From the Workbook (and book) “Living In the Light” by Shakti Gawain.

Shakti explains, “To be a creative channel is to be fully and freely yourself and to know that the universe speaks through you and your creative actions.”

The more you trust in yourself, your intuition, the more open your channel will be.  There’s a piece here about being willing.  To allow this flow to happen.  You must be in that easy state.  Not churning up useless thoughts about the regretful past or the imagined future.

Shakti agrees with Brenda Ueland, that we are all geniuses.  How much of that genius shines through depends on the depth of our willingness to be what others think we should be.  The more we allow ourselves to be shaped by others, Shakti warns, the more  “ . . . we will fail to hear the voice of our higher power and our genius will remain an untapped potential within us.”

It is that surrender again.  There’s more on this in the book, describing how it feels to focus on this connection and ways to practice opening to it.  Shakti also talks about detachment.  In order to be an open channel, you have to let go of attachments to everything but your intuition.

For Exercise 7, we are reminded that it is a risk to be fully and freely yourself.  That person may well be foreign to you.  Not what you expected.  There is a short meditation to close your eyes and relax.  “Ask your intuition to show you an image of your essential self.”  Shakti says it could be anything, a person, an animal, a color or just a feeling.  So, she wants us to remain open to it.  If you don’t understand the message, ask for clarity.

I saw myself in a long, flowing dress.  I thought, at first, I was tip-toeing, but when I asked for clarity, I saw myself dancing. Not sure what it means, exactly, but it feels good.  It’s possible that I have harbored a long-held suspicion that there is a dancer hiding in me. Shakti says you can repeat this exercise and see what other aspects of yourself you can discover.

“To be a creative channel,” Shakti tells us, “you must risk doing what you really want.”  Exercise 8 gets us to look at what that might be.  I love these kinds of exercises!  It’s a 3-Column List.  First is to list 10 things that you currently do that you love to do.  I found that easy and quickly jotted down many things like writing, reading, and watching movies.  The next column is 10 things you do regularly that you don’t want to do.  I wrestled with this a bit.  I don’t really like paying bills or cleaning house.  And when it’s hot, I don’t care for outside work, either.  In the last column, we are asked to list 10 things we love to do that we don’t do very often.  It became clear to me that I want to be spending more time in nature, keep in better touch with far-away friends and take a class.

This, as you can see, becomes a basis for creating a good action plan.  To reduce or make more pleasant the things you don’t like to do and see how you can increase the things you do want to do.  I’ve made a pledge to send a letter to a friend at least once a week. And I’m looking for ways to get myself out into nature more often.

Next week is about Spirit and Form.