Beloved Work
Falling in love with what we create
Are you expecting what you create to fulfil you, while rationing how much of yourself you bring to it?
You have a deep well of desire to experience more: more life, more satisfaction, more fulfilment. Your creativity gives you somewhere to bring your curiosity, imagination, passion and all those unexpected parts of yourself that come alive when something truly engages you.
The Energy
Sometimes we begin creating with a fairly simple idea of what we are making and what we hope to get from it.
Then, somewhere in the making, what we are creating reveals something unexpected. And what it reveals calls more of us forward.
We become curious. We follow. We bring more of our imagination, skill, attention, play, knowledge and care. As more of us enters the relationship, more becomes possible within it.
The more fully we meet what we are creating, the more fully it becomes somewhere we can be met.
We may find ourselves engaged from depths we never intended to bring to the creation. We discover capacities, desires and parts of ourselves we hadn't expected to encounter there.
We fall in love with what we are creating because, through our relationship with it, we encounter more of who we long to become.
The Invitation
Beloved Work does not mean that creating is always easy or harmonious.
Something we love can challenge us, frustrate us and carry us into turbulent places. We may reach the limits of our skill, find that our original intentions no longer fit, or discover that what is emerging cannot be controlled into the shape we expected.
Our instinct can be to respond with more force: work harder, control the process more tightly, impose the outcome, perfect the technique.
Beloved Work offers another possibility: bring more of yourself.
Bring your curiosity. Your play. Your tenderness. Your intelligence. Your strangeness. Your humour. Your devotion. Bring the parts of yourself you love bringing into the world.
The challenge may not be asking you to overpower what is happening. It may be opening another place where more of you can enter the relationship.
A Way Through
Notice what you are trying to force, control or treat like a mechanical interaction, particularly where the creative process has begun to feel unsatisfying.
Instead of asking how you can make it produce what you want, ask:
What changes if I bring more of the parts of myself that I love into the creative process?
Let yourself meet what you are creating differently. Bring something you have been holding back. Follow what becomes more alive.
You may discover that what you were asking the creation to give you begins to emerge through the greater fullness of your participation.