Creative Breakthroughs

By Rosemary Christoph

Is there a trauma or loss that is keeping you stuck and wounded after many years time? Impasses have a way of putting us up against places that are unhealed or unacceptable, losses that do not go away, betrayals that still burn, where the mind freezes and we still can feel heartbroken. There may be something we need to come to terms with in order to understand, heal and go on.

The Buddha was once approached by a grieving mother holding her dead child in her arms, asking for his help. The Buddha sent her on a mission back to her own village.

"Go and ask at each house, and collect a mustard seed from each home where no one has died." The woman went to every house, on every street, but nowhere could she collect even one seed, since she could not find even one house where death had not visited. Then she returned to the presence of the Buddha, having buried her child, not just resigned, but in a different internal space than before. Now she had actually reconciled herself finally to her child's death. She then began to follow the Buddha's teachings.

I needed to visit some houses. I began by looking at my own life, the places where I had been impassed, and noticing where I had turned the corner, and where I had not. Most had been triggered by losses, loss of a job, a friend, a partner, a community....

Some were actual relationships that were extremely difficult and relentlessly problematic...

Each required their own process of healing. But it was in the process of researching other people's impasses and turning points that I began to finally understand my own.

I want to ask you questions. What kinds of Impasses do you find yourself in? How have you handled your Impasses? What happens for you at a Turning point? What shifts things for you from Impasse to Turning? What kind of therapy and/or groundwork facilitates this process? Impasses like traumas have a way of holding on and repeating, unless worked through. However this all depends upon an act of Interpretation which holds the Impasse in place. To question the Interpretation, to pull it out of the Unconscious and re-frame it in a more positive light, perhaps may shift it into Turning and healing...

Creativity studies show that when a person is stuck or stymied there comes a moment of great intensity when all the energy brought to bear on the matter brings forth its fruit. Chaos theory demonstrates too that a small change adds up over time into something much, much bigger, as in the Butterfly effect; suddenly a "phase conversion" takes place, a Turning point. This occurs too in spiritual or psychological shifts, which occur as if one is struck by lightning, but are able to come because the vessel (the soul) has prepared and now is open for another possibility, a change, a turning over, turning around, breaking through.

In coming together in the Creative Breakthrough process we can uncover the root system underpinning our lives and begin to re-structure, heal and integrate our losses. Creative Breakthrough is a process through writing, drawing and music that works to allow you to discover your own circuitous and utterly individual path that will lead you out of impasse toward healing. The right brain and the left have two different languages for this change. The right brain tends to see Impasse and Turning points holistically, intuitively, through visual images or sound/music, or even gesture. The left brain tends to see this process as sequential, step by step, almost as a geometrical sequence leading to a higher order. These steps can occur spontaneously, or they can be generated, learned, taught.

The goal of Creative Breakthrough is to access and stimulate this process by means of a multitude of modalities that prompt the unconscious to move toward change and healing.