The Bright Way. Diana Rowan

The Bright Way Ignites

The Bright Way Readiness Quiz

The Bright Way Revelation

The Bright Way Philosophy: Past Wisdom + Present Illumination

The Bright Way Spiral: Navigating the Spiral

       Part Two: Step into the Bright Way

       Step One: Define Your Purpose

       Fire: Light Your Eternal Flame

       Step Two: Set Your Intentions

       Water: Pour Heart and Soul into Your Purpose

       Step Three: Create Your Practicum Plan

       Air: Prepare to Fly: Map Your Dreams

       Step Four: Integration

       Earth: Ground Your Intentions in Real Life

       Step Five: Fulfillment

       Spirit: Your Ongoing Creative Story: Joy and Resilience in Sacred Reciprocity

       Part Three: Homecoming

       Valediction: Your Creativity Spirals Ever Outward: The Wheel Turns

       Acknowledgments

       List of Practices

       List of Illustrations

       Notes

       Bibliography

       About the Author

       PART ONE

       Invitation and Initiation

       As Above, So Below

      The concert finishes, the house lights blaze, and applause rings out. I take a bow happily and bound off the stage to meet my audience. And it happens, as always; among the people surrounding me, several approach with a particular shyness I’ve come to recognize. They hail from all walks of life, yet they share a deeply hidden desire. Sometimes they know my dramatic story of severe performance anxiety and how I finally managed to recover from it. Others know me only as a performer, composer, writer, and teacher and generously assume that I’ve always had confidence and motivation. Either way, there are two things they probably don’t know: the vast potential they hold inside themselves, and how much their story is my story.

      Rewind three decades. I remember one concert in particular, a showcase of the top student pianists. When I was fifteen, my diplomat family moved to Baghdad while I attended high school in nearby Cyprus. The concert, which took place during my second year there, was a special occasion for me because my father was present. I was the only representative of my teacher’s studio that evening, so I wanted to make my piano teacher, Kleri, proud. But I was at the height of self-consciousness; my body had betrayed me in a most awkward phase of frizzy hair, braces, and acne. Climbing the stairs to the stage, I felt dumpy, absurd, and fragmented into a thousand shards of stress. Ice-cold nervous sweat trickled down my back and spiked out under my arms as I confronted the looming beast of a piano.

      The audience waited silently. I thought about my father and my teacher sitting there in the shadows, expectantly. The room became a vacuum. My ears dialed the silence up to a roar. I launched into Poulenc’s Nocturne no. 1 — only to be catapulted out within three bars.

      The piano keys — keys that had been my daily companions for almost a decade — mocked me as they danced, rearranging themselves before my eyes. I couldn’t regain a handhold in the music. Clutching at the song, I hoped my fingers would somehow remember what to do on their own. They betrayed me, too, with a grotesque parody of the song I thought I knew so well clanging in my ears. Titters arose from some boys in my class, the same ones who bullied me about my appearance every day. I was mortified that my father had come all the way from Baghdad to witness this fiasco. I felt sure he was ashamed that I was his daughter, especially given that my mother is beautiful and accomplished. I was a total disappointment.

      Mercilessly I threw myself in again. This time I made even less headway. My stomach twisted in the knowledge that my teacher was watching all this. She could only feel that I was letting her down in the most public way possible. I dreaded damaging our close relationship. Cringing at the evidence left behind, having sweat all over the keyboard and the piano bench, I fled the stage as quickly as possible. The hall filled with outright laughter from my tormentors and appalled silence from everyone else.

      Today people can’t believe I was ever like this. Yet it was in this fiery crucible of suffering that I eventually came to understand our deepest reasons for creating and, further, why our creativity must be given voice. If I hadn’t gone through this degree of pain, feeling as if my very validity as a human being was on endless trial, I wouldn’t have gone the distance it took to uncover the lessons you hold in your hands today. Necessity is the mother of invention, and I needed to escape my personal hell. The mother of invention gifted me generously, ultimately leading me to transform the prison of my fear into the freedom of love. Yes, it was arduous work (and still is sometimes). Reasonably so: it is the Great Work that we all undertake to encounter our true selves.

      Knowing what I know now fires me up with enthusiasm to share this truth: there is a brighter way. What you seek, you will find. I want to impart this to all who approach me about their creative issues and anxieties: there are answers to your suffering and your longing. The Bright Way is one of those answers.

      My fellow creative seekers reach out to me in many ways: anonymously online, privately via email, safely within my teaching groups and online conferences, through chance encounters in cafés. They believe they struggle alone. Not so: their hidden desires mirror one another’s with striking faithfulness. I’m honored to be privy to their secret hopes and fears. They yearn to find