EP 163 You Are Already a Creator. Here Is the Proof.

I want to tell you something Abraham Maslow figured out while studying the highest levels of human consciousness.

He had assumed, like most of us, that creativity belonged to a certain kind of person. The artists. The composers. The poets. The rest of us just didn't have that natural creative genius.

Then he started studying people who were truly thriving and one of them stopped him. She was a housewife.

Uneducated, not wealthy, no artistic training.

And yet everything she touched was original and inventive and alive.

What he wrote about her is something I think every mother needs to hear. Come listen and I will share with you exactly what he said and why it changes everything about how you see yourself.

Resources from the Episode: 

• Mothers of Creation - Provo, Utah - September 26th

AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

AUDREY: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” That is one of the most important and well-known sentences in the history of the world. It tells us who God is: He’s a creator. And it tells us who you and I are, as children of God — we are also creators. We cannot not create. So what are you creating? That’s what we’re going to talk about for the next few minutes. I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, founder of The Mission Driven Mom, and today I want to spend some time on a topic we’ve been discussing a lot on this podcast and will be diving deep into this fall at our Mothers of Creation event: creation, and being creators. What does that really mean? Why does it really matter?

Are There “Creative Types”?

AUDREY: For those of you who went through a lot of public school in the West, you were probably just like me. In school there were art classes and music classes, and those students were “the creative types” — the ones who could draw and paint, the artists and the musicians. The rest of us weren’t creative. And then, on the other hand, today the world tells us like crazy: just create what you want. Create the life you want. Create a life you’ll love. You hear that kind of thing all the time. So which is it? Are there creative types, or can we all create literally anything we want? I think the truth is somewhere in the middle.

AUDREY: I want to read you something today from Abraham Maslow — a very famous psychologist, in case you’ve never heard of him. He said that Freud figured out the unhealthy part of psychology, and he wanted to figure out the healthy side. He came up with his hierarchy of needs and the concept of self-actualization. This is from his writing on creativity, and he started with the same assumption I did. He says: “I soon discovered that I had, like most people, been thinking of creativeness in terms of products, and, secondly, I had unconsciously confined creativeness to certain conventional areas only of human endeavor — unconsciously assuming that any painter, any poet, any composer was leading a creative life. Theorists, artists, scientists, inventors, writers could be creative. Nobody else could. I didn’t even think of scientists, as scientists, as being creative. Unconsciously I had assumed that creativeness was the prerogative solely of certain professionals. But these expectations were broken up by various of my subjects.”

AUDREY: So he was studying people intensively to better understand the highest levels of human consciousness and living — what it looks like when people are really at their peak, this self-actualization we strive for. He goes on: “For instance, one woman, uneducated, poor, a full-time housewife and mother, did none of these conventionally creative things and yet was a marvelous cook, mother, wife, and homemaker. With little money, her home was somehow always beautiful. She was a perfect host. Her meals were banquets. Her taste in linens, silver, glass, crockery, and furniture was impeccable. She was, in all these things, original, novel, ingenious, unexpected, inventive. I just had to call her creative. I learned from her and others like her that a first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting, and that, generally, cooking or parenthood or making a home could be creative while poetry need not be — it could be uncreative.”

AUDREY: That was a huge insight for him, and it’s important for us to keep in mind. Just because certain people are labeled “creatives” doesn’t mean anything. We are all creators; we can’t not create.

What Creation Really Means

AUDREY: You are creating, every day, the life that you live. Your choices, your thoughts, your beliefs, your patterns, your habits, your actions — they build up the circumstances all around you, and you experience the fruits of them. What happens to us is that we have areas of our life we don’t like, so they become problems. We build out these problem stories, telling ourselves everything that’s wrong with the situation and all the ways we can’t make it any different, and we struggle and fight, focusing on the problem instead of on what we want instead. To have a creator orientation is the gateway to a new life — and that’s what we’re working to flesh out for you on this podcast all through the summer and into the fall.

AUDREY: I looked up the root of the word create. It comes from a very old root, “ker,” and here’s what’s fascinating: that root means to grow. Sometimes when we think of creation — of God as a creator, of ex nihilo, “out of nothing,” and all those biblical or Christian ideas — we picture it as coming up with something from nothing, molding and making material. But really it’s just to grow: to bring something worthwhile into existence, to love it enough to create it. This is how Robert Fritz talks about it — we’re going to have him on the podcast later, and I’m excited to talk with him about his ideas. He describes how we create because we love. We love the creation enough to bring it into existence. We love the unborn child enough to prepare for it; we love it before it exists in our material world. That’s the spiritual creation we bring about when we imagine things that could be and love them into existence.

AUDREY: Now, this state of being is the opposite of being a victim. Creator is the opposite of victim. A victim is caught up in obsessive mental patterns that keep them stuck on a problem — focused on what they don’t like, what they don’t want, what’s not working out, unmet needs, unmet expectations, things they feel they can’t control, ways they feel stuck. And this can be a small thing, like hating running carpool, or a huge one, like going through a divorce or losing someone close to you.

