Do this before you begin to create
A little goes a long way...
This weekend, The Baseline Happiness Project, which I co-founded with my good friends and colleagues Barron Hanson and Matt Handley to raise baseline happiness levels in the music industry through meditation, will host its first Creators Retreat in Nowra, Australia as part of Barron’s HERE In Nowra festival of Vedic Meditation.
The dozen or so retreat participants will immerse themselves in nature, eat delicious Ayurvedic meals, meet for daily discussions, and practice an expanded form of Vedic Meditation called Rounding, which entails a specific sequence of yoga asanas, breath work, and Vedic Meditation, all in the name of clearing the mind of stress and creating time and space for stillness in order access deeper levels of creative insight.
Most importantly, they’ll then have ample free time for creative exploration or collaboration and deep work on meaningful projects. It's the kind of time we always wish we could have for ourselves—time to reflect, time to connect, time to open ourselves to new insights and inspiration, time to listen to what our inner voice wants to tell us, and time to create from that place of pure Being.
Before we can create, sometimes we need to destroy—old habits, old ways of thinking, old relationships, old paradigms need to be cleared out to make way for new ideas to evolve.
One of the things the Vedic worldview teaches us is that destruction is always inevitably followed by creation, and, interspersed by periods of maintenance, the cycle continues to alternate back and forth between the two forces.
In honor of the inaugural retreat, I’m sharing this beautiful passage from Joseph Campbell about the necessity of destruction that Matt shared with us this week.
“We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.
If we fix on the old, we get stuck.
When we hang onto any form, we are in danger of putrefaction.
Hell is life drying up.
The Hoarder,
the one in us that wants to keep, to hold on, must be killed.
If we are hanging onto the form now, we're not going to have the form next.
You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.
Destruction before creation.”
—A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living
Let’s discuss these and other ideas during Collective Effervescence, our online group meditation series, this Sunday October 27 at 12PM ET. Drop in for meditation only (first 30 min) or stay for discussion + Q&A on this and other life topics from the Vedic perspective. Join the WhatsApp group to receive reminders 24 hours before each session, or use the below links to have all upcoming dates automatically sync to your calendar.
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Music today is Weighing Me Down by Gustaf, an art-punk group from Brooklyn who recently delivered their excellent Package, Pt. 2. Punk rock just gets destruction.