Turning Depression Into Creativity

Depression into creativity. Let's learn some things about this that are quite different than what most people are probably thinking or knowing about or have identified. First of all, the most shocking thing to know about creativity is that the people that are really creative, whether they're painting or doing art or business or however they're creating, they're the most depressed people, but they know how to transmute depression into creativity. Whereas the depressed person doesn't have the equipment, so to speak, developed to transmute that depression into creative activity.

 

So the muscle groups on the back of your shoulder, including your infraspinatus, that go up around your neck into your head and into to your face and down your arm into your little finger, they're associated with your small intestine in traditional Chinese medicine. And the small intestine is where the food comes from your stomach and where your gallbladder releases bile to digest fat and where your pancreas releases enzymes to digest the food. And then your small intestine is like a furnace that burns that food up and then those nutrients travel through the walls of the small intestine, if it's healthy, and then the nutrients go into your bloodstream and around your body so you get fed. And while it's doing that, the heat of digestion is what heats up your lungs. Your lungs aren't just heated by the outside air. They're heated by your own digestion.

 

The small intestine in traditional Chinese medicine, like all the other organs, are associated with a particular type of tissue. In traditional Chinese medicine the Stomach Meridian, which is located on the outside front of your leg, is associated with muscles. And the muscle groups on the back outside of your leg are associated with bladder and associated with your bones. But the small intestine is associated with cerebral spinal fluid pressure and flow. That means inside of your spinal column is a hole before the bones stick out to the side and back, and in that hole is where all your nerves go up and down to your brain and your body. And that's full of fluid and that fluid is called cerebral spinal fluid and that's under pressure. And what happens is that when you digest food well, for reasons that are not well identified, that causes these pumps above and below to pump that fluid up into your brain. And it pumps up and it washes over your brain like a shower. And that's what determines your upright posture, not the muscles on your back being strong enough or your shoulders. It's really that pressure inside of your spine. So it shouldn't take any effort at all to sit upright. And you can tell if somebody's depressed because, literally, the body doesn't sit up. They have to yank themselves up. But if the small intestine works correctly, then they're pushed upright and they're not depressed and they find themselves very creative.

 

So there's a couple of things about creativity that are kind of fun to discover. And one is that the anxiety and the excitement that's associated with creativity, a person feels that inside. And when they feel that anxiety and that excitement, that naturally drives their attention outside to find objects to attach to be creative with. A performer doesn't have enough anxiety that they can transmute into excitement to perform. That's why they perform in front of all these other people. It's because they actually attach to your excitement and your anxiety and that then connects them to parts of themselves that are anxious or excited that they couldn't feel before they were with you. And now their body transmutes that anxiety into excitement. And so now they're even more creative than they could be by themselves.

 

The creative process is important because it shows up emotionally as beautiful in the face and in beautiful ways of being with people, very classy ways of being. It's also associated with being self-affirming. So when you create something that you like, you're like, "Oh, I'm so glad I did that! That was so satisfying that I created that thing." That's being self-affirming. So you can evaluate whether another person's being creative or not by how self-affirming they are when they do something. It's not bragging. They're excited they did the thing they just got involved in and they love the outcome that happened. They're not bragging about it. They're just psyched they got to do it.

 

It's a very superficially expressed form of emotionality. It's not so deep like one of the other emotional types where they are very excited inside, but they don't really express it on the outside. The Small Intestine Type, that emotional part of a person that's creative, is very out and expressive about that, almost to what some people might view as hysterical. It's a very superficial, outward display of their excitement. The Small Intestine Type also sees beauty in everything. So when they look outside and they see a tree and then they see the shadow of the tree as the sun changes, they find that really beautiful; that play between the shadows and the light, between the light and the dark, that interface for them is very exciting. And they see vertical lines all the time when they look at things. So when a person is a creative person, they're always seeing beauty and what's beautiful in another person. They attach to that and the other person and that gives them great joy that they get to experience that with the other person.

 

So it's really important that if someone's depressed, instead of thinking, "Oh, that person is depressed, they're malfunctioning." I totally agree, but you don't get rid of them. What you do is you realize some part of them's not developed and it's this part on the back of their shoulders. And if those part got changed by naturally stretching and removing dense fascia and scar tissue, that person's going to become creative. That's gonna be good for them and for everybody else at the same time. So I think most people think that depression is a thing a person has, but not that it's associated with dense fascia and scar tissue on the back of the shoulders that might've come from a trauma. The person might have been abandoned as a child and that would show up as trauma on those muscle groups. But they're not realizing that the person really just needs to change that tissue and then they can become creative and really affirming about what they do and with other people. And so that chemical imbalance that's associated in the brain and in the body from depression is actually coming from your small intestine not digesting your proteins. And when that happens, the undigested proteins become toxins in your body and that creates a cascade of negative effects. So it's really important for the small intestine to work well to digest your proteins, give you great energy and to give you cerebral spinal fluid to push you up. And then you find yourself just naturally much more creative.

 

And then you have to be supportive of yourself and other people that are being creative because they require support from the outside and from other people. Because what's not known about the most creative people is that when they're being creative, they have a voice in their head that says things like, "That's the dumbest thing you've ever wrote. That's the ugliest thing you've ever created. Nobody's ever going to want to look at that. Nobody's ever going to want to listen to this." And the highly creative person knows that only if that voice shows up is it actually good what they're doing. Otherwise, they haven't gotten deep enough down into transmuting their depression to create something that's really creative. I think that's the opposite of what most people think. So when you're creating things, don't expect it to just be a fabulous experience. There's incredible anxiety associated with being creative and so your attention needs to naturally go outside when you're anxious and then you can start processing that anxiety and get even more excited about what you're creating. And you might have a voice in you that's very self-deprecating. And if you do, I wouldn't argue with that. I would let that voice speak and realize, "Oh boy, this is going to be really good, what I'm creating now" because that voice has showed up again. And then after awhile, that voice isn't very loud because you don't argue with it anymore. You just keep creating because it's becomes a fabulous experience for yourself and other people.

 

I hope that lets you think about depression differently and how to be creative instead. And again, with the common concept that you don't develop flowers out of flowers. They develop out of compost. So you can take any negative thing you're experiencing and develop those muscle groups that are associated with transmuting that negative thing and you can change anything into a really positive phenomena. Have a great time.