are you?
4 minute read
I wanted to offer you something practical this week.
It's been two months since I sent out an email saying that I had finished writing The Life Compass. In that time, outside of my private practice, I haven't stopped rewriting.
It's now been four months in total, of a project that I assumed was only going to take a couple of weeks, and I'm still not finished.
To those of you who have been waiting patiently for your copy, my apologies. It will arrive when it is ready.
There is a lesson in this that I wanted to share about creativity and life.
I do believe it's a good thing to have a plan and that as far as possible sticking to it without changing direction. However, in the creation of things and life, I believe another principle holds true, and that is, there are layers of expression and intelligence that go far beyond those we are conscious of.
I believe I've mentioned before that in writing this book, it is almost as if the book has taken over, and that my role is simply to keep re-expressing the concepts it contains until they come out in the right order, or more accurately, one of the right orders. I also believe that there are multiple versions of this book that could be written, and that the end result will be one of them. It might not be the absolute best - to pursue that would be to fall for the trap of perfectionism - but it will be good enough.
But the thing is, the only way I will discover what the quality of good enough is, will be when I experience it as such. In other words, I won't know that the book is finished until I read it through and know that it is finished. Insofar as my conscious mind might have had the plan to draw together some of the course notes from the revival program and piece them into place as the life compass, it wasn't aware of other layers of intelligence or expression beneath the surface. It was just the trigger that got me started.
This process leaves me to question how much of our true potential do we leave unexpressed and unrealised as the result of the imposition of our conscious and rational mind?
The first iteration of the book was okay. But it wasn't great. I knew that I could do better. If I had stopped at that point, though, rationalising the fact that it had already taken me four times as long as I had intended, where might I be now? For my own part, I know that I would have regretted not trying harder and not doing what I felt needed to be done.
In maintaining my relationship to that truth through the process of writing, much more has been revealed to me than I had anticipated I even knew. This is what I mean by saying that when we engage in living and creative we engage with a level of intelligence that is beyond the comprehension of our conscious mind, we enter into a relationship with something more. Whether you refer to that as personal unconscious, or collective unconscious, or source, or God, or Gods makes no difference to me. The truth is that whatever it is you are engaging with is greater than your conscious mind has the capacity to comprehend in totality.
It is to be in the unfolding mystery of becoming
It is to live creative.
But what is this for you?
What is your truth of these things behind my words?
What paths in life have you followed, perhaps believing them to be a simple detour, only to discover that they where the ones that shaped your life?
And how much agency did you retain in that process?
How many of the paths have you allowed yourself to follow was the result of convenience or comfort?
How many paths have you followed because you knew, deep inside, despite fair reason, that you had to?
How many have you followed out of love or desire?
How many out of fear or dread?
When it comes to what you are creating of your life right now, there are 3 questions I would like you to ask yourself:
