Okay so what’s next on the list? Yes, co-creation, creativity as a spiritual action. You know Mark Twain once said, “One thing I’ve learned is to only go where I’m invited.” And I’ve learned over the years that spirit, God, Goddess, All That Is, however you refer to that presence and energy, is very much like Mark Twain. Spirit only goes where spirit is invited. Force, force is not of God. God presents opportunities. God invites, God allows. And what really transforms creativity into a spiritual action, a conscious spiritual action, is when you’ve reached a point in life where it’s you’re true desire to invite God, Goddess, All That Is, and God’s representatives, your higher self, your soul into your creative process. I actually encourage you to actually do what I’m just telling you. Actually sometime talk to God and actually invite God into your creative process and say I know I could create to some extent as the Lone Ranger. I could do the John Wayne number but I would rather have us do it together. Invite spirit into your meditation. Invite spirit into different areas of your life where things aren’t flowing as well as they might. And there’s something very powerful about the power of permission. It’s a feminine energy. It creates space; it’s very powerful. The power of permission. I would ask you to actually give yourself permission to invite spirit into your co-creative activities and that will bring the conscious spiritual dimension to the creative process that you might be looking for.

So we talk about creativity a lot. There’s power in clarity, there’s great power in clarity and so I’d like us to have a working definition of creativity. I enter this talk with a tremendous amount of humility because there’s enough material in the outline for about a four day intensive and maybe we’ll have that someday. I’m aware that we won’t be able to cover everything, certainly not in any depth but there are certain areas that I’ll go into more. I think we can really propel ourselves if we come together on a definition. As you know this talk is being recorded, you don’t have to take notes to remember it. Some people find that when they take notes it helps them remember it so whatever works well for you. The key elements of a definition of creativity: 1: Initiative – For creativity to have any meaning it has to have something that’s on your own initiative. If it’s forced on you, it’s not the type of creativity I’m talking about. So the first clause in the definition would be on your own initiative. The next key element here is organizing your resources. What are your resources, your physical energy, your emotional energy, your thought energy, your possessions, matter, energy, space, time, and your relationships …? All of those are your resources. So on your own initiative, organizing your resources in a new way that expresses your values, that’s the third key word in the definition; that expresses your values better or more fully than the old way that your resources were organized. So let’s do that all again.

Creativity is on your own initiative, organizing your resources, both physical and metaphysical resources, matter, energy, space, time … in a new way that imbodies, expresses, amplifies your values, that which you desire most, that which you hold most dear. That which organizes your resources to express and reflect your values in a greater way than the old way that your resources were organized. So if the only thing you get out of this whole talk is that definition for creativity, I think it will be extremely valuable to you because that is not a pie in the sky definition, that is a definition that has some real punch. If you meditate on that definition it will almost guide you down the right river, down the right road. That’s what creativity is for our purposes here this morning. My assertion is that creativity is innate, that you are made in God’s image, God is creative, and you are creative.

Why spend a morning talking about it if it is innate? Because we live in a world where there are many forces that can block our flow. This starts very early in the ballgame. I’d like to spend the next part of the talk without getting too heavy, just to touch on it to free up our consciousness, just to begin to touch on that list you have on your outline, that middle section on things that can block the creative flow.

One of the biggies, if not the biggest block to the creative flow is what I call negative goals. Falling into the trap of negative goals. I need to amplify that to bring that to life. I need to introduce to you a principle, if you can stay with me here, the principle of positivity. The principle of positivity states that behind or prior to, or senior to any negative goal is a positive goal that creation is essentially positive. What that means is that if someone wants to avoid being sick, the only reason they want to avoid being sick is that at some level they believe being sick would keep them from something they really desire which is greater health. So behind the negative goal of avoiding being sick is a positive goal of amplifying and expressing health. The trap that human beings often get into is getting stuck in thinking that what they really want is to avoid being sick. But that’s not what they really want. What they really want is a greater experience of health. But if you live your life as though what you really want is to avoid being sick, or avoid feeling bad, you’re going to make very different choices than if you were in touch with the fact that what you really wanted to do was increase your health maximum. When you focus on negative goals more than seventeen seconds, you cut yourself off from the creative flow.

