Creative Impulse to Manifestation

The audio below can also be found on Awareness at Play podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Hello, In this episode I’m going to talk about the steps of the Creative Impulse, going from nothing but potential to making or doing something. And I’ll talk about what it takes to support this process so we get more comfortable and adept with it, and therefore bring our ideas to life with ease. 

I want to make clear I’m not just talking about art. Everything we do follows this process. This is a life thing that applies to everyone, not just poets and dancers. It could apply to housework, business, relating to people, sports, hobbies….any of our labors and pastimes. 

Most of the time these steps happen so quickly we couldn’t possibly pay attention to it. It’s like hearing. There’s a fascinating chain reaction with many steps that happens when sound reaches our ears and ends up being interpreted, but it’s not something we need to understand or pay attention to. 

Knowing about the creative impulse process can help us recognize that each thing we do requires a little spark, a little gumption. We can be encouraged to know that when creativity isn’t moving or we are having a hard time getting ourselves to act on anything, there is a reason for it that has nothing to do with us being lacking. 

Moving forward with creativity can be scary. 

When my students join my painting class they have to overcome a list of fears to even make it to the room the first time. I know they are already brave people to even be there. Many of them have waited many years if not decades to step up and try painting. I respect that they’ve gone through all these hurdles I’m going to mention here. 

There are steps to the Creative Process. They take place on the road to making or doing something, and rarely do we even know they are happening. 

It begins with a Creative Impulse. Whether we’re making or doing, all our activities start with possibility or potential, and then something sparks. 

I use the metaphor of combustion to illustrate this spark. In actual combustion you start with oxygen and a fuel source, and then it takes a spark at a high temperature to ignite it, to cause a reaction that makes fire. With creativity our life and our aliveness is our fuel and awareness is our oxygen, and we just need a little spark, which is our willingness to believe that a spark is there. That’s all. That mustard seed of willingness ignites our creativity.  

I’m an art teacher and an artist so I see and feel these sparks flying all the time. Sometimes it’s like fireworks and others it’s a few smoldering embers in the night, but it surrounds me and I get to notice the different aspects of it. 

As you listen to these steps of the Creative Process, notice how each step requires a little more leaning in to a sense of self that’s bigger than we’ve lived it so far. A little more than we’ve taken it to be. A little less counting on the old ruts of our habits and fears. 

Going forward requires some qualities that we possess. The spark of willingness first shows up as Curiosity. 

a. Curiosity is wonder, interest, inquiry, openness to experience. You could call it a desire for more awareness. Just having that yearning is already expanding our consciousness. It’s the spiritual engine of the process. [In some circles they say all yearning is the yearning for God. You can unpack that if you want.]

There have been Harvard studies about creativity that show that Curiosity or openness to experience is the number one factor in determining creative accomplishment. 

Curiosity is wide-eyed and fascinated. There’s a keenest or appetite for experience. 

Curiosity is like the Big Bang of your project. It’s the impetus for bringing something to life. And it’s pretty simple. It’s just a questioning, as in what’s going on here? What’s this about? What can I open to? 

b. Aspiration. It’s a recognition of something more, that expanding our curiosity might lead to something. There are no ideas yet, just sense that it’s feasible that we could express in our own unique way how our curiosity affected us. 

Aspiration requires a sense of possibility, an expectation or assumption that our expression could happen. There’s a sense of promise. It’s a, “Yeah, I could do something with this maybe.”

I notice that it’s a big deal for some of my students to assume they could tackle a particular thing that interests them. On some level aspiration is guts. It begins with a little hope, a little sense of assurance. It gains momentum if it’s encouraged. 

The old definition of aspire derives from: To rise up, to mount, to soar. I picture aspiration as reaching out or stretching.

c.  Imagination. We allow our aspiration to open us to our intuition, our insight, our vision. In other words, our Higher Power. The more open we are to this inner arising, the more we can imagine, and the more ideas flow. 

This takes some trust that within us there is a source of good ideas. At least good enough to take a look at. Without this trust there can be second guessing or just flat out denial that our ideas are worth glancing at. 

