What Am I REALLY Creating?
By Kristen N. Fox
Part of the challenge of being a conscious creator is that you choose, in every moment, what you want to experience, what your focus is. My personal challenge in this area was that not only did I not know what I wanted, but I was creating lots of things that seemed to be outside the realm of what I SHOULD want as well! I now consider this to be a process of lining up and integrating my head and my heart so that they work smoothly together – instead of my intuition telling me one thing and my rational mind not listening because it has other ideas of what’s going on. It’s not just my rational mind that was choosing my realities and my experiences, but my Whole Self, rational mind included.
Actually, my rational mind, on its own, had developed a very narrow band of what it considered “acceptable” experiences, based mostly on societally accepted norms and what was judged “good”. Truthfully, if my experiences in this life only fell within that band, I would have died of boredom eons ago, but it took a while for me to admit that to myself. I had learned to focus on these SHOULDS and SUPPOSED TO WANTS, ignoring the spontaneous, creative thrust for LIFE and EXPERIENCE that boils within each one of us.
As a testament to this creative unstoppability, I think of the El Nino floods in California in 1998. My partner John and I live out in ranch country in Central California next to a rain-fed creek. During the constant rains the creek, in just a few days, grew to a raging muddy river, carrying tree trunks and boulders easily – that final night we spent our time nervously monitoring the level of the river with flashlights and wondering if we should grab our dogs and dash for higher ground – especially when we discovered that a foot-deep stream of water was already rushing down our sideroad! In the wee hours of the morning however, the rains finally dissipated – it was then that we discovered that our main road was destroyed in six places (including four bridges that were washed away) we were cut off from everyone (except a helpful neighbor on horseback), we had no phone or electricity, we obviously couldn’t drive anywhere, and our food supplies weren’t going to last forever. Three days after this main event, a red cross helicopter landed right on top of the hill we’d considering evacuating to that last night of the storm – the rescue team said that there was more rain coming and so we hurriedly packed up some things, grabbed the dogs, and flew out of there. We didn’t know that the roads wouldn’t be fully accessible for over a month but luckily we had some good friends that let us stay with them.
Now, to look at that experience through the narrow beliefs of my rational perspective only, I would have thought that I would NEVER have created such a calamity – the fear of the flood night, the utter inconvenience of being cut off from our cars and other stuff for a month, living at friends’ houses out of suitcases, the expense of renting a four wheel drive vehicle to get through the mud to even see if our house was still there in the first place… well, you get the idea.
But looking past the fear, and the beliefs in lack and limitation, I see an entirely new picture forming. When I consciously decided to let go of fear that night of the flood, I actually started having a good time! It was – heaven forbid – EXCITING! We had waded through knee deep waters to our front gate and saw the road washed out. We got to meet neighbors we hadn’t before. We got a FREE helicopter ride. We got to go four-wheeling in a rented Ford Explorer. We got to stay a few weeks at a friends house by ourselves while they were on an overseas trip – HUGE house, big screen tv, a porch with a view, etc. We also got to visit with other friends in the area for longer stretches of quality time.
When I understood that at every moment, what I was experiencing was perfectly FINE, I also understood that it was time to drop the judgments that caused me to think that any of it wasn’t SUPPOSED to be happening. I mean – what a distraction from focusing my attention on the NOW moment! At every step of the way, if I was paying attention, I could have noticed that everything I needed was available and taken care of in one way or another, either in mundane or seemingly magical ways.
The point is that I came here, to physical reality, to create an interesting and intriguing life of expansion, growth, and adventure. This plan of mine may only OCCASIONALLY connect with the plan that my rational mind had constructed with judgments about what was and wasn’t okay to want or experience. For instance, who in their right minds would choose to create a flood and be cut off from their home for over a month? Or so says the rational mind, which is only looking at things from that one perspective. Instead, I like looking at it from the perspective of what I really DID experience in each moment – this offers me an entirely larger perspective of not only what was happening and what I chose to create, but who this larger *I* really is.
In many ways, I do look at this as a way of getting my conscious mind to work with my intuitional. This required letting go of my “trust” in “the rules” of how things were supposed to be, and how I was supposed to feel about them, and a reinvestment of my trust in my Self, and the larger arena of which we are all a part.
[Originally published in The Edge, July 1999.]