The purpose of being aware of a negative goal is to teach you something. It’s a very high contrast reality that we live in. If you become aware that you don’t want to become sick, become aware of that for about seventeen seconds and then pivot, okay, then what is it I do want? And then spend the rest of your life focusing on that. But if you go into the illusion that what you want to do is avoid being sick, whenever you start feeling not sick, your motivation to become healthy has evaporated. If you’re just one inch over the line of feeling sick and you don’t feel sick anymore, then what motivation do you have to pursue greater health? I know you know people who play that edge all the time.

I could spend the rest of the talk giving you the dangers of negative goal setting. For example, what if you think that what you want to do is avoid bankruptcy? What if you think what you want to do is avoid poverty? Well believe me, a person who’s living their life to avoid poverty is a different person that a person who is living their life exploring and amplifying and promoting God’s prosperity. You see things differently, you feel differently. You think differently, you make different decisions, you make different choices. I’m not suggesting you feel guilty or be in denial when you’re in a negative goal. What I’m suggesting is the opposite. Become acutely aware of when you’re trying to avoid something, when you’re trying to get rid of something, when you’re trying to push something away from you. Tell yourself "Lesson time, high contrast experience here." The more acutely I’m becoming aware of what I do not want, the more it can propel me into an intense desire and focus to that which I truly desire. Then, as you refocus on that, you reconnect with the creative flow. Very powerful principle, I recommend you spend some time thinking about the application of that. All you have to do is look in an area of your life where it’s not flowing for you and I guarantee you there’s negative goal setting going on there. You can go to the bank on it. Because energy follows thought. That ability to pivot from a negative goal to a positive goal, the more consistently you can do that, the faster your life will take off. You can really connect back into that energy.

Another trap is when we were very young, we learned from our parents and from our teachers that there were certain things that weren’t okay to talk about. It’s a very small leap from a child learning it’s not okay to talk about something to experiencing that it’s not okay to think about something. When you create that inner war with yourself with your inner process you start to evaluate it that way. It creates tremendous self-inhibition. Eventually it creates an estrangement from your inner life, your inner process. Obviously that shuts you off from your creative flow.

I don’t know about you, but when I was in school, I got A’s and I got rewarded and stroked when I came up with the right answer, not a right answer but the right answer. Very early in life we were programmed to look for one right answer. That cuts off creativity the minute you think you have the one right answer. That cuts it off because life is dynamic, it is synergistic, one thought builds on the next. There’s many ways to do things; there’s ways to combine ways of doing things. Rote memorization, getting locked in the left brain. A real block to the creative flow. The creative flow involves a resonance with the whole brain. Both right and left sides have their place and an over-emphasis on rote memorization sticks people into their left brain, blocks the creative flow.

In school, how much of the time were you acknowledged for regurgitating other people’s thoughts? You read a book and then you’re tested on what the author thought. It was probably pretty rare that you had a teacher that said “Okay, what did this person think, what did this person think and what do you think, why do you think that, and given that you think that, how could you apply that?” That didn’t happen a lot. You were rewarded, you were given A’s, you were given high SAT’s, and jobs with good salaries because you could come up with the one right answer, you were good with rote memorization and you could regurgitate other people’s thoughts. Society rewards you for this particular type of thinking, which is such a small part of what all thought is about.