Creator Is the Opposite of Victim

AUDREY: Any issue, small or major, that’s causing that pit in the stomach and those negative emotions — that’s where you’re probably showing up as a victim. I’d encourage you to go review the victim-type discussions I had with Lindsey Wright, and start asking: do I maybe have more power than I think I have? That’s the message our mothers and the women in our programs continually discover. They keep seeing new ways to identify truths, to see principles, to peel back the layers of how they’ve been thinking and believing about themselves and about life. And they feel so liberated as these misbeliefs and lies they’ve been telling themselves fall away. When we’re doing that, we’re acting like victims — and awareness is the key to change. We can’t know how to become a creator until we can admit we’ve been a victim; identifying the type of victim, and the antidotes that get us out, is enormously helpful. Once we recognize we’re being a victim, we can start to create something different, because now we know what’s been going on with us.

What Meditation Teaches Us

AUDREY: One thing I thought about while preparing this was from level three of our academy, where we go through worldviews. One of my favorite authors on worldviews is Huston Smith — he’s brilliant — and in this section he’s talking about Buddhism. Buddhism and the Eastern religions have gained a lot of traction in the West over the last fifty to eighty years; a lot of people love those worldviews now, or adhere to them. And even when they don’t, meditation has taken off in the West in a huge way. Here, Huston Smith is talking about why we meditate — basically what it can do for us — and I found it fascinating, because one of its primary functions is to move someone from a victim space to being a creator. Listen to how he describes it. Through the practice of meditation, one arrives at a number of insights.

AUDREY: Number one: every emotion, thought, or image is accompanied by a body sensation, and vice versa. So as you become more aware that you’re acting like a victim, it’s an awakening — you become aware that you’re having these emotions and thoughts, and that they’re accompanied by feelings; that there’s a connection between your thoughts and your feelings, and that they’re inextricably linked. That’s why you can better control your thoughts by changing your words, your actions, and your thoughts. We talk about this in the academy — how they’re all interconnected. So those feelings of anxiety, dread, frustration, and confusion are a cue that you may be thinking like a victim in this area of your life, and you can key into that.

AUDREY: Number two: one discerns obsessive patterns in what arises in the mind, and how these patterns constitute our misery. I mentioned this a minute ago — these obsessive patterns, where we feel so stuck. He says: for some it’s a nursing of old grievances; others find themselves preoccupied with longings and self-pity; and still others simply feel at sea. With continuing practice, the obsessive grip of these patterns loosens. So as you get better at understanding your thoughts and feelings and putting your finger on the obsessive patterns, you can begin to identify them. It’s different language, but it’s the same process.

AUDREY: Number three: every mental and physical state is in flux; none is solid and enduring. Even physical pain is a series of discrete sensations that can suddenly change. You recognize that life is fluid, that you can make changes, and that all these sensations in your body take different shapes.

AUDREY: Number four: the meditator realizes how little control we normally have over our minds and over our reactions. I found that so helpful and insightful to sit with — that even meditation, that every worldview and world religion, is attempting to help us get out of these terrible patterns and become creators, and to choose the tools that help us become a creator and stay a creator. Vision is the anchor; it’s the main tool we use. There are a lot of tools and principles around how to reframe your problem story into a creator orientation and build out a new vision for the world, and we’ll go over the details of those at our Mothers of Creation event. I’m so excited, and I hope you decide to join us to gain them. This is really important, because to be creators simply means we choose growth. When you feel stuck, you can be pretty sure you’re in drama — and creators grow. They change. They become better.

As a Man Thinketh

AUDREY: As we finish up, I want to read you a couple of things from James Allen — from As a Man Thinketh — that I think really apply. He says man is “a growth by law, and not a creation by artifice.” In other words, you aren’t just something that shows up fully formed; you are a growth. And “cause and effect is as absolute and undeviating in the hidden realm of thought as in the world of visible and material things.” Your thoughts are real. They’re things, and they create results. This law of cause and effect is happening to you all the time, and these obsessive ways of thinking are keeping you from being the creator you were born to be. That is your true orientation, your true way of being — but you have to choose it, and you have to know how.

AUDREY: He goes on: “A noble and godlike character is not a thing of favor or chance, but is the natural result of continued effort in right thinking, the effect of long-cherished association with godlike thoughts.” In terms of what we do here at The Mission Driven Mom — teaching you to be principled — how better to be in constant association with godlike thoughts than to strive to be in association with His principles, to learn how to uncover and practice them, so you can lift yourself out of the persistent problems keeping you stuck? Those godlike thoughts can be principled thoughts. That’s what we want to do: change our orientation so we think in terms of principles.

AUDREY: He continues: an individual “is continually frustrating the accomplishment of their goals by encouraging thoughts and desires which cannot possibly harmonize with that end. Such cases could be multiplied and varied almost indefinitely, but this is not necessary, as the reader can, if he resolves, trace the action of the laws of thought in his own mind and life; and until this is done, mere external facts cannot serve as a ground of reasoning.” In other words, you can trace your life back to your core beliefs and thoughts. What you think about all the time is what’s manifesting in your life. And you can change from a victim orientation, from drama, to a creator orientation by reorienting the things you think about persistently — untangling that knot. That’s why it’s so helpful to label it and to make the choice to change the way you’re thinking, to stay in a creator orientation. We’ll talk more in a future podcast about what vision is and how it’s the anchor for staying there.

