When I started working as a coach, I used to schedule morning sessions until I realized that once I started to focus on others I completely bypassed my connection to my own life. (This is a huge risk for all helping professionals.) By reserving my mornings for my own study, writing, and extended walks, I am able to open myself to the needs of my clients without sacrificing my connection to my own creativity and need for self-expression. I no longer run the risk of confusing my life with that of my clients. My creativity is nurtured and preserved and, as a result, I can be fully present to others when called to do so.
Be willing to stand naked before yourself. Without prejudice.
Here, I simply have to give it up to Clive Barker. Yes, Clive Barker. A few months ago, as I was preparing to work on this very chapter, I received a gift from a friend. It was Naomi Epel's Writer's Dreaming, which contains interviews with writers talking about how their dreams have influenced their creative process. I was delighted that the book should arrive at such an auspicious time in my own project. Doubly intriguing was the subject matter, as I have had a plethora of complex and intricate dreams which have fascinated and, at times, perplexed me with their richness.
Now, I admit I was going to skim, if not skip entirely, the chapter on Clive Barker. I confess I have not read his works and have not seen any of the Hellraiser films so I have no right to have an opinion on the man but, honestly, his name has never jumped out at me as one of the great authors of our time, as, say, a Maya Angelou or Isabelle Allende. Imagine my surprise when I found myself absorbed in his chapter and highlighting line after line saying, "Yes, I understand this!" "I have thought this very thing myself!" “This is a marvelous insight!” Consider these paragraphs on the interplay between waking and sleeping life and the process of allowing one’s unconscious/subconscious life to be acknowledged and given validity as an expression of some aspect of oneself and one's experience:
… the idea of putting those things [here he means dream images, some of which are quite disturbing] into art is an important and interesting issue… simply to talk about them as things which have meaning, which are intimate self-confessions is, it seems to me, the primary act. The secondary act is the turning it into art… But to simply say I am whispering to myself through the lattice of my consciousness… and saying, I don't mind what I hear. I don't mind. I forbid myself nothing. I forbid my subconscious, and therefore my consciousness nothing, is the beginning, I think, of great health.
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