A Mud Map For Creating What You Love

Everything in your life is a creation, from the day you just experienced to the relationship you have with your mother! Your dinner is a creation, your job, the shower that you’ll take later, this post. All is creation. As a human, you have two options: to consciously create what you love, or to unconsciously and randomly create a life filled with repeating patterns and predictable results. Understanding the phases and qualities required during the creative process will empower you in bringing what you love into reality.

The qualities and phases described below are applicable to most stages of creating. For example, commitment to what you are creating is required throughout. If at any stage you pull your creative energy out of your creation, it will be reflected in your reality. Using your imagination throughout your creation will always improve your end result and courage is a given at every stage!

The voyage to what you love (your treasure) begins with discovery and ends with completion. Enjoy the journey through this post …

1. Discovery – what do you love? This may be buried under reams of stories about what you should and ought to do, how what you love is impossible and so on. If you don’t know what you love, reflect on your childhood – what did you love to do/experience as a child? Use this as a starting point. Any action in favour of what you love will bring more of what you love into your awareness.

Expect your monkey mind to apply a layer of conditions over the top of what you would love in this stage. You may be unaware that this has happened. That’s fine, keep your focus on discovering what you would really love to create.

2. Imagination – breathing life into your creation by exploring it with your imagination. This is not the same as trying to control the outcome by thinking about every little aspect of your creation and deciding you must have it just so. Imagining is about opening to the unknown, allowing images to come to you from the soul realm. It is a process where you receive from deep mystery, instead of trying to force your thinking onto reality.

Imagining is about letting go, allowing yourself to revel in the vision of what you would love, and receiving the vibration of it.

3. Commitment – acknowledging what you are choosing to create, on every level of your being. Where possible announce your creation to the outside world without expectation of validation, approval or encouragement. Commitment also means that you keep your energy with your creation until you have realised it. Only then will you know whether you really love it!

4. Self Awareness – becoming aware of the tricks, ploys and games you play with yourself (including the thoughts and emotions that go with them). Choose to notice your distracting and sabotaging strategies and allow them to be in your consciousness.

Self-awareness is also about noticing what brings you joy, where you get your energy from and how your reality is changing throughout the creative process.

5. Courage – developing the strength of character required to see the ravings of monkey mind and go beyond them. Engage this quality when your thoughts and emotions are screaming at you to quit on the creation or cut back on what it is that you want to create.

Each time you complete the creative process, your courage will naturally grow. You will discover that you are more and more ready to bring your dreams into reality.

6. Persistence – remaining in your creation, come what may, whatever obstacles arise within or without. Not struggling, but quietly continuing to take action towards your final outcome or vision.

Persistence is also about staying with your creation even when it seems as though nothing is happening. You will be particularly aware of this during the middle phases of the creation, where long periods of time can pass without anything noteworthy arising in your reality. Remaining is about trusting that your infinite creative being is beavering away in the background in ways that you will never comprehend to compel your creation into reality!

7. Action – taking action toward what you are choosing to create. All of the previous steps are pointless if you take no action. Action informs your infinite creative being what you want to see in your reality. When you take direct, obvious action towards what you would love to create, unseen forces support you through occurrences that are labelled ‘coincidence’ or ‘luck’. Resources that you require come your way.

You do not need to try or think about what action is required at any stage. It is always obvious, like the old adage “you can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket”. Buying a ticket is an obvious action. Trying to calculate the odds of winning, which days to buy a ticket on, which newsagent to buy it from, etc won’t make any difference to your outcome and will exhaust you. Take the most obvious action. Then take the next obvious action.

8. Adjusting – if you have been practicing self-awareness, at some point in your creation you will reveal to yourself the conditions that your monkey mind applied to the creation at the beginning. You will find that you have been attempting to meet these conditions instead of taking direct action towards what you are trying to create. You can often recognise this stage of the creation because you will be in discomfort – pain, sickness, depression, misery etc. Trying to meet conditions will always lead you to pain of one kind or another. The most common response is to quit on your creation. This is where the courage that you have cultivated will serve you.

The courage to make adjustments means letting go of your conditions and aligning yourself directly with what you want to create, even if it means losing face, wounded pride, loss of resources (eg. money), major changes to your circumstances or a big shift in how you perceive your creation. These adjustments allow you to clearly see the direct path to what you want to create.

9. Receiving – Like action, receiving is critical to the creative process. If you are not open to receiving your creation when it appears, it will slip past without you noticing and you will come to believe that what you want isn’t possible. Monkey mind will always have ideas about how your creation will look when you finally get there. If you listen to these perceptions of ‘how it’ll be’, you will miss the boat to what you love. Receiving is about opening to possibility, noticing what’s obvious in your reality and taking a firm hold of your creation when it shows up.

