Introduction:
Creativity – the River of Life for a Woman Entrepreneur – Pt 1
Have you ever read something that unlocked these secret doorways inside you that you did not even know were there? It’s not a huge explosion of an A-ha moment… it’s like hearing a safe-cracker opening up a locked safe in a mystery novel.
You read a passage and hear those tumblers click into place with the first turn of the dial… a few more paragraphs and another turn … more clicking sounds dropping… you finish the chapter and the door glides open.
That’s what I felt like after reading Clear Water: Nourishing the Creative Life, chapter 10 in Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés book, Women Who Run With the Wolves; Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Dr. Estés is an internationally renowned Jungian psychotherapist, scholar, storyteller, and poet. By exploring these stories, she gives us profound insights into what happens in our feminine psyches.
This journey of mine into the awareness of the Sacred Masculine for Women Entrepreneurs is leading me into the depths of my soul… and what I am realizing is my true calling. That sounds so grandiose on one level. Maybe even a little hokey on another. Yet, it’s just clear and present for me as a reality.
I’m keenly aware that I’m also called to be way more open and vulnerable with you in that process. I’m still inside the labyrinth though and haven’t made my way back to the outside world. I can’t translate the messages yet.
For that reason, I am sharing directly from Dr. Estés book. The structure of this piece and all quotes are from chapter 10 pages 297 – 333. There is too much here for one article. So I’m breaking this up into 4 parts.
Part 1: Creativity – the River of Life for a Woman Entrepreneur
(and how you might be drinking from a polluted stream)
Part 2: Beware: Signs of a Poisoned Spirit
Part 3: Discover Your Unexpected Partner in the River Clean-Up Campaign
Part 4: Take Back the River… 9 Powerful Ways to Clean Up Your Inner River of Creativity
Part 1:
Creativity – The River of Life for a Woman Entrepreneur
(and how you might be drinking from a polluted stream)
One thing we can say for sure: being an entrepreneur is creativity in action.
Creating your business is one of the most amazing experiences, is it not? You have an idea and begin to shape it, change it, try this and try that until this “thing,” this “creature” is born and begins to grow up.
When we’re in touch with that deep creative life force, the Wild Woman, the Río Abajo Río, the river beneath the river, moves into us and through us, bubbling up and out of us in simple and profound ways, giving expression to our soul’s spirit.
And like a river, it feeds all who come in contact with that expression. Words, music, art, and ideas from others inspire us, and, in turn, we inspire them. These creative expressions can be life giving and life changing, rippling outward in wide circles influencing many.
“For this reason, a woman’s creative ability is her most valuable asset, for it gives outwardly and it feeds her inwardly at every level: psychic, spiritual, mental, emotive, and economic.”
So this wild river of creativity is flowing, pulsing through us all the time. Except when we block the flow, dam the river, allow destructive negativity and negligence to poison it.
When that happens, the creative ideas die off before they have a chance to bloom; we create vision boards but never focus long enough to take the actions needed to make that vision a reality. We second guess our motives, our ideas. Whatever seeks to come forth is twisted, not whole or viable. These still births disappoint and defeat us.
At some point, we stop pretending we can live without that deep river of creativity. We stop hiding behind distractions from binge TV shows and scrolling through Facebook, to our unhealthy eating and sitting for hours at the computer. We can’t fake it any more.
A voice deep within penetrates our trance and we know we have to clean up the river. “We have to wade into the sludge, purify the contaminates, reopen the apertures, protect the flow from harm.”
Here’s where this gets interesting
Women’s role as the one who cleans up the messes of life is well known. We’re trained for it from a young age.
If this river of creativity is flowing into us as pure, clean water… but when it reaches us it’s blocked with obstacles, filtered through layers of self doubt, our first impulse might be to think “there is something wrong with me.”
And we can spin around in that mind trap for a very long time. I know it well.
Let’s see how the following story sheds some light on this process.