This is a biggie, number six, you can star this one. Pressing feeling. If you are at war with your inner life, especially with your emotions, you will be cut off from the creative flow because creativity begins with desire. There’s no creativity without desire. Do you think that God got us all that is, created you because God had nothing better to do? NO! NO! God had an intense desire to express herself more fully and created you to co-create with you out of an incredibly strong desire to do that. The creative process isn’t launched willy nilly. There has to be an intense fire in the belly. If you’ve cut yourself off from one kind of feeling, you’ve cut yourself off from how to feel anything… including your passion, including the depths of your desire. It takes great courage to say “Hey, I’d rather feel the hurt and keep breathing, keep caring and keep dreaming than to become a cynical person and give up”. That takes courage and that certainly is a component of creativity. If you have issues with being able to be present in an accepting, loving way with your feeling nature, there’s no way around that, that’s an area you’re going to have to heal if you want to maximize your access to the creative flow. It can be done, believe me.

The next one on the list…how many times were you told “pay attention!”? How many times were you given the message don’t daydream? This is the only reality, this is the only thing that matters, this is the only thing that’s real. Don’t daydream. Well, that type of over-focused materialism definitely cuts you off from the creative flow because creativity is to a great extent an inside job. If creation is a cycle of creation and creative form, the amount of that cycle that is visible to the physical world is very small. A tremendous part of the creative process is metaphysical. It has to do with the creation of the space for the creation. And then there’s a tremendous part of the creative process that has to do with the release of matter, the release of the form. So if you’ve been taught don’t daydream, in other words, the physical plan is the only thing that’s real, you’re going to be hypnotized and cut yourself off from seventy to eighty per cent of the creative process.

Number eight. This is another one I would put a big star by. So many people are in the presence of mediocrity so much of the time that it becomes an unconscious expectation and standard for their own behavior. Think with me. Think about times in your life that you have been inspired to take life to the next level. I’ll bet you it had something to do with the catalytic presence of a person who embodied excellence to a great extent. You got the idea that you like that. If they can do that you can do that. Even if it wasn’t a conscious thought, somewhere in your subconscious it’s like “hey I like that, I can resonate with that, I understand that, I appreciate that, I value that, maybe that’s possible for me”.

One of the greatest cancers on a society is when a level of mediocrity, whether it’s a level of thinking, caring, ethics, morality, if any of these aspects of life settle to a least common denominator, settle to a level of mediocrity and people start assuming, “Well, I guess that’s life…” that’s extremely dangerous to your access to the creative flow because one of the greatest doorways to the creative flow is this energy of excellence. Holding you in a spirit of joy, not in a spirit of perfectionism but a spirit of joy and a love for spirit. To hold yourself to a high standard of conduct and to expect the people who populate your world to have the same level. When that starts to slip the cultural milieu starts to devolve to a point where it cannot support the energy of excellence. It cannot support the resonance with the creative flow.

The last one on the list – perfectionism, fear of failure, addiction to winning. Put a star by that one. Perfectionism has got to be one of the most hellish realms of existence. You’re constantly comparing your experience of yourself to some static image of perfection. It’s a no win situation because 99.9% of the time you fall short of that image and so you don’t feel good. Then if by chance you temporarily line up your reality to match that image you’re immediately petrified that in the next second it’s going to change. You know the funny thing is if you ever did get to that static state that would be hell. Imagine waking up in the morning and God telling you you have nothing more to learn? So it’s a big joke. Perfectionism will block creativity faster than anything; it’ll just slam it. It’ll take you right into that negative thing that we talked about. Fear of failure is self-evident. If you’re afraid of failing, first of all you probably won’t try, Secondly, if you do try, you fall into that trap number one of negative goal setting, you’re not wanting to fail, you’re not wanting to fail! Suddenly your life’s full of fear because you’re not wanting to fail. When what you really want to do is succeed, to embody the natural successful energy of spirit but you’ve forgotten that. You’ve cut yourself off from that because you think you don’t want to fail.

