Is there anything more fulfilling than to allow our love to take form, come through us and be received with appreciation? The place where “our deepest gladness and the world’s hunger meet” as Bill Plotkin put it, or our “Dahrma”, in Sanskrit, that which we are here to bring, our unique expression of life. Once we have tasted it, there is no forgetting. We are enraptured by the delicious union of the personal and the universal working together in service! Discovering this experience had me hooked and devoted to living as close to it as possible. Ah- but the irony! The path of “birthing our gifts” can be as excruciating as it is ecstatic, and takes a lot of navigation.
How to define our gift? It is often very intimate to us, something we naturally do, things that our friends value us for, our most effortless contributions. Sometimes we discover it by being asked to serve in some way and “the gift” is called out of us. It’s a place where we can find ourselves feeling expansive, energized and supported, and at times-most challenged. Discovering these qualities or activities can be like first falling in love- new, fresh and simple. But we all know that the honeymoon doesn’t last forever. The moment we think we’ve figured it out, that “we’ve got it”, a process of fixation of identity begins and troubles follow. We begin to tighten around the idea of who we think we are: a therapist, a film maker or a dancer; an identity that now needs maintaining and can be used to avoid any internal sense of inadequacy or emptiness. In that state we forget the original joy of letting our love flow. I arrive there regularly in my work, bumping up against the constructs of my own mind that have to die in order for me to reconnect to reality. I have to become “nobody” again, to recover my curiosity and innocence of heart. I don’t have to abandon my skills or experience but I do have to give up a position to prove or defend something.
The ultimate challenge on the creative journey of self-actualization is meeting with our oldest of “friends”- the inner critic.
Most of us have some early memories of being “told off”, of receiving a blast of coldness from the one we loved and admired, signalling that we are not OK. That most likely happened when we were happily and simply being ourselves, allowing life to flow through us. It was quite a shock to the system. After receiving this message repeatedly from a few “significant others”, we begun to internalise it, along with the disapproving figure. He or she embodies a conglomeration of all the messages of how we “should” or “should not” be in order to be loved or accepted. The content changes and evolves as we move through stages and circumstances of life but the fundamental brief is the same: we are not OK as we are. The critic believes that it’s doing us a favour, protecting us from outside rejection, by serving it internally first. This character can be seriously threatened by our desire to let life flow through us freely and gets very activated in the process of our coming forward with our precious gifts.
The first step in confronting the judge is to recognize that you are “under attack”. It usually happens so quickly and forcefully that we mostly get the effect of it, not the activity, ending up in a pile on the floor before we can catch it. It takes some presence to recognise that you are actually being abused, which gives you a chance to feel the pain of the violation and extend compassion to yourself.
What happens in the moment of attack is that all our strength and actual life energy is usurped by the critic and the trick is to get it back. There are several ways of going about it but the recognition of the activity and that “the attacker was never you in the first place” is step one. This is an important and empowering work, very supportive in sharing what we love.
More could be said but for now I want to celebrate all of us women with our unique gifts and flavours. They are needed more than ever before. In fact we ARE the gifts and we can reflect that exquisite truth to each other.
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