On a deep level we are angry that we were not unconditionally loved as children, and this anger can saliently block our creativity and our forward creative movement.

We can feel frustrated that we regularly compromised our truth and our authenticity. We became inauthentic in childhood to belong, but now it is our task and our purpose as mature adults to find out who we really are.

We move through our creative blocks by loving ourselves unconditionally. We do this by feeling everything deeply. And in that intensely loving fire of attention to all that we have denied inside of ourselves, we come to know ourselves and our purpose profoundly.

Loving all that is repressed and rejected in our unconscious mind is evocative of the mother holding her child in the collage at right with such tender awareness. With unwavering attention and determination she vows to never abandon her crying child. We need to treat ourselves in this same reverent way.

It is all to easy when we feel uncomfortable feelings to become the opposite of loving towards ourselves. Usually we put ourselves down and start mentally punishing ourselves for not feeling happy. We wonder what is wrong with us. We tell ourselves that we are no good, or substandard as a human being for feeling the way that we do. We punish our shadow parts that are simply trying to come into the light to be seen and included and learned from.

Perhaps one of the most creative things life accomplishments that we can we can focus on is to learn how to love ourselves unconditionally. To love ourselves means loving what feels hard and painful inside — unconditionally — without thinking or reacting. It does not matter what comes up — we attend to it with tender and exquisite attention. Every feeling holds messages and gifts embedded within it no matter how difficult it feels.

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Becoming Strongly Present to Your Emotional Pain

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Often inner pain can take over our entire life for a time. It can become so big, we can barely think, function, work, or relate to other people. We think we have to get rid of our pain. But presence to our emotional pain is nothing more than learning to become more largely loving than the pain.

Becoming larger and stronger than your pain does not heal your pain — it is still there — but because it is loved and accepted with such inner strength, it integrates into your larger being. This is how we grow up. This is how we mature ourselves into contributing, creative adults.

We do this presence work by touching our inner pain with awareness — tapping it lightly at first — taking breaks when it hurts too unbearably. We then effort to sustain loving attention to our emotional pain for longer periods of time until we learn how to become consistently larger than it.

As we grow psychologically stronger, the pain passes through our being at a faster rate and we are no longer mired in it for long periods of time.

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Next: Blocked Creativity and Blocked Emotions

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Copyright ©2012 Shelley Klammer. All rights reserved.

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