Tenzin Wangyal RinpocheAn Excerpt from Spontaneous Creativity
So how do we access our creative energy when we feel stuck? How can we rekindle inspiration? Even though we are inherently rich with positive qualities at our core, we may fail to recognize our inner resources. So how do we access our creative energy when we feel stuck? How can we rekindle inspiration?
Even though we are inherently rich with positive qualities at our core, we may fail to recognize our inner resources. How do we reconnect with the source? Awareness is the key. That means knowing ourselves intimately. Knowledge of our inner essence is not acquired through formal learning. It is not the accumulation of skill or facts. It consists of recognizing openness and being aware of it in any given moment. The open source of being becomes our refuge—support that is always available to us.
The path to accessing creativity and manifesting our positive qualities always comes back to openness. It is the ground, the beginning—not a step we can avoid. Since the natural openness of being is the source of creativity, whatever blocks us from experiencing a feeling of openness blocks our creativity and also our joy. In fact, it blocks all our positive qualities from arising. If you reflect on what is blocking your creativity at any given moment, you are likely to come up with a long list of obstacles: I don’t have enough time to do everything I’m supposed to do, never mind doing something creative. I’m too scattered. I have no privacy. I have bills to pay. After I get off work I don’t have any energy.
There are a few people I know who repeat like a mantra, I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I can’t do it. Send yourself a message like that often enough, and creativity doesn’t stand a chance.
There are so many possible blocks to living creatively, so many excuses for not taking action. Resolve one block and clear it off your list, and chances are, you will find another to replace it. Our lists are never-ending in this way. But the items on our lists are not the problem. The question to ask is not whatis blocking you, but who. Who is the one who is suffering? How you experience yourself, the identity you create, is the number-one block to accessing the source of creativity within.
Holding on to the sense of an I that is fixed and solid—and will be with you always—is one of the fundamental errors identified in the Bön and Buddhist traditions. We suffer not because of what is happening to us, but because of this I we identify with and cling to so tenaciously. This is the source of our suffering. This I is busy making up a story about how life is, and since human beings tend to have a negative bias, our stories seldom have a happy ending.
There is a way out, however. Through meditation practice we can look inward and explore the fixed I who suffers. When we do that, we come to see that this sense of I can only continue to exist because we maintain it with our thoughts and imagination. When we stop building up I in this way, it loosens its grip. We begin to feel a sense of openness. That narrowly focused self no longer controls our thoughts, no longer blocks access to inner space, to the creative source.
