Though you wouldn’t think so at first, creativity can lead you to the darkness within. When I say darkness I don’t just mean that dark source of intelligence where all things emerge, where the moon becomes the muse, where artists and dreamers go to find generative threads of their creation. I don’t just mean the kind of darkness that is the void, the emptiness where fullness is born.
I mean the darkness you want to keep hiding. Your particular heaviness, the parts of you kept in the shadows because it is hard to face, difficult to accept, and terrifying to feel. I mean your black night, the shadowy raven within that you keep hidden, caged, and tied down. And though you have rejected this part of you, let me clarify that you want it too. In fact, you are always wanting it, forever feeling its absence, your loneliness and therefore your incompletion.
Creativity can lead you to both types of darkness, one a prelude to the other. You see, when you let anything come out of you by giving your inner world creative expression, when there is no critic, no judge, no censor, then there is just the unmediated expression of your inner world. Little by little, bit by bit, as you continue to give outer manifestation to whatever arises from within (through writing, painting, dancing, sculpting, etc), then you eventually become the source. You become the beginning from which the river of your creativity streams, and when you yourself become the void, the place where all your opposites are born then you will come to witness your light and your darkness, your good and your bad, your sainthood and your sins.
So the simple act of bringing something out of nothing is a healing method that can release your dark somethings out of holding and create a whole, radiant and authentic you. Creativity heals by mending the split between what to hide and what to reveal, by uniting what is shameful and what is beautiful, making all of your expressions, good and bad, the manifestations of one holy source.
Once you finally free your shadow from the cage you keep it in, then you no longer have to hide anything. When you arrive at the darkness of the Source as well as the darkness of your shame, then you will finally experience the bright light of yourself shining and radiating out into the world, and that is a gift the entire planet is waiting for.
This article was first published in 2009 by Soulful Living.
© Copyright 2009 Adriana Attento. All Rights Reserved.
