Birthing the Creative Process

I’m thinking today about how the creative process resembles the process of gestating and birthing a child.

About six months ago, I received the ‘download’ that there was a creative task in store for me which would eventually involve making a larger effect in the world. Around the Autumnal Equinox, I conceived. The vision for what I am currently calling ‘The Womb Medicine Project’ came to me clearly and with a lot of excitement and potential. I felt that I had been touched by something greater than myself, just like some women feel around conception, I was full inside, with a mystery of my own making.

After the conception, I went underground for the winter and gestated. I worked with creative frustration for many months and the daunting feeling that I was not doing anything to bring forth this vision. I stared in the face again and again the negative beliefs that kept me from moving forward ~ ‘I’m not good enough’, ‘It’s not OK to be an artist’, ‘I am too young to make that kind of effect’, ‘I’m not powerful enough’, and more. It was quite a bit like the morning sickness in the first trimester of a pregnancy…painful and nauseating!

I knew that I was being asked to do something risky, something that will change me forever and I didn’t believe it was real. Just like a new mama, pregnant for the first time, I wasn’t sure if ‘there was really something in there’ and I didn’t trust with certainty, that someday I would actually have the courage to give birth to this vision. (continue reading…)