Artist Inside A Spiritual Guide to Cultivating Your Creative Self

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Art as Sacred Practice: Recovering the Creative Soul The artist and the shaman were probably one in the same, as artists have ever since claimed. Through their magical power to recreate the animals on the walls of the temple caves, they--the artist-shamans--connected the tribe with the source of life that animated both human and animal, becoming themselves vehicles of that source, creators of the living form like the source itself. --Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image When was the last time you made music? When did you last dance? What was the last story you told? When was the last time you engaged in the "work" of art? These are the questions a shaman or indigenous healer might ask if you came seeking help or guidance. It wouldn't matter whether your condition was physical, emotional, spiritual, or emotional. The answers to these questions would still be of vital interest. If your answer to any of these questions is "not within the past six months," you might be instructed to go home and sing, dance, perform, or express your creative spirit. This recommendation alone is often considered sufficient to cure an illness. But even if a return visit to the healer is required, this first step of entering into communion with the spirit world through creative expression is critically important. There is a connection between artistic expression and spirit that resides deep in our ancestral memory. The native and indigenous cultures from which we all descend understand this connection. It is only our contemporary, Western view of art that de-emphasizes the connection between the material and the spirit. In his book, The Strong Eye of Shamanism: A Journey Into the Caves of Consciousness, Robert E. Ryan describes how a well-known aboriginal "shamanic ecstatic dream artist" named Allan Balbungu was able to separate his soul from his body, and, with the aid of his spirit helpers, enter the otherworld of the ancestors to find songs and dances for the tribe. "Allan translates his visionary experience onto the corroboree ground. The poet has delved deeply into the creative source, the world of the spirit, and touched its deepest source. This art not only represents his reception of the songs and dances he has received in the Otherworld but also the very structure of the creative visionary experience itself." For tribal peoples, the "work" of art is the manifestation of spirit in material form. The tribal individual engaging in artistic expression first accesses the realm of spirit, seeking what we might call inspiration or the breath of the divine. This divine inspiration is then translated into material form with words, images, music, dance, or artifacts. Engaging the spirit, now in material form, through ritual completes the cycle. This ritual releases that spirit and draws artist and community alike back into sacred communion with the divine. This is the sacred creative cycle. It is a cycle of transformation. In his book, Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime, Robert Lawlor writes, "Sacred art always implies transformation: the transformation of pure energy into form, the transformation of ancestral powers into animals, animals into humans, and humans, through ritual costume and body painting, into the ancestral beings and their animal powers." When art is about transformation, it is a sacred practice. But we needn't look far afield to find examples of artists engaging this sacred creative cycle. When dream artist Dan Raven finds a piece of stone, he studies it energetically, vision-shifting to look and listen to what the stone has to share. He slips momentarily into divine space to seek the animal spirit waiting to be released from the stone. Carving the stone is a careful process. He carves until just enough of the animal is visible. This i