Some time ago, I spent two years living on a Buddhist retreat center along the Central Coast of California. Being an architectural designer (and a third rate carpenter) I was there to rehabilitate the center, which needed a lot of loving care.
The place was located on 40 acres at the back of a long winding canyon and for much of the time, I was alone. The benefit of spending that much time alone was that I could clearly see that my mind was the one that was perceiving the world around me as either pleasurable or painful.
Even more interesting was what would happen on a bad day, where I found myself locked into my own thoughts and unable to relate with the world directly. It felt as though over the course of the day someone was slowly inflating a raft inside my cranium, a feeling of getting more and more constricted in the space behind my forehead.
When I noticed what was happening and was smart, I would go for a walk along the steep, half-mile driveway, pausing to watch the vultures circle in the waning afternoon light. When I allowed myself to relax in this way, I could feel the world around me come rushing back in, filling me up. My thoughts fell away, and my sense of creativity, possibility, wonder, and magic were all aligned again.
I tried to capture this once in a poem I called, “Sometimes I Crack.” In relation to this topic, here is the first stanza:
Sometimes I crack
and the hammer of a thousand lifetimes
descending on this pregnant point
pauses in midair
and the hole I’m driven into
instead becomes
a tunnel.
What is the relationship between creativity, karma, and creative insight? It is this: When we go into our heads and get stuck there, we feel separated from the world. In such moments our karma, the habitual energy feeding those imprisoning thoughts, is the driving force of our experience. And, in such moments, we don’t experience our lives as particularly creative.
But in my experience, the sense of being trapped allows us to savor and appreciate the feeling of being released.
Thanks to impermanence, our relationship with both our internal world and the external world is always changing. And sometimes, those karmically-driven patterns suddenly crack, release their grip on our experience, and allowing both the sensorial world and the primordial ground to come rushing back in, leaving us with the experience of creative insight.
The whole of creativity involves us expanding and contracting, like the changing shape of the shoreline with the the rising and falling tides. The discomfort of being trapped in one’s thoughts is often followed by the exhilaration of being liberated from them.
For the sake of your own creativity, try to love yourself no matter what you are thinking, feeling, or experiencing. Creativity is not a single thing, but a way of being where we learn to ride the the tides of change occurring both in us, around us, and in the magical space someplace in between.