As a creative being you are always evolving towards a desire for creative integration, even if you aren’t fully aware of it.
You build skills, likes and dislikes, creative desires, experiences (good and bad) and aspirations throughout your life, collecting them like actual objects in your mind and heart. Each separate feeling, experience, memory and skill is part of your personal development, and creates an “energetic hit” for you in some way. The sensation may be positive, negative, ambivalent, joyous, loving, painful; there’s an endless list of potential reactions and insights.
While an “energetic hit” is a helpful clue on it’s own, it’s power is greater as part of a whole – as part of a pattern of insight that reveals where you are craving creative integration and balance.
The Tendency to Separate Before you Integrate
Your divine nature longs for you to be integrated and whole, to connect the pieces that feel lost, hurt or betrayed, with those that feel loving, supportive and inspiring. Yet, it’s also natural to separate what you cannot accept or love about yourself. By keeping it separate, you feel as if you are protecting yourself and the identity you’ve built up all along.
It can seem impossible to visualize the opposing sides operating within you at the same time, side by side, as part of you. However, creative integration is essential to creativity because it’s what makes your unique expression unlike anyone else’s.
The inspiration to make something, to call on your creative insights and desires to create, comes from all aspects of yourself. Maybe it’s from a place of desiring a shift, solving a problem, expressing pain or anger or from a place of joy, love, acceptance and bliss. This yin/yang balance makes you fully aware of all sides of yourself and gives you a way to see how all parts of you are important, valuable, worthy – and an essential part of your creativity.
Flexibility and Faith While in Chaos Leads to Creative Integration in the Now
When you take time alone in a calming space to sit and be present with your “energetic hits”, frustrations, pains and joys, you begin to notice how the dots connect into a pattern across your life experiences, both past and present. Do your best to step outside of judgment as you review your thoughts and experiences in a mindful way, like little pieces of information in a file folder.
While you invite in the mind to be objective and observe the contents of “the folder”, do your best to stay present in your body and open up to connect with any feelings of separation within you ignited by what you are reviewing.
Do you have a sense of fear, shame or frustration from those experiences? Are you excited, impatient or confused? What exactly are you willing (or not willing) to feel? Can you have faith that spirit will show you what you need to do as a next step?
This is your starting point for sacred creative integration.
The creative integration process is an ongoing, lifelong flow of invitation, awareness and growth so you can create from new perspectives and embrace the truth of who you are as you change. The more you can be flexible and have faith as you sit with discord, the chaos you feel will give way to cohesiveness. Your creativity will deepen and expand in new directions you can’t possibly see or conceive of right now – and that’s the point.
As you integrate more and more pieces, accepting them into a balance, your creative vision blows wide open in the most sacred, natural ways. It’s also a deep, all encompassing act of self-healing.
Are you ready to embrace the flow within yourself to reach towards creative wholeness?
If you want help creating a more supportive creative integration process, connect with me for a creativity coaching session. For a little more reading on integration, check out my previous post: The Importance of Rest, Integration and Patience for Spiritual Growth. Looking for other simple tools to use as part of your creative mindfulness practice? Check out my podcast on creativity and spirituality called Flirting with Enlightenment.
Photo credit: Yin/Yang salt and pepper – Sarah Shagam