The Power of Creative Energy

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by Evelyn C. Rysdyk, author of Shamanic Creativity, The Norse Shaman, and The Nepalese Shamanic Path

To be an aware person at this moment in time means experiencing feelings of despair, stress, and anxiety about the wider world. It seems that everywhere you turn, ever-more scary news about rising ocean levels, multiyear droughts, wildfires, melting glaciers, extreme weather, and unique new diseases dominates the headlines. The overwhelming, environmentally induced aspect of our collective distress has even been given a name: solastalgia.

All of us are suffering from this collective disorder, and our situation feels immense, overwhelming, and profoundly frightening. The effects can be isolating, giving you the feeling that you’re having to face the insurmountable alone or that, no matter what you do, your efforts won’t make a difference. Our current state of despair limits what solutions we can conceive. While we are in such a state, we simply cannot break through to the imaginative level of uniquely ingenious thinking that this time requires.

But there is hope.

To a shaman, everything is primarily energetic in nature. Energy is the armature on which physical reality is formed, and this energetic arena is where the shaman has always been a master. In shamanic terms, even the animating essence that we may call spirit or consciousness is part of that energetic landscape. This is the arena in which the shaman is master.

When any imbalance or illness occurs, it means that spiritual energy has fallen out of harmony. Indeed, a shaman’s work is primarily focused on the creation and maintenance of energetic harmony and balance. This might entail encouraging harmony and balance in a person for purposes of healing, among people in a local group to maintain tribal harmony, between different groups of people to negotiate harmony and preserve peace, and between people and the surrounding landscape to maintain a healthy environment in which all may flourish.

In their work, shamans work to increase that which is beneficial and to reduce that which is harmful, to return a healthy state of equilibrium.

Shamans also understand that by attending to the harmony and balance inside yourself, you are simultaneously engaged in transforming the entirety. It is why shamanic healers spend the lion’s share of their day attending to keeping balance and harmony inside their own lives. They have always understood what the new physics has postulated, which is that our universe functions like a hologram. In other words, even the smallest part of the whole holds all the information of the entirety. The microcosm of your self is both a manifestation of and a doorway to the macrocosm of All That Is.

The destructive illness from which our human community suffers requires healing in a similar manner. While all of nature is engaged in an ongoing cycle of creation and destruction, it’s clear that life’s energetic balance is now weighted far too heavily to the latter. We need to encourage and increase creative energy to balance our human collective’s destructive energy. In so doing, we will heal ourselves and our world.

Nature’s creative energy is what continually shapes and reshapes life so that it endures in the face of any circumstance or challenge. It gives a tree the ability to heave up a roadway with its roots, an endangered polar bear the ability to alter its ice-hunting methods so that it can hunt whales, and you and I the ability to find solutions when confronted with a problem. From the evolution that has occurred over many millennia to each year’s magical springtime renewal, creative energy is what produces life’s continuance.

As a product of nature’s creativity, you were also born to be a creator. As such, you were meant to engage with the creative energy that was wired into you as part of your birthright. The world needs all of us to reawaken our brilliant and uniquely ingenious creative minds. That’s why I wrote my book Shamanic Creativity.

Everyone’s creativity is being called forth to shift our collective into one that is willing to sustain and encourage life. The need for creative thinking and action is especially acute these days, faced as humanity is with climate change and other global challenges. In 1962, the British historian Arnold Toynbee recognized how crucial creativity is socially, noting that “to give a fair chance to potential creativity is a matter of life and death for any society.”

Integrating the forces of ordered structure and creative flow is a necessary process for healthy organisms and ecosystems. In a living body, the extremity of order produces death. Life must continue to evolve change and move. Stasis has no place. When native organisms are eradicated or replaced through human intervention to create more orderly landscapes, the ecosystem can collapse. On the other hand, unhampered growth of one single organism can be just as deadly.

Certainly, forces are continuing their destruction of our planet. Those forces have reshaped Earth for profit-focused motives perpetrated in the arrogant belief that the linear human mind is in some way capable of altering the exquisite balance of nature so that it serves a small group of humans at the expense of other life-forms. However, since our planetary ecology is an intricately organized closed system of living beings, there truly is no aspect that can be injured or removed without causing damage to the whole.

It’s the delicate balance between order and chaos that creates the sweet spot for life.

Inside us, we have the same opposing energies. We have the forces of order, which encompass our linear mind, our domesticated enculturation, the suppression of emotion, our desire for control and fear of losing it, and our desire for predictability. We also have our own inner wildness, the part of us that suffocates when confined to a box. This is what we need to restore and encourage. It is our nonlinear and unbound, primal creative energy, our emotions and our physicality, that are being called forth. Embracing the fullness of our being is part of being a creative person and that which can give birth to new, remarkable solutions for our world. We have never needed out-of-the-box holistic thinking and actions more than we do now. That is exactly where creativity can make all the difference.

