getting intimate with the mysteries of your body

opening the conversation: feed the muse | week 1

Hello, my dears, and welcome to Feed the Muse, a space where you are free to taste all of you, a virtual studio designed to help you explore, create, and express the deliciously hidden aspects of self that are just dying to come out and play. 

I can only assume that since you’re here, desire is what brought you. Desire, specifically, to explore your relationship with your inner muse. To feed this relationship. To stoke the fire. To become more alive with creative energy. Well, that’s exactly what we’ll be doing. And I promise, it’s a lot simpler than you think.

We’ll begin with what other than the foundation? As you know, the foundation of any relationship is opening the doors of communication, and since intimacy is what we’re after, we’ll start by creating an atmosphere of love, trust, and friendship. You know, lay out the basics before we let the muse fuck us into creative bliss.. or whatever you wanna call it. 

Shall we?

Ground Zero: getting intimate with the mysteries of your body. 

Why?

Your body is your instrument.

Your body is your channel.

You have access, through your body, to an infinite well of wisdom — and endless source of sensation, inspiration, emotion. The question is, will you let yourself in? 

The muse wants more than anything to help you in the process of self-realization by giving you opportunities to connect body, mind, and spirit into one integrated power network through your creative efforts. You can think of sensation as the physical impulse, inspiration as the mental spark, emotion as the spiritual experience. 

For clarity’s sake, let’s define spirit as the nonphysical aspect of what moves you. You can personify it (or not) however you like. However it manifests as for you, it is what gives you a sense of depth, connection, meaning — that feeling of longing — the yearning to become or do, or create — an intensity of desire that propels you forward, and often unto the unknown. 

Because of this, it can be useful to address creative challenges, just as creative desires, through the physical, first. We’re often inclined to try to think our way into creativity, but our minds can be stubborn and attached to habitual thought patterns.. which means thinking too much can stifle the connection with the Muse we’re wanting to cultivate. The connection — our ability to become a vessel for inspiration in all its forms and flavors — is built on the primary skills of curiosity, listening, feeling, receiving, and responding. Inspiration can be experienced in many ways. You might relate with it as life force, creative energy, eros, emotional energy, sexual energy, love, power, strength - all of these things and more. 

I digress. Even though we desire to connect with our inner muse, the one who wants to create, we often resist because what shows up when we open the door is unfamiliar, strange, uncomfortable, chaotic, confusing. It makes sense - most of us were taught to deny our desire in one way or another. So of course it’s uncomfortable. You’re entering new territory, and that’s the point; there’s no growth without challenge. There will always be tension to reckon with. But maybe, just maybe, we can change our relationship with it.

Instead of resisting tension, thereby creating more tension and more pain and more suffering, we can choose to go straight to the center of it. To feel it, actually. Not rationalize or intellectualize or explain why we resist and why we feel afraid, but actually just feel the fear and feel the anxiety and feel the discomfort. Because guess what? If tension, then release. If we feel all the way through the discomfort, on the other side, is ahhhhh, yes. On the other side, is pleasure. On the other side, is freedom. On the other side, is space to become a more expansive version of you.

The thing is, emotion — creative energy — is energy in motion. It just wants to move through us. Sometimes it becomes fuel for a creation, sometimes it just needs to be let go of. If we’ve spent a lifetime denying our desire, there will be layers of muck to let go of. It might feel dense and icky at first, but the good news is you can learn to work with and through the ick. The key to being able to do this is simple: turn judgement into observation. Judgement is how we got into this mess in the first place. 

It’s useful to recognize that we use words to point to common experiences we have: fear, anxiety, discomfort, and these words often come with positive or negative judgements. But beneath the words themselves are just sensations. And this magic thing happens when we release judgement from sensations. Over time, our association with them becomes more neutral, and we are free to experience them for what they are. Just sensations. Just energy. Just part of the tapestry.

When we learn there are no wrong feelings, we learn to stop resisting, and in doing so, create an environment in which emotion is free to move through our bodies.

Here’s where the magic of movement comes in, which will be one of our guiding forces through these workshops.

Movement offers a way of unwinding the tension we’ve been holding onto and creating space to experience what the muse is offering.

To do this, we’ll use movement rituals as ways to invite the muse to enter and express through your body & consciousness. 

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