This is one that really affects the men in our culture, the last one there, addiction to winning. You know addiction to winning is really horrible. If you’re addicted to winning, you get to a point where you don’t even enjoy your wins anymore. It’s like being addicted to alcohol. You get to a point where you don’t really enjoy the alcohol anymore; it’s just a temporary distraction from your pain. Addiction to winning can really be an ugly thing because you can be winning and you’re losing. Now don’t get me wrong, I love to win but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about addiction to winning and that’s a very slippery one. You could be addicted to winning and not even know it. That’s when you’ve got to go pretty deep inside to flesh out there. Take a look at that. If you can free yourself up from being addicted to winning, there’s a whole new level of creativity that can come out for you and it’s really tied back into perfectionism.

I’m running out of time. I think what I’m gonna do is on the second service I’m gonna focus more on the latter part of my talk. How’s that for being creative? (Applause) Why don’t we just go back to that place for the second talk? You guys can set the resonance for the second group, see. If you want more detail on the second part, get the tape from the second service because I will go into more detail, or contact me. You would do me a favor if you would spend some time at the back table when you leave today. There are ample ways for us to stay in communication.

I would like to end my talk here by sharing a couple of quotes with you. One is from Martha Graham the famous dancer/choreographer. The second is from Pablo Picasso the famous Spanish painter and sculptor. From Martha Graham, "There is vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action. Because there is only one of you in all time this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist in any other medium, it will be lost, and the world will not have it. From Pablo Picasso, “My mother said to me, if you become a soldier you’ll end up as a general. If you become a monk you’ll end up as a pope. Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.” Thank you very much! (Applause)

What we found out from the first hour was that this is really a two-part talk. Some creativity burst through me, we’re going with the flow here so I’m just going to spend a brief amount of time on the first part of the talk, then spend the rest of the hour picking up on the middle of the outline. I would encourage you to get the tape of today because the tape will be two sided. I will design the talk so the talk stands on its own and the impact of it will be amplified greatly if you get the tape of the first hour as well. I’d like to begin the talk today by dedicating it to two people. One is a gentleman named Jim Leonard. I don’t know if Jim is even on this planet anymore but of all the people I’ve ever met, he had the clearest understanding of the nature of creativity and of the creative process. I’d like to salute him. Secondly, I’d like to dedicate this talk to my father who passed away three or four months ago. He was a very creative man and taught me quite a bit about the creative process without ever saying anything about the creative process. He taught by the way he thought, the way that he cared and the way that he lived. If you can join me in those two dedications I’d appreciate it.

I’d like to begin a bit differently than the first hour. I agreed to do both services yet I had this other agreement with myself and with spirit that I never give the same talk twice. So it’s interesting how it all worked out. Take a minute to take things off your lap, uncross your arms and legs, if you feel comfortable doing so just let your eyelids close down for a minute. (pause) Take just a moment to simply become aware of your breath, its location, it’s depth, it’s rhythm, it’s quality. Now very gently allow yourself to get in touch with how you would like to slightly alter any aspect of your breathing pattern so that your breathing pattern is more pleasurable for you and conducive to looking inward.

Now in a moment I’m going to ask you a question and this isn’t a question with one right answer. My question is like throwing a pebble into a pond. I just want you to notice the ripples in your mind. Be really easy with yourself and just notice what happens. Allow yourself to become aware of something you deeply desire. (Repeat) You might perceive a word or a seed or a sense or some combination of all of that. Whatever you perceive that’s fine. The next question pertains to whatever that desire is. What’s most important to you about that? (Repeat) Just notice whatever came up there. My next question pertains to whatever came up then. What’s most important to you about that? So take a deep breath, exhale, let go of your attention on that, come back to just being present with your breath and with your body. Take another deep breath. Let yourself come gently back into the room. When you’re ready you can gently open your eyes, your eyelids will open and you’ll be right back here in the room. Take all the time you need. If you feel a little spacey one thing you can do is gently move your fingers a little bit, move your toes a little bit. You’ll just gently come back into the room, back into your body. Come on back. (Repeat)

Thank you for coming along with me there because the beginning of creation, the beginning of creativity is the fire of desire and then clarifying the essence of that desire. The more we know the essence of what we desire the deeper our inner life, the closer we are to the core and the heart of God and our existence. People can want the same thing and have completely different experiences. Somebody might want this car and another person might want the same car. Because of the reasons they would want it or the essence of what that car is representing for them, that quality, their experiences could be completely different.

