Diving Lessons

Creating Through Darkness & Light

What stories are you living with? That’s a question I ask myself daily. They may be stories I’m expressing through fiction, poetry, and essay, or through coaching conversations and personal discussions, or even emails and social media. They may be stories I’m telling only to myself—consciously or unconsciously—about this world, who others are, and who I am. Whether or not we’re writers by profession, we are, by our nature, story makers. And the stories we tell ourselves determine much.

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

Last week I shared a personal memory that I chose to work with over time. It began as a victim story and evolved, through various iterations, until eventually it became a forgiveness story. Learning to forgive human beings (including ourselves) for unskillful actions is not the same as condoning destructive behaviours. And such journeys, from feeling afflicted to embodying forgiveness, can’t be forced. Being gentle with ourselves, we may begin to honour the work of forgiveness as a work in progress—one of fully experiencing feelings in order to find greater compassion for ourselves and others. Often the best thing we can do is simply take a few deep breaths, hold the tension of the moment, and bring awareness to it. Then, we may notice that as we engage our “inner witness,” even in times of great worry or anguish, that part of us—the observer part—is always calm. Awareness opens a space for curiosity.

Awareness and curiosity are our greatest tools for transformation.

When I quiet my mind and shift from contractive states of fear, anger, doubt, or judgement, to the more neutral, potentially expansive state of curiosity, various questions may arise:

• What is the opportunity for growth here?

• What can I do to help make a positive change?

• And, borrowing words from Jungian author James Hillman—What “latent powers” may be calling to be developed?

• I might even ask, what would love do here?

Helping highly creative people to recognize their own conditioned, limiting inner stories, and to transcend them, is one of my passions as a professional coach. I love seeing creatives overcome old barriers and thrive, and I consider that process a work of soul.

Yet being a fiction writer and poet is also a work of soul. In order to bring issues crying for attention into the light, we writers must explore the dark. It’s part of the territory.

There are parallels between writing about characters dealing with trauma and living in a world where the effects of trauma are being felt and re-experienced constantly on a global scale.

The piece I’m sharing with you today, from my book Birdlight: Freeing Your Authentic Creativity, comes from a chapter called “The Duck: Freeing Your Emotions and Discernment.” It’s about dealing with a limiting belief that arose in me, years ago, as I was revising my novel The Shining Fragments. When you read about my “paradigm”—i.e., the old pattern I found myself stuck in, I encourage you to ask yourself what YOUR self-limiting stories may be. Then get curious. Where are there opportunities to grow? What latent powers within you are calling to be developed? And if you find that task difficult, please know you’re not alone. One of the many maxims in the personal development field is this: “It’s hard to see the picture when you’re the one inside the frame.” That’s why getting help to identify the old stories that have become barriers for us is key to honouring and following our dreams. If you know it’s time to make the changes you’ve been yearning for, but aren’t sure how to do it, reach out to me. That’s how I help people, and I’d be glad to schedule a chat.

On this planet, we need more heart-centred, aware, and deeply caring, visionary individuals to build dreams and make a positive difference. I help creative people overcome obstacles and use their gifts in a world calling forth its light bearers.

A first step on that path—a step to wonder—is consciously recognizing and changing our old narratives.

Photo by Angelina Kusznirewicz on Unsplash

From Birdlight © Robin Blackburn McBride…

Chapter 5

The Duck: Freeing Your Emotions and Discernment

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.
—Robert Frost

A Walk in the Sand

At first I saw only feathers. When I pulled, I found them lodged somehow and I pulled harder. It took me several seconds to realize they belonged to an almost intact body buried in the sand. Then up came the bird’s carcass, complete but for a cleanly severed head. I bagged the animal’s remains and continued walking, the weight a welcome mystery.

Back at the workshop I showed Lana, an artist and intuitive healer, who was facilitating our session on reading found objects and incorporating nature’s messages in art. She identified my bird as a duck.

