Clearing Your Creative Pathways

The Creative PathAuthors, artists and musicians all follow a creative path.

And so do those who decide to apply the creative process to other aspects of life.

Some paths meander gracefully downhill; some paths are strewn with debris and the going might get tough; some paths go up steep and dangerous rock faces. We have free will to help us choose which Creative Path we want to explore — and the experience we want to have on it.

When creativity comes our way too, we can make its passage easy or we can prevaricate and procrastinate. It’s amazing how creative we can be at doing everything else but what we most want to do.

When researching my book on how to allow creative sparks to arrive and give them smooth passage, I could find no real evidence as to how we receive and experience light bulb moments on request.  What I did was meditate, go into that quiet space  and allowed what I think of as “universal wisdom” to guide me.

What came amazed and astounded even me. It came in as a full vision, in a split second, and it seemed — and still seems to me —  to make absolute intuitive sense. I did not “make it up” in the conventional sense. It arrived as a perfect example of the process it describes.

Continue Reading →

Creative Living, Creative Practice Shortlink

What Is Meditation? By Orna Ross.

Inspiration Meditation by Orna Ross

Inspiration Meditation by Orna Ross. A Go Creative! Book.

Picasso once said: “A painting speaks for itself.  What is the use of giving explanations?”  The same is true of meditation. Like art, meditation is a doorway between our inner and outer worlds; between “reality”, the seemingly solid world that we can see, hear, smell, taste and touch and an elusive “something else” beneath, between and beyond what those five senses can grasp.

And, like art, meditation is its own explanation. The danger in analysing is that intellectual explanations can detract from our understanding of it.

Perhaps a description might offer us a better way in.  In the passage below, Jo Devereux, the narrator of my second novel, Before The Fall, is having a meditative experience . Jo has spent recent months immersed in a tangled family history of insanity and murder.  Now as she walks along a wild Irish beach, mired in misery and confusion, she is surprised to find another part of her mind interjecting into her troubles:

Stop it, I order myself. Stop thinking.  Feel the sun on your eyes and the breeze on your skin. Pull yourself out of your head, down into your body, the body that can’t be in tomorrow or yesterday but only here, where it is.  

Somehow, to my own surprise, I do it.  In the very middle of my trouble, I manage to let it go.  

And as I do, I feel a shift in perception that recomposes the scene before me, making everything in my sights seem more completely itself. The expanse of glistening sands, the knobbled fingers of rock jutting into the ocean, the sunlight pirouetting on the waves — each is more full of its own living presence than it was a moment ago.  Yet somehow, simultaneously, more connected to me. 

I kick off my shoes, I slip out of my clothes, I walk into the sea. My skin is porous, no longer a boundary. Joy surges: I am melting into the water and all the world.  The same molecules dance in me and in everything. 

Continue Reading →

Inspiration Meditation Shortlink

What is Creative Intelligence?

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life thinking it is stupid.” Albert Einstein.

1. What is Creative Intelligence?

By definition, the creative is unconventional, anarchic, flexible, open and difficult to pin down. What the concept of creative intelligence does is enable us to understand and apply this dimension of human life that can sometimes feel so erratic or nebulous.

We are all creating all the time — both consciously and unconsciously – but our understanding of how, and our confidence in the process, has been suppressed in us (see 6 & 7 below).

2. Can you give me a definition?

Human intelligence is the capacity for knowing and learning. Creative intelligence is a vital dimension of that capacity. It is fostered through understanding how the creative process works in human beings and how to apply it.

Continue Reading →

Creative Intelligence Shortlink