I’m going to ask you some questions. I don’t want you to answer them out loud but these are just for your consideration. By the way, the talk is being taped. Some people like to take notes anyway because it helps them stay connected but I just want you to know that the talk is also being taped. So … I wanted to ask you … do you allow yourself to desire? Or have you allowed yourself to become disconnected from your deep desires? Has some cynicism sunk in or have there been some hurts, maybe some disappointments, some rejections, some humiliations, some wounds of the heart that have just been so hurtful and unmanageable at the time that you shut down and you didn’t realize the bargain you were striking? When you shut that down you were also shutting down your connection to your love and to your desire. There are no right answers here but I just want to get you looking in a particular direction. Do you allow yourself to desire and do you allow yourself to passionately desire? Do you allow yourself to bring in the wisdom aspect and to clarify the essence of what you desire? For the essence of what you desire is never physical. Think about it. Think about anything that you want. It’s either metaphysical or physical. If it’s metaphysical there you are and if it’s physical ask yourself why do you want that and what’s most important to you about that? If you take that back far enough you’ll always find that the essence of your desires are metaphysical. That can be incredibly liberating news because that means there’s absolutely no power outside of you that can ever separate you from your essence of desire. Because the essence of your desire is metaphysical.

You want a beautiful house. Why do you want a beautiful house? Because the comfort that I feel for example. Well, what’s keeping you from resonating with that experience, that comfort right now? God gave us this tremendous capacity to remember and to imagine. One of the secrets about creativity is that creativity is an inside job. If you are waiting for the physical to change (and this is a good one) in order to give yourself permission to get in touch with the essence of your desire, don’t hold your breath. I’ll say that again, if you’re waiting for the physical to change so that you can get in touch with the essence of your desire, don’t hold your breath. Creation is an inside job; creation comes from the inside out. It begins by finding a vibration, an energy. Then that energy of being and of feeling moves outward into the physical and sets it in motion. So one of the secrets I can tell you about creativity is that if you’re waiting for the physical to change so that you can get in touch with the essence of your desire, I beg you, take yourself out of that prison. Give yourself permission to allow yourself to desire. That’s what’s so great about children before they hit about six. When they hit about six they start to get socialized but I would say about age three, four and five many children if they’ve been treated respectfully are extremely in touch with their desire. In fact one of the things I do when I’m counseling people to help them get back in touch with their desires is I ask them “When you were three to five years old what did your think about? What did you want to do? What did you like to do? Who did you like to be with? What did you like about being with them? What was important to you? Where did you naturally gravitate to in terms of where you put your attention and where you spent your time?” There are great clues there to doorways to your soul. And doorways to your own creativity.

So I strongly recommend you give yourself permission to desire, to desire passionately, to somehow or other work through the hurt and the disappointments that have closed down the heart so you can open up to that heart energy. That heart energy is another highly resonate point to the creative process. Give yourself the rigor of finding out what the essence of that creative desire is so you’re not living on the surface of yourself. Why do you want that house? Why do you want that car? Why do you want to take that class? Why do you want to spend time with him? Why do you want to spend time with her? Why do you want that dress? Go deeper. I guarantee you you’ll come out again but coming out will have such a different impact than if you were just out there all the time.

