to help you centre in your own way of creating
Hello Readers,
I write this from my desk in a garden summer house, looking out at two cherry blossom trees. We deliberately chose one spring-flowering sapling and one that would give us blossom in the autumn to extend the joy of seeing the pink blooms. Cherry blossoms always remind me of ‘playtimes’ at my infant school, where, to my bewilderment the other children would careen around, running, jumping, screaming and, to my mind, wasting fifteen minutes of precious reading time. I would pull an Enid Blyton book out of my drawstring bag and sit on the kerb around the garden border where wafer thin petals would fall from the cherry blossom tree onto the pages.
Photo by Crystal Kay on Unsplash
Cherry blossoms are also inextricably linked to Japan and it is to Japan that we turn for this month’s festival series. The Obon festival is celebrated in July in some regions, in August in others depending on whether the solar or lunar calendar is being followed. Families will take chochin lanterns to the graves of their families and call their ancestors’ spirits back home in a ritual called mukae-bi meaning ‘earmark’. This is a calling out to the sprits of ancestors, usually from a gate, a crossroads or a graveyard.
Torches and bonfires are used to guide the deceased spirits home. Their arrival is celebrated with street food stalls, fireworks, taiko drumming and singing. Communal dances are held in parks and temples, with performers wearing the kimonos known as yukata) and geta flipflops. You can see one such dance here.
However, a part of the holiday is also to pay homage to the spirits who are still alive particularly parents, matchmakers and godparents, bosses, teachers or anyone to whom gratitude is felt. Gifts are taken and time is spent with elders and mentors.
We do not live our creative lives in isolation. We bring with us the spirits of others alive and dead and their influence on our work and our sense of identity. It occurs to me that we also bring with us our past selves, the parts of us that we feel are in the past and ‘dead’ to our current lives.
I was researching this festival at the same time I was rereading Maggie Smith’s wonderful memoir-in-vignettes You Could Make This Place Beautiful. In it she refers to feeling as if she was a set of nesting dolls:
How I picture it. We are all nesting dolls carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves – all of our selves – wherever we go
Inside forty-something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was… I still carry these versions of myself. It is a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.
In this sense, we can draw from the Obon ceremonies to recognise the spirits of our own past selves as well as honouring those who have walked before us. There are two rituals or exercises which I find helpful in my own practice which you might like to try yourself. One focuses on others, one on my own past selves. One is a centring practice which is focused on body and emotions, one is a more analytical brain focused tool involving tables or spreadsheets.
Centring
So often my creative practice is derailed by outside influences. It could be the major lifechanging incidents of accident or familial cancer or the impulse to spend more time than usual watching the news as unusual world events unfold. Or it might be the mundane fact that my mother is ringing (again) to ask how to use the Internet, or the delivery man rings the doorbell at a crucial point in my writing.
I also get derailed by my own brain. I am not a person who stays at a happy medium. I get pulled away by firework explosions of ideas, inspirations and possibilities for the future and by the sadness and frustration that comes when I feel isolated or inept. I constantly need to come back to centre, that being a place of rough equanimity where practice is possible.
When I need to return to my intentions and creative commitments or when I need to shift my brain to a new focus, say from the deep flow of making my own art to the requisite focus on another person that is required with coaching, I turn to this centring practice which includes a homage to the sprits of others. I was taught it on my psychosynthesis leadership coaching programme, but I believe it may originate with the Strozzi Institute in California.
Its aim is to embody our intentions and commitments to enable us to return to them multiple times a day as needed. This realignment ritual can be done in five minute or longer or, once you are familiar with it in 30 seconds or so as required.
Instructions:
1. Find a place to stand quietly. Stand with your feet hip width apart your back straight. (If you can’t stand you can adapt this to sitting or even to lying down. Do what your body allows; the important part is the mental activity that goes with your body.)
2. Call attention to your bodily sensations, movement, aches and temperature but keep your eyes on what is around you. This is not about disappearing but about being centred right where you are.
3. Pay attention to the part of your body just below your belly button. Place your hand and attention here which is your centre of gravity when we are standing up. From here you will consider all your dimensions.
4. First your length. Think of yourself as standing both up towards the sky and down towards the earth. Make yourself stable and weighty in your feet and also drawing up the crown of the head, stretching to the heavens. This dimension is s about centring in your own dignity and being able to see that in other people. Depending on your own belief system, you may find it helpful to consider how we are not alone in our struggles but connected to the bodies of others we have buried and the freed spirits of those people. Or you may prefer to focus on the simple duality of solidity and freedom and how that applies to you today.