“Only the unexpected is real.” Nisargadatta Maharaj

Did you ever notice how certain themes run through your life, rising up and falling away, only to appear again sometime later, maybe in a slightly different form?  For me, over the last while, it’s been about creativity, spontaneity, the flow of life which is unstructured and unrehearsed.

We had a great discussion about it one evening in my ‘Alchemy of Writing’ group. I’ve been offering to my students a vision of creativity as something that is innate and universal, because it is our true nature. It’s not something that belongs to anyone, and especially not to a privileged or special group of people. Creativity is how the whole universe emerges into form- over and over it demonstrates this spontaneous power of expression at the very heart of life.

When I really allow my heart to open to the sense of this vast field of creative energy, I realize that each one of us was born to discover ourselves through this process of free expression- to experience directly that who we are is not a fixed and static thing, but a flow of energy that is always new and dynamic.

As we explored this way of looking at things in my class, we realized that a lot of confusion happens when we equate creativity with skill. They are not the same. Skill is a learned thing, something acquired through practice and intention. We can practice creativity too, but only in the sense of learning how to open, to surrender to something that we can never control.  Rumi was pointing to this when he said, “The more skill you have, the further you are from what your deepest love wants.”

I heard something very close to this when I was listening to a coach called Michael Bungay Stanier recently. He spoke about the difference between good work and great work. He described good work as the work we do when we are inside the area of our competence, functioning consistently, and with confidence and surety.

Great work takes us into another universe. When we do great work we venture out into the unknown. We have no clue how it will turn out. There are no guarantees. We don‘t know what we are doing. There is often fear in this place, and a lot of aliveness and presence. But we keep going, because we have learned to trust something, even if we are not quite sure what it is.

I would describe great work as something that comes when we are living on our creative edge. I’m reminded of something that happened when I was in India, with my teacher, Swami Shyam. One day, a few hundred of us were all sitting together, listening to him and other learned teachers and scholars speak about life, oneness and consciousness. Right in the middle of someone’s talk, a small child from the audience wandered right out into the middle of the stage and dropped his diapers. Immediately the whole place dissolved into wild laughter, and the speaker was totally forgotten. And even after he resumed his speech, we all remained captivated by everything this tiny human was doing.

My teacher said something that day that I have never forgotten. “Just look,” he said, “how all of your love and attention naturally flows toward that small child. What does he know compared to the speaker? He has no skill of that kind at all. But his innocence, his spontaneity, that’s what we all love, more than anything, because that is our inner nature, our real self. There is no speaker on earth, no matter how famous, no matter how skilled, who can compete with a one year old child losing his pants on stage.”

What a mysterious thing to consider - that who you are when you are not trying to be anybody is the most beautiful way you could ever be. You at your most natural, most free, is the way your basic goodness and sanity will flow out into the world. What an amazing piece of good news. And what a radical departure from most of what we have been taught. It takes a great deal of courage to live life with that level of trust. What would it take for you to begin to trust yourself in that way?

with love
Shayla