The Creative Rites of Summer
On Soul Maturations and Riding the Edge of Risk
from our podcast, The Inner Circle
A podcast for when you're spiraling, wondering if you're doing it “right”, and you need someone to remind you that you're going to be okay and that lying naked on the earth, touching grass, going swimming, and reading poetry is a powerful option for when your existential perfectionism is being a raging b*tch.
Listen to the podcast here.
“Am I doing this right?” is the number one question I’ve heard over the years in my Vision Midwifery work. It’s a question I often ask myself sometimes, when I feel the fear of rejection blooming in my chest.
This question is often a signal that some part of what we’re doing, creating, destroying, cultivating, building, and unbuilding carries risk. We risk losing something—belonging, trust, friendship, material possessions, our ego, et cetera.
Go deeper with the Creative Rites in our 2.5 hour workshop on working with the four seasons of creative process and soul.
“Am I doing this right?” is a Summer question. A South question. Because in this question, we can feel the heat rising in our bodies. We can feel both the excitement and the embarassment. We can feel our pulse quicken. We can feel our radical aliveness coming online in ways that edge the space between what is comfortable and what is absolutely not.
This question grows our awareness, our discernment, and challenges our willingness to stay with the tension. Stay with the edges and the heat and the complexity. Stay with the grief. Touch the rim of our fear. This question challenges us to notice what will cost us something.
A mantra that has stayed with me throughout the last decade of pursuing my creative work is, “Profound beauty is (and will always) be found in the tension. I make it my work to seek it out and expose it—to expose beauty in all of it’s messy and inarticulate forms.”
And this, my friend, is what the invitation of Summer is.
It’s the embrace of the inarticulate. It’s allowing yourself to love your works-in-process. It’s finding eros is your pile of unfinisheds. It’s fielding off the automatic thoughts that tell you that everyone is going to leave, or that everyone hates it, or that no one understands what you’re doing.
It’s recognizing that sometimes, no matter how much trauma resolution work you have done, there may still be a lingering sensitivity to being abandoned or underestimated or made fun of. It’s recognizing that sometimes, no matter how many layers of the grief you’ve allowed yourself to feel, that the memory may still have more to say and might even leave you feeling frozen and needing a break.
Summer invites us to embrace the beautiful inarticulate nature of the body. The wildish. The scared. The frozen. The fighting. Summer shows us that none of these states mean that we aren’t able to keep growing up into ourselves and our voices and creations. None of these states are wrong to be in or feel. None of these states are indications that anything has gone awry. They are all part of being human. They are all part of the creative and the visionary process.
And the more deeply we can show ourselves grace when we feel that awkward wave of heat moving through our bodies, the more likely we can move through it successfully.
The Summer seasons of the soul asks…
Instead of spiraling on the question of whether you’re doing this right or not—or staying rigid in the idea that everything is going perfectly and there is no need or room for refinement and approval—can you get lower? Can you bring your body to the Earth? Can you all our system to rest on the Earth’s body and slow down a little?
The Summer seasons of the soul asks…
How deeply are you willing to actually, truly feel in your body the process that you’re moving through right now?
Do you really need more inputs? Do you really need another course or coach or book or podcast? Or is it time to allow your discomfort to be an activating force that moves your forward?
Where are you avoiding the eros of risk in your process? Where are you hiding from the potential of failure, rejection, loss? Each of these experiences are often thresholds / doorways that will take you deeper into your devotion, your vision, your soul maturity, and your capacity for your work.
Related
The Creative Rites of Spring (podcast episode)
