Dancing in the Dragon's Den Prologue

By Rosanne Bane

We all have some part of our creativity that’s waiting to be expressed. Maybe it’s the sunsets you’ve never painted, the pots you’ve never thrown, the buildings you’ve never designed. Maybe it’s the blank page, the blank canvas, the blank stage, the unyielding lump of clay or marble or emotion that you’ve stared at for hours, knowing you want to do something with it but not knowing what. Maybe it’s the life you’ve never fully lived.

This book is about that.

Some people think they’ve never had a yearning to be creative. They’ve been taught to believe they’re not creative. They have been taught a lie. The life force is creative energy. To live is to create. To live fully is to create fully. To deny or restrict creativity is to deny and restrict life.

Most of the people who believe they aren’t creative won’t read this book, and that’s sad because it’s for and about them too. This book is especially for those of us who were taught that we aren’t artistic because we couldn’t draw in grade school or act in high school or write in college, but still hold a spark of hope that we might have some hidden talent.

This book is for all of us who are both attracted to and a little afraid of our own creativity. The first thing we must know is that we are not alone. Look around; the next person you see either struggles with this dilemma or has given up the struggle by unconsciously blocking his or her creativity and, as a result, struggles with the surrender. It makes no difference whether that person is a successful, recognized artist or a hopeful unknown or someone who has given up any hope of being artistic. We all struggle with our desire to create fully—and thus live fully—and with our fear of what will happen if we do.

The second thing to know is that this struggle is perfectly natural. We have good reasons to be both attracted to and afraid of our creativity.

In the more than ten years that I’ve taught writing and creativity, I’ve seen the pure joy that occurs when a student discovers that he or she is creative, that’s its okay to be creative, that it's okay to be creative, and that however he or she expresses that creativity is acceptable, even desirable. I’ve also seen students falter although I thought they had tremendous promise. I’ve come to recognize that faltering is part of the cycle of living a creative life. Some of those students have persevered, allowing themselves to struggle and fail and struggle some more and eventually succeed. Others quit. I’ve come to see that quitting is also part of the cycle. We all quit at some time, and we can unquit at any time.

Quitting is not an act of cowardice or laziness. It is a reasonable response to a real threat. How can creativity be a threat, and if it is, how can we hope to express our creativity fully? That’s what this book is about.

We don’t often talk about the threat our creativity holds for us. We talk about how being in the creative flow is a blissful state. All the books, tapes and seminars that tell us how to be more creative at work, in our relationships, and in our art assume we want to be more creative and promise we will be if we’ll just learn a new set of techniques. We do need to learn techniques and develop our craft, but it usually isn’t lack of knowledge that keeps us from being as fully creative as we yearn to be. It is our fear.

We’re so busy telling ourselves how wonderful it is to be creative that we conveniently forget to mention, even to ourselves, "By the way, I’m afraid of this creativity. I’m not just afraid that I won’t be able to do this or that I’ll be criticized or rejected, I’m afraid I don’t want to do this at all. When I open up and explore my creativity, I scare myself."

We don’t want to give up the joy of creativity, and even if we did, our creative urges would not be ignored. We don’t want to go back, yet an unnamed fear keeps us from going on. We are blocked, not just in our art but in our lives.

The only truly satisfactory solution is to acknowledge the shadow of fear that accompanies the joy of creative expression and then, as Susan Jeffers says in her marvelous book of that title, "feel the fear and do it anyway."

In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron writes, "When we open ourselves to exploring our creativity, we open ourselves to God: good orderly direction." This is true because, as Cameron explains,

Art is an act of tuning in and dropping down the well. It is as though all the stories, painting, music, performances in the world live just under the surface of our normal consciousness. Like an underground river, they flow through us as a stream of ideas that we can tap down into. As artists, we drop down the well into that stream. We hear what’s down there and we act on it—more like taking dictation than anything fancy having to do with art.

Herein lies the source of both our joy and our fear. What Cameron describes as "dropping down the well" is the process of exploring our unconscious, hidden self. Not only do we open ourselves to God when we open ourselves to our creativity, we open ourselves to our unconscious as well.

The "underground river" is the stream of the unconscious. It is a flow of ideas and inspiration from a divine source that we can access through our subconscious or unconscious mind. In Jungian terms, our personal unconscious connects us to the collective unconscious. In spiritual terms, our Higher Self connects us to the Higher Power and our creativity connects us to the Creator. However we describe it, what I have observed in my own life and in the lives of my students and friends is that opening ourselves to our creativity requires opening ourselves to our own unconscious.

The problem is that the unconscious is unpredictable. Sometimes I’ve dropped down the well and discovered an idea for the next scene in my novel. Sometimes I’ve dropped down the well and discovered old resentments I needed to address in my personal life.

The unconscious holds energy and inspiration for creative expression. It also holds our shadow-self, what Carl Jung described as the person we have no wish to be. In the process of opening ourselves to our creativity, we open ourselves to this shadow, the denied and repressed parts of ourselves. No wonder we’re afraid.

We’re afraid that to be creative we will have to become everything we don’t want to be. We’re afraid that the myth of the dysfunctional, egocentric artist is true and that being a great artist necessarily means being a rotten human being. But dysfunctional artists are not creative because of their egoism; they are creative in spite of it. The uncomfortable truth is that there are ways to be truly and deeply creative without behaving as a rotten human being, but not without acknowledging our potential to be a rotten human being. We don’t have to become the person we have no wish to be—we have to acknowledge that we already are that person.

To be truly creative, we need to be aware of the difference between acting out and acting on. Jung called this distinction "taking moral action," which means acknowledging our dark inclinations as part of our human heritage, rather than pretending we don’t have any, and then relying on our highest values to choose how we will act on what we find in the deepest parts of ourselves. Those who don’t consciously act on their shadow will unconsciously act it out. If you don’t own your shadow, it will own you.

To deny the dark potential is to deny an enormous part of ourselves. It takes a great deal of energy, energy that is diverted from creative expression. It is to deny that we are truly, fully human and to deny the depths of our humanity that makes our creativity meaningful.

Echoing both Cameron’s image of the unconscious as a well and Jung’s comment that the shadow is 90 percent gold, Joyce Sequichie Hifler writes about our fears of tapping the depths of our soul in A Cherokee Feast of Days:

Giving up robs us of drawing up gold from our own depths. Imagine having a well, a very deep well, that is topped off with several feet of tainted water. But deeper down, the water, the ‘a ma,’ is clear, and down even further it is a spring, a spring that bubbles cold and pure through deposits of gold. Should we give up because of what we saw in the beginning? Or would we want to tap the depths and clear away the polluted water and get down to the very best? If it is true that we only know five percent of who and what we are—then, it is possible that we have untapped depths, where our being is pure and free of contamination. Should we give up such a rich experience because of what we have seen on the surface?

With knowledge, commitment, and reliable support, we can let go of the surface life of spending our energy repressing our shadow—and our creativity along with it—to become fully alive, fully creative, fully moral and human. We can walk through our fear to claim our larger Selves on the other side.

This book is about how to do that.

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