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Facilitating Creative Breakthroughs

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An Atomic Bomb?

June 3, 2009

I had lunch with a friend the other day. This person likes metaphors as much as I do, and he asked me what metaphor came to my mind around my book, Getting Messy (…which I hope will be available very soon.) My mind immediately gave me a very clear image, but I didn’t want to share it, because the metaphor that came to me was the mushroom cloud after the atomic bomb was dropped… !


I did tell him, and his first response was Shakti, the Sanskrit word for the creative forces that move through the universe. And of course, creativity necessarily involves destroying the old, to make space for the new. I’m not very familiar with Shakti, so my own interpretation was that my subconscious was influenced by a play I say recently about the science that led up to the bomb. What I remember from watching the play is that two different substances collide which results in the splitting atoms, and the splitting of atoms produces lots and lots of energy. Here is the explanation I pulled off Wikipedia:

In 1898, French physicist Pierre Curie and his Polish wife Maria Sklodowska-Curie had discovered that present in pitchblende, an ore of uranium, was a substance which emitted large amounts of radioactivity, which they named radium. This raised the hopes of both scientists and lay people that the elements around us could contain tremendous amounts of unseen energy, waiting to be tapped.

And my friend was right, Shakti has a similar definition in kundalini yoga:


Energy that lies dormant at the base of the spine until it is activated, as by the practice of yoga…

There is something about the line: “containing tremendous amounts of unseen (dormant) energy, waiting to be tapped” that has to do with why this particular image came up for me.

Our subconscious minds are fascinating, aren’t they? There’s so much inner wisdom there, wisdom we just need to open up to and explore, unseen energy waiting to be tapped.

Oddly, that is what my book is about.

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