Old fascinations, we crave new sensations
Old fascinations, it’s feeding my frustrations
It’s feeding my frustrations
And I haven’t got the patience.
-La Roux in their song, Fascination
We are given a foundational language at birth. The human experience and our participation in the life cycle give us fundamental similarities by which we can relate and understand each other.
How we arrange our patterns, what connections we make, and when and how we choose to express them is our personal creative language.
I feel sure that access and attunement to these languages is available to everyone and that we all benefit when we are connected to them. Even further, I feel sure that connecting to our personal creative language in a way we can express and contribute to the fundamental understandings of human experience is central to life satisfaction.
Here are four other things I find about creative language:
It’s inside of you.
We are born into this world dependent upon others for our survival. Others show us how to order our patterns, what to value and how to express. Caregivers do their best to share the structure and language that has worked for them. Yet, often the entire personal creative language doesn’t work for everyone. We resonate with others, learn from their patterning and processes, but ultimately, we are individual beings with very personal processes of our own.
Trying to build our life off of someone else’s personal creative language is like trying to build a lego tower 3 feet away from us. We can reach it, and possibly build something impressive, but its awkward, uncomfortable, and we don’t quite feel connected to it. Sticking with what you know is not creating, its manufacturing.
Your fascinations, and sensations are within you. They resonate in your body and mind. You know connection when you feel it in yourself, not by seeing it in the distance.
It’s messy.
The agreement to create comes with a clause to destroy the old. Destruction comes with a prerequisite of messiness, loss of control, and the recognition of an end, which some may experience as failure.
In her book, Rising Strong, Brené Brown says, “ What we’re trying to do in the rumble- choosing to feel uncertain and vulnerable as we rumble with the truth- is a conscious choice. A brave, conscious choice.” Living unconsciously and without courage comes with its own set of experiences. The set of experiences many of us desire and that lead to satisfaction requires a willingness to release the egoic need for rightness and be along for the ride.
Think about how control stifles the creative process:
Is the color getting outside of the lines?
Are the notes in harmony?
Is the emotion too strong?
How do the angles look?
Is the hair groomed?
It is like being in love.
One of my most influential spiritual and sexual teachers, Coco Mckenzi, shared an experience from her personal language that has resonated with me deeply and which I have applied to my personal creativity ever since. She said she once experienced a deep fear. It took the form of flames in her mind’s eye. The fear inspired her body as she could feel the invitation to contract. In that moment, she made the conscious choice to go into the flames and as she quotes, “became the devil herself”, dancing in the metaphorical flames until her desire was met. She emerged from the experience new and empowered.
From my view, she was able to follow her inner experience’s call into the flames because she was deeply in love with the process. Like a captivated lover, she knew her desire was worth following. She followed the experience for the sake of following her experience, because that alone is enough.
It’s not always the intensity of flames that call. It can be rest, confusion or deeper expression that calls. The creative language invites us into a wider spectrum than what we have experienced up until this point. Truly developing a creative language means falling in love with the thread itself, not the outcome of the thread.
What is it like to be WITH your creative process, your desire? Will you follow it into the flames or anywhere else it goes? Will you trust the wisdom of your inner experience, your thread, your aliveness, your consciousness’s guidance and leadership? What is worth following? If not you, then what?
It grows.
The life cycle shows us that all seasons are important. Seasons of inspiration, fruition, relaxation, and integration give us balance and each one of them contributes to the effectiveness of the others. The Greek word used in the Bible for Spirit is pronounced Pneuma in English. It can also be translated as breath. It’s used in contexts of inspiration and aliveness.
The creative language is continuous. It is experienced as divine alignment, always presenting new life. The breath, the spirit, expresses through the body and on every canvas imaginable.
What’s the breath in you saying? Are you available to grow with it?
In demonstration of my own messy, creative process, I’ve shared this table which presents my personal creative languages as they might relate to the fundamental language.
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