Remembering that God is my source, we are in the spiritual position of having an unlimited bank account. Most of us never consider how powerful the creator is. Instead we draw very limited amounts of the power available to us…we unconsciously set a limit on how much God can give us or help us. – Julia Cameron
LIMITS begin the chapter on ‘Recovering a Sense of Possibility’ in “The Artist’s Way” this week because if the Universe will only give us what we’re willing to settle for, and so much of the cultural programming is based on scarcity thinking, it’s no wonder the bar has been held low for so long. As Julia says “if we receive a gift beyond our imagining, we often send it back.”
“Conscious partnership in which we work along slowly and gradually, clearing away the wreckage of our negative patterning, clarifying the vision of what it is we want, learning to accept small pieces of that vision from whatever source and then, one day, presto. The vision seem to suddenly be in place” and we’ve got to run to catch the bus we prayed for.
So often times jealousy makes us feel like the abundance someone has access to came from the same account we’re using, and the reality is that we all have access to the same unlimited funds, it’s just our own consciousness that applies limits to how much of that unlimited supply we’re willing to believe we can have.
“If we learn to think of receiving God’s good as being an act of worship, we can begin to let go of having to sabotage ourselves.”
So often we judge what we’ve had access to as a measurement of what’s available to us, forgetting that our past is only a reflection of our previous level of awareness of our potential, not a direct reflection of it. Once we know better we can do better and the moment we start to see creativity as a spiritual issue, we can begin to accept that progress is made by leaps of faith.
“As each idea comes to us, we must in good faith clear away our inner barriers to acting on it and then, on an outer level, take the concrete steps necessary to trigger our synchronous good” Julia says and it reminds me of a lesson from an early mentor who was training in Gestalt therapy that has stuck with me ever since she shared it with me.
Imagine you’ve got a problem, represented by a finger that is pressed up against your forehead. The problem circles around the perimeter of your head, causing a disruption every time it gets back in front of you, in the centre of your forehead. Our choice point comes from changing our response to the finger when it shows up which moves it slightly further out than it was before, so it takes longer for the finger to trace around the perimeter of the head and each time we respond differently than before we move the finger further away so we can see it from a different vantage point. The benefit of this is that the further out the problem gets the better view we have of it and the more we can do with it, given our enhanced understanding of it.
FINDING THE RIVER is about reconnecting with the creative force within that frees us from external dependencies because we start to say yes to the flow of power and creativity from within instead of looking for it outside of ourselves. “As we begin to pry ourselves loose from our old self-concepts, we find that our new, emerging self may enjoy all sorts of bizarre adventures.”
Julia says that “as we come to trust and love our internal guide, we lose our fear of intimacy because we no longer confuse our intimate others with the higher power we are coming to know” and that pressure-relief does a world of good for all concerned.
THE VIRTUE TRAP is the way we let our image of our self define us to the point of resenting who we feel we must be in order to maintain the unbalanced relationships we’ve created in our lives.
Julia says “there are powerful payoffs to be found in staying stuck and deferring nurturing your sense of self. For many creatives, the belief that they must be nice and worry about what will happen with their friends, family, mate if they dare to do what they really want to constitutes a powerful reason for non-action.” And the resistance breeds resentment, regret and revenge as the reward.
“Virtuous to a fault, these trapped creatives have destroyed the true self, the self that didn’t meet with much approval as a child… The true self is a disturbing character, healthy and occasionally anarchistic, who knows how to play, how to say no to others and ‘yes’ to itself” which can be threatening to someone lacking healthy standards.
Modelling healthy standards in a world governed by FEAR, scarcity and limitation can be intimidating because so few people know how to meet us on solid ground at a higher altitude-type attitude, yet the difficulties of the climb will not compare to the views we get to have once we settle into our new-found higher vantage point so climb anyway; remember that False Emotion Appearing Real requires us to leave the present to live in a past or future that doesn’t exist. Call yourself present and remember to in-joy the journey.
FORBIDDEN JOYS and WISH LIST are exercises designed to liberate the trapped artist within and the tasks this week are designed to expand our sense of possibility so we can leave the mental trap of expectations we question our worthiness of enjoying. I’ll leave those for you to work through on your own time should you choose.
I’m learning a lot through doing these summaries each week, especially because I have also been putting together a PILOT Program to create a SPECIAL Practice to honour all of who and whose you are instead of just aspects of it. I’m basing it off key theories in FULLY COMMITTED: The Sacred Sojourn of NOW which is now available as an audioprogram on audible, amazon and itunes too! To learn more about that opportunity and how it will help you unlock possibilities in your life, check out the details here.
With love,
Laura JeH – Namaste
