I’m pretty obsessed with the creative process–how it works, what gets in the way, and how creativity overlaps with magic.
In recent months, I’ve been deliberately creating space for my unconscious to seep into my writing (and my other art), and today, on the New Moon in Pisces, I want to share how I use astral travel to transform creative blocks into electric, can’t-wait-to-get-started inspiration.
I’m going to be a little vague-sauce about the piece I’m working on, only because it’s a book-in-progress, and I tend to wait until things reach a certain stage before I let my book babies interact with the big, wide world.
That said, the issue I was running into was how to capture, in writing, how messy and nonlinear personal growth really is, while still offering the reader enough of a roadmap that they won’t want to fling the book into a dumpster with a wail of frustration.
Let’s set the scene: The living room is hazy with frankincense, candles are flickering, I’ve taken three tasty-sweet drops of my favorite tincture (Clear the Way by 69Herbs), and my journal is smoothed open to a fresh page. Settling in, I close my eyes and astral travel to my Inner Sanctuary (which I show you exactly how to do here).
I meet my guides in the Hall of Portals, a wing of my Inner Sanctuary where I can conjure a doorway to wherever I wish to be–this time, to talk with the spirit of the book I’m writing.
The door opens on a bridge of stars, like stepping onto the Milky Way, which leads deeper and deeper into the celestial expanse until I encounter what I can best describe as a cosmic funnel. Imagine a giant kitchen funnel, only made out of this multi-hued star stuff:
And then I realize, wait a minute…I’ve been here before. The funnel is the underside of a place I’d visited in previous meditations.
What I find super fascinating is that, this time, I was coming at it from below, as if this part of my psyche/the cosmos/is there even a difference between the two was more unconscious, less accessible “through the front door,” if you will.
This way of thinking required a backstage pass, approaching things from an angle my ego consciousness wasn’t yet familiar with.
My guides lead me to a tiny door woven into the side of the funnel. I step through…and find myself in a moss-carpeted, humid forest at night, the air a symphony of insect harmonics, and a deep violet light, barely visible through the undergrowth, catches my eye.
Moving through the greenery, I find the source of the light: a cave, its entrance pulsating with a purple glow that feels palpably alive.
I enter the cave and there, in a massive quartz worthy of The Dark Crystal, is the spirit of the book, and it proceeds to tell me how it wishes to be written, how I can present the nonlinear complexity of inner work in a way that won’t confuse the hell out of readers.
The spirit called up imagery from a series of books I pored over obsessively as a child, ones that I still crack open whenever I need to tap into a magical mindset. While the main story unfolds in the center of the image, itty-bitty doors and lilliputian figures play at the margins, hinting at an entire world, just out of sight–a perfect metaphor for the vast, magical landscape of the unconscious that surrounds (and seeds with inspiration) our conscious awareness.
The spirit explained how I could create this effect with words, injecting bits of spontaneity and sideways inspiration into the main text, thereby mirroring the way in which the unconscious (through dreams, synchronicity, astral traveling to speak to a book spirit!, etc.) augments the ego’s tendency to plot a set-in-stone course that can crowd out the magic of the unknown when taken too far.
Not only was I stupendously grateful for practical guidance in how to write the book, this experience reminded me that we are never alone. Never.
Synchronicity interlude: As I wrote that last sentence, a song popped up on Spotify that perfectly captured my mood…
…and wouldn’t you know, the album artwork is the cosmic funnel I was trying to describe to you earlier. Yep. The universe just helpfully delivered that right to my eyeballs–and now to yours:
Whatever you’re grappling with, support exists in forms so numerous, the conscious mind can’t even conceive of the half of them.
There are friends, lovers, therapists, random strangers, that bird that lands on your windowsill, a quote in a book, a song, a sweet glance from a pet, the spirit of your creative project that wants to help you channel it into existence, and so many other things I can’t possibly list them all here, that will guide, encourage, or simply keep you company on your journey.
And then there’s the infinite universe within. The endless well of wisdom, inspiration, and connection to the livingness of everything that has, is, and ever will be. You are a part–an important part–of something so vast, so rich with meaning, that countless lifetimes wouldn’t be enough to experience it all.
Happy New Moon.
P.S. One of the biggest suffocators of my creativity is enmeshed relationships, and liberating myself from their entanglements has accelerated my creative process more than I could ever articulate.
If you also struggle with carving out time for the stuff that lights you up, perhaps because you’re afraid of making someone mad or being seen as selfish, this email series is for you, my friend.
