(saipua: the best flowers in the universe!)
Mums are a symbol of fidelity, lasting love and devotion. What potent flowers. What a beautiful message.
Everything worth doing requires devotion. Lasting love. Fidelity. It’s all constantly created.
If you’re feeling burdened, saddled with too much stress, unable to find your focus or otherwise feel blocked in a feedback loop of negativity that doesn’t seem to change, it’s worth taking a step back to see how you’re creating it.
Yes, creating it.
Nothing ‘s in your life for no reason.
Somehow it’s been created. I’ve seen it over and over again and I’ve lived it over and over again…
Have you?
Even if it’s hard to see, if you can see how you’re creating these walls in your own life, they can be un-created.
Mysterious, lingering blocks in life are built and held in place by US.
They manifest in over-thinking, paralysis of ideas, a lack of momentum, depression… feeling you’re “not enough.”
They rob the joy from life and suck the air out of a room.
You can’t simultaneously embrace and judge things. You can’t be creating and destroying at the same time. You can’t hold onto pain and still love simultaneously.
So what do you do when you’ve reached a block that feels like it won’t budge no matter how much you try to move it?
I’ve found that you really don’t always need to know why you’re blocked in order to keep moving forward… but when you see how you’ve been creating blocks and walls, you can stop making the causes that create them and hold them in place.
Just like every single time big clutter is cleared from life all sorts of chaos reveals itself, when you decide to go after those burning dreams, all kinds of stuff can come up. Stunning and challenging. The mirror of life gets amplified. Your heart is on the line.
You can move through and over and around the issues. Or, you can bail.
It’s often easier to bail. It’s the modern condition.
But…
Oh how true that is!!!
You want the greatness. The big love. The dream come to life.
Plus…
When you bail when things are hard, you miss the lesson and the grand Universe seems to give you the same situation over and again until you see that you are the situation.
You’re the creator of your life.
I’m creating my life, and if things are going wrong, I have to set them right. You, too. You’re the creator.
You have to be bigger than the blocks.
In feng shui, blocks are a form of stagnation. Things have built up that take us out of present time and leave us in environments and issues and situations where we aren’t present. We’re creating through the lens of fears. We’re holding onto piled up hurt that get’s triggered. All sorts of emotions and habits and stuff builds up…
The feeling of built up “stuff” can be so intense when you’re holding onto it that you’ll lash out and act irrationally, be destructive, quit on dreams or just become exasperated… all because you can’t get rid of the STUFF that’s presented itself.
Things like (I’ve seen all of them up close and personal)…
You get scathing criticism and suddenly the page you’re staring at is blank because you can’t write through fear. Those critical words linger between you and your self-expression.
A brutal argument leads to things said that linger and stand between you and you’re relationship. Suddenly you’re thinking and walking on eggshells instead of loving.
A business deal fails and you become careful so you never have to experience that feeling of failing again…So you’re not reaching and creating because you don’t want to be crushed.
It’s frustrating, it’s maddening, it’s heartbreaking and we all wonder why the sterotypes of crazy artists perpetuate themselves. It’s a big task to show up every day and pour yourself intimately into your life. It’s a lot of trust in the universe to wear your heart on your sleve and create with passion.
If you can see for yourself how you’re creating these situations where blocks and stresses and clutter CAN build up, you can stop creating them.
I know people who’ve decluttered their homes so radically that they just won’t accept clutter building up. They see it and immediately set to taking care of it before the few pages become a pile, then another pile.
Having tools to keep sweeping your own life clean of the stuff that builds up is so useful. The only place to start, though, is with the idea that you’ve somehow created what’s sitting in your space. You’re letting it linger. It’s your job to let it go. Even if it seems unfair, annoying, heavy and confusing.
Here are a few ways I’ve been my own worst-enemy-creative-block-creator, and how I’ve seen others do the same.
Tolerating things. Handle them. If you’re tolerating a horrible living situation, you’re a victim. If you’re tolerating your finances, you’re a victim. If you’re tolerating your career, you’re a victim. Victims are powerless and that’s a big block that’s an active choice.
The worst part about being a victim is that it’s easy to see how “other people are doing things” to you and make them the cause of the victimization. If you’re truly being mistreated, step away right now or you’ll perpetuate the cycle by staying.
You’re not a victim, so you might as well stop tolerating stuff you don’t want and saying that you have no other choice.
Swallowing poison. I get criticized daily. It’s part of putting stuff on the Internet. I stopped reading comments for a while because some can be… poison. I love your feedback and critique, but man, there are haters. There’s also a lot of anger that can come at you in a day. Lots of bad words, lots of big condemnations. Take from it what’s good. Don’t swallow the rest.
