Contemplation
Inbreath. The first act asks the participant to take in and receive the world around them through the lens of a leitmotif. To pause and linger for a moment and gaze gently into their life and explore the patterns of where/how the previous contemplations touch them and how they influence their perspective. It is about locating, uncovering and revealing the expression they wish to share with the collective in the next step.“
Each and every individual is unique. Unique means unique! It means that each participant of life experiences their world in a very particular way that can never be repeated, nor copied, nor changed and that no other person will ever experience life in quite the same way ever again! This is nothing to apologise for – it is to be celebrated!!!
That alone is something worthy of deep contemplation!
There aren’t the odds to express uniqueness – it cannot be calculated for it would require infinity to do so and infinity cannot be represented by a single number – approximations need not apply for they are deeply limited expressions; always leaving things out that come back to bite them. It is not possible to map the unknowable with the mind alone… those who try – suffer a unique path to madness fraught with immeasurable anxiety!
So it becomes prudent to foster a strong helping of awe and respect when we are working with the unknown, as they make formidable allies when meeting uncertainty – but don’t be fooled into thinking they can be drawn out of thin air – they have to be forged in the body so that when they are brought together with a mind of sufficient receptivity and openness – the unknown will pour forth a steady stream of gratitude for being aware of what it is to be alive and no outcome matters beyond that because a true trickle of gratitude is worth more than any value that could ever be placed upon it by the “outside” world.
And yet this awareness that is every human’s birthright has been relegated from our attention through a programme of homogenisation; and it is so commonly traded for the illusory comfort of not being unique, of not standing out but of fitting into the tribe.
There’s gold in them thar hills”
Within those places that make us feel uncomfortable we will find invitations to transform our experience of life. If we lean into our unwillingness [outside of harming ourselves and others] and feel into the resistance with enough heart we will find that the resistance is no more solid than our thoughts – and we will begin the unique journey of rooting out and arriving upon a treasure that we humans were born to discover and grow throughout our lives – pure awareness.
There is a creative principle at work throughout all life and it involves pressure and lots of it! Humans are not separate from life no matter how seductive that assumption is to the mind. We are all driven to find an outlet for this pressure and we all have a unique ability to experience it as it moves through our lives. If we repress it or react to it through the need to “fit in” – we will come to experience that misplaced pressure building up within us as suffering.
An alternative approach could be to turn inward and get to know our own inner hills with a contemplative mind; following those lines of pressure we feel within us until we reach unexpressed pockets of creativity. Simply discovery is all it takes to release and transform them into a growing awareness of how incredible life can be – there is no limit!
As such, this is a process that cannot be measured by conventional means because individual creativity is mutative – by its simple expression – it changes the collective – there is nothing else to do except to become as uniquely authentic as we were designed to be and to trust the outcome without expectation – the more we surrender to the process – the less we feel the need to take from life to support ourselves because we feel aligned with life; not separate from it.
So you are invited to drop as deep as you dare into those pockets of the unknown and embrace the uncertainty that threatens to overwhelm you in those moments of deep despair – for therein lies the true pressure of creativity… surrender into the process of life without expectation of reward and you will become a passenger of awareness so profound, deep, unique and stable that even madness would feel ordinary.