A duck. I confess, I was a little crestfallen that the harbinger I’d claimed and come to consult on wasn’t more edgy and arresting, like a cormorant or hawk or, even better, an eagle. Yes! To return from the Toronto Islands with an eagle in my big orange bag—now that would have been a kick-ass augur. A duck, on the other hand, made me think of Hans Christian Andersen’s story of an ugly, misunderstood creature, an outsider who endures disconnection, yearning, and painful constrictions only to realize its full identity as nothing less than a magnificent swan. Read: Not a duck. My ego wanted something bigger.

I thought of duck feet and adjusted my stance. I thought of Daffy Duck, and of Donald and Daisy quacking, and cleared my throat. Of course my ego, disappointed by the synchronicity I’d experienced on the beach, was the same ego that didn’t reveal to my friend I was disappointed. “Ah… a duck,” I said, like I’d found gold or a sacred chalice.

Quack, quack.

Yet as I handled the animal’s body, stroking its feathers and fanning its wings, studying the curled feet, all of my mind’s cartoon antics vanished.

Lana smiled. “They may not fly very high, but they sure know how to dive.”

Of course. All at once it became clear that the webbing and wings were for a different medium altogether.

“Emotion,” I said. “Deep water.” Suddenly I understood why the animal and I had found each other. I knew my job that summer would be to dive deeply into the interior life of my current novel’s protagonist. I also knew the work would require me to plumb my own emotional depths; to say that I felt daunted was an understatement.

Months earlier, I thought I’d already gone deep enough in producing a manuscript that had been praised and circulated. But prospective publishers wanted more access to my central character’s inner wounds. When I received their comments I wanted to shout, “Don’t you know he’s emotionally shut down? Isn’t it obvious that his feelings are buried—so buried that even he can’t feel them?!”

The inherent contradiction in my unvoiced defense had caused me to step back from the project all spring. I’d waited for the school year to end, knowing I’d need space to remember and explore how an emotionally damaged person feels and doesn’t feel—how feelings come out sideways, and how to show that.

The duck’s head was gone, yet it spoke. Don’t bother searching for answers in your head, it said. Dive down.

Diving

The challenge: to go back again into the dive, the murk, the pain and wonder of the created world without questioning why I conceived of it in the first place, accepting that it came for a reason and the reason was a mystery—accepting that this was my child, my creation, and that even though it was June and sunny and people were happily sipping coffee on café patios and cycling in the ravines, I was in my basement in the dark of my character’s transitory hell.

I’d spent the spring reading books on post-traumatic stress disorder in order to do justice to my novel’s protagonist. I’d read other works on emotional pain and abandonment, and I’d made copious notes. I had internalized all I could through my researcher’s brain—that safe place of being a learner, of material you can talk about at dinner parties when people ask you what you do. All the library books, e-books, articles, and bookmarked sites were conventional, appropriate, academic. But I knew what was coming: the propeller blade’s clean swoop.

My heart, not my mind, would need to take the lead in those margins where the editor had written, “But what does he feel?”

The biggest obstacle in making the dive back into character work was my paradigm. I still experienced old, lingering shame and artistic self-doubt from years of negotiating deep-seated fears and “managing” my own emotions so well as to bury them—so deeply and seemingly completely that at times I feared true feelings had stopped existing in me. That fallacy was inextricable from my “failed actress who shouldn’t have given up” narrative of myself. Eventually, through creative recovery work, I’d discovered I had hit a wall in acting when I couldn’t quite “get” the feeling underlying the stage action. I understood motivation, but it was hard to access emotion in performance (that is, beyond a child’s joy in play and the excitement of the adrenalin rush), because for me, emotion—and, more specifically, the vulnerability in intimately conveying emotion—was terrifying. I had ambition and stage presence, but I had a tough time feeling on cue. I was twenty-two.

