Serious injury can be a wake-up call to what needs attention.
Last week I bought a guitar.
Now I’m in love! I can’t wait to get home every day to spend time with my beloved guitar, to learn new songs, to discover how my fingers and voice can make me happy. Even when I’m not playing my guitar, actually when I’m not even thinking about playing my guitar, I can tell I am happy on a deep level. My step is light and I hum a lot.
That’s what creativity can do when it’s in line with the longings of the soul!
Last January I was hit by a truck while walking in my neighborhood, and broke my pelvis in two places. In my long recovery process — using Focusing — I realized that there were longings deep down in me that didn’t feel they were able to live and be expressed in my current life. I had a very satisfying successful life, with travel, courses, friends, family… so it was easy to ignore those whispers. But serious injury can be a wakeup call to what needs attention, and I couldn’t ignore the whispers any longer.
Using Focusing, I tuned in to what was calling to me from within those hidden depths. At first I just saw two eyes burning from inside a dark hood. I sensed whatever it was had been waiting for so long, it had nearly given up. But I also sensed its strength, its passion. It was holding onto something important.
Slowly, with the support of great Focusing partnerships, I began to sense it was something about… singing!
“Singing? Oh, really?” said something it me. “That’s rather silly, isn’t it?”
(And we often see that the longings of the soul are belittled by other parts of us that are worried about how we will look, what others will think, and whether this will make too big a change in our settled life.)
So I said Hello to the part that was worried that singing was silly, and the other things it was worried about, and then I came back to this “something” inside — and why not call it my soul since that word seems to fit — that is longing for something that it knows will bring me my own fuller life for reasons that no part of me can yet explain.
Opportunities for singing began to come up. At the end of a workshop in Hamburg in July, the class asked me to sing! I realized that those opportunities had always been there, but something in me had been shutting them down.
The Forgotten Guitar
One day last week I was pulling songbooks from a long-neglected shelf in my bedroom. To my great surprise, I found there were also guitar books! Sometime in the past 10-15 years, I had owned and played a guitar (and had then given it away), and I had completely forgotten! It simply amazes me: the power of something in us to shut down and shut off what brings us joy. (Of course trying to protect us…)
What have you shut off? What have you forgotten? What would bring joy to the deepest places of your soul?
This week’s Tip: Listen for the deep longings of something in you that thought it had to hide away. It might be something about bringing your creative impulses out into the world. And if there is a voice saying that that is ridiculous…be compassionate to its worry, but don’t let it stop you!