When we do trust enough that we have a source from which ideas can arise, this can be an enormously fun part of the process. It depends on how willing we are to entertain a wide spectrum of ideas. The more we’re open to anything from good ideas to stupid and weird ideas, the more fun we can have.

People who are really good at imagining have a deep trust in the breadth and scope of their source. They can see farther because they believe there’s a lot to see, a lot coming from their source. 

I have students that labor with great stress to come up with an idea for a next painting and some who have files of a 100 things they want to paint and think about new ideas all the time. It’s all fine, because we either already trust or we can grow trust and cultivate intuition.

d. Agency Capacity to act on an idea. We could call it will. Let’s leave aside controversy about free will and god’s will and stay with the higher power idea. Our aliveness has power and energy to do and make things happen, to manifest. 

No matter how dynamic our imagination is, to make an idea come to life is going from stasis to doing, and it is a transition. (Many people find it a giant chasm.)

Someone in our WAN workshop this week said, “Oh this is the one that gets me”. And everyone nodded. I told them as an teacher I see people having to find courage with agency, but also with each one of these steps. This one gets a lot of play time because it’s the one we recognize as showing on the outside. 

 We call it putting our money where our mouth is, and what’s at stake is a self-image. Doing could make us a hero and not doing could make us a couch potato. There are a long list of reasons why agency trips us up, involving self-esteem and fear of being seen, but that’s for another time. Here I’m pointing out the most interesting part to me. Something farther below the surface.

Agency is the movement from inertia to motion. We are taking our idea from the fast-moving, all-encompassing imagination to the limited and bound real world. We aren’t wrong to feel a real sense of “uh oh” or “oh boy” because we carry an innate sense of how slow and solid things get when they move from the mental to the physical. Our wild and free imagination has to be corralled and tamed and made solid. 

Also, our ideas go from the seemingly known (our interesting image in our head) to the unknown. We know we will lose the purity our pet idea to whatever unfamiliar new thing it will become. It’s a realization of being out of control.

These aren’t conscious ponderings going on, these are innate instincts. To think that our “lack of will power” is what’s failing us here is not trusting that we are just having  impulses that are natural and human. Our whole system feels the resistance or slow down when we  get to this point. We feel the friction of mental transforming to physical. This resistant to bringing ideas to life is a challenge until we train ourselves to not freak out at these slow-down points.

e. Resourcefulness This is where we act on the question, what do we need to make this happen? It’s reaching outside us or inside ourselves for sources. We are reaching into and pulling from a source. We are re-sourcing things. We get supplies and we transform them or we get tools and use them to transform other things. 

We have to have an awareness of the abundance in ourselves and the outer world to recognize that they are both full of possible raw materials. Tools and supplies.

A dancer needs moves and muscles. A painter needs art supplies and a subject. Poets need words and ideas. Cooks need food and recipes. Housekeepers need cleaning supplies and a plan. 

In ourselves we have to believe ourselves capable of devising ways and means to use our tools and supplies. We have to believe in our faculties of planning, ingenuity and competency.  

We also might have to research. This broadens our range of knowing what’s out there, or what’s in inside us. We stretch our terms of reference and widen our latitude. 

We might have to connect and collaborate with either other people or their ideas or tools they’ve made. This is the first step where we are now co-operating and participating with others and the world outside us.

d. Make. We cooperate with all the exciting things your mind and the supplies and tools are already doing ,and MAKE OUR IMAGINATION LIVE. We embody or manifest something. It’s happening naturally with those other steps under our belt. There’s barely anything to this part when we’ve been brave enough to get this far. 

What does it take to support this process? 

We have to cultivate trust in our inner sources, the higher power we all have.  And if we run up against roadblocks where trust isn’t possible, we address the blindspots that are keeping us stuck there. 

Opening our eyes to blindspots is not a small thing, and cultivating trust in our source takes practice. That work can go deep and give ever-expanding rewards beyond the thing we’re making and doing now. Applying courage and awareness to one thing gives us those qualities in all things. Getting help from others with these life skills helps immensely. 

Once we learn to trust the process, we get to enjoy the journey. The creative impulse is naturally sparking everyday. We get to ride through those steps with less doubt and slow-downs. We get to let our imagination live and watch how it inspires others to do the same.