The world is in disarray, and this affects us all on some level, as we try to focus on our day-to-day lives. The destructive energy of the world has a negative effect on everyone. Perhaps you feel more anxious, irritable, or confused. Maybe you lack enthusiasm or your usual capacity for concentration. Or you feel easily overwhelmed and have a hard time making decisions or trusting yourself.
First of all, you’re not alone. Also, there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s difficult to make sense of what is going on because the structures that have provided a sense of security are crumbling, giving way to a sense of anxiety and powerlessness or even despair (see What Is the Best You Can Do When the World You Know Is Collapsing? and Why Martial Souls Rule The World). Rather than disconnecting with addictive behaviors or defeating thoughts, it’s essential to discipline the mind with creative and spiritual practices. And there’s no better time to start than between today and tomorrow, which is Makar Sankranti, the time when Mother Nature begins to wake up and things start moving forward. It’s when you plant the seeds of things to come (I’ve written about it before; see It’s Time To Grow Emotionally & Spiritually! or Are You Ready To Hit the Ground Running?).
When you sit down to write, paint, play music, or create anything, you’re doing more than making something. You’re gaining access to the creative energy of the Divine Feminine that shapes the universe and everything in your life-movie. This is how you transform the world through your own transformation. If you engage with it intentionally, as a form of spiritual discipline, you develop emotional detachment from the world of appearances and chaos, which is what we all need right now. Not to become indifferent, since the collective movie is currently demanding clarity of purpose and action (with the emerging Aquarian “Power to the People”), but to balance out your investments of energy while giving yourself a break.
Now, if you really don’t have the energy or wherewithal to do any of this, then try to carve some time to meditate or even just sit in silence for 10 minutes throughout the day. Focus on your breathing, anchoring it in your heart while resisting the mind trying to pull you outward with thoughts. Keep your attention and your breathing in your center. You’ll be surprised how you gradually gain energy and inner peace to engage with life and a creative endeavor as well.
Society treats art as entertainment or mere self-expression while limiting spirituality to specific practices like prayer or meditation. These are essential to transcend our suffering, but being creative is sacred work, too. From cave paintings to cathedral builders, from psalms to symphonies, and every other form of human expression, art is our way of touching something bigger than our mundane selves. As a sublimation of the ego, a creative endeavor can mirror deep spiritual truths when it is used to know ourselves.
Art as a Spiritual Practice
But this comes through structure, not in spite of it, because the ego will get in the way to derail us. Deeper revelations arrive through repetition and self-awareness, as well as discipline and continuity, not fleeting inspiration. The point is directing the mind to allow something to emerge from within rather than allowing the mind to distract us with a million things.
Creativity is not a mysterious gift reserved for a few; it is a natural tendency that becomes a skill through structure and training. If you perceive creativity as a practice rather than random inspiration, you discover that the Divine Feminine is accessible to everyone willing to do the work. Here the spiritual and the practical aren’t separate. If you want to feel more creative on a consistent basis, you need to treat your art—no matter what form you choose—as a spiritual discipline.
Here are some guidelines to help you stay on track:
1. Reduce your options. Too many choices overload the brain and slow decision making. Limiting your projects, tools, or techniques forces your mind to go deeper instead of wider. Many iconic ideas came from strict limitations rather than unlimited freedom.
Your unique voice emerges from commitment, from delving deeper, not from keeping all the doors open. The Divine is often revealed through constraint. Your creative practice gains substance when you stop chasing endless options and focus on working deeply within the boundaries you’ve chosen.
2. Separate creation from judgment. There are two distinct energies in a creative activity. One is expansive, exploratory, playful; it is the energy of intuitive self-expression. The other is more discerning and analytical: choosing what to keep, what to change, and what to let go.
Both aspects are necessary and deserve space, but they cannot occupy the same moment. If you judge your work while creating it, you interrupt your own flow. Create first, judge and reflect later. Let your process be messy, imperfect in its first form. Editing needs a different cognitive mode and works best when done at a later time. First comes the making, then the reflection.
3. Work in short focused sessions. In every contemplative tradition, there are designated times for spiritual practice. Not only do they strengthen our discipline; they recognize that we can only sustain deep attention for limited periods before the mind begins to wander.
