First Draft:
The Introduction to
The Creativity Journal, Tools & Techniques

We are each on a journey that has a kaleidoscope of physical and spiritual levels. We come to a place in the woods where the trails fork. One path is well worn; the other is obscured by undergrowth. As in the Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken”:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the road less traveled by
And that has made all the difference

Both paths have their advantages and both have their cost. One offers security but mediocrity. The other offers a deep experience of life. On the road less traveled by, you build your life around what really matters to you, around what you are most curious about, around what excites you. You seek to develop your potential, your inner resourcefulness. You confront your fears and learn to have faith: faith in yourself, faith in your dreams, faith in unseen influences. Doing nothing, avoiding the choice, is in fact its own choice. When we turn our backs on our adventure, something inside us shrivels up. Something of Spirit. You become less open to what life offers.

Author, professor and scholar Joseph Campbell wrote extensively on what he called the Hero’s Journey — the journey of someone who leaves behind hearth and home to answer a larger and deeper call. He related this journey to the epic stories of ancient mythology such as Perceval and the Holy Grail, as well as the religious beliefs of North American Indians and Hindu and Buddhist texts. The book and movie Star Wars were heavily influenced by Campbell’s work.

The journey Campbell describes is both a physical journey and an inner, spiritual journey. It is shaped by influences—elements that show up, guide or support the traveler at a crucial moment, then disappear. It can be, as in Campbell’s own case, a journey of study and scholarship. It can be a journey of physical hardship and adventure. It can be a journey in the world of art and creativity. It can involve solitude or connection with the human community. Whatever it is, it is giving in to a persistent tug, a tug inviting a deep experience of life. It is a step outside one’s boundaries, in particular self-imposed boundaries. It is a step outside of your comfort zone. Or several steps outside. It is often not what people in your life want you to do, including people you love.

Joseph Campbell described turning one’s back on the adventure of life as living in the Waste Land. He also called it living in the land of “thou shalt” -— the village where we are born, grow up and die living as others want us to live. We climb the ladder but when we get to the top, we find that it is leaning against the wrong wall. At that point it may be too late to find another wall. We’ve lost our flexibility.

On the other path, following what Joseph Campbell and others have described as “following your bliss,” life opens up. You take one opening, and new openings appear —- openings that exist for you but that do not and would not exist for anyone else. You strive to find the life that is waiting for you. You move toward the transcendent. You ride the mystery and the mystery rides you. The path is often scary. You don’t have to risk life or limb, but you have to put yourself where the unexpected could happen and sooner or later will happen. You learn to get your fear under control. You need faith. There will be setbacks. You will make mistakes. Your old patterns will recur. Others disappoint you, but more significantly you disappoint yourself. To emerge on the other side you need to persist. You need to keep seeking the best that is in you. There are no easy answers or everyone would do it. Wonder takes the place of answers and certainty. Failure follows success and then success follows failure. You get to touch the mystery, the Mystery. The experience is deep and wonderful if you are willing to roll with uncertainty.

The belief at the center of this work is that life, when you embrace your adventure and take that step toward the gods, is made deeper and richer, and the ultimate destination more meaningful, if it grows out of an intimate connection with your inner world. Campbell talked and wrote a lot about this connection. This work explores techniques to develop that connection, techniques that help the seeker draw from the pre-verbal, the half-understood, the subconscious. There is a wisdom inside each of us that often cannot be put into words but that, with practice, can be used to guide and shape our lives and our work. From time to time your spirit links up with the Great Spirit outside. When you are on the right path, the energy that you expend comes back to you increased. When you are on the right path, you feel really alive. You feel blessed. Not every day or even every week, but overall your work gives you energy. The ultimate is to also know that it adds something special or crucial to the lives of others.

A journey needs a destination; a life fully lived needs a vision. Ultimately, where you think you are going, and where you actually finish up, may be different. Nevertheless, a vision helps us avoid meandering aimlessly. If you don’t shape events in your life, entropy will determine who you are and who you become.

There is who we are today, and who we hope to become. On our journey, the two come into closer alignment. Otherwise, there isn’t much point. If we are already where we want to be, living as we want to live, being who we envision we could be, there is little need for a journey.

A life well-lived is a creative process. Like an artist, a person on a journey is in the state of becoming. An artist strives to make the images in his or her mind reality. Without the tension of reaching for the half understood, the artist will get bored, and create boring work. A person on a journey strives to make the vision of their potential a reality and in the process experience life in a deep way.

The journey will have both failures and successes. Adversity is an agent of personal transformation. Adversity can show you your deepest darkest, most terrible aspects as well as the most beautiful parts of you.

How do you define integrity? How do you achieve your deepest integrity in your life? To achieve integrity with others and yourself, there’s a lot of inner work to do. A lot of things have to be right. Out of fear and insecurity —- we humans are bundles of emotion and messiness —- we go to extreme lengths to avoid the crucial issues at the center of our lives. We’re in denial, and rationalize and thus avoid probing deeply.

Integrity with yourself is often about your deepest truths –- the truths that transcend the facts.

Just as creativity is a search for the essence of the thing –- the creation of deep, beautiful, meaningful work –- work that grows out of a searching and a seeking, journaling is a search for the essence of your life, a creation of love in response to the gift of life.

Man does indeed know intuitively more than he rationally understands. The question, however, is how we can gain access to the potentials of knowledge contained in the depth of us, how we can achieve increased capacities of direct intuition and enlarged awareness.
      - Ira Progoff, from At A Journal Workshop

Ira Progoff was a psychoanalyst, student of Carl Jung and researcher into human psychological processes and creativity. At a Journal Workshop is regarded by many, including myself, as an important tool in understanding the use of journaling and meditation to gain perspective on one’s life and psychological processes. It is a little more complicated and theoretical than it needs to be, a little academic, but its usefulness far outweighs its weaknesses. Progoff put decades into researching and developing the techniques explored in the book.

Progoff likes to use a metaphor that many may find helpful. He says there’s an unground stream of images and recollections within each of us. The stream is nothing more or less than our interior life. When we enter it, we ride it to a place where it wants to go. He says this is not a discursive method, not analytic: “There’s no neat wrap-up; you don’t end up with ‘insight.’ It’s an event, and when it’s happened, your life is different.”
- Psychology Today, March 1981, By Robert Blair Kaiser, “The Way of the Journal,” an article about Ira Progoff and his workshops.

 Journaling is a search for your deepest truths – the truths that transcend the facts. The belief at the center of this work is that your journey that is made deeper and richer, and the ultimate destination more meaningful, if it grows out of an intimate connection with your inner world.

Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to me as my own thoughts . . . My journal should be the record of my love. I would write in it only of the things I love, my affection for any aspect of the world, what I love to think of…I feel ripe for something…yet can’t discover what that thing is. I feel fertile merely. It is seed time with me. I have lain fallow long enough.
      - Henry David Thoreau, in his journal