SUMMONING THE MUSE

The Muse has been a little elusive for me lately. When I sit down to try and write, nothing shows up. Worse yet, when I simply consider sitting at my computer and thinking about the process of doing this, I feel a lot of resistance.

In the past, I’ve moved through this resistance by simply “doing it anyway”. Okay, I’ve got some resistance, what there is for me to do is sit here and just start writing. Eventually, something will come.

Lately though, that hasn’t felt like the path for me to take. Call it intuition, or spirit, or something else — it just hasn’t been gelling for me.

I’ve distinguished two things for me as I work with this.

The first is that I’ve been so filled with consumption, there’s been little room for my generation to show up. You’ve probably seen me write about my tendency towards gluttony, and all my consumption leaves me energetically bloated.

The more we consume the less space there is for generating.

Studies have shown this in children. The more TV they watch, the less creativity they tend to have available.

The muscle of our own creativity atrophies in the space of rampant consumption — there’s simply no need, use or space for that muscle to be exercised.

As I’ve engaged in the challenging work of releasing the things that I put in me, I notice that there’s more space. And, if I’m willing to sit in the space (which I find quite challenging), I notice that ideas start to show up.

There’s now a clearing in which my Muse can show up.

The second thing I’ve distinguished is that a lot of my response to this new space has been to resist what is showing up. The present moment has brought sadness, or heartbreak, or a feeling of boredom, or something else that I don’t want to feel.

My resistance is a bit sneaky. It sounds kind of like “I’m okay this is showing up, it’s fine that it’s here, but it will be nice when it leaves so that I can do what I need to do.”

It’s a halfway surrender.

I’m okay with the present moment, provided it eventually changes. That’s different than real surrender, which is more like “I accept that this present moment is all there is. I don’t need anything to change. I will sit here forever, if this is all that there is to come.”

That’s a tall order.

When I start to see this (thanks to the support of my gracious coach), I can actually start to drop in further, and let go of all pretensions that things will shift.

And what I notice then is that instead of waiting until the present shifts so I can start generating, I begin to simply generate as the present moment.

Until I surrender to the present moment, I’m unable to generate from it. Once I let go and simply be here, in all its “perfection” (said with just the slightest trace of irony), then I can start to generate in it.

In service of this practise, my stand today is “I Gift Myself Presence”.

What’s yours?