Creativity peaks in focused bursts rather than long, unfocused marathons. So, set a clear time window and make it sacred. Twenty-five minutes. Forty. An hour. Whatever works for you. During this time, your endeavor is the only thing that matters. No phones, no distractions, no half-attention. Commit fully to the work, then stop.
This trains your brain to associate creativity with momentum instead of fatigue. A regular practice, even in small doses, compounds in ways that sporadic bursts never can. The same applies to any spiritual practice: meditating daily for 10 minutes is more effective than doing it for an hour every now and then.
4. Feed your mind with new inputs. On the spiritual path, pilgrimage matters, even if just through philosophical exploration. You leave the familiar. You cross thresholds. You put aside the usual categories or ideas, and in that space, something new can emerge as you open up to new possibilities.
Creativity benefits from the same kind of pilgrimage. It’s about seeing connections others miss, linking ideas into new constellations, and reinventing what is possible. Expose yourself to other creative minds and work as well as new ideas to gain fresh material and inspiration.
5. Make creativity a habit, not a mood. This is the most important principle and the hardest to embrace. It’s also where the spiritual nature of creative work reveals itself most clearly to discipline the ego-mind.
Waiting to feel inspired is unreliable. Inspiration, when it comes, is wonderful. It’s the feeling of grace, of being touched by the mystery of life. But it’s fickle, sporadic, and beyond your control. You cannot summon it. You cannot schedule it. What you can control is showing up again and again to build a welcoming space for it.
Consistency beats inspiration every time, and the practice itself is the point. Some days will feel electric, but most won’t. You show up anyway. You’re building a sacred container by removing resistance and self-judgment. You’re making yourself available for whatever wants to come through, thus turning into a divine vehicle free from ego. In addition, a regular creative practice builds neural pathways that make the subconscious (and the superconscious) easier to access over time.
When you make it a regular practice, something shifts, as you build a structure that allows insight to come to you. This is the heart of creative practice as spiritual discipline: you don’t wait for the Divine to arrive; you create the conditions that invite it. The primary condition is showing up, again and again, with as much presence as you can.
A Creative Project Is Sacred Work
Creativity grows when you treat it like a system instead of a miracle. Small structural changes can unlock surprisingly big results. But this doesn’t diminish the subtle, spiritual dimension of your creative activity as a reflection of yourself, which you can use to make the subconscious conscious.
Spirituality is self-knowledge. It isn’t somewhere else, waiting to be accessed through the right experience or epiphany. It’s here and now, woven into the fabric of daily life through both spiritual and creative practices. The eternal Self speaks through the silence of inwardness and concentration.
When you create something, you’re not just producing content for some pragmatic purpose. You’re bringing form out of nothing, meaning out of randomness, beauty out of raw material. You’re reaching toward something that transcends your individualized human experience as a unique expression of Divine Consciousness.
Do not wait for the muse to grant you permission. Your creative endeavor is sacred not because it produces sacred objects, but because the process of making it transforms you, as a vehicle of the Divine Feminine. Every time you choose focus over distraction, curiosity over comfort, and commitment over mood, you’re engaging in spiritual practice. You’re training yourself to be present, to trust the process, to work with what is rather than waiting for what might be.
Make the studio your sanctuary, the blank page your altar. Then a spiritual practice like meditation becomes easier, for the mind is more disciplined and quiet when you train it to concentrate and to remain anchored in the moment, free from its own fluctuations and detached from the external world.
Artists and athletes call this “being in the zone,” but for a spiritual aspirant, it’s simply living a mindful, meditative life to dissolve the identifications with the ego-mind that cause suffering. In truth, this state is your divine essence. So contact me today to explore and remove what gets in the way of the peaceful, creative disposition that is your true nature, as you gain emotional and spiritual freedom!
P.S. If you’re not ready to work with me as your spiritual mentor to delve deeply within, you can learn about the workings of the ego-mind to transform your perception and experience by implementing the Swan Method I share in You Are Your Healer: The Ultimate Guide to Heal Your Past, Transform Your Life & Awaken to Your True Self!
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