Exploring the Labyrinth_ A Guide for Healing and Spiritual Growth - Melissa Gayle West [49]
You can walk with an affirmation as you would with a question or intention, repeating it in your heart as you walk. Sample affirmations that might get your creative/intuitive juices flowing are:
I welcome my full creative powers.
I am an open channel for creativity to flow through.
Creativity brings me joy and life.
My creativity blesses me and all those I love.
Walking with an affirmation can quickly flush out whatever is blocking your creativity. If an objection comes up to your affirmation, you can either note the objection gently, breathe into it, and let it go, or turn your attention to the objection if it has enough charge for you.
Let’s say you need to plan an important report for work, one that will get you noticed for its innovative ideas. You sit down to begin the report several times, only to find that your mind zooms off elsewhere and you can’t bring it back. Realizing that you’re feeling anxious about the report, you go out to your labyrinth and begin walking with the affirmation “I allow my creativity to flow into this project.”
Immediately a strong internal objection surfaces: “I can’t!” Take a deep breath, keep walking, and ask yourself, “Why can’t I?” A memory comes to mind: You’re in fifth grade and about to give an oral report you’ve worked hard on for a month. You’re excited, but nervous too. You open your mouth to begin but nothing comes out. Kids laugh. You want to die. Your teacher tells you to sit down and try another time.
As you relive this memory, you realize that part of you is terrified to go through with this report, even if—or perhaps because—it’s so exciting to you. Keep walking, and keep breathing. As you walk, breathe into the humiliation and disappointment from long ago, and ask for healing. Once in the center, take some time to acknowledge that child’s hurt and send light or healing energy his or her way.
On the way out, return to present time and to your affirmation. Chances are the affirmation will feel different, and you will be far more receptive to it.
I am currently working with a very powerful affirmation from A Visionary Life, by Marc Allen: “In an easy and relaxed manner, in a healthy and positive way, in its own perfect time.” This affirmation directly challenges old beliefs about creativity being a struggle. As I walk with this affirmation in the labyrinth, my body and soul learn about relaxing into and trusting the creative process. I could work with the affirmation without using the labyrinth, but the labyrinth adds power and focus to the healing that the affirmation brings: When I walk with the affirmation, I am far more open to its meaning than I would be if I simply repeated it to myself elsewhere. The affirmation can work at a deeper level when I walk into it with my heart and soul.
Take whatever affirmation you create and walk with, and make a copy to put on your desk so you can see it frequently. I like to make a “sticky” of my current affirmation and place it on the computer’s desktop.
DREAMING NEW DREAMS
Our blocks to our creativity are also blocks to our ability to dream wonderful dreams for our lives and bring those dreams into reality. Most of us not only feel that we can’t open to our full creativity; we also feel that we can’t allow ourselves really to envision what we want for our lives, our relationships, our work. Our life itself is the ultimate creative act. The greatest creativity we can manifest is co-creating, with Spirit, the dreams of our lives into physical reality.
The labyrinth is a wonderful place to begin envisioning how we want our lives and loves to unfold. It affords us time, and sacred space, to dream our High Dreams for our own lives. Sandra Sarr, the managing editor for Grace Cathedral’s labyrinth newsletter