Creativity and Spirituality: the Enduring Path

The Shadow Land of the Human Psyche is Grist for the Artist's Mill: Don't Be Afraid to Use It

I sent my Soul through the Invisible

Some Letter of that After-Life to spell

And by and by my Soul returned to me

And answer’d ‘I myself am Heav’n and Hell.’

—Omar Khayyam, Sufi poet

As the poem by Omar Khayyam suggests, our power as human beings comes from the blending of the light and dark, the gentle and powerful. Power can be used to create or destroy. Destruction can be seen as positive or negative. Darkness can be terrifying or magnificent.

Your deeper self knows that creating is a constant dance between heaven and hell, yin and yang, intuitive and rational, head and gut and heart, and in that dance there is no right and wrong, no like and dislike; there is simply being and dancing the passionate dance. It is this shadow world of the human psyche that becomes the grist for the artist’s mill...

Your Darkside Is a Powerful Part of Your Creativity

Darkside has nothing to do with evil or morality.
It has nothing to do with ethics or lack thereof. Darkside is a label attached to psychological material that lies in the shadows of consciousness and even deeper, buried in the unconscious. Your darkside material holds some of the most fertile ground for your creative expression.

You can call the darkside by a variety of names, including shadow material or disowned material, which means those parts of self that the Inner Critic, deeming them unsuitable for the face that you show to the world, has shunted off into the shadows. In so doing, the Inner Critic has forced you to “disown” what could be the truest part of you. For your disowned, shadow or dark side holds some of the most vital parts of what makes you you. In this light, then, you might call your darkside or shadow material your True Self.

Don't forget to get down and dirty sometimes!
This True Self holds a lot of your instinctive, primal material; it is the part of you that Clarissa Estes says has been “starched out.” It is the part of you that knows your creativity is the most passionate part of yourself. It is the part of you that knows how to get down and dirty, the part that has no interest in merely surviving but instead wants you to flourish like a rose bush flowering with mad abandon. It is the part of you that isn’t afraid to claim your body and the passions that lie within.

"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious." ~ Carl Jung

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The Shadow Land of the Human Psyche is Grist for the Artist's Mill: Don't Be Afraid to Use It

Your Darkside Is a Powerful Part of Your Creativity