Connecting with the Creative Unconscious

Winter 2018 Feminine Fire Newsletter

Mask making is one way to tune into the universal and the inner depths that connect us to the collective unconscious. These masks were done in a creativity workshop that visual artist Shelley Yampolsky and I led called "About Face". In it participants explored both the face they present to the world and the one they hold deep within.

Creative Embers in the Darkness

Here where I live in Canada, winter is getting ready for her last gasp. We have a spring-like day or two and then are buried once again beneath the snow. These icy days give us a chance to burrow down, go deep, and be still.

As you may well know, this stillness is as much a part of the creative process as the active outpouring that results in our magnificent works. This was brought home to me by Marion Woodman, the renowned Jungian analyst, when I had the good fortune to interview her for both of my last two books. In these interviews and in her writings, she has often used the image of the seed buried deep underground to illustrate how essential a period of incubation is to the creative process.

Looking out my window at the melting snow and the ground it darkens, it is easy to imagine digging down into that brown-black, moist, rich and crumbly earth and nestling there, seed-shaped, at one with the germ of an idea. And then to stay there, lying still and quiet for a time, allowing the idea to incubate and soak up the creative life force.

While Woodman was using this image of the seed to emphasize the need for fallow periods between bursts of creative expression, exploring this imagery and identifying with it in our meditation and creative visualization is profoundly useful. Especially, if we allow our meditation to take us even deeper than usual, to a place that hovers just above – and even lapses into – the dream state. For me, this deep meditation and dark-earth seed imagery is invariably associated with the universal and the archetypal images that Jung wrote about. 

It is a dark place, but not a cold one. Incubation, by its very nature, requires warmth. This is a place where the creative fire smolders; where the embers may be banked, but are glowing, red-hot, ready to flare. The images that come during this meditation will fuel the idea that you are incubating – even when they, apparently, have no relation to it at all.

There is a need – and a deep longing – in us to reconnect with this universal imagery. In fact, this column was triggered by a news article I happened to notice on a big-name designer who was using the images from Tarot cards on his fashions. In the photo, a whole row of anorectic models was parading them down a runway. At first, I was appalled by this – it seemed almost sacrilegious. “Those are universal images,” I thought, “archetypes!” On second thought, I realized it was just another example of how our starved, outer-focused society hungers for the inner, for the deeper, for the more universal reality.
 

Let us use these last few days of cold as they come and go to connect with this reality, to delve down into the collective unconscious and allow its powerful imagery to fuel the creativity to come

Creativity Exercise

This is a good exercise to do right before going to bed or having a nap. Have a notebook handy and the germ or an idea or a specific aspect of a project you are working on in mind. Then begin as usual with Exercise One so that you feel deeply relaxed and in tune with the radiant light that is the creative force within. Next, allow yourself to sink even deeper. Breathing deeply with every count, count backwards from 12 to 1. Take three deep breaths, then do the count again.

Visualize yourself entering the dark, rich, moist earth beneath the winter ground. You enter easily and burrow deep. Curl up, seed-shaped. In this deep, dark place you are very close to the universal. Feel your mind opening to it. Release the idea you were holding, and allow an image – or images – to flow into your mind. Do not alter or direct them.

When they begin to fade, count from 1 to 12 and find yourself back in the radiant light. Bask in it. Allow this creative force to seep into your cells. When you are ready – or more awake! – make notes about the image or images that came to you.
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Later, delve into it or them. What meaning does it have for you? Does it have meaning for you on other levels? How might it relate to the “seedling” of an idea you had in mind? 

Like 

    treasure hidden in the ground 

    taste in the fruit

    gold in the rock 

    oil in the sand

the Absolute hidden away

in the heart....

Mahadeviakka

Akka Mahadevi, as she was also known, was a 12th c. saint from southern India.

Her work here is translated by A.K. Ramanujan in Speaking of Shiva.

Photo Credit: Siddharth Mallya