Spirituality and Psychotherapy

As a therapist who frequently works with writers and other artists,  I’m perpetually it seems engaged in the study of creativity. Over the years, I have become absolutely convinced that engaging in creative acts awakens our intuition, cultivates self- awareness, deepens our spiritual lives, and facilitates healing. (I’ll be writing much more about this in future blog posts.) Best selling author, Julia Cameron has written a great deal about the connection between creativity and spirituality. In fact, she asserts that the two are interchangeable.

In The Artists way Cameron writes, “The heart of creativity is an experience of the mystical union; the heart of the mystical union is an experience of creativity. Those who speak in spiritual terms routinely refer to God as the creator but seldom see creator as the literal term for artist. I am suggesting you take the term creator quite literally. You are seeking to forge a creative alliance, artist-to-artist with the Great Creator. Accepting this concept can greatly enhance your creative possibilities.” Cameron also offers in “The Artists Way” the following ten spiritual principles as the foundation for which both creative discovery and recovery can be achieved.  She suggests that the following principles are read through once a day.

“1. Creativity is the natural order of life. Life is energy: pure creative energy.

2. There is an underlying, in-dwelling creative force infusing all of life — including ourselves.

3. When we open ourselves to our creativity, we open ourselves to the creator’s creativity within us and our lives.

4. We are, ourselves, creations. And we, in turn, are meant to continue creativity by being creative ourselves.

5. Creativity is God’s gift to us. Using our creativity is our gift back to God.

6. The refusal to be creative is self-will and is counter to our true nature.

7. When we open ourselves to exploring our creativity, we open ourselves to God: good orderly direction.

8. As we open our creative channel to the creator, many gentle but powerful changes are to be expected.

9. It is safe to open ourselves up to greater and greater creativity.

10. Our creative dreams and yearnings come from a divine source. As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our divinity.”

I love Maine in September. I savor its gentle temperatures, mist filled mornings, and its quiet country roads. While I’ll admit that there’s a slight melancholy in the air as summer drifts relentlessly backward into the past, there’s a whiff of promise too. The leaves are beginning their spectacular turning, the apples and pumpkins grow closer to harvest with the dawn of each new day, and tomatoes hang ripe and juicy on the vine.

Autumn is a time of both abundance and disintegration, of brilliant vistas and diminishing light. In the midst of plenty, as we gather the harvest, the cooling mornings and shortened days inform us that winter is on its way. Making this transition can be particularly challenging to embrace for those of us who reside in the north country. And yet, embrace it we must if we want to participate as fully as possible in the enduring cycles of nature and in our own inevitable evolution. Everything changes, and just as whole new vistas open up in winter, I am reminded that each and every ending contains its own beginning. Transition periods whether welcomed or not very often compel us to stretch and grow, offering us a certain amount of grace if we will only try our best to meet them with acceptance and receptivity.

Joan Chittister in, “Called to Question: A Spiritual Memoir observed, “Transitions complete us. We ripen. We learn. We hurt. We survive one thing after another…Then, in the end, we gain what we came to get – a kind of well worn, hard-won wisdom… the problem is that we all too seldom bother to stop and notice how much we have become in the process.” Each September finds me in a different place than I was the one before. Last year was filled with change, challenge, and celebration. This September finds me struggling to keep a healthy perspective as I slowly and faithfully work my way through grief.

Perhaps I love September so much because it symbolizes on some level crossing over a threshold. Just as the natural world begins once more its seasonal process of transformation – from summer to fall, fall to winter and finally winter to spring- we are reminded that during the course of our lives the landscape of both our bodies and our souls is altered again and yet again.

We’re born to create, each and every one of us. I’m not necessarily talking about painting, or poems or novels, although I am talking about works of art. Each of us makes the painful and profound journey down our mother’s dark birth canal and onto a waiting canvas. That canvas is our lives.

We’re not presented at birth with our fair share of resources, nurturing, or opportunities upon our arrival, but we do each receive all that we require in the way of teachers. These teachers school our souls even while at the same time they may break our hearts.

Frederick Buechner in, Our Fiction or our Faith wrote, “There is something deep within us, in everybody, that gets buried and distorted and confused and corrupted by what happens to us. But it is there as a source of insight and healing and strength. I think that is where art comes from.”

Our once empty canvas doesn’t promise beauty or wisdom or meaning. An empty canvas doesn’t promise much. But the world that holds it is overflowing with possibility, more than enough for us to create meaning, and beauty, and wisdom.

It’s entirely up to us.

In Legacy of the Heart: The Spiritual Advantages of a Painful Childhood”, Wayne Muller observed that those who suffered in childhood, while baring painful scars, invariably exhibit exceptional strengths including remarkable insight, creativity, and a profound inner wisdom. He challenges those of us who have suffered to not perceive ourselves as broken and damaged, nor to disown those dark and wounded places in ourselves, but instead to work to reawaken that which is wisest, strongest and whole within us.

In working with victims of childhood trauma, Muller noted that while still haunted by the past, many also develop an acute sensitivity to others as well as a tendency to seek beauty, love and peace. He writes, “Seen through this lens, family sorrow is not only a painful wound to be endured, analyzed and treated. It may in fact become a seed that gives birth to our spiritual healing and awakening.”

It’s been my own experience as a therapist that this is often the case with survivors of childhood trauma. While not all survivors with whom I’ve worked possess the characteristics that Muller so respectfully describes, I’m almost always touched by their strength and depth. Each person has brought to therapy his or her own uniques skills, stories, and beauty – gifts that truly seemed to be forged to a significant degree in the flames of the very pain they now seek to escape.

Muller assures the reader that suffering and pain are not exceptions to the human condition. Instead they are inevitable threads that make up the tapestry of a life. He cautions us to not become entangled in our memories of childhood suffering – to not let our pain resonate throughout the whole of our lives. He also points out that many of us would prefer to explain our hurt rather than to feel it. He advises that we acknowledge our pain, allow ourselves to experience it, and then to look for the lessons it will inevitably teach if we only look and listen, particularly to the wisdom contained within the depths of our very own souls.

While I never, under any circumstances want to minimize or justify the pain of another, nor suggest that anyone be grateful for their suffering, I do try to gently suggest (when he or she is ready) that even the most painful path can be a pathway to possibilities not yet discovered.

There have been many hurtful experiences in my own life that I would have adamantly refused to face had I been given the choice, I am also aware that to deny the value of the message, in spite of how painful the lesson or unwelcome the messenger, only serves to add insult to injury. If you have no choice for the time being but to travel a difficult path, at the very least, why not claim all possible compensations along the way?