Rally your Creative Genius. Only s/he can rescue you from the flames!
In my STUDY, SAVOR, & SUPPORT Each Other CHAT☕️🍵, we’re doing a deep-dive into our Book Club selection! This week is Chapter 8 of BEYOND ANXIETY: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose by Martha Beck.
In Chapter 8 — Mastery: Freeing the Magician — MB tells us one of the greatest truths that society indoctrinates us to forget:
We ALL have a Creative Genius Inside of Us!
Even if we tell ourselves lies like, “I’m not creative at all,” like one of my friends told me about herself, it’s NOT too late for us to wave our magic wands and be the Creative Geniuses we are still meant to be.
Even if we’ve abandoned all hope in the past.
Even if we feel we’ve given up on ourselves too many times.
That bright spark of creativity still exists inside each and every one of us.
We just have to be willing to go in search of it.
It may very well reveal itself in the most unlikeliest of places.
Take, for instance, the story MB tells, about the literal Firefighter (not the IFS-kind) who was the sole survivor among 14 smoke jumpers who were engulfed in one of the worst wildfires in Montana history:
Robert “Wag” Dodge survived purely because of his creativity. When he “realized that no one could outpace the fire…Dodge stopped running, lit a match, and set fire to the grass in a circle around him. He shouted to his men, telling them to gather around him, but in the confusion, they continued to run away. Dodge threw himself down in the smoldering circle of burnt grass, covered himself with a blanket, and waited for the fire to pass over him. The flames raged all around him, but the burnt circle gave them no fuel, acting as a firebreak around Dodge’s body. Thirteen other firefighters died. Dodge survived, basically unharmed.”
What makes this story so impressive is the fact that Dodge came up with this method on the spot.
Contrary to what firefighters are trained to do today, when this happened in Dodge’s time (1949), creating a firebreak for this purpose was something that he’d never been trained to do. In fact, it was something “no one had been trained to do.”
And yet he came up with this plan, this seemingly miraculous feat of ingenuity, in mere minutes, maybe even seconds.
The TRUTH: How Creative Inspiration Strikes
Society teaches us in overt & covert ways to trust in rules, methods, step-by-step instructions.
To color within the lines.
But, if Dodge had followed that logic, he would’ve perished like his comrades.
Instead, it’s the Creativity that resides in the right hemisphere that literally saved the skin on his back.
As MB explains, it’s “our creative thinking [that] marshals our right hemisphere’s ability to associate everything we’ve ever learned with whatever is happening to us in the present and come up with completely new ideas.”
Often, genius-level strikes of inspiration aren’t found inside our go-to (conscious thinking), but inside our subconscious, where our Creative Magician resides.
For Dodge, MB says he was “[w]orking outside his conscious thinking [when his] right hemisphere evaluated the situation, combined memories of many previous experiences, decided on a solution, and pitched it into Dodge’s awareness as a flash of inspiration.”
Like Archimedes shouting “Eureka!” when he stepped into a bathtub and noticed how the water was displaced when he slid into it. Without meaning to, he saw the water shift and his mind drew the creative connection that submerged objects will displace a volume of water equal to their own volume.
What an amazing feeling that must’ve been, to solve such a difficult problem plaguing Archimedes with such a life-changing, world-altering stroke of inspiration!
It certainly makes you think…
What Hope Do Us Mere Mortals Have, to Experience Our Own Creative Genius?!
Hope’s not lost.
Creativity is not reserved for only the few.
We just have to be willing to not only think outside the box, but to step outside of it.
We must take action.
To take our coloring outside the lines off the paper and into real-life.
MB says there’s no better way to do it than the real-life way that Dodge got it done, with these 4:
(1) Circumstances that require you to grapple with difficult problems;
(2) Interest-based curiosity (as covered in Ch. 6) that prompts you to gather knowledge and experience;
(3) A dollop of courage; and,
(4) An apparent impasse.
Real life is full of these. Lucky us!
Take it from Dodge, who’d garnered a plethora of firefighting expertise based on his lived experience on the job. After many hours of training and learning how to solve problems based on troubleshooting all types of circumstances, he had the knowledge and real-life know-how to tackle many scenarios with courage & aplomb.
But, interestingly, his Creative Genius didn’t bust out to save the day until he’d reached the impasse of all impasses: a conflagration so massive that there was no escape. With fire engulfing the forest everywhere, he was forced to come up with a solution to save himself or he’d die.
