Drawing Ideas Into Being

Yesterday someone said to me that I have ideas that I am able to bring into fruition. It got me thinking, because up until very recently I had characterised myself by having been someone who spoke a great deal and did nothing. I used to talk up a storm, but I could feel the energy of the project depleting even as I talked. It led to years of frustration and sadness and a coming to believe that I was not really capable of doing much.

How did that change? For it clearly has changed. There were many reasons I had reached that point, but there were also several ways that I went beyond it.

One of the beginning points at turning it around was going back to find what I really enjoyed as a child. Guided in meditations and my own explorations I journeyed to my childhood self to rediscover what I truly loved. In my case it was drawing, piano, horseback riding to name a few.

I was advised to make them real. And this I believe is the key. It is not only to discover something; it is to bring it into the present moment and to do so with no aim behind it. If you stop to ask why you’re colouring in a children’s book and what the point is, then you won’t do it. But if you do it for sheer enjoyment, you have no idea what you might connect with.

It is again about not considering things as products in themselves but rather as parts of a flow. Colouring led me to cake making, cake making led me to doing it more seriously. That in turn led me to giving a workshop on it and earning money, which in turn was part of a greater theme of working through my twisted relationship with money and my right to earn.

In the meantime I began drawing and creating works of art, which opened up new horizons within myself. These works I later made into cards to sell and sold. All of that together opened up the realisation that I could combine art with my spiritual interests and design workshops for children, the design of which is flowing.

If at any point I had become mired down in the questions of what it all meant, I would have broken the flow. If I had tried to use an interest as a means to create an identity, am I now a cake maker? am I now an artist? I would have stopped because I didn’t have enough experience as others therefore I couldn’t be. But if I did it because I enjoyed it, I could avoid my own judgemental comparisons.

But the main point is that in the process of just experiencing these things so much opened up inside me. By seeing that one thing did lead to another with no forcing on my part, it became easier to know that what I’m doing now is also part of some unfolding strand which has its relevance.

Mediations and visualisations have been a big part of my experience. I was told from the beginning that I should ground what I experienced in meditations, that I should anchor it in some way. I have done many guided meditations in which I journeyed to meet my Full Self or my guides, or many other experiences.

It always seemed very clear to me that these were lived experiences no different from the run I had this morning on the beach, just as real and just as relevant. And so I worked to anchor it. If a word popped up, a stone for example, then I tried to bring that stone into my ambit. I would look up what came through in the meditations, I would write them down and whenever I had the opportunity to physicalize a part of it I did so.

The same was true with dream work. I was very disciplined for a long time writing down my dreams; I still do, though a little less frequently. One suggestion that Robert A. Johnson in “Inner Work” has for dream interpretation is to look for where the dream intersects your daily experience. What is the dream mirroring to you? By focusing on the feeling of your dream you are more likely to see how it is reflected in your daily life.

Writing the dreams down is a way of anchoring it. With both meditation and dreams it is about bringing a certain kind of knowledge into your conscious camp. It is about increasing the stores of what is available to you and actively bringing them into your ambit. In terms of dreams I got to see that I was working out many things in the dream world that were pertinent to me in waking life.

In terms of meditation, I was able to draw on inspiration I do not know how I could have accessed otherwise. From there, the version of myself and of the reality in which I inhabit naturally shifted.

As that shifted so did the awareness that I could work in the wings so to speak. Instead of working only with tangible events, I work through envisioning and feeling realities. Things I might be able to do, projects for example, I could work with on how they felt. Build up the feeling and continue to anchor that. It is not about delineating how it is to happen or what it must be.

Since very small my father always said to me that I would only be good at what I really loved doing. I never realised until recently how wise and how true these words are. But I didn’t believe them to be possible. I couldn’t see how my interests were to fit into the world around me or how, if need be, I could shape them into the catalogue of jobs that were agreed upon, but felt limited. I also didn’t see how I was capable of fulfilling what I loved.

I had not realised that by searching within myself, by working with my own reality and expanding and discovering more of who I am that my reality could shift so drastically. I did not consider that I could begin to work from this. I am still amazed at how my interests seem to be coming together to create viable projects, which I can feel coming into being.

It is a thrillingly creative process and one I believe is available to all. It is helpful to have the openness of a child’s mentality: they learn and try things out just for the fun of it. If we can enter into that space and work with envisioning and grounding what comes up, I believe we can begin to realise ourselves in different ways and thus shift our experiences within this world.