6th Verse of the Tao – Living Creatively
The spirit that never dies
is called the mysterious feminine.
Although she becomes the whole universe,
her immaculate purity is never lost.
Although she assumes countless forms,
her true identity remains intact.The gateway to the mysterious female
is called the root of creation.Listen to her voice,
hear it echo through creation.
Without fail, she reveals her presence.
Without fail, she brings us to our own perfection.
Although it is invisible, it endures;
it will never end.~ Wayne Dyer version
Living Creatively
When I first read this verse I didn’t think it would be too hard for me to put it in action. I’ve always loved expressing my creativity, both in artistic ways and in working out ways to creatively solve a problem.
Wayne Dyer in his “Do The Tao Now” section of this verse encourages the reader to watch small babies and children to get back in touch with who we are at the source of ourselves.
Babies and children are less suppressed by society because they have had less time to have their true, creative selves pushed down and knocked about.
He also encourages us to think back to our own childhood and think of what we were like in our earliest years. What lit us up? What did we love doing? What was our natural character – before parenting, schooling and other societal influences had a chance to influence that.
I watch my own nieces and nephews and see such a spark of passionate independence and their beautifully creative ways of playing.
One of my nieces is 3 1/2 and she is just overflowing with imagination from the moment she wakes around 6am till she goes to bed around 8pm (or longer if she’s had a nap).
She creates whole worlds with a rug and a few stuffed toys. And she will jump to the next imaginary scenario in an instant, without any mourning for the last one. She is so totally in the moment, so vibrant with life that it’s just beautiful to watch.
And for now, everyone sees all those aspects of her as cute and fascinating – which they are! – but pretty soon she will enter kindergarten and then school, where she will be told that moving around the classroom whenever she wants is not allowed and that she needs to sit still and learn whatever the teacher decides she needs to learn.
Her natural instincts will then be obscured by what everyone else expects of her, and so her little personality will develop aspects to it that are not of the Tao, but of the 10,000 things.
And in many ways, I guess you could say “that’s life”. Because it is.
But I wonder how we, as a family and a society can help to nurture her instinctual behaviours, rather than telling her they are wrong?
I’ve done my best with my own daughter to help her balance out her instinctual, creative, imagination-filled mind, with the more practical attributes of resilience that will help her navigate this world.
Time will tell how that balance has panned out.
My childhood reflections
In the past 6 months or so I have been reflecting a lot more on my own childhood.
A dear friend of mine, who is a natural health practitioner, always had a theory that whatever we loved doing as a kid is what we should be doing in our job as an adult because that’s when we are most fulfilled.
I used to question this and think it was simplistic, but I now see more and more that if we tune into what we truly loved doing as a child, that we are able to get in touch with our true passions and purpose – and our soul-selves.
What did I love doing as a child and how does it relate to me now I’m 43?
I loved: questioning, learning, reading, climbing trees, wearing no shoes, bike riding, building tree huts and other cubby huts, exploring our old machinery sheds and under bridges and down creeks, creating BMX tracks and mini golf courses for the other kids of the town to use (my first entrepreneurial attempt, alongside my cousin), pouring over the classified section of the farming newspaper “The Weekly Times” with my cousin to see what type of poultry we thought we could buy, breed and sell, and basically thinking of any possible way of making money, listening to music, dancing (to “Flashdance”, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and “Young Talent Time”, and singing (singing and dancing mostly on my own!).
Some of these things came a bit later in my childhood. I don’t remember much before I was 3. From what I’ve been told, I was a baby who cried a lot and was a very active, very full-on toddler.
I think it’s very easy to take on the memories of other people though, especially when their memories of you are not favourable. In adulthood I’ve often met people who knew me as a toddler who exclaim how surprised they are that I turned out so well.
I always laughed at this. My “difficult baby/toddler” story is a bit of a legend in my family.
In hindsight, and with the knowledge I have now, I think I was probably dealing with quite a few food sensitivities that were making me uncomfortable and perhaps affecting my behaviour.
What I know for sure is I’ve always had a super-active, super-inquisitive mind, and before severe illness hit in my late teens/early 20s, I was as physically active as my mind was.
