Inhabiting Our Deep Inspiration
Transformation happens when our learning is infused with intentional processes of becoming.
Each week, following an ICN article, we offer invitations into deeper becoming—spiritual practices, ways of engagement, and opportunities for life integration. This rhythm seeks to intensify our mystical practice, deepen our embodied engagement, and call forth greater transformation in ourselves, our communities, and the world—the I, the We, and the All.
IF YOU MISSED IT LAST WEEK, WE ENCOURAGE YOU TO FIRST READ THE ARTICLE INFORMING THESE PROCESSES: “What is Your Spiritual Inspiration?”
We invite you to consciously and intentionally engage in the following processes for your personal lives, WeSpace groups or other spiritual communities, and global participation.
Embodying Our Divine Agency
“In taking up our divine agency, if we truly believe and experience ourselves as participants in the divine nature, then we will increasingly feel more and more compelled from our divine source to do what God does—create in love.”
This Becoming Practice invites you into embodied response to the three shifts described in last week’s article. Before engaging in this practice, you may want to reread that part of the article.
These three shifts—insight with inspiration, experience with enaction, ambition with aspiration—are explored here through invitations to embodied movement, deepening awareness, and enactive divine agency.
We offer a triptych series of images as invitations. Let these INSPIRE your own movements—individually and communally—as you listen, respond, and live from your divine agency and vitality, here and now.
Shift One: Integrating Insight with Inspiration
“Sense from our divine agency, the true source of our motivation for learning and for inspired response, growing in our capacity to embrace and release as needed. Times for taking in and times for taking up our charge to WeCreate. Inflow, interflow, outflow. And the ongoing interplay and dance of these movements both personally and collectively.”
Shift Two: Integrating Experience with Enaction
“Through this integration of experience and enaction, we bear the fruits of our experiences and offer them as an outpouring, an enactive engagement with the flow of loving contribution. They become sacred offerings, stemming from a will inspired to make a difference in the world and in how we live. We can embrace the spiritual inspiration that calls us to go beyond experiences themselves and into ways of WeCreating that integrate and bring forth these realities we experience into everyday life, in our relationships, and in the world in new and generative ways.”
Shift Three: Integrating Ambitions with Aspirations
“The helpful integration we might make is to hold our desired outcomes and projected content of realization with and through a bigger field, a wider channel of possibility than we might see from our current vantage point.”
Inspiration & the Creative Process
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Attending to Phases of WeCreating
Inspiration is often the first spark of the creative process. Of course, we can also be inspired all throughout, especially in WeCreating, where our collaborations can catalyze one another with new perspectives, possibilities, and potentialities at any point in our creative endeavors.
We can invite the energy of spiritual inspiration into any phase we find ourselves in the creative process. Here for this becoming offering, we bring forth an invitation of an infusion of divine vitality and inspiration into whatever step you are at right now in a given creative endeavor.
The following stages can be taken as suggestive and evocative, rather than definitive. They are not necessarily linear. Receive them as possible waypoints to aid in recognition, with invitations to infuse with new inspiration along the way.
For each part of the process, we offer one personal and one collective reflection invitation.
Conception / Preparation
What are some sources of inspiration that you can welcome and engage with more to open yourself to greater creative invitation?
What relationship or connection might inspiration be guiding you to cultivate as an act of potential creative conception?
Gestation / Incubation
How might you feed and nourish the ideas and possibilities gestating within you right now?
How might you come together with others in a wombful way, to make space to hold, play, bear, and co-inspire together with that which is still growing?
Experimentation / Illumination
What do you need to try that might fail?
Would you feel open to asking your guides to support and illuminate you with wisdom and insight, opening to inspiration arising with divine revelation?
Discernment / Evaluation
As you begin to craft and create, how is your spiritual inspiration continuing to live and evolve throughout the process? Are there earlier inspirations that might need to be released?
To whom can you offer something that is in process, for honest feedback and authentic evaluation that will be generative, supportive, and inspiring?
Enaction / Verification
What is ready to be brought forth that you might be holding back?
How might you continue to hone, refine, and grow together with the living, ongoing work of continual creation and cultivation with what has come forth?
Beyond these stages…
What other parts of the creative process are you experiencing right now? What other inquiries, invitations, and openings to inspiration might be
Inspiration through the Arts
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Sacred Poetry
Where Everything is Music
by Rumi
trans. Coleman Barks
Don’t worry about saving these songs!
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it doesn’t matter.
We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.
The strumming and the flute notes
rise into the atmosphere,
and even if the whole world’s harp
should burn up, there will still be
hidden instruments playing.
So the candle flickers and goes out.
We have a piece of flint, and a spark.
This singing art is sea foam.
The graceful movements come from a pearl
somewhere on the ocean floor.
Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge
of driftwood along the beach, wanting!
They derive
from a slow and powerful root
that we can’t see.
Stop the words now.
Open the window in the centre of your chest,
and let the spirits fly in and out.
All Images are open-source, used with permission, or created by ICN