Creativity & The Chakras

In this episode Dr. Sally and Dr. Jen explore the chakras and creativity. 

Transcript

 0:05  Sally describes the ‘nested concept’ of  evolution, transformation and creativity. We are made in the image of the Creatrix/ evolution and so we can access that creative identity. She describes how creativity integrates us, and is a fully embodied participation with the universe. Localized imagination is impotent without the left brain attributes of execution, manifestation and problem solving. Creativity is a bridge between the self, the other and the world. Creativity builds intimacy. She then describes how her Chakra model of creativity is ‘developmental’, an unfolding of potential over time, and resonates with both Maslow’s Hiearchy of needs, and the Spiral Dynamics stages model. Once the more basic needs are met, you can progress to others. She describes the chakra system, a 3000 years old map of human development that came out of India. These chakras are not medically distinguishable. We understand these as energetic centers in the body, symbolic but also active. You see the expression of the chakras through behaviour and motivations/drives. So this is not something you can see with a microscope, but you see it through evidence - of the embodied response to the world. The chakras are the ‘energetic anatomy’ of the subtle body, and how that translates into action. So if we're looking at creativity, we're going to look at how we can express and deploy that - through seven different motivations, which are developmental. If you are fully mastering your creativity, you're expressing it through all seven chakras at once. You don’t have to leave nay behind as you enlighten. They're all meaningful. And it's a matter of having the capacity to access more and more energetic flow. Sally then describes the root chakra at the base of the spine, concerned with safety, survival, security, home, belonging, grounding. At this level, you might be offering your creativity as a transaction. You might be doing it for a living. And you're spending your time honing your craft, developing the best skills you can, to keep producing something that benefits people.

 

14:35  Jen says Sally’s model makes us understand the full journey, and be receptive to times when we're not creating as much as we may want to. She describes how she dropped out of high school at 16. And was recovering from a cocaine addiction. And as part of that recovery, she went to community college. And this was the first time she’d ever been successful in school because her English professor became a mentor and reflected back to her her natural talent for writing. Something activated and she was aligned in her creativity, as a living force. That encouragement set her off on her creative writing journey.


 

