To Expand and Express
On Courage and Creative Practice
Curious about meditation and journaling? Come, let’s learn at lunchtime. Join me for virtual practice this Friday, 8/23 and next Friday 8/30 both from 12:15 - 1:00PM EST. September workshops arrive next week! Use code celebrate for 20% off journals.
If courage were an image, I’d conjure up a rose. Bright, blooming, a flower rooting down into soil, fragile and sturdy as it reaches upward, rising and expanding.
Any act of creativity is a courageous one: to walk to the edge of your mind and stay, to drop into your body and feel, to lift pen to blank page and draw or write, to feel the stir of emotion and write a song, to stir the pot of ingredients and stand at the flame, to take action and tend to yourself and your communities, to embody a shape or a vision, to take the paint and drag it with no certainty across the expanse of canvas. Each act of creativity is rooted in the act of noticing, allowing, and opening. And requires courage in the process.
In our creative practices, we discover flow, and find much in the way of moving forward: storylines that tell us not to open, not to step, not to risk that opening. Ideas, sensations, dreams, flow like rivers, or crash harsh against barriers, obstacles, blocks. Courage, when we tend to it, roots into our bodies and minds, bold with petals unfolding, becoming rose in our inner worlds — a necessary ingredient in the nature of our existence reminding us of the power and risk of opening.
On morning pavement, I breathe courage into body and mind with idea, momentum, and breath. Waking feet hit the pavement and I feel my arms swing, daylight greeting morning eyes, lungs opening like the gulls along the glass lined beach. The thinking mind is constant. Thoughts are neutral, skillful, sturdy, unskillful, wild, loving, inspired, moving like the river I follow, and varied. They are ocean waves, slow and vast, quick and pummeling. They are impulses in the mind, seeking actions, next steps, or longing to bridge gaps in information. With practice, I learn to watch the thoughts like river currents — watching as lingering remnants of wants, desires, needs, fears, worries, histories, celebrations, joys, stories and curiosities tug on the sleeve of my present attention. Still, I return to breathing, feet on ground, return to pacing. Still, like sunlight, I keep returning. I find a patch of sunlight, daylight, a bench, and I sit. With movement, nature, breathing, something rises, strengthens, softens, and opens.
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On my first meditation retreat, I remember the first sensations of courage clearly, a heart in stillness, tender and opening. I’d sit for a week in front of an East-facing window, a frame encasing the stable view of a dusk colored skyline, Northern California hills just on the edge of opening and bursting into spring, finding deep embodied revival after a season of forcing. There, I learned the language of the body — wise in its stillness, learning to breathe with thoughts, sift through the thinking — then finally drop into the heart and wise body, letting the quiet inner voice of whole humanness come through.
With time and practice, with dedicated effort, I found enough compassion to let all parts of the experience arise: my mind took a seat, body let to still, and for the first conscious time in my early adult life, I felt the deep song of my heart come through — sunlight at the center of my chest, a mysterious ocean, deep and tenuous. It was rosebud, tender, softening, and opening. It was grounding, warming, and strength. At others, the opening was terrifying. Still, we kept breathing. Still, we kept sitting.
"All too often our so-called strength comes from fear, not love,” says Roshi Joan Halifax. “Instead of having a strong back, many of us have a defended front, shielding a weak spine. In other words, we walk around brittle and defensive, trying to conceal our lack of confidence. If we strengthen our backs, metaphorically speaking, and develop a spine that’s flexible but sturdy, then we can risk having a front that’s soft and open.”
That week, the language of courage spoke through the pulse of heart, opening to the stillness of practice — a recalibration between the cultural, societal over-emphasis on thinking thoughts, while ignoring the whole human wisdom of flowing dialogue between heart, body, and mind. We sat at dawn, dusk, walked the trails until I felt like dust, too, and I saw myself in all my flawed humanness, and learned to hold my experience open. I learned to sit and breathe and how to keep going. The moment was a seed of courage, watered by the act of returning. “How can we give and accept care with strong back, soft front, compassion, moving past fear to a place of genuine tenderness?” Halifax continues. “I believe it comes when we can be truly transparent, seeing the world clearly and letting the world see into us.”
From heart, clarity comes. From heart, courage arises. From the nourished soil, each plant roots and unfurls. Courage — denoting the heart, as the seat of feelings or Latin, cor — each return us to the soft and strong pulse of us, that centered swirl of seed and rosebud, that opening and sturdy place. To open to body, breath, day, dark night, idea, expressing out to our inner world or on voice, with each other, in the light of day, requires courage. The strength of flexibility, stability, and opening.
Take your arms wide, open your wingspan, and breathe in. Root down into places, practices, tastes that remind you of your strength. Remember strength in softening. Notice when you harden, notice when you curl in, notice the impulse to close, and breathe. Write to the phrase, I’m opening to… and notice what the heart says. Notice your wide thoughts, what curiosity is leaning towards, and how you focus in. When you feel tender, notice. Take your hand and let it be the warm weight of sunlight there at the center of your chest. Inhale and envision, exhale and soar — write, create, and express. Be your own witness and notice anything that dams that path between your heart and your life. Then continue, each day and breath, courage compounding, and keep going.
PS. Want more from a practice like this? Try Journaling for Courage from my recording library, an hour-long experience designed for you to connect to a brave life using pen, paper, and contemplative practice. Write, breathe, and keep going.
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For more on courage, try this Lion’s Roar article, Brené Brown on On Being, and this practice with Roshi Joan Halifax. In the mood for a new journal? Use code celebrate for 20% off at Odette Press.