I know that you have some deep desires that you know about, that are still not flowing into your life, I know that but that’s not the whole story. So what’s the next word on there? It’s belief. Do you believe that you have a right to the essence of your desire, to experience it right now? Do you? Do you believe that you can experience it right now? Do you believe you can experience it easily right now or do you believe that it’s far away and difficult? Do you believe that you have to contort your personality or your physical plane reality into some bizarre position in order to experience some of that desire? Or do you believe that you can experience the essence of that desire right now? What you believe about those things makes a difference. It’s not just an intellectual exercise. What you believe about those things is a piece of the formula that cracks open the lock, the secret recipe of resonating with the creative flow. It’s not just desire it’s also what you believe. Deep, deep down, when you’re all alone, what do you believe? Do you believe that you can close your eyes and in 7 seconds, boom, be resonating with the energy of your deepest desires? Or do you believe that it’s 27 lifetimes down the road after you’ve paid your dues? What do you believe? It makes a difference.

The second word there is experiment . This has a lot to do with what we were singing about earlier. About having enough faith to step out and try things, to do things, to put yourself into the game. It’s such an obvious point but I can’t tell you how many hundreds of times in my professional life I’ve worked with people to help them and I couldn’t coach them because there was no player to coach. They were not in the game anymore. They were not giving life a chance to give back to them because they had stopped participating. They had stopped giving. They had stopped being in that flow of life. They were looking for a coach and I’d have to tell them I’m sorry, I have nobody to coach. The only way I can coach you is to encourage you to get on the playing field again, to give something a chance. I can’t tell you how many times, hundreds of times I’ve had people tell me “I’m not meeting anybody, I’m not meeting any new people.” And then I say, “Are you doing this? Are you doing this? Have you made this phone call? Have you contacted this person? Have you put it out there?” I can’t tell you how many people look dumbfounded. I can’t tell you how many people are just not in the game. They’re in fantasyland. They don’t really believe that they’re going to succeed. They’re sitting on the sidelines avoiding pain. Of course they’re getting what they’re avoiding because energy follows thought and to avoid pain you have to check out where the pain is all the time so you can avoid it. Therefor your reality is filled with pain that you’re trying to avoid. In fact, after awhile it gets so bad you don’t know who you are without the pain. It can really get a mess and they forgot that the whole reason they wanted to avoid the pain was because they wanted to feel good. But they forgot that their goal was to feel good and they got trapped into thinking that their goal was to avoid the pain. When you’re spending your life avoiding pain you’ve got to make sure to keep the pain around so you can avoid it. Otherwise you’d be out of a job and then who would you be? And that’s really scary. What a tangled web we weave.

So you gotta be in the game. If you’re going to win the game you’ve got to stay in the game. You have to be willing to try things, You have to be willing to fail and not have that wipe your sense of self-esteem out. You have to be willing to go “Hey, that worked okay here, this part I didn’t like, next time I think I’ll do it that way”. Doing this instead of doing something that doesn’t work out and saying to yourself “Oh that proves I’m a failure, I’ll just go back to the sidelines”. When you say to yourself "that just proves I’m a failure, who am I trying to kid, I’ll just go back to the sidelines, back to my Days of Our Lives and my Haagen Das. And people do that. And you know their life is about whether the supermarket still carries the right flavor, or whether Clinton is interrupting the soap opera. And this is big for people. People’s lives get shrunk. When you give up on your dreams, you’re not playing a big enough game to fully engage who you are and you start to feel empty. Then things like the flavor of the Haagen Das become really important because we’re tying to avoid the emptiness. So I’m encouraging you to get back on the playing field. You can’t win, you can’t learn, you can’t experience, you can’t get any real feedback if you don’t play. You learn from experience, and if you don’t play you can’t get any experience, then you’re just going to live through other people’s thoughts, other people’s words and then you’re really not going to know who you are and then it’s going to get really ugly.

We have desire, we have belief, we have experimentation and then the next word on that list is intending. This is so key in the creative process because God, Goddess, All That Is has given us such enormities of freedom that without defining your parameters a little bit it’s kind of chaotic.

