How to be Madly Creative Part 3

If creativity is the answer, what’s the question?

There are quite a few really. But here’s a top ten…

How can I solve problems at work?

How can I find the way forward?

How can I beat insurmountable odds?

How can I stop an addiction?

How can I heal loss?

How can I live a more meaningful life?

How can I increase my ability to feel joy?

How can I help?

How can I be happy?

How can I fall in love?

Creativity is the miracle of an altered perception.

Not a different perception – A different perception is just a good idea. We can have good ideas all day long, but they don’t change didley squat. When push comes to shove we can come up with lots of ideas. Motivational gurus thrive on this premise. They go into workshops and within a few hours they have people positively bursting with ideas.

This is often referred to as a Brainstorm. This is because there’s lots of energy and many of the participants look like they are auditioning for a part in Singing in the Rain – either tap dancing around the issue or punching the air at the awesomeness of their ideas.

Nothing changes. Because change requires a different kind of energy – the energy of desire.

We’re more comfortable with needs, wants and goals because these all come from the familiar territory of the mind.  When we can’t make things work, we rush to the mind to fix them. We seek help from data analysis or psychoanalysis. But the configurations we are trying to unravel go back millennia. They’re deep and complex. That’s why they’re called Thought Patterns. Most of them are not even our own thoughts.

But Desire is different.  The energy of desire comes from the heart. We find it hard to trust desire because it raises two further questions.

What if the desire goes away and we’re faced with loss or deadness?

What if the desire becomes obsession?

So we close off our hearts.

But these thoughts were invented by the mind, not the heart! And of course because our mind can’t think its way out of either of these dilemmas it creates distance. We ride around on increasingly fast horses throwing ropes around the things we want to catch. It’s easy to corral the things of the mind but to corral the things of the heart requires a higher intelligence.  One that involves a paradox.

Total commitment is the path to total freedom.

By moving towards the fear of deadness, loss or obsession, the spell is broken and we see that it is distance, not closeness that creates all the problems.

We need to change our perspective and BECOME madly creative if we’re going to deal with the crazy world our minds have created. This is a very different concept to thinking creative thoughts!

There’s one of the ten questions that solves all the other questions combined.  How can I fall in love?

Because there are three definitions of madness…

Insanity (welcome to the world we currently live in)

Anger (to be mad with someone or at someone – usually ourselves)

Love (Being madly in love. Becoming the Divine Fool).

Love brings sanity to the madness of the mind.

The practice of Creativity teaches us how to inhabit the realm of the heart. NOT the Ego’s version of the heart as portrayed by Hallmark Cards and Country and Western songs. But the Heart of the Matter. Our true essence.

The practice of Creativity teaches us how to rely on something more intelligent than our minds to provide the answers to our questions.

Or as Iris Murdoch put it. Love is the very difficult understanding that something other than yourself is real.

Fall in love with your life again. BE creative now courses start in just over a month. January is over rated as a month for new beginnings. It’s the middle of winter. There’s the hangover from Christmas indulgence and the gym is crowded. (It’s empty by February but that just demonstrates the limited power of the mind!)

September is the new January. Make the intelligent choice.  Or as Albert Einstein would say…

Creativity is intelligence having fun   Albert Einstein.

Enjoy the summer, but set an intention to fall madly in love… by the fall.