10. Completing – acknowledging your creation and what you have learned about yourself and about creating. This process of assimilation will free up space in your consciousness for what you want to create next and brings a deeper appreciation of your creation and of yourself as a creator.

© 2011 Pollyanna Darling

I love every phase of the creative process. One of my passions is assisting you to bring what you love to life and realise your dreams. I have just a couple of intuitive life coaching spots available right now and would love to connect with you. Mention this post to receive a special discount on your coaching sessions. Email me today and start taking direct action towards what you would love to create.

Day 45 – Simple Pleasures

 

Just doin' what we love ...

This morning was beautiful. We walked into town, enjoyed a coffee by the river, strolled down to the ocean and watched it boil it’s autumnal cauldron of swirling rips, meandered back home, spent some quality time together and then had a little nap. Doesn’t sound very exciting does it? It wasn’t exciting, but it was blissful and I’m very partial to a regular serving of bliss. The colours of the day were vibrant, the mountain backdrop to our coastal town crisp, clean and luscious green.There were a few periods where my focus sneaked off into to-do lists and distracting thoughts, but mostly I received what I love.

 

The deeper we get into the 120 Day ‘Do What You Love’ Challenge, the more often I enjoy periods of time where I am in my bliss. It’s day 45 and I have fully integrated my chosen activity (writing) into my day. In fact, if too much of the day goes by without sitting down to write, I start to get fidgety! I have also calmed down in my attitude to my writing. Before the Challenge, I almost never wrote unless I ‘felt like it’. At the beginning of the Challenge, I ‘felt’ that I had to write posts and articles that were “worthwhile, meaningful and really good.’ I laboured over my articles, hoping that they would be ‘good enough’, worrying about how people would respond and restricting what I said to avoid offence.

I have now dumped these criteria. I am writing because I want to. Some days I have a great deal to express, other days there is a quietness inside as though the well of inspiration were filling up. I have stopped forcing myself to complete something on these days and instead have focussed on writing whatever is within me. I come back to these pieces, tweak and adjust until I’m happy that I’ve expressed what I wanted to convey. I have almost stopped concerning myself with what the world out there thinks about what I am creating, which is incredibly liberating.

Settling into this rhythm of creating has brought a peacefulness to my inner world that I would never have thought possible. This inner calm has made me more receptive to my outer world, more aware of what I would love from moment to moment, more open to receiving what is offered to me. It’s rather wonderful.

Asher, who initially set himself the rigorous challenge of doing a head stand every day and increasing the time by 30 seconds each day, has also sacked his inner slave driver. It’s the yoga that he loves. Continually striving to stay upside down for longer and longer each day is a kind of dementia and has nothing to do with what he loves.

How it has to be

That is what happens at the beginning of the Challenge, just like any other creation. Monkey mind jumps in and lays its agenda over the top of what you would love, adding expectations, a bar that must be reached (and possibly moved upwards), a fixed idea about what will eventuate in the end, and a set of conditions regarding ‘how it has to be’. The Challenge then becomes about meeting the conditions that the mind has set up, instead of doing what you love. It’s insidious and unconstructive, but it’s also a great way to learn about the way that you create.

In attempting to meet the ‘how it has to be’ conditions, we have inevitably run into our limitations, creating problems (illness, pain in the body, etc) that appear to make continuing with the Challenge very difficult or impossible.

Of course, these problems are an illusion. By quietly remaining in the Challenge and being open to making adjustments to our chosen activity (for example doing yoga instead of insisting on a head stand, or in my case – writing every day but not pushing myself to post every day), we have become more and more connected to what we truly love. Even the mind has mostly shut up (now that’s unheard of!!), seeing for itself the benefits of dropping the conditions.

Receiving Bliss

Naturally, there are days, hours, minutes and seconds where shit happens, where I over-react, when I’m negative and poopy, when I pout and complain. More and more, I find these moments funny. Mostly however, continuing with The Challenge is increasingly generating opportunities to enjoy what I love. I am much more open to listening to my intuitive voice and following my heart. The more I engage in what I love, the more of what I love shows up in my reality. That’s very cool!

© 2011 Pollyanna Darling

The 120 Day ‘Do What You Love’ Challenge is open to anyone who would love to take it! It’s FREE, it’s an amazing adventure and you will learn more about yourself than you would have believed possible. To take the Challenge, choose an activity that you love, fill out this form and you’re in!

Not ready for The Challenge just yet? Join our Creative Community and get connected to a network of people doing what they love.