 17:57 Sally says ‘activation’, in the language of India, is the Kundalini process of awakening which starts right in the Root Chakra and progresses upwards. She then describes the second or sacral chakra around the reproductive system. This chakra is related to sexuality. And that energy that is also deeply creative. It's interested in beauty and pleasure, and attracting partnership. She gives an example of the sexualizing of car design. Successful design is around allurement, beauty and sexuality. It's strongly aligned with the principles of aesthetics, harmony, symmetry, color, attraction. And that sells, so it still includes first chakra motivation, its business. It then also includes aesthetic, and deliberate manipulation of principles of design to attract. 21:44  Jen describes how she wrote her wife Iris some love letters from this place of being aligned in her passion for life, love, and her recovery. She was expressing herself from a place of authenticity for the first time. And it was the sacral chakra that was activating this creative abundance from attraction.  23:05  Sally then looks at the under-recognized third chakra at the solar plexus. It’s more about willpower, agency, confidence, finding the discipline to do the work. She describes how form meets function here. We need our world to work. It's not as sexy, or as aesthetic, but function is very important. But if it's including second chakra aesthetics then its at a whole different level of production. So at chakra three, we're really doing some service to the world to make it functional. And when it includes the other two chakras, it's even better.  26:10 Jen describes how her solar plexus woke up in that dark night of the soul of her breakdown. She was getting to know who she actually was, confronting the illusions that had ruled her inner world. That understanding would take years, and writing was a large part of how she came to understand that awakening. A flood of writing came through, and a lot of artistic self portraits. She wrote two books about Oneness and non-duality. The way our chakras open up and activate are not discrete levels. They're really practically intertwined with each other, and they engage with each other as we develop.  28:47  Sally describes her chakra openings through her different career choices , starting out as an art educator (skills based), then opening an art gallery (business), clothing and interior design (working with form and functional, space), etc. But her creative flow, kept deepening and changing, as her chakras began to activate the motivations changed. She then moved into creativity as therapy. She had a new need to explore deeper motivations. As she matured, her creativity started flowing in different directions, including healing. As her fourth heart chakra opened, her creative work was more about love and releasing trauma that's held in the body. The heart chakra is about finding our personal story that is expressed creatively, often through writing or art. So the way we deploy our creativity keeps evolving. So we're not just developing skill or creating a business, we're not just solving functional problems in the outside world, we're not concentrating just on beauty and allurement. We're concentrating more on revelation of our interior world, healing and connecting, self awareness.  33:23  Jen agrees that fourth chakra is all about an opening up connections and compassion. She describes how she went to Naropa University to study transpersonal eco psychology. And that is where her heart chakra opened - the relationship between mind and nature, heart and nature. This course helped her integrate those experiences she didn't understand conceptually. And her writing reflected the ecological bonds. At the fourth chakra her creativity and healing come face to face.  35:35  Sally adds that we begin to notice things like injustice. It's not just about us anymore, it's about starting to build a better world. So then we come into this fifth chakra, the throat - the narrowest part of the body, and it can easily be closed and silenced. When it's open, we start speaking not only our truth, but truth on behalf of others. Fifth chakra is about speaking truth and communicating. It's about full, authentic expression. And it's not only about us anymore. So it has more of a finely tuned morality and ethic. Propaganda can emminate from this chakra too, though, as all chakras come with a shadow element. She describes censorship in South Africa, where artists were actually banned. She explains why doing our own fourth healing work first is important. And how chakra capacity builds much needed resilience.  39:53 Jen agrees that taking this developmental view is important. And it's important to note there are shadows within each of these points of development, so that they don't get out of control, or take over our creative process. Jen describes how she started using her voice for the earth and animals. And that sometimes we even have to go back and revisit the same chakra, in order to have a deeper integration and healing. 42:37  Sally points out that as we mature so do the creative products that emerge from our body. They reflect the depths that we ourselves are at. She was noticing that as the groups she worked with created objects together, the participants were transforming. At that point, she began to ask ‘what’ was being activated for transformation. At the sixth chakra we start to play with altered states where our artmaking - of any kind, whether using words, images,  rhythm or gesture - can help us enter a meditative state as we create. Left and right brain are working together fluidly, we can begin to really enter the flow state. We've got a certain level of mastery, and we can begin to surrender. The ego steps out of the way, we enter a state of timelessness, as we do that art practice. The actual brain changes. ‘The dancer becomes the dance’. This is creativity as meditation. 47:06  Jen says creativity blossoms and matures. As we heal and develop, our light becomes brighter, more direct and clear. Jen describes how, as she continued on her creative journey, when she was doing her PhD, she did auto ethnography - a way of researching and writing about our lives in a personal way. Her third eye was activated, because her writing was about self awareness and insight, and seeing the big picture. 50:10   Sally says when her third eye started blooming, her creativity became a spiritual practice, as opposed to an educational or business career, or psychology, or alleviation of suffering. When she stepped into an Ashram, as a director, and started living in community, and teaching art as a meditative practice along with other things, she saw the overlay of the chakra system. She describes chakra seven at the crown of the head. You start experiencing inspiration, from a place that you can't even explain. She describes the various names for inspiration. We can channel whatever wants to move through us. She mentions actual entities that enter some human bodies, for example Seth (Jane Roberts) and Abraham (Esther Hicks). The ‘prophets’ of early times were able to access knowledge from beyond them too. There is a surrender of the ego. It's more about your ‘identity’ at Chakra seven – of Oneness. You give up your personal relative story that you healed at chakra four. And you begin to speak about a much bigger universal story.  59:32  Jen describes how she started writing her memoir when she was so ill. And it was creative writing that she had never really experienced before. It just came ‘through’ her. It was an amalgamation of all of those different chakras that were operating together. This was different writing than the scholarly writing that she had done in school. It was purposeful. It didn't ‘belong’ to her anymore. What happens is a level of play, and moving with ease within these points of development, and one becomes healthy, productive, in a generative way.  1:03:33   Sally says this human body is an instrument for an unfolding of potential as we mature. She’s mapping out the possibility of full integration of the creative gift, until it becomes a fractal identity, because we are expressing the Creatrix, and our evolutionary powers through our brain, our hands or feet, or heart or mind. The chakras model is light and playful, an easy way to understand the different deployments and motivations and needs as they unfold and mature. It is not a hierarchy, but a fluidity of structures. And when we become fully literate in the creative expressions, we can use any language, verbal, textual, visual gestural, we can use any chakra, and apply it selectively and carefully, and we become a master of the embodied creative instrument.  1:07:49  Jen says she’s feeling activated on all levels right now. And she needs to go create something. She then shares a poem Donna Markova. And she invites listeners to consider their own creative lives, what they are seeding, what is blossoming, and what is bearing fruit.