Lesson 1: Start Where You Are—The Dynamics of Intention, Agency & Surrender
Welcoming surrendered process & an intro to 4 Phases Design (co-creation, expansion, deepening, surrender)
Over the next 12 weeks, I’ll offer perspective on a process of design and creativity that is more relational and emergent than we might have practice with today.
This process has come through personal dedication to living into and desire to create from a dual state of agency and surrender.
Without agency, we can become a victim to what it feels like life is “doing” to us.
Without surrender, we can become a martyr or self-obsessed person thinking that we are the one doing everything.
We see these two extremes all over our culture, but rather than point fingers, let’s look within.
My goal with Magnetic Design is to bring you into a deeper relationship with your craft or art form, and ultimately with your life itself.
To look with loving awareness at all the parts of you who don’t want “to do”… for all the parts who think they have to “do it all,” and actually notice their relationship.
Can you feel their relationship?
To create from a different state, we have to get beneath or above or outside of the frame of mind these two interconnected. This work is not about doing or not doing (alone).
Beneath the doing is the being — a relationship asking to be attuned to — a relationship between you, artist, and the art, life, art-form.
That is the relationship we will be focusing on in these lessons.
An Introduction to 4 Phases Design:
This process is about disrupting, “If I do… then, this will…,” and letting art/life-force be liberated through our lives.
4 Reframes on “Design” in this Platform:
Reframe 1: Phase 0 is the Unknown—where our intention moves us through.
Design without clear intention will always leave you wanting. Magnetic = That which connects you to the heart—over and over, even as the intention changes, deepens, or expands. This is the kind of design I am inviting us into here.
Reframe 2: Phase 1 is an Initiation into deepening and deconstructing.
Creative process without deepening lacks originality, and recreates what’s already here. A richer creativity is one that invokes wholeness, that embraces destruction or deconstruction as part of the creative process. This is the kind of creativity I am inviting us into here.
Reframe 3: Phase 2—Process, allows for expansion and room for artistry to be revealed.
Process, when we are attached to the end result, keeps us stuck in outdated paradigms, thoughts and beliefs. A truly restorative and generative creative process can hold a vision while allowing the exact result or “how” to reveal itself. This is why I call my work “Dream Doulaship.” Creative Process makes space for emergence, becoming and the unknown being made known. These are the kind of processes I am calling us into.
Reframe 4: Relationship to “completion” is required.
Design is fundamentally relational — to ourselves, our bodies, the earth, Source/God/Intelligence, each other… Mature relationship contains phases of transformation just like powerful design contains phases. To become more embodied (more in agency and surrender, less performative or controlled), we are being invited to deepen in connection and relationship. (More on that on my upcoming platform Unlearning Love). Activation or conflict is not the opposite of whole relationship, it is the sign of a growing one, just as completion in the design life cycle is not the end but an opening (when all parties choose to come through it.)
Finally, our habits matter. My intention as a Creatrix is tap you into life-cycles and intuitive creation, and this is not about negating or throwing away structure and process. It is about bringing that structure forth in service of the surprise that is your creative power.
If you watched the intro video, read & listened to this piece, I would love to know:
What reframe is most relevant to your work right now?
What phase of design do you get most stuck in?
If you would like access to the Habits Spreadsheet, shoot me a personal message or email. If you’d like coaching to set it up, you can book a call with me here.
To join the next 7 Day experience of Codes of Creation, book here.
With joy,
Creatrix Libby
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