Engaging with the creative impulse can enrich both your personal and professional lives. It’s more than thinking outside the box. It’s moving forward as if there never was a box at all.
Instinctive Meditation® is one of the ways to attune to your creative instincts. Engaging with the senses, sharpening your internal and external perceptions, and dropping more readily into a state of relaxed awareness all come into play.
In what ways might you explore creativity in the coming days?
As so often happens, I was looking for something completely different when I came across an old notebook. I think it was from an expressive arts conference I’d attended years ago.
I turned the page and this phrase was glowing off the page : Breath as an art material. Everything stopped as those words carried me away on a mind journey.
The way breath gives voice to poetry and stories.
The collective inhale of a concert band before playing the first note.
Blowing on a dandelion and sending off little white skirts as gifts to sky faeries.
Shaping molten glass, or inflating two slabs of clay into a pillow.
A deep grounding inhale and exhale before stepping onto stage and dancing.
The play of rhythm between lovers.
How breath informs our senses. The sense of smell in cooking. More subtly reaching our instincts, sniffing out adventure, or danger, or a potential mate. Communicating emotions when words don’t suffice.
I began to wonder about using breath in other ways in art, such as using a straw to blow watered down paint on a surface.
What would it be like to receive a breath, and use the energy of releasing it through a paintbrush, in movement, or in whatever other way one might imagine? How does how you vary your breath affect the quality of lines, colours, textures, or gestures? What would the flow of creative practice be like while intentionally incorporating breath as one of the art materials?
I invite you to set some time for your favourite creative practice, and intentionally incorporate breath into your process. I’d love to hear what your experience is!
The most simple thing can be a doorway into meditation. On my walk this morning, I was captivated by the unexpected green for this time of year , and the way the light was landing on this stone wall. I took the time to receive this beauty, and felt myself going into the beautiful relaxed awareness of meditation.
Your meditation can be as unique as you are, and may be different every time. Being open to allowing the experience to unfold, you begin to see doorways everywhere, and develop a deeper connection and appreciation for all that is around and within you.
This is the way of Instinctive Meditation®- meditation for modern humans.
“Through me course wide rivers and in me rise tall mountains. And beyond the thickets of my agitation and confusion there stretch the wide pains of my peace and surrender. All landscapes are within me. And there is room for everything.” Etty Hillesum.
This passage is so evocative of Instinctive Meditation® to me. In this practice, we welcome all aspects of ourselves- the wild, the serene, the playful, the contemplative. The mind is allowed to go on an adventure. It may roam around for awhile, and it may eventually settle into a state of apparent stillness and calm. Find a deeper connection within, as well as the outer world.
This is the way of meditation for modern people. Won’t you join me?
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