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You know you are feeling something…
Yet, you aren’t a 100% sure of what that thing is.
It’s something that has upset you deeply.
It’s something that you are spiraling around.
Perseverating on.
It’s keeping you from creating.
It’s keeping your writing at bay.
Your art at a distance.
Your creativity is howling but from someplace locked deep inside.
And when you can’t get at the heart of the matter…
When the root of the problem doesn’t seem to want to be found…
Can I ask you something?
How safe do you feel in this moment?
When did you stop feeling safe?
I’m here to tell you that what it is that you are feeling is a lack of feeling safe and secure and then in the end feeling love.
If you’ve joined a writing group, study group, business group, or heck, even a play group and feel someone in the group is stealing your ideas, poaching from you, and depleting you of your best resources—whether they are doing it consciously or not—you are not going to feel safe in your creative life.
If you have a boss, department chair, dean, dissertation adviser, mentor, or supervisor, who awakens your inner critic and provides less than helpful feedback, you’re not going to feel safe in your life.
If your writing partner, co-author, business partner, literary agent, editor, publisher, the gallery owner who showcases your work, subtly criticizes you—you know you can’t quite put your finger on it, but you never feel safe when showing them your work and your work often feels discredited—you’re not going to feel safe in your creative life.
If you are worried that your partner in life is going to tell you the moment has arrived where he no longer loves you the most-est, then you are not going to feel safe in your life.
If someone in your life is hot and cold with you—rejecting you one minute, pulling you close the next—you are not going to feel safe in your life.
If you have a lover who speaks out of both sides of her mouth, saying she loves you, but meanwhile with all that she does, she’s denying that love is an action verb and never really showing you the love you are so worthy of, then you will not feel safe in your life.
If your needs are never getting met but only sporadically, if you’re living on the breadcrumbs of love, you are not going to feel safe in your life.
If you have a friend who is constantly asking for your forgiveness because she doesn’t match and mirror your attentiveness, your responsiveness, how will you ever feel safe in the friendship?
If your colleague, boss, family member, friend, loved one, doesn’t honor the pulse within you and adore the moments between your heartbeats as much as they love the heartbeats, then you are not going to feel safe in your life.
If you have a friend who isn’t really a friend, spreading gossip and innuendo and ruining your reputation with tiny, small comments that don’t look much like love, you will not feel safe in your life.
If you are always worried the email won’t be returned, the call won’t be answered, the text will lay fallow, that the person on the other end of your communication won’t respond, you won’t feel safe in your life.
For it is as Jeff Hood tells us, “Distance doesn’t separate people…Silence does.”
So how does this relate to inspiring the creative within?
What does this have to do with your creativity?
It’s to remind you…
You can’t be building your business if your competitor is in the room, seeing each and every idea as it comes to you.
If the man you love most in this world, doesn’t make you feel safe and secure in his love, energetically you’ll carry yourself in a posture that makes you exceedingly vulnerable.
If your friend isn’t really a friend, you’ll keep making self-sabotaging choices that deplete you of your personal power.
If the woman, who you thought was the one—the love of your life—always puts her own needs and wants above your own, you’ll accept a life of less than, settling for barely good enough.
If, in each and every meeting at work, you are faced with colleagues, an adviser, or a boss who makes you feel unsafe, it will drain you of your personal peace.
If that’s the case, when will you ever feel safe?
When you’ve depleted yourself to the point of martyrdom?
When you’ve beat your head against the brick wall repeatedly and falsely expecting a door, a window to appear magically and open?
Sure life has unexpected crises and twists and turns and things that go bump in the night.
And moments of sheer exasperated terror that make us cry out loud.
But that’s not what this is all about.
This is the stuff you can choose to feel safe around instead of settling, tolerating, or compromising less than you deserve.
In this life, you have been given the responsibility to decide whether or not you will open yourself up to people, things, and experiences that do not make you feel safe, secure, and loved.
And you must, as a result of this responsibility, be willing to accept the consequences of choosing not to feel safe.
And I’m here to tell you that you can feel safe…
You can choose people who will make you feel safe, secure, and loved.
There are people you can expect the world from.
They’ll always answer the call on the first ring, return the email when promised, respond to the text with a near immediacy that takes your breath away and makes you feel so very loved.
They’ll reach out for no other reason that just because.
They’ll give you the Universe when they can.
These are the people you want to hold onto tight.
They are always on your team.
They know how the Universe operates.
They orchestrate it so that the Universe works for you, not against you.
They know how to have your back.
And YOU…YOU are the one who can make you feel the most safe, secure, and loved.
You have a fire inside of you that you can always return to and sit beside.
On the days when you are shattering like glass and shivering to the point of turning yourself inside out because all of your trust has been shaken…
It’s that fire that you need to warm yourself beside.
Now the goal isn’t to always feel safe.
For as Jumana Sophia teaches us, “It’s not a realistic expectation. It is also not necessary. You might be a refined, subtle flower of delicacy and sensitivity. But you are also a Lioness [or a Lion] who knows how to welcome the unknown, take risks, protect what’s yours to protect. And then to roar when necessary.”
And I’m here to tell you that it’s okay to know when to ROAR.
Know when the poachers are in sight.
For your creativity, for your life force of inspiration to swell sweetly, you must maintain clear, safe spaces around you.
Those safe spaces clear the creative blocks.
Those safe spaces open up the vessel for creating to occur.
For all creative goddesses and gods have literal and figurative shields to protect them, so whatever is not in their best interest does not come through to harm them.
And this in return allows the love—whether that love is in human form or creative project form—that is meant to be welcomed into your life to arrive.
It also allows for you to create openly from a space of abundance.
You’ll be able to feed your creative self until it overflows with nourishment, loving kindness, deep empathy, compassion, generosity, and more gratitude than you ever knew was possible.
So here’s to cultivating feelings of SAFETY and SECURITY and LOVE.
And ROARING when necessary.
Holding your safe space and roaring alongside you,
Dominique
P.S. Thank you to Lyza Fontana, the wisest woman I know, who introduced me to the concept of beating my head against a brick wall expecting a door or window to open. She is also the one who first shared with me Jeff Hood’s quote on a deep, dark night of the soul when I realized that the answer to the question I was puzzling over was all about safety.
P.P.S. Have something you’d like to share? Please leave me comment. I read and respond to Every. Single. One. Thank you!
P.P.P.S. And sharing is caring…I love when you share my words with others. Thank you in advance for sharing on social media!