Choosing to Be a Creator

AUDREY: One of the things we talked about in our discussions is the shift that happens when you recognize — because you can’t change anything you can’t see — that you’re being a victim. Just that begins to loosen the chains; it begins to help you change. And then you choose to be a creator, and now you’re in a new place. You look around and think, “Wait a minute — if I’ve been seeing it wrongly, then maybe there’s a new way to see it. I can reorient myself, I can see myself and others more clearly, and maybe there’s hope for me.” That’s stepping into creator orientation. Just in the act of questioning your way of being and your way of thinking, you’re beginning to think like a creator.

AUDREY: James Allen says it’s “pleasing to human vanity to believe that one suffers because of one’s virtue.” Sometimes we think, “I was just being such a loyal friend, and that’s why it all fell apart — I didn’t have any part in it.” Even when it’s absolutely true that something happens to us that we had no part in, it’s also true that we’re in control of our response, and that we can choose a more empowered one — a response in which we’re at the center of what we can control, choosing to be a creator, choosing to grow, choosing to see the problem as a challenger, and choosing to go out and be coached through it.

AUDREY: That coaching is invaluable. Creators need coaches. You need the tools, the guidance, the feedback. My daughter was a gymnast for twelve years, and that coach stood there for every single skill saying, “Change this, change this, change this” — and the nuances of all those changes led to incredible growth and great success in her gymnastics. We need the challenge, because that’s where growth happens: when we see our problems as challengers we can conquer, mountains we want to reach the top of, and we do the work to find the coach who can take us through it and help us become the creator we want to be. The anchor for all of it is vision — we hang on to that vision, and it keeps us wanting to see ourselves in this new orientation and stay the creator in our lives.

AUDREY: So what Allen is saying is that it’s pleasing to our vanity — it makes us feel good — to think, “This problem only happened because other people are messed up, not me; I had no part in it.” And then we have no power to change it. That’s the trap. But if we can see that even our reaction can be made different, that’s a whole new place to be. He goes on: “Not until a man has extirpated every sickly, bitter, and impure thought from his mind, and washed every sinful stain from his soul, can he be in a position to know and declare that his sufferings are the result of his good, and not of his bad, qualities. And on the way to that supreme perfection, he will have found working in his mind and life the Great Law” — and he capitalizes “Great Law,” which I think is really telling — “which is absolutely just, which cannot therefore give good for evil or evil for good. Possessed of such knowledge, he will then know, looking back upon his past ignorance and blindness, that his life is, and always was, justly ordered, and that his past experiences, good and bad, were the equitable working out of his evolving, yet unevolved, self.”

AUDREY: In other words, when we get honest about the fact that we show up in our lives as victims — when we accept that this is something we’ve been doing but don’t want anymore — then we have the power to decide to make it different: to decide to be creators, to engage in our own growth by admitting we’ve been in drama, even if we didn’t cause the problem. Admitting that our reaction was one of anxiety, frustration, confusion, and overwhelm — that we were reacting instead of acting according to a new vision or outcome. Taking the time to do that is where we really sit with ourselves, work it through, and determine to see things differently and think differently from now on, so we can stay in that creator orientation.

Why Affirmations Aren’t Enough

AUDREY: This is one of the reasons flat affirmations don’t really help. Affirmations aren’t enough of an anchor for us to truly change the way we’re thinking. In life, truth is the great anchor, and principles can do that for us. When we use principles to create a new vision for ourselves in a circumstance we maybe didn’t like or didn’t anticipate, we grow through all the challenges that come into our lives. We grow, and grow, and grow — because we show up as a creator every single time.

Closing Thoughts and Invitation

AUDREY: So I hope that’s some food for thought as we head into a few more podcasts on this theme. We’ve got some great discussions coming up — Donna from The Power of TED, Robert Fritz, and some other people we’re excited to talk to — to flesh out what this creator orientation means, why vision matters so much, how we hold the tension to stay in that place, and how to make our lives more of what we’d have them be. But most importantly, to remember that our own development is the great adventure of our lives, because we are the only person we can control. When we take that seriously, really own it, and decide we’re going to show up as the creators of our own lives, things can really start to shift. When you use the principles of creation, and principles in other areas of your life, to lift yourself out of whatever is currently holding you stuck, everything can be different for you from now on. I’ve experienced that personally, and I’ve watched it happen with hundreds of women in our programs. I really want it for you.

AUDREY: So if this material has been helpful, keep listening to the podcast and pass it along to a friend. And we’d love to meet you in person at the Mothers of Creation celebration — our MDM celebration this fall. Oh, I love the mountains, and we’d love to have you there. The information is down in the description; come meet up with us, and bring a friend. In the meantime, more great information on these concepts and principles is coming on the podcast. Thank you for joining me today, and I’ll see you next time.