When you intend something you focalize. Stay with me here. When you intend something you provide a point of focus. You become a focalizer for the presence, the love, the light the power of God to work in you and through you and as you expressing itself into the world. But if you’re intentions are nebulous, your thinking is sloppy, you can’t focus that beam of energy into anything that has any real power. So intending is very important and it only takes five or ten seconds. I have an exercise I call segment intending. You just divide your day up into segments that are natural segment breaks. At the beginning of the segment you just take ten seconds and declare your intention to yourself. For example, a segment would be coming in and listening to this talk and you would just take ten seconds and intend whatever you intend. Intend that this talk leads to a breakthrough in your experience, understanding and application of the creative flow in your life. Boom. That takes ten seconds, you release it and come right back in to being in present time. If you will take that ten seconds and practice segment intending, after a while your subconscious mind will get it. Will get it that you live intentionally. It’s amazing what can happen.

So let’s continue in our formula a little further. You’re desiring, you’re believing, you’re experimenting, you’re intending but you know what!? It’s still not enough. I’ve seen people that do all four of those things and still are miserable. Believe it or not I see this. Because there’s that last word on that line. Allowing. Allowing. Because once you put out all this good energy there’s a natural flow for all that good energy to alchemize and then come back to you. You have enough free will that if energetically, you may not even be conscious of this, you do not allow yourself to receive love. You do not allow yourself to receive the blessings that are your right. God will not force them upon you. They will hang out on the edge of your energy field for years and lifetimes, waiting for you to exercise your power of permission. I allow myself to receive. I love myself enough, I see myself as an individualized expression of God, Goddess, All That Is that I say that I love more than anything. So I love myself, who I am more than anything so it’s simply right and natural that I allow myself to receive. To do that there’s a price to pay and you have to give up anything that’s keeping you from forgiving yourself and other people.

For many of us it’s our own self that it’s the most difficult to forgive. We are into punishment. Somehow we got into the punishment game. Or for others it’s resentment of other people. I can tell you this from direct knowing, from direct experience every single little resentment that you have not released, that you have not transmuted into light, into forgiveness and eventually into gratitude is a stop to your full access to your creative flow because it interferes. There’s nobody outside you punishing you. You do it to yourself. You block yourself from receiving the blessings that are yours. So I urge you to do what you have to do. Nobody knows but you. Do whatever you have to do to get right with yourself that way. If there’s any area of resentment, either with yourself or others that you have not forgiven, that you can possibly think of, if you can get to the point where you can acknowledge what you’re feeling without judgement and you can actually forgive them, you can be right with yourself. Now to forgive doesn’t mean to hang around so they can do it again. To forgive means to give up all claim to punish. It’s not your job. There’s a balance in the universe that’s going on just fine without you taking that post.

Let’s go back to this alchemy, this formula. Desire, belief, getting in the game, living, intending and allowing. Now out of this groundwork there are many tips, there are many techniques that can amplify and magnify the process. I won’t have time to go into depth about them in this talk; however, there are ways to deepen your exploration into this material. One of the things I would commend to you is I made sure that on the back table I have a lot of things for you to pick up and ways for you to continue staying in communication with me. If there’s enough interest I might possibly return another time. Just touching on them briefly, I’ll just spend thirty seconds or so on each of these.

Your breathing pattern is a very powerful tuning mechanism to tune you into the life power, to tune you into the life force. Where you breathe, whether you breathe into your chest or your belly makes a difference. Whether you breathe through your mouth or your nose, the rate, the rhythm, the depth. This is an area that I commend to your study. It is very powerful. It affects brainwave patterns; it’s very powerful. Sleep patterns. Who said you have to sleep for eight straight hours? Who said that? I don’t see it as one of the commandments. Do you know that if you’re working on a creative project, if you will sleep for about five hours, wake up, work on the project for an hour and a half or two hours and go back to sleep for another two or three hours the psychic distance between the inner you and the outer you that you think you are will really diminish. The distance between the dimensions will really diminish. You’d be surprised by how even just changing your sleep patterns can change your access to your creative flow for awhile. Interrupting patterns in general and exposure to new stimuli. Habit, we’re creatures of habit and very often habit is the enemy of innovation. I urge you just to start with little things. If you always brush your teeth with your right hand, do it with your left hand. If you always drive home from work this way, drive home from work that other way. If you do something in this order all the time, trying doing it in this order. It’s well known in systems theory that as you interrupt patterns you create a possibility for some newness to emerge. I strongly recommend that.