Creative energy is a life-giving force that unbinds our imagination, supports our capacity for brilliant innovation, and aids in the implementation of unique, new solutions. It’s a kind of inherent superpower that engages aspects of us that are capable of incorporating the intelligence of body and soul as well as a spacious nonlinear mind. This energy is so powerful that tyrannical governments seek to restrain it by shutting down creative people. While these law-and-order, doctrine-following authorities are invested in oppressing anything that challenges the status quo, creative energy is ingenious. Creativity actively seeks new horizons. It cannot be bound. It is an energy that, like water, always finds a way to flow.

In my book, I share shamanic perspectives about what creative energy encompasses, how it works, how it is connected to your health and well-being, what interferes with creative flow, how you can enhance your native creative abilities, how to get unstuck, and how you can use the ancient methods of shamanism to transform your whole brain into a creative energy machine. The exercises throughout the book are some of the tools I have learned on my own path, which I’m certain will serve you, too.

Here’s a sample exercise from my book to help you tap into creative energy.

Tapping into the Creative Energy in and around You

Begin by finding a quiet space where you will not be disturbed. Sit down in a comfortable chair that allows your back to be straight with your feet on the floor.
With your hands folded gently in your lap, close your eyes and take a few moments to breathe. Allow your breaths to be both quiet and full, somewhat like the breaths of the deep sleep state.
As you begin to more fully relax, notice that your breath originates in the center of your chest. Imagine a light there that grows brighter with every breath that you take.
As this light grows brighter, imagine it expanding to fill your entire body—growing ever brighter. Your radiant body is an expression of our cosmos of creative energy. The powerful creative force of exploding novae seeded the cosmos with all of the elements to make you and the body of our beautiful planet. All of the iron, calcium, oxygen, and other elements are gifts from the stars. This gift is what you inhabit while you are embodied. You are a divinely radiant, creative being wrapped in star stuff!
Allow your radiant energy to expand so that your physical body is enfolded in light. Your spirit—your light—completely surrounds your body. This is your true state of being. Your entire being is full, rich, radiant, beautiful, and alive with creative energy!
While continuing to breathe, notice how your creative radiance is connected to the creative radiance of the Earth. Your body moves within the atmosphere of our planet. You live by swimming through her air with your feet touching her body. Your body is held by your light and is always cradled by the Earth. Her creativity is also yours.
Allow yourself to reach out even farther and feel how the sun’s creative, life-sustaining warmth embraces the Earth as she embraces you. Allow all your senses to be fully enlivened by this nurturance. You are a magnificently embodied aspect of the creative energy that flows throughout All That Is. You were created to be a creator in concert with Mother Earth.
Breathe in the depth of these creative connections between you, the cosmos, and our beautiful world and allow it to bring you to a peaceful and fully enlivened state of being. Allow yourself to feel completely and deeply peaceful in this awareness.
When you feel full of this experience, clasp your folded hands tightly together. As you are doing this, recall the sensations of being fully enlivened and nurtured by the creative energy that flows throughout the cosmos. Whenever you wish, you will be able to attain this feeling again by repeating this symbolic gesture with your hands.
Now, gently release your hands and allow yourself to slowly return your attention to the room in which you are sitting. Take a full, deep, sighing breath and gently open your eyes.

When you feel ready, you may wish to make notes about what you experienced while doing this meditation. Take time to record all that you felt, saw, and heard.

If you experienced difficulty visualizing or feeling the light at your heart center, don’t worry. Sometimes it can take some time to move the consciousness down into the body and into the heart. This is especially true when we are used to being in our heads or being out of our body as a protection. Those wonderfully ingenious strategies, which may have helped us survive when we were younger, can interfere with us being able to thrive as an adult. However, with practice, you will be able to move through to a heart-centered experience.

If, on the other hand, you feel foggy, confused, or lightheaded after this meditation, it means you need to practice grounding yourself. Some easy ways include:

Eating a light snack
Spending time outdoors, especially in a natural setting—in the woods or by the ocean or a river
Doing something with your hands—making something, touching stones, playing in water or digging in dirt
Sitting on the ground with your back up against a tree
Breathing with a focus on the soles of your feet, feel them touching the inside of your shoes or the ground
Imagining roots coming from the bottom of your feet into the ground to firmly tie you to the core of Earth
Listening to whatever music makes you want to dance and then getting up and dancing!

Above all, please be gentle with yourself, especially if you feel like your experience with the meditation feels difficult. You are in the process of transforming old, outmoded ideas about creativity and yourself. This procedure is something that is best done with a loving patience and a gentle persistence. Over time, a kind of softening begins to occur that gradually allows your new way of being to ease into existence.