One way to look at creativity is the creation of ourselves. Many children naturally make up and try out personas and express themselves through chant, songs, dance, mudpies, swinging, and making up stories! This occurs in children living through war, oppression, hunger, poverty, neglect, and abuse. However it is most likely to flourish when children feel safe, loved, and they are allowed to pursue their own interests, experiments and passions. All too often, this creativity is squashed entirely by families, biased educational programs and restrictive religion.
Many of us as adults are those squashed and repressed by those forces. We fit into predetermined roles and lack the internal permissions to allow our creative inner children to continue to express themselves during our adulthood!
As someone like this, I was somehow able to recover this creative exuberance in mostly small but sometimes large ways! I encountered friends, teachers, mentors, and had challenges that encouraged me to look within to my heart and outwardly look to the inSpirited natural world! I learned little by little to love and embrace life and to consistently forgive myself for real and imagined failures, fear and pessimism, and unkind words and deeds. I found I was and have always been part of the loving and conscious self-revelation of the Universe! Assisting me in this were plant medicines, psychotherapy, treks in the Himalayas, Rockies, the Appalachians, and Stone Mountain, heart centered prayer, and breathwork.
All these and more have in common opening myself to nature as myself, so decreasing self-hatred and judgment. It can be considered as being in love with the animate Universe! This is when the natural, creative inner children come out to play and to make and remake the World! Let’s Play!
~Daniel Bailey
I can identify with the repression you talked about. The natural world is a very healing balm for me, also. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this.
I hear Daniel’s point and it strikes a personal cord.
It is also frustrating. It seems that there is a major difference between the child of our yesteryear and the child of our today. It goes something like this:
We are born with pure, simple innocence, not at all self conscious of our personal expression, just an intense curiosity about how the world works and who we are inside it.
Then we are “matured” through rules and discipline. The right , the wrong.
We grow through these 2 paths, one nature, one nurture. We grow into the space between.
I don’t think we are oppressed by the rules of maturity. Some of it just happens and is not a function of giving up our inner child. Its in the hands of the adult children to decipher the balance between. Sometimes I wonder if we spend too much time trying to overcome the burden of our childhood/past and cannot get a clear view of how we want to raise our own kids. if we are a victim of having our childhoods squashed, then how do we advance our understanding of nurturing to our own children? “Victims ” just add weight to the pendulum, swinging from one extreme to the next, between the generations.