The next one is a biggie. You may want to put a star by this one. The gratitude context. This begins with forgiveness like we talked about but don’t even get stuck in forgiveness, take it further. Take it further than just forgiving the situation or the other person. Get to the point where you can honestly feel grateful for that experience because it taught you something. Maybe it taught you what you don’t want but it taught you something. And if you can tune into the gratitude of what it taught you instead of focusing on the pain that gratitude context has incredible power for healing as well as creativity. We don’t have time to go into the details of brain food and nutrients but just suffice it to say that we are physical beings and paying attention to our biochemistry can make a huge difference. Getting out in nature, relaxation, that’s self-explanatory. Meditation, self-explanatory.

I just want to take about three minutes and talk about discovery writing and then we’ll finish. Discovery writing is the best method that I know of for being able to reliably tap into your creative flow. This is how you do it. You give yourself some time where you’re not going to be disturbed and you take out some paper. There’s three parts to discovery writing. The first part is stream of consciousness writing. You simply allow yourself for three to five minutes to write whatever thoughts are going through your head. As they’re going through your head you write them. No censoring, nothing, you just write them. That’s step one. You don’t have to do this all at one time but you can. Step two, is you do discovery writing on an innocuous topic. At the top of the page you write these words: 20 Things That Fly and you number from one to twenty. You have a maximum of three minutes to write down whatever comes to your mind to twenty things that fly. Bees, airplanes, time, whatever. Just keep writing. There are no right answers, there are no wrong answers, you’re just trying to fish for access to your creative flow. Then, the third step of discovery writing is you go through that same sequence except you do it on a topic that matters to you so for example, if you want to increase your income your would write down at the top of a page 20 Ways To Increase My Income. You would number from one to twenty, you would give yourself a maximum of three minutes and you would write down the first twenty things that come to your mind. Without censoring them, without putting any pressure on yourself that you have to do any of these things, giving yourself a directed exercise into the subconscious mind. If there’s a topic that’s important to you like twenty ways to increase your income, if you do that for 30 straight days you’ll have 600 ideas on how to increase your income. I guarantee that three, four or five of them will resonate with you, then you can expand them and if you feel like working on them you can. Discovery writing is by far the most powerful structure I’ve ever come across for allowing you access to tap in to the creative flow. It’s like the expression “The Ocean doesn’t care if you go to it with a thimbleful or a bucket”. There’s this ocean of creative flow. Our job is to turn from becoming a thimble to a bucket so we can have more, hold more and be more. I’ve never met anybody who was willing to persist with doing discovery writing on a subject matter for thirty days who did not have a breakthrough in that area of their life. The way we’re wired it just has to kind of be that way.

I know that in this time together we’ve just had time to scratch the surface of this question of how do we expand and open creativity. There’s a lot more depth there and we can round out the breadth of it by listening to the first hour where I went into detail on the first portion of that outline. I know I’ve probably stirred things up for you and that’s okay. I know this is a beginning. But it’s a good beginning. I appreciate you coming along with me on this journey because like I said, a coach has to have a player. I appreciate you hanging in there. I know some of the things are difficult to confront but there’s tremendous payoff, tremendous blessing from hanging through that process. The last thing I want to say is I wish you tremendous blessings as a church and I know you’re in transition, you’re in a creative process resonating with whoever is that next perfect leader / focal point for you. I said this to the first hour’s group too, I have a lot of confidence that you’re right there with that right energy to connect with whoever that right person is. So God bless you and thank you for having me. (Applause)

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