Awakening Tips: 4 Ways To Bring Your Creative Vision Into Reality

One of the many perks that comes with spiritual awakening is your increased creativity. It usually starts with one tiny thing, then like a gate opening up, something stirs inside, and more and more passions also catch your attention.

You are moved and touched and inspired. You feel your calling. You cannot help but want to give more of you to your creative vision. Deep in the bones, you know that it heals you and helps others. The urge and yearning is real.

Meanwhile, you might feel discouraged by the big gap between your vision and your reality.

For example, if you are a dancer, you have an idea, a great vision of a choreography that you want to bring to life. In your mind, your body can do anything that you could imagine, and you can really jump high. However back on the dance floor, you have to deal with gravity.

Throwing yourself into dance is one thing but the moment you look at your own pictures or videos, you start to scream…

Of course this is not limited to dancers, the same feeling can happen to a painter, photographer, designer, inventor and anyone who is on his/her new creative journey, especially at the beginning.

Our vision is beautiful – but the reality doesn’t seem to match it, at least not yet.

Fortunately there are ways to get around this inherent gap, find hope, courage, motivation and joyful momentum on your journey.

1. Accept the existence of the gap

If we do want to create with peace, then we need to quit the perfectionism.

You already know this intellectually, however, the tension between what you are capable of making in the future and where you are now is taking up a lot of your emotional and mental space.

No matter how hard you try, how much you push your limits, there is always a barrier or some form of “gravity” to restrict you.

And you are not the only one…

I remember a while ago that I saw one of Da Vinci’s quotes, “My work has offended God and mankind because it hasn’t reached the standard it should have”. If that is how he felt about his work, how does the rest of us face ours?

Initially I took it as sarcasm – if this was how the master himself felt, then the rest of us might well not bother attempting anything at all.

However looking back now, I see the pain between vision and reality he was talking about. We are normal people, but the source of underlying pain is the same. You are certainly not on your own.

The gap is always there, but by working on your craft, day by day, month to month, year on year, the gap will get smaller and smaller.

2. Give your work a purpose

What is the message behind your work? Hopefully it relates to some universal truth that you are expressing in your own way.

The purpose is the bigger picture, it is the reason why we are working on our project. It keeps us going.

And if we fail, it is not because our techniques aren’t perfect, it is because we disconnect with our purpose. On the contrary, if you deliver your purpose, it doesn’t really matter if your work is 100% polished, you’ve got the energy right and it will touch the people as it is meant to.

If the purpose of your project is to bring a healing effect via singing, keep that in your mind all the time, it will affect your choice of songs, your presence, and above all, your underlying intention. Then the moment you start to sing, you are already successful.

We should always aim to have a good standard of work of course, but just be careful, try not to let the nit-picking steal away the original joy.

Purpose can put our mind at ease. It can save ourselves a thousand attempts at video editing, or a hundred hours of photoshop once you captured the right moment in the initial second.

3. Detox your subconscious mind

**When I first wrote this blog post in 2012, I just came back from the zoo, and while I was writing I still couldn’t forget what I saw: cheekiness in monkeys, cuteness in giant pandas, ferocity in lions…

They are all raw, but they touch us because they are being themselves.

It is easier for animals to be this way due to their nature. We were also good at that when we were toddlers – creative and expressive straight from the heart.

However once we grow up, we forget who we are. Our minds are filled with too many: “shouldn’t”, “can’t”, “not good enough”.

We hide our inner child deeply to protect from any criticism. We must unlearn the B.S. that has been imposed on us.

We need to bypass the censor in our subconscious mind. Concentrate on your strengths, let your strengths give you courage to get started; then over time, you will pick up tools and ways to work around your weaknesses.

Keep the amateur enthusiasm. Amateur in Latin simply means love, let the love and passion be the fuel for your project/work to unfold.

And understand that we are not here to please everyone. Sometimes, if we are stuck with the wrong type of people, it doesn’t matter how much we try, we simply cannot make them happy. We tend to invest more energy on those who are harder to please than our true tribe.

Focus on finding your tribe.

4. Go pro

On one hand, we need to keep the amateur attitude to stay in the creative process. On the other hand, when it comes to the last stage, which is getting yourself out there and presenting your work, we are scared and feel insecure.

Gather every resource you can to melt that resistance…There is a sweet creative responsibility to take: it is more painful to suppress our creativity than to follow the calling.

Encourage ourselves to understand that vision is to inspire our reality, and our reality is to ground our vision. No matter how different your vision is to your reality at the moment, they are not enemies, but complementing each other.

Daoism teaches us that there is a beautiful power in reverse. So instead of feeling frustrated in chasing your vision, ask yourself this question,

“If I were already living my vision, how would I act differently today?”

**This post was initially written in 2012, updated now to add more reflections and insights.

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Much love,

Yiye Zhang