The 4 forced his Eureka to come.
Scream it with me, “EUREKA! There’s PURPOSE in Our Pain!”
As MB states so eloquently, “[O]nce I really understood that difficulties and impasses are necessary components our brains use to make creative leaps forward, I stopped feeling so anxious about all my problems. I even became less anxious about the problem of anxiety itself.”
Looking back, I see how true this has been for myself.
After years of being depressed and anxious grinding as an Attorney, with no creative outlet, I didn’t have my Eureka Moment until it dawned on me:
I had to STOP prioritizing a To Do List that leaves ME off of it!
I had to carve time out for me, to do all the creative writing I wanted to do!
I had to experience that impasse — one so full of pain and suffering that I was forced to get real with myself.
To stop waiting for someone to come save me.
To make myself wake up at 5am every day to give my creative mind time to write.
And, boy, it gave me more than the 3 books I’ve written for THE OBSIDIAN CHRONICLES, with the 1st published and the 2nd I’m about to release.
It gave me the confidence to see that I get to write my own story!
If I want to be more than an Attorney, I can. I just have to do it.
In that way, my pain did serve a purpose.
And it serves a purpose still, because it’s now MY MISSION to encourage others to do the Creative Work we dream of doing, no matter how much time has passed. No matter what anyone else says.
And when you do it to honor yourself, you’ll discover the truth:
Creative EUREKAS CAN CURE Your ANXIETY
How?
It transforms our relationship to life’s problems and the struggle to find solutions.
We needn’t fear our anxiety. Or our seemingly insurmountable problems.
To the contrary, we can WELCOME them as a sign that we’re about to achieve a Eureka Moment of our own!
Nothing compares to the way it feels when your entire body, soul, and spirit gets to shout, “Eureka!”
You get to FEEL the tremendously freeing state of FLOW that can only be found when we let our Creative Genius rescue us from the Fire of our Self-Doubt, Self-Denial, & Far-Too-Serious, Always “Professional” Self!
When we get into a state of Flow, when we stop locking our Creative Creature inside a cage, the real magic happens:
We become highly motivated to keep going.
To keep trying.
To keep learning.
To keep growing.
And we gain the best accelerant we could ever wish to add to our creative arsenal:
We’re finally pulled by our curiosity.
To new heights.
To the loftiest experiences only our Highest Self can take us to —
NOT out of anxiety or fear, but because we’re propelled by our own Highly-Motivated, Self-Honoring Creativity!
Now, take a Mindful Minute to reflect on your life:
⭐️📝 For our Journaling this week:
⭐️ Ask yourself, “How can I free my own Creative Genius?”
⭐️ Notice how your limitations can be turned into strengths.
- Like how MB’s favorite art teacher expanded her creative capacity by forcing her to grow by restriction, namely, practicing how to draw a straight line or a perfect circle. Sounds boring. But it forced her to slow down and perfect the foundation of her artistic skills.
- And using a drafting pen forced her to learn how to shade in a new way, instead of blending with her preferred drawing tools.
I love how this mindset can help us to reframe the problems that we encounter in life. Many times, limitations are an impediment.
But they can also be forcing functions that become the precise reason why we grow.
⭐️ Can you see how a limit you’re facing could spark your own Creative Genius?
⭐️ How might you view it as an opportunity, a blessing in disguise?
Are YOU as ready as I am to let your Creative Genius guide you out of the woods?
To embrace your Curiosity & Intuition,
and let go of society’s oppressive seriousness?
To live a healthier & fun life,
wrapped in the warmth of
your own free-flowing joy & self-soothing sanity?
👭 If you want to enlist the help of a Fellow Creative, to help you break free…
Our CHAT can be a safe place to tell safe people what you’d like to accomplish, so we can all support & cheer you on.
👭 If you’re comfortable doing so, feel free to tell us what Creative Practice you would like to try whenever one of your Anxiety Spirals starts to spin.
Let’s TRUST in our ability to create safety in ourselves by being the Creatives we are meant to be.
Together, we can support each other on our healing journeys.
Together, we can be the Firefighting, Creative Selves we are meant to be.
The Firefighting, Creative Genius in me honors & respects the Firefighting, Creative Genius in each of you.
Marisa
⭐️ Remember, we don’t have to figure everything out, all alone. ⭐️
We can find solutions, together!
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