The only way I know to counteract this kind of poison is to literally throw more love into my life. More creativity. More self-care. More and more.
Living for validation. Validate yourself. It’s a big thing to sweat over what other people think in a world of social media. I can tell you that when I start creating stuff in hopes that you’ll like it or it “sounds cool” rather than feeling right, I stop wanting to write. If you’ve been looking for validation, you might be creating your own disappointment. And that’s a huge block. Connect to your life and create the things that set your life on fire.
Expecting things to stay the same. Things grow or they diminish. It’s all a function of the care, attention and creative energy you put behind them.
If you don’t show up for work, will your work stay the same? It’s funny that we put those expectations on other things- like our talents and our friendships and relationships. They won’t stay the same if we aren’t creating them.
If something seems to be slipping from your life, if you’ve lost your edge or your passion, you might want to see if you’ve been expecting things to grow without your participation.
Looking for magic circumstances to create your genius. I’ve had more magic circumstances in my life than I can count- literal outpourings of money in the past, doors wide open to immense opportunities (like a million dollar film deal out of the blue, served up to me, so crazy to even think about it…) and incredible blessed adventures. No magic circumstances could un-block me. Each of them just magnified how I wasn’t creating my own genius. Every opportunity was falling short. It was all stuff from the outside coming in, but genius and art and self-confidence comes from the inside.
I’d choke on the pressure because I never felt ready. I didn’t know how to actually stay grounded in my creative energy.
Magic circumstances are awesome but they won’t unlock your personal genius. They won’t create your talents, develop your communication skills or unblock your blocked life.
Magic circumstances are something we all create. Just like blocks. You can make more of them.
I’ve come to see it’s a choice.
Choose to grow or chose to dwindle.
Choose to tolerate or choose to change.
Choose to need love or choose to give love.
Choose to swallow poison or choose to be bigger than the poison.
We’re all so imperfect and that’s part of art. We’re all never ready and that’s part of the excitement. We’re all challenged and it can be exciting… or it can be a burden.
The day I released the new e-guide Creating Genius was a really emotional one. It took me about a year and a whole lot of very eyes-wide-open looking at my own life to pull together a book of creating beyond creative blocks. It’s a collection of all the ways I’ve seen myself and others get un-stuck. It’s about changing space to change life. It’s change in action… not in words.
I had to look at all my own darkness along with my light in order to make pull it together. I actually had to live it.
I use this stuff every day. Shaking up space to change life. Confronting karma. No one is immune to blocks or problems or anger or hurt or heartbreak. Especially not me. I don’t preach from a golden throne. I’m it’s biggest consumer.
In writing a compilation of so many creative-block-breaking habits, I realized just how much blocks are opportunities if you see how you’ve been holding all the heavy bricks in place. It got me to sit in some powerful trauma therapy (EMDR) and learn how my own self-sabotaging habits were rooted in trauma as a kid. Resolving the trauma, the habits faded. My own stuckness was the key to incredible growth.
That’s what excites me about the process of uncovering more and more creative power: the keys to the most locked-away abilities, a life of ease, more inner peace, all can be hidden behind creative blocks.
Complaining, bemoaning your fate, stressing out, becoming frazzled, looking to someone else to fix things… it keeps that negative stuff strong and bright and firmly in place.
I know that no matter what you’ve got going on, you can create genius in your life from the outside in and the inside out, in spite of it all, transforming those blocks in the process.
If you choose to, you can. For sure.
It’s the way life becomes art and it makes the hard days so worth it.
Be patient with yourself. Be gentle with what you love and who you love. Be the maker of your life. Be OK with your imperfection. Be willing to grow without condeming yourself.
And, keep moving toward what you want. Keep creating genius.
xoxo Dana
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Welcome to Creating Genius!
I spent the last year creating this e-guide to balancing and unblocking life by pulling together the best of a decade of space-changing and life-shifting feng shui! It’s 50 days and 50 ways to use feng shui to shift your space and your routines to move from “stuck” to creatively inspired and alive.
Start Creating Genius right HERE!
As a thank you for helping me make this guide (many of you have helped in important ways), and as a celebration of it’s arrival (!!!) the e-guide is ON SALE for just one week… so now’s a great time to get started.
And… As a special bonus when you get the e-guide– a bonus that thrills me!— I’m leading a private Creating Genius + Artist’s Way Group for all of you, to guide you online through twelve weeks of creative awesomeness this year!
Gather up your magic & make gorgeous dreams come true!
xoxo Dana
You are such a great inspiration… Many blessings… Lately, for example, my body is asking me to eat a lot of live food, that is part of self love.