If you want to tap into your deep creativity — the profound, unbridled, genius, life-infusing, widely useful and healing kind of creativity, then purification is essential.
There’s the planned-for kind of purifying. Think: cleanses, information-fasting, silence, burning journals, a sabbatical, closing up shop, burning bridges, letting go of some beliefs. And then there’s the “surprise” kind of purification, which is especially effective (and intense). Think failure of most kinds: a business tanks, a relationship falls apart, a tumour needs to be removed, betrayal implosions.
Purification is gutting. Cleansing. Rectifying. Re-orientating. Divine. It can be wretched or graceful, intentional or shocking. Either way, once you’re hollowed out and detoxed you are going to be way.more.real. Which is to say, wildly more creative. Deeper. This is why I’m always so interested in someone’s personal story of suffering — it points to their greatest potential to create light — or more darkness, in the world. Creation.
So, if you want to tap into deeper creativity, you’ll need to get your purification on. We covered that. Now, to get through such purification, you’ll need passion. You already know what that is. Fire, heart, big vision.
And then — are you still with me? Because deep creativity isn’t for the faint of anything, then you’ll have to:
- Do the work. Like a grown up.
- Risk being disliked (actually, it’s not a risk, it’s inevitable.)
- Risk being very very misunderstood (and you don’t know how much that hurts until it happens.)
- Say what you feel — in every possible way.
- Burn the draft, the plan, the strategy that you thought was everything.
- Pray. On your knees. (When’s the last time you did that?)
- Cut people out of your life.
- Humbly make amends.
- Drop everything and call your energy worker.
- Become your own Lover.
- Eat your longing backwards.
- Keep going, even when it feels like you’re being punished.
- Become obsessive.
- Move ON.
- Be truly compassionate with yourself when it’s so hard to move on.
- Be incredibly tender, and not just when you’re by yourself, but the exposed with others kind of tender.
- Take a hit for the team. You don’t think you’re learning lessons just for your own good, do you? Nah. Healing for one is healing for all. Thank youuuuu.
- Ask for help — the vulnerable kind of asking when you’re afraid the answer may be no.
- Be profoundly lonely.
- Use your own money.
- Feel it all — in one day.
- Say Thank You — for all of it. All of it.
- Let yourself feel very small next to the size of your dream.
- Get bigger than the size of your dream.
- Keep doing the work.
In summation:
Want to tap the depths of your creativity? Marry your soul. @DanielleLaPorte (Click to Tweet!)
See you at the wedding.
True Love,
Danielle LaPorte is the creator of The Desire Map: A Guide To Creating Goals With Soul — the book that turned into a day planner system, a top iTunes app, and an international workshop program. A Desire Map workshop happens every weekend somewhere in the world. Author of The Fire Starter Sessions and the wildly popular #Truthbomb series, Danielle is also the co-creator of Your Big Beautiful Book Plan and co-host of the Beautiful Writer’s Group podcast.
Entrepreneur Magazine calls her “equal parts poet and entrepreneurial badass…edgy, contrarian…loving and inspired.” A speaker, poet, former business strategist and Washington-DC think tank exec, she writes weekly at DanielleLaPorte.com, where over four million visitors have gone for her straight-up advice — a site that’s been deemed “the best place online for kick-ass spirituality,” and was named one of the “Top 100 Websites for Women” by Forbes. The Huffington Post named her Twitter feed as one of the “12 of Wisest Twitter Accounts Worth Following.” You can find her @daniellelaporte just about everywhere.
