“Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.
Don’t try to see things through the distances. That’s not for human beings.
Move within, but don’t move the way fear makes you move.
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
-Rumi
My undergraduate alma mater’s slogan was “creative thought matters,” at the time, I admittedly thought the slogan was a bit silly. As I was more on team jock/science nerd in the division of our liberal arts campus. The large part of my school was composed of artists: musicians, studio artists, writers, and actors. Many go on to New York City and work in theatre or open an art studio.
With every year passing, I find myself more and more aligned with that slogan. Creative thought really does matter. We all have this wonderful and vibrant yet individual creative energy within us that we must unleash. We need to go within in order to not go without, in order to not go without realizing our potential. If you left that creative bulb of energy within merely settle at your core and in your heart, because you fear expressing yourself, you might never find out what you are capable of. For instance, if I had continued taking art classes through high school, who knows what I would be doing now. But I didn’t. None of my friends were enrolled in art classes, and as a teen who was part of a very close knit group of friends, I was scared to break away from that status quo.
Flash forward to college and there I was at a hippy dippy liberal arts school, where the art classes were graded so harshly that majority of students received C’s. In college, my fear was lowering my GPA and thus I never quenched that creative thirst. Post-college, I found myself lost without athletics, I found yoga. Really found yoga. I was committed to a daily practice and I wanted more. I was thirsty for knowledge, and I wanted to quench this spiritual thirst as well. I signed up for yoga teacher training, even though every fiber of my being was terrified. I was always nervous, incredibly nervous, of speaking up in classes from elementary school all the way to college. Despite feeling my stomach twisted up in knots, I managed to hold myself up in front of a class, and share my voice through teaching asanas (postures). The process of teaching yoga and expressing my creative thought, listening to my inner voice, and sharing it all has been incredibly healing for me.
Today, this Rumi quote has reminded me that we all need to stay creative, play music, paint, dance, write, and express ourselves somehow. Tap into the inner world within you, who so badly wants to express, wants to express something to the world. Whatever you do, don’t let fear stop you. Fear of not fitting in, fear of receiving a poor grade, fear of falling, and any other fear that you’ve conjured up in your head. Let it go. Let this creative thought and expression bring your closer to finding what you love, so that what you do on a daily basis is also what you love. Today, go within, so you don’t go without. Namaste.
With Love,
