Barnet Bain: Rediscovering Your Creativity

Barnet Bain: Underneath a layer cake of strategies to get along in life, we all have a kind of a luminous joy that sometimes we lose touch with. To recover and reestablish that I say, ‘Call to mind a moment, an experience in which you felt wonderful, connected, attuned, joyful, or where you felt loved or loving, whichever. Maybe that time you excelled at a sport or hit a hole in one, or maybe that time when you remember the family Thanksgiving or Christmas and just a perfect moment of feeling connected and loving and loved. Maybe it’s a relationship that you have with a particular loved one or a pet, and when you think of that, you can attune to how glorious it felt. So, I ask people to find what it is, put their attention on it, and attune to the quality of that amazing feeling. Allow the feeling in the body, that feeling of love or accomplishment to come up and express itself on your face, in your eyes.

I call this feeling; this felt a sense, ‘The Most Amazing Thing.’ It’s kind of like a GPS that you can go to at any time, but when you go to it, one of the mysteries of life is that the energy itself is causal; it will have an impact on the quality of the choices you make, and of the mood that you have for the rest of the day. That mood will also have an impact on the kinds of situations that you attract into your life and the ways that you respond to situations. When you come from ‘The Most Amazing Thing,’ you’re coming from the part of yourself that is luminous, filled with light.

Sandie Sedgbeer: Many people have wonderful imaginations and brilliant ideas but somehow never seem able to ground them, whether because of self-criticism, judgment, fear, anxiety or a belief that they’re unable to produce something tangible without expert help. What advice would you offer them?

Barnet Bain: Well, the self-criticism and self-judgment, are trained. It generally comes from the experience of having others assess and criticize you or witnessing others assessing and criticizing somebody else and the feeling of fear that it might happen to you. These feelings and judgments are exactly the forces that constrict imagination, that constrict our ability to expect and to experience hope.

So, when I refer to developing creativity, I am looking at these forces of self-judgment and criticism and understanding when and where they became empowered to have an impact on my life. Those injuries arrested our capacity to grow our imagination, and one of the aspects of imagination is the ability to manifest. When we have constrictions in our imagination, the first thing that goes is the ability to produce something. We always create what we are most easily able to imagine and what we most expect. Even though we desire flow and love and abundance and growth, many of us are more easily able to imagine and to expect disappointment and failure. So, we need to understand and feel this so we can put it in a place where we can innovate beyond the limitations. ‘What were the moments where I learned how to judge myself, where I learned to lose confidence in myself?’ Because it is those moments that we continue to feed energy to.

So, what is important to me when I talk about developing creativity and imagination is to support people to learn how to identify these painful, disruptive, repetitive patterns from running your imagination, so we can identify them, interrupt them, and build new pathways forward.

ALSO READ: CO-CREATING THE STORY OF YOUR LIFE by Barnet Bain