So what have I learned from this verse of the Tao?
Those of you in our FB group may have seen the excerpt of a poem I shared from Jewel’s autobiography Never Broken.
Her journey from an abusive childhood in a primitive rural area of Alaska, to living in her car in California, to hitting the big time is fascinating. But what came next was even moreso.
After realising the insidious influence her mother had had on her life, and choosing to break away from her and the cult that she’d inadvertently been drawn into, she found her own incredibly resilient ways of “deprogramming” from the beliefs that had been drummed into her.
One of her simple ways of doing so was starting to notice whether a belief, a thought, an emotion or behaviour was coming from her true self or the influence of others.
She called this process “self or other”, and it was a simple moment of reflection where she constantly looked inside herself to see whether the value, belief, thought etc it was her true, essential self speaking or whether it was what she had been “programmed” to think.
I think this is a really valuable exercise, and one that I’ve been practising for many years, as I imagine most of you have. We get to a certain stage of adulthood where we start to question whether we truly believe the things we say, think and feel or whether they are the result of other people’s influence on us.
Then it’s a matter of peeling back the layers to try to see our true, innate self underneath the other stuff.
From this 6th verse of the Tao, I’ve learned to keep peeling off those layers. To look at different aspects of myself as a child and remember what I felt like back then, and really use that to get in touch with my higher self.
I believe in many ways I’ve managed to stay in touch with that true self, by using writing, art, photography and such to express my creativity. But other parts of myself I still allow to be stifled because of my fear of what others may think of me.
I moulded myself into a “pleaser” and a “good girl” fairly early in my life. Obviously NOT in toddler years, as the above comments attest to, but at some point I decided it was more important to be approved of by others than to fully express my true self. It’s clear my true self, if my toddler years were any guage, was not acceptable to others, so I was smart enough to pick up on that and give the people what they wanted! š
I never completely lost that spirit of pushing boundaries, but I learned to do it in a way that did not offend people. When I think about it, nothing could really suppress the strong-willed, passionate side of me.
I’ve always been creative in getting my way in life, whether it be by using convincing argument, doing a qualitative Honours thesis in psychology when only one other person had done it before (and getting a High Distinction!), or choosing to take on living my passions and purpose via online platforms despite getting severe headaches from doing so (see this post on the electrosensitivity I live with).
It’s like my true inner self (the inner toddler!) could never truly give in to the wants and needs of others.
But I’m learning more and more to trust my inner voice, allowing me to reconnect with who I truly am at the soul level. And to live a life of continuous creating from that, regardless of the opinion of others around me.
As Jewel so eloquently puts it in her poem “The Infinite Ache” from her book Never Broken:
… dare this much
engage your creativity
let your mind daydream about
how you wish it to be
imagine the face of what is unborn
and have the courage to name it
don’t rushfor you are pregnant with yourself
a new you
and it has its own gestation period
because you cannot
force nature
only nurture it”
~ Jewel Kilcher, Never Broken
If you get a chance to read this full poem, do so. You won’t regret it. I’d highly recommend reading the whole book – there’s even a Deluxe Version I found out about where Jewel reads the poems and sings songs imbedded into the eBook!! (same price too!) As one person put it online, it’s the “perfect mix of memoir and self-help manual” (saw it once, couldn’t find it again to give an attribution!).
Recently when I was visiting back in my hometown of Navarre, I went walking in search of a tree to climb. I really just wanted to feel that lovely safe feeling of sitting in a tree again. Unfortunately most of the tress I used to climb have fallen down or are ina
ccessible now due to them growing so much.
But I did find a suitably low long eucalypt branch to climb up on and lay my head on. I can’t explain to you how peaceful I felt. I’ve written a bit of poetry about my love of tree climbing as a youngster. I might even share it sometime. But for now, here’s a photo of my tree that I took that warm, summer evening.
May you be getting some real value out of your own Tao journey. If this is the first blog post you’ve stumbled upon, please check out the related posts, especially the first one which explains how you can be part of this journey – My Tao Year 2016: A Journey You Can Join Me On.
Until next time
Keep Smiling
Louise xx