Life
Force
“The
basic creative energy of life—life force—bubbles up and courses through all of existence.
It can be experienced as open, free, unburdened, full of possibility,
energizing. Or this very same energy can be experienced as petty, narrow,
stuck, caught.”
Pema
Chodron (The Wisdom of No Escape, p.21; Shambala, 1991)
What makes us creative in a million ways, that drives us to
procreate, invent, take apart and reassemble, prepare a meal, arrange a vase of
flowers, design clothing, paint a chair is creative energy. It is life force, or,
as it’s called in eastern religions, chi. It runs through all living things. It
causes seeds to germinate, leaves to sprout, birds to call melodiously to a
mate, goats to leap for joy when they are let out to pasture. Chi animates life
and calls it to create.
The
very same life force can also destroy. It can turn evil and begin lashing out and
tearing apart whatever is in its path. Think of “Mother Nature” here—one moment
she is shining a beautiful sunrise upon us, encouraging tomatoes to ripen and
bees to pollinate, and the next, her tornados and floods and lightening-set
fires are burning down our houses and swamping our roads and fields with floods.
The power of the creative force is awesome in the most literal sense of the
word.
Life force enables us to create a masterpiece of such beauty that the world lines
up to see it five hundred years later—like the Sistine Chapel. Or it can devise
a plan to violently conquer other people to take their land and resources—like we
did with the Native Americans, and the British empire did all around the globe.
What determines how the creative force is used by humanity is simple—it is
intention. What is my intention? When I create a beautiful meal for my family,
what is my intention? When I speak unkind words to another human being, what is
my intention? When I lie about something, why? When I treat someone coldly,
what is the intention behind it?
We can look at things
superficially—"I’m mad so I won’t speak to him.” Or we can dig a little
deeper, “I am deeply wounded and am responding to it by hurting someone else.”
The first transfers our pain and deflects it away from us but changes nothing. The second gives us a little window into our own power and how we use it for
good or ill. It allows us to make informed decisions about the use of our
life force. It requires awareness.
The key to evolving as
human beings is self-awareness—it always has been. If we want to emerge from
the state of angry gridlock we find ourselves in today, we must self-reflect.
What are we doing? Why are we doing it? What role do I play in keeping things
locked up? How can I open myself to allow creative energy to flow through me in
a positive way? How can I use my life force for good? If enough of us were to
do this, there’s no limit to what we could create together—for the good of ourselves,
each other, and the world.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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