I am a creative junkie. I experience creativity as a delicious erotic energy moving through my body. I can’t get enough. This is how it works. If I have an idea coming in, it wakes me up in an aroused state early in the morning to complete its bidding. If I follow through, this ‘inner fire’ and highly pleasurable state will amplify. I can utilize this potent force and create, or put the pillow over my head, go back to sleep and crash and burn. It’s usually fifty fifty what I choose, but I’ve learned it pays to listen. I don’t experience creating as something I ‘do’ rather as an energy moving through me. It is my job to show up and listen and then take aligned action. I want to be in an intimate relationship with this force tingling through me all the time and I want to talk about it with anyone who will listen.

Creativity is sensual, whether you are baking a cake, or writing a report on insurance claims. Yes, even that. My point is that every single one of us knows the creative force intimately, even if we are not aware of it. It is the very same fire that fuels desire. When my creative life is on fire, you can often bet my sex life is too. In the Hindu practice this generative force that propels the universe forward is called Shakti. Creative energy is sexual energy and vice versa. It is just how it comes into form that changes. The creative force fuels creation, period. Important, yes?

The second chakra is known as the creative and sexual center. This chakra is located just below the belly button. I experience this energy center in the womb; a place where babies, new creations and consciousness itself gestate. Whether you identify as a male or female, with or without a physical womb, this energy center is equally important and holds potent creative potential. To awaken this creative vortex in yourself, simple honoring and meditation practices are a potent way to begin a relationship with the power of creation in you.

At the moment I am needing a dose of my own medicine. I am writing this article to keep my fires lit and care for my own vitality. Let’s just say it has been a long Winter in Oregon. This is for anyone who is needing to spice things up. Anyone who is feeling stuck, underwhelmed, grey and turned off. It is so easy in our current world to find ourselves strangers with what as children might have felt second nature. This is a list of what I do to turn up the heat on my creativity.

1.) Dance.

First things first, get hot. For me putting on some Shakira and a sport’s bra always spices things up. Move your body. Get sweaty. Get that Shakti flowing. Creativity is not in your mind, it is a literal energy moving through your body. Move your hips, let it rise through you. Shake it. Breathe it up from your root to your crown. Make spirals with your hips. You are doing more to get your juices flowing than you know.

2.) Listen..

Next I Listen. Creativity is always pouring through us if we are quiet and clear enough to hear. If you truly grow quiet and listen, you might hear the first words of your next recipe, novel or song. The important thing to do first is not to try and make sense of what you hear or see. Give the words or images time to take form. Allow. Allow for the quiet whisperings of your inner creator to speak freely without your ego hopping in and saying ‘but how much will I get for that?’ ‘What are you?’ ‘What will you give me?’ (I constantly struggle with this one). Then, write it down. The more you listen to this voice the stronger and clearer it becomes.

3.) Water.

This is an all the time tip that I need to take myself. Drink more water. Seriously, just do it. Take baths. Visit waterfalls. Water has everything to teach us about the way creativity moves through our bodies and the planet. It’s all about the flow baby.

4.) Believe.

Don’t listen to the voice telling you this is all for nothing.

Believe. Believing in your wild ideas and letting them have life and take form will uplift every pocket of your life, and I mean every dark cobwebby corner. The more you believe and take action, the stronger your creative energy will become. The creative force responds to presence, and action. It takes belief to take action. So take a leap of faith, and do it already. If you didn’t believe before, you will once you see your beautiful creation in form. If you need any more convincing, your cake in the oven won’t be the only thing cooking. (wink, wink)

5.) Charge your Creative Center.

Place your hands on your lower belly. For women this is your womb space, whether you have a physical womb or not. For men, this is also your energetic womb space. Place your hands there. Bring your attention to your breath. Keep your hands on your skin while you breathe into this space. You can begin to imagine that with each breath you are breathing more light down through your center and into your womb center. This space begins to fill with white light, buzzing radiance. Do this for five minutes each day. You are supercharging your creative power center. You will be breathing in energy, consciousness, and amplifying your creative charge. I often experience a tingling sensation in my womb that fills me with pleasure and purpose. (This practice is based on a SacredWomb meditation by Melanie Swan.)

6.) Play!

Many of us have felt the weight of survival, loss, and change this year. Grownupping is not for the faint of heart. Energetically speaking we have grown too dense. The answer is play! It is not easy to move from grownup important survival mind to play. This is one of the hardest ones for me. I think I’m turning into Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter lately just to get through the days with children fed and accounted for. Yet I must persist. Give yourself a five minute time limit if your mind says ‘No way I have too much to do’ which it will. Then think of your child self, what did you used to do to play? Run all crazy in an open field? Read a children’s book. Try rolling around on the ground for 30 seconds. As a young girl I loved to dress up. So in the spirit of play, when I’m really feeling serious, I put on my brightest lipstick, wildest earrings, maybe some fake glasses, dance around in front of the mirror for a few minutes then get to the momming and the laundry. Motherhood can feel a bit looser even at times more fun, once I have conjured this energy in myself. But first things first, this is your play. Own it.

7.) Seasons.

Remember that your creative life and your relationship life is not always meant to be in full blossom. Take a tip from the seasons of the year. Everything moves in cycles. When we allow for a full rest and release in our internal Winter season, the blossoms of Spring and the fruits of summer will be all the more luscious. For women, the menstrual cycle can bring great insight for an embodied map of the cycle of creation, and destruction and creation again.

Approaching our creative life force as a child to gently care for, not someone who owes us money, is a paradigm changer in our culture of lack. Caring for our creative energy is an act of love and devotion. When we show up to tend, stoke and keep the fire lit we are remembering our place as creators within creation. Creativity flows with abundance if we are willing to do the work, or play to open to her flow. Once you start down this path you will find your own rhythm and inspiration for how to tend this vital flow, but for now this will be a juicy start, or reboot for all of us needing a boost after a long Winter. For me, the most important thing to remember is that this is a sacred life force moving through me, and I must hold this with reverence. Perhaps I am learning to be a devotee rather than a junkie when it comes to the delicate process of creative cultivation. Caring for this life force, clearing what blocks it and sometimes nursing it back to health with presence, love and some booty shaking is not only necessary for our own health but the health of the collective. Be the channel for more creative juice on our planet. I hope these practices ignite, tend or stoke the creative fire in you.

‘Seeing the beauty in animals and plants is a form of love and longing; and we can see the animal, as we see the plant, patient and willing to come together and increase — not out of physical lust, not out of suffering, but bowing to necessities that are greater than lust and suffering and more powerful than will and resistance.

Oh that humans might humbly receive and earnestly bear this mystery that fills the earth down to the smallest thing, and feel it as part of life’s travail, instead of taking it lightly. If they could only be respectful of this fertility, which is undivided, whether in spiritual or physical form. For this spiritual creativity stems from the physical, derives from that erotic essence, and is but an airier, more delightful, more eternal iteration of its lush sensuality.’ - Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

A Testament

After being woken up at five in the morning by my friend creativity to write this article, I listened and wrote the thing quietly in the dark while my children slept on a blow up mattress at a beach house. Four days post writing I have felt all kinds of yummy. All the good feels came to call. I felt sexy, when I hadn’t the day before. I felt aligned, when I had been going through a time of depression. In my power, check. I can’t help but mention all the right tingles.. even still. Raising the vibes, clearing, listening, hearing, and following through with aligned action can create a momentum, a force to be reckoned with. This is the cyclical nature of creation, alive in our bodies, in the seasons and like pedals of a rose each layer growing in vibrancy. When the cycle is repeated it only grows in strength. Are you ready for the reckoning?

With Love,

Jamie

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