La Llorona – The Weeping Woman
Dr.Estés shares that the story of La Llorona, the Weeping Woman is an ancient tale pre-dating the Aztec reign of Mexico in the 1500s. Essentially it tells us how the river of life, becomes the river of death.
Over the centuries this tale adapted to the cultures and circumstances of the storytellers. In this modern version, we can see the connection to our blocked female creativity.
A wealthy hidalgo, a nobleman, has factories along the river. He falls in love with La Llorona, a beautiful but poor young woman who gets pregnant.
During her pregnancy, she drinks from the river not suspecting any problem. But because the hidalgo poisoned the river with waste from his factories, she gave birth to twin boys who were blind and had webbed fingers. He rejects her and the boys and marries a rich woman who covets the goods from his factories.
Crushed, La Llorona throws her children in the river to drown and drops dead in grief. When she gets to heaven, Saint Peter says she can come in, but first she must retrieve the souls of her two sons.
You can find her wandering the riverbank with her long black hair, weeping still, dragging the river bottom with long stick-fingers searching for her lost children. But the river is so muddy and filthy it’s nearly impossible to see.
How does La Llorona connect to our feminine creativity?
The underlying theme of this story is the “destruction of the fertile feminine.”
The metaphor of the beautiful woman and the flowing river of life describe a healthy female creative process. “But here, when interactive with a destructive animus, [the masculine side of ourselves], both the woman and the river decline. Then a woman whose creative life is dwindling experiences, like La Llorona, a sensation of poisoning, deformation, a desire to kill off everything. Subsequently, she is driven to seemingly endless searching through the wreckage for her former creative potential.”
When your programs are never good enough and you fuss and fume, reworking them them over and over; when writing a simple newsletter turns into days of thinking and worrying if it’s ‘right’; when half-finished projects fill your computer; when you seek out someone, anyone to validate you…
you are drinking polluted river water and don’t know how to stop.
(I know this one well too. Though I’ve now decided I’ve had enough.)
“In order for her psychic ecology to be arighted, the river has to be made clear once again. It is not the quality of our creative products that we are concerned with through this story, but the individual’s recognition of the value of one’s unique gifts and the methods for caring for the creative life that surrounds those gifts.”
The Río Abajo Río, the river under the river, nourishes every creative act we make, from painting, writing, giving a hug, to playing with our kids, and sharing our work.
If we’re drinking from a polluted source, we feel stunted, poisoned, no energy.
Or our creative impulses are siphoned off from full expression by making products or programs that only serve our ego, not our soul. Listening to the voices of a culture or the people around us that tell us our ideas are not important is another form of pollution.
We might feel angry at this hidalgo character, fighting against him and what he seems to represent. Or slide into apathy and depression. This only keeps the river filled with more pollution.
When we only see this hidalgo male as a negative, as one who polluted the river, we can’t allow that he has a positive role in our psyche. Filled with impotence and grief, we drag the river bottom for our lost soul. Not aware that staying in that place of either doing nothing, of fighting against him or joining him by making things that do not feed our soul, we actually perpetuate the pollution… we keep pouring the toxic waste into our own river and can’t see how to clean it up.
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What’s Next:
In Part 2 I’ll talk more about how your creative life becomes polluted. How you can recognize if you’re drinking from a poisoned stream.
And in Part 3, you’ll see the way through this dilemma. Yes, you as the woman must clean up the river, but you cannot do it alone. And this is where we’ve so often got lost along the way. Find out who your partner is in the river clean up campaign in Part 3.
And finally, in Part 4 we’ll zero in on the ways we can reclaim the river and reconnect to our deep Wild Woman river spirit.
Giving thanks and credit to:
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., author of Women Who Run With the Wolves; Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, ©1992, 1995 Ballantine Books. Quotes and story from Chapter 10, Clear Water: Nourishing the Creative Life
Does this ring any bells for you? I know we still have more to talk about to bring the full picture into focus. Stay tuned for the Part 2.
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This was first posted in: Linda Kaun ~ The Power of You, Oct 6, 2017