Getting creative

Once upon a time creativity in yoga would have meant to me something about nifty sequencing or exploring unusual transitions between poses. Yep, I’m a vinyasa girl! Nowadays creativity is more about generating something for myself rather than being creative or artistic in my yoga practice. I’m exploring how to create more of what I need, to create new ways of feeling and perceiving. Does it sound too grandiose to claim I’m creating a new life, a new inner life perhaps?

Once my meditation was a pure mindfulness observation of how things are and my physical yoga was a cautious moving within my physical comfort zone, practising with a single teacher I felt familiar with.

It was very stabilising.

But increasingly I’ve felt that there’s too much ‘acceptance’ in this, it’s too much in the status quo. It was too confined by what was already obvious to me. Where was mindfulness going? How would I ever rise above my familiar daily concerns, with this repeated observation of what is? My practice habits seemed to reinforce my feeling of ‘stuckness’. How many lifetimes before I could reveal something beyond this surface experience?

This week one of my teachers (yes, now I have more than the one!) suggested to me that mindfulness was fantastic as a kind of starter practice to counter the overachieving mentality many students arrive with. But although she studied many years with Michael Stone, she latterly shifted her own practice, I think from a similar questioning as mine.

So now I’m trying to follow her suggestion and explore a different way of meditating, using imagery from the natural world and the feelings this evokes to more deliberately shift my state into something lighter, more expansive, connected, creative…. insert positive adjective here! It feels strange, transgressive almost, to do this after years of practising simple observation. It brings up all sorts of questions about self-worth and whether I’m deserving of such beautiful experiences as this might lead me towards. Am I really part of the natural world with my own cycles of energy, of growth, consolidation and digestion? Can I be radiant like the sun or full of the mysterious silvery beauty of the moon? Can I lift my hands and turn my face up to the horizon, with trust that there’s more for me just out of sight, where only my slender faith can carry me…

I want to write about faith, 
about the way the moon rises 
over cold snow, night after night, 
faithful even as it fades from fullness, 
slowly becoming that last curving and impossible 
sliver of light before the final darkness. 
But I have no faith myself, 
I refuse it the smallest entry. 
Let this then, my small poem, 
like a new moon, slender and barely open, 
be the first prayer that opens me to faith. 

David Whyte

I feel like this new moon: slender and barely open. But moons wax and wane in cycles, and really I’m feeling less stuck than I have done in years. I’m full of wonder at what might be. Yes, I sit with my doubts about my ability to create this for myself — but I’m more willing than ever to trust to nature, to trust that I am part of nature, that creativity is in my nature…

I am as yet feeling a little lost in this new exploration, but I have the moon to guide me.