HEALING THE GOLDEN CHILD - healing creative play

 

 

When I first started teaching craft workshops many years ago, I began to realise how many adults have a wounded place within them relating to 'being creative'. This hurt is often only recognised when these same adults want the 'Golden Spirit Child' within - to come out and play again; to sing, dance, use paint or clay.
The root of the hurt is often from childhood experiences when the imaginative self, a very open and vulnerable place, is ridiculed or feels rubbished. This can be from a chance remark, a thoughtless comment, but the effect goes deep, and can lead to a lifetime of avoiding creative play. The 'Golden Child', source of our spontaneity and flexibility, gets shut away.

 

So whenever we re-encounter a 'creative' situation, we re-experience the shame, unexpressed outrage, and embarrassment and retreat again into a kind of uncreative shell. It often takes quite a lot of coaxing and tempting to get the most retiring to peek out of that shell. And the most persuasive way is to offer the hiding Golden Child the means of play again in an unchallenging and completely un-judgemental way.
The quality of feeling in the studio when this return to play takes place is often highly charged and full of real fear. It is a powerful barrier to cross. The trepidation of many adults when actually faced with 'making something' is very real indeed and often surprises them by its power.

The Golden Child is the source of our spiritedness, our imaginative response to situations in the everyday, our 'fire' of passion and purpose. On the Medicine Wheel map of Creation, creativity sits at the East point of the Wheel, with the fire element.
When we finally regain our fire and creative play is in full swing, the amount of energy and joy released is truly magical. This Golden Child is distinct from the better-known Inner (emotional) Child that has been affected by the everyday history of the individual; it is related to the fire (spirit) aspect of the person found in the East of the Medicine Wheel, rather than the water (emotion) aspect found at the South point.

 

A DIFFERENT WAY OF BEING
So why has the hurt been taken so much to heart - or rather, to spirit? Often when the criticism happens, our awareness, as the 'creator', is still in the East, in the Golden Child place, where we are very open and vulnerable, where we 'bare our soul'.
The position of the 'judge', the person who has put us down, is usually in the West, the here-and-now, the place of the physical and concrete aspect of reality. There has been a traumatic mis-match of awareness and communication. To protect from further trauma, we may label our self as 'not creative' or 'lacking imagination.'
A kind of self-imposed blankness can result in extreme cases, literally a dis-spirited state, with much suppressed frustration in the form of fiery anger locked in. We may even deny the existence of the urge to create - and this is a very powerful driving force to attempt to deny. Its suppression takes up a lot of energy.

Creativity also has its own time quality. When totally absorbed in day-dreaming, meditation, or listening to music; times when we are operating in our non-physical aspect, we enter the 'no-time or eternal zone.
We look at the clock when we remember physical reality and are surprised at how much, or how little time has passed - we have lost our everyday time bearings. Or perhaps the phone rings to interrupt our reverie, making us jump back into our physical awareness like awaking from a dream suddenly, and we find it very hard to get it together and remember our phone number!

At these creative times we can drop certain psychic guards. This is why artists of various disciplines are often meticulous about having a ritual that separates and protects them from the Everyday, and which is enacted when beginning and finishing the activity. This may be a simple ritual like using a lucky pencil, wearing a thinking cap or favourite slippers, listening to a certain piece of music, and so on.
It is also why many artists are very circumspect about their studio or practice spaces; they need to know they will be safe and uninterrupted whilst 'in the East'.

 

SELECTION AND LABELS
Imagination is soon socialised. The nursery child will be patiently told that pigs are pink and have four legs; we persuade them to paint out a few of the lines (which may or may not be legs, ignore the fact that pink is not necessarily pig skin colour, and that we rarely see all four legs of a quadruped at once).
We allow musical instruments to be used in certain ordered ways that have more to do with producing musicians (and suppressing passion) than exploring sound -and so on, gearing the imaginations into measurable performance and production criteria. Educationally we select out those who 'can draw' or 'can sing in tune'

We also establish the labels of 'creative' and 'non-creative.' Whole groups of exam subjects in the later years of school are labelled 'the arts' and further marginalisation and specialisation occurs.

 

VALUING THE GIFTED
We all have tendency to have one or two directions of the Medicine Wheel in which we are most confident, in which our natural abilities lie. So what happens to those individuals whose gifts lie in the East? As we socialise and normalise we also isolate and alienate those with 'vivid imagination', who may be labelled 'useless daydreamer' or 'off with the fairies'.
They cannot shut down their 'core self'; they may learn to hide it, to create a false 'normal' persona under which their fire smoulders. All too often they live trying to suppress and deny their imaginative and visionary powers, aware they are different and alienated from a very west-based culture, and therefore afraid that they are in some way odd or crazy.

From my experience of healing through creativity I have found that there are very many who are living behind this kind of 'normality' mask. When people 'come out' about their suppressed imagination and spirit connection to life it is often a big social risk and profound revelation for them. For some of those for whom the East is strong within them, there may be a need to balance through using the earth aspect, the West, for grounding. After any creative time it is good to practise a little grounding, such as eating, walking outside, gardening, doing the housework etc. Anything, in fact, which involves the physical body and outer, rather than inner, perceptions.

 

RECLAIMING FIRE, RESTORING SPIRIT
It is very important to reclaim this fire and maintain it in a healthy way. Our initial impulse, as we move back into creative play, may be to rage or weep, or to freeze.
At this point it helps to ask whether we really want to play, but are afraid, or whether it is simply a form of play that does not appeal to our Golden Child. Obviously, if there is a lot of emotion present, we probably have some healing work to do.

 

This article first appeared in Sacred Hoop Magazine Issue 26

 

© 2004 Jan Morgan Wood

 

If you wish to reproduce this article in any way please seek written permission from Jan Morgan Wood.