Now, many years of recovery later, as a writer on the edge of facing what felt like the ultimate challenge, I worried I didn’t have what it would take to find the emotional truth of my beloved character. Yet as much as I worried, I also recognized the ludicrousness of my fear. This story had moved me deeply from the start. Like every significant creative project in my life, it felt like a received work. My job was simply to bring the work into form—completely. I’d spent many an afternoon drafting outdoors, letting nature contain the story and my free-flowing tears in breakthrough moments when more was revealed to me. This summer would be no different. I felt a deep connection to my protagonist. I knew him. I simply had to trust my own emotional knowing, my range of experience and—yes—feelings, in order to access more of his.

I agree with Frost’s sentiment, cited in this chapter’s epigraph, that the poet’s tears are the connective tissue of his work. Those tears need not be made obvious (indeed, our craft teachers remind us, “Show, don’t tell”), yet the artist’s emotion must translate to the cathartic experience of others as they view, read, explore, listen, dance: tears of sadness and also of laughter—of joy. Art is made through full-spectrum feeling in both the artist and the co-creative receiver. Regardless of the form our “poetry” takes, our range of emotion is its life force.

Left unchecked, my mind is very good at caging me with old stories of being so injured, defective, and “naturally” flawed as to not be capable of making fine art. Yours may be too. And there are variations of the cage story. Ask yourself if any of these statements are familiar: I don’t feel enough (my former limiting self-talk); I feel too much; my feelings aren’t powerful enough; my feelings are too powerful; I’m too sensitive and vulnerable; I’m too closed off and cold; I can’t take criticism; I have good reason to be numb; I’m afraid I’m just not talented enough; I’m easily damaged and overwhelmed; I’m terribly shy; I have reason to be cynical; I’m not giving enough; I always give too much and then I get hurt…. The list could go on and on. Such emotional baggage, regardless of the story variation it perpetuates, is just that: a story—and one which can be transformed.

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

The Depths

When I followed my dream to live fully as a writer, a new dream revealed itself. I knew I was also called to guide others on the creative path. At first this twofold vision seemed paradoxical. On the one hand, I was learning as much as I could about creativity and personal development. My study intensified and my life evolved as a beautiful, albeit at times scary, adventure. I was committed to helping people live inspired, fulfilled, and happy lives. That meant teaching others effective techniques for replacing negative messages and emotions with positive, uplifting thoughts and feelings in harmony with their newly expanding visions. At the same time, I was committed even more whole-heartedly in my fiction to exploring the darkness—the minor keys—with characters whose journeys took us ever into the depths. This tension of opposites gave me life, but it also baffled me.

In my new situation, I was confronted with an age-old question: Why are some of us called to plumb the dark depths in our creativity anyway? Part of me wondered if I still desired to go into emotionally tough, gritty places in my fiction. The answer I received was “Yes.” I held fast to Zen Roshi Joan Halifax’s words on rites of initiation, as so often my characters have taken me such places. In myriad ways, they continue to reveal for me what Halifax describes as “those great zones of darkness that make the unclear, the contradictory, the polluted, and the changeable the ground of renewal.” She describes such passages as “the occasions of fruitful darkness.” For me, the whole process of receiving a story into the world is fruitful—that impulse to move through darkness into light, to harvest the gifts of those zones of becoming.

Quote of the Week:

“One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these—to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity.”

—Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Video of the Week:

What’s Ahead:

This Saturday, November 16, I’ll be at the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair selling my books. If you’re in town, come out and join the fun!

Next week, I’ll wrap up this month’s series, “The Stories We Tell Ourselves,” by focusing on creating new stories for our lives. I’ll touch upon working with a vision. On Friday, November 29th, paid subscribers will receive the third talk in my Wonders Within Series, a deeper dive into refining and testing a vision, including strategies for bringing it into form. Join here:

I’ll be on holiday with family during the first week of December, so there won’t be a newsletter on Friday, December 6th. After that, my letters will resume on December 13th when I’ll begin a new series, including the occasional poem or two.

Thank you for being here!

Robin