The past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot and talking with my 19 year-old daughter and some of my students about the situation in the middle east. The conflict has been on my mind every day in a different way than with other global challenges and conflicts. It may be because my husband’s extended family is Jewish and my my family has muslim friends. But I also sense that, collectively, we’re reaching our limit of tolerance for separation, and the fact that no one can seem to come up with ideas that honor all of humanity.
Trish and I and our staff teach our students how to hold their space and also how to hold space for others to have experiences while in the presence of grounded neutrality. We completely believe in the power of energy to bring real, long-term change that’s supportive to all, but I, for one, still look for other ideas and new solutions that I haven’t thought of before. A thought popped in just yesterday: it’s about creativity! Many intelligent people have proposed solutions to this particular conflict that just haven’t stuck yet. There is no shortage of ideas floating around, so maybe it’s about bringing in the next wave of conscious awareness that’s higher than what we’ve worked with before, that’s part of this massive spiritual transformation we are all going through.
That’s something we can help with, from the comfort of our living rooms.
We teach our students to hold space by identifying discordant energies outside themselves, then moving those energies as if they were their own. In other words, if I see someone who’s angry at others, I seek out and clear my own energy of anger toward others. If I see judgement, I move my own judgement toward others or myself. We are all connected by a phenomenon called quantum entanglement, so when we move our own challenging energies, even someone far away that we’ve never met, now has space and permission to move their challenging energies. In other words, the more I clear myself, the more room we all have for new ideas and solutions.
In the infinitude of the Universe, every problem can be solved, but we can’t always see the solution because its time has not yet come. As Einstein once said, “we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Coming up with new and different ideas is a creative act! British writer Brian Aldiss said, “whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem”. What if we can hold space for problem-solving by being creative, and therefore giving others permission to be creative too?
I started thinking about the Women’s March in early 2017. Three women, Jayna Zweiman, Krista Suh and Kat Coyle of Los Angeles, conceived the simple pink hats that were the hallmark of worldwide women’s marches for the next several years. Together, they leveraged social media and the word got out fast. We all know what happened next: a wave of pink spread around the world as women gathered by the millions to protest the inappropriate words and actions of a toxic patriarchy. Women may not have overthrown governments or even fully healed the problem, but the marches flung open the door that led us all toward greater awareness of the dignity and the contribution of half of the world’s population. The energy of the marches in turn rippled out over the years, helping encourage greater awareness of, and more compassion and respect for, all populations across the world.
I saw this on the website pussyhatproject.com:
In late 2016, artist and design architect Jayna Zweiman was rehabbing from a serious injury. Unable to work or engage in strenuous physical activity, Jayna wanted to find a creative healing modality she could do for recuperation. She roped in Krista Suh, a screenwriter, to take crochet classes at the Little Knittery, a local yarn store near her home in Los Angeles. The two were hooked.
During many lengthy conversations in knitting circles, the two women found common ground in their passion for women’s rights and the inspiration they found in the pro-women’s rights language of the pending Women’s Marches.
Krista was planning to attend the Women’s March in Washington DC that January of 2017, and needed a cap to keep her head warm in the chill winter air. Jayna, due to her injury, would not be able to attend any of the marches, but wanted to find a way to have her voice heard in absentia and somehow physically “be” there. Together, a marcher and a non-marcher, they conceived the idea of creating a sea of pink hats at Women’s Marches everywhere that would make both a bold and powerful visual statement of solidarity, and also allow people who could not participate themselves a visible way to demonstrate their support for women’s rights.
The pink hats didn’t change the world in one day, but they contributed significantly to the coming era of humanitarianism that we are embarking on, the time of Pluto in Aquarius, which spans the years 2024 to 2044. The three women created the hats from an urge to participate in something greater, and they did it in a little knitting shop in LA, in a spirit of community and amusement. Both of these qualities are beautiful high vibrations and the womens’ efforts helped to elevate the marches into something fun while making a powerful point.
It’s not about each of us creating a world-famous, iconic article of clothing that stands as a symbol of spiritual transformation. It’s really about, what can we accomplish when we are in our creative space? I often say, when we are involved in the act of creating, we are in the flow. The flow occurs when we’re directly connected to spirit, whether we’re aware of it or not! It’s when we set out with openness and curiosity to produce an outcome, whether material, mental, emotional or spiritual, and the thing takes on a life of its own. As a friend once said, in the flow it’s as if you’re on a boat in the river, letting the current take you. You use your paddle to make small corrections so you don’t run into the shore, but it’s the river that does the work. It’s a great metaphor for co-creating with spirit!
The writer Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote Eat Pray Love, has this to say about creativity: “I believe the creative process is both magical and magic. Because here is what I chose to believe about how creativity functions: I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied energetic life-form.” She goes on to describe how ideas present themselves to us; in effect they choose the person they wish to incarnate through. If that person isn’t available, they’ll go on and visit someone else.
Many times we feel helpless because we think we have to solve a problem with a capital P. But what if all we have to do is hold space for those disembodied energetic life forms to come in, whether to ourselves or to others? What if we have no obligation to fix or solve anything, or even get out of our jammies and leave the house, but we can help someone else clear their own creative space just by clearing ours, and as we do so, that opening reverberates down the line so more and more people are open and receptive to the ideas and solutions that will ultimately help us all get to the next level in our transformation?
It sounds big, but it’s really just having a little fun with energy! The easiest way to move the energies that keep us from our creativity is to decide to do something that isn’t part of your normal routine. Take a class, rearrange the furniture, paint something, write someone a letter, try a recipe for something you’ve never made. Even driving to work a different way, or wearing something you wouldn’t normally wear, can make an interesting shift in your awareness. These are small acts of creativity, but they could have big repercussions. It’s the movement of butterfly wings on the other side of the world, that eventually ends in a windstorm somewhere else. So have fun stirring things up! If you are already a creative, get cracking! When you’re inspired, because of entanglement, others will be inspired too. You can count on it.
Blessings,
Katie
Rt. Rev. Katie Heldman is the Co-Director of Psychic Horizons Center, and wrote this article for the November 20th, 2023 eNews.
