I think all of us are brilliant at something. The key is working out where our brilliance lies. But too many people waste their talents by trying to develop skills that they don’t naturally possess. In this post I want to talk about a new way to think of your personal genius that will hopefully ease some of the anxiety that comes with striving for excellence and inhibits the flow of your genius.
We feel anxiety when we doubt our ability to be able to take care of things or when we distrust the ability or motives of others. If we are looking to change or achieve something, especially if it is of a competitive nature, it seems like it’s us alone against the world. And that can easily seem daunting.
So to begin with I’d like to start at the top by thinking about the nature of your relationship with God and how that relationship can aid you and set the foundation for your genius.
Your Genius = Alignment With God/The Universe
Possible Root Of The Word Religion
religare ”to bind fast” (see rely), via notion of “place an obligation on,” or “bond between humans and gods.”
The word religion is considered by many to have derived from the word ‘religare’ meaning to be bound by, obligated to, or the bond between Man and God (or the Gods). In other words, it refers to the basic contract between the divine and the mortal. Traditional religions are built around the smallprint of that contract. If you mention religion to most non-religious people, and perhaps even to many religious folk, immediately what comes to mind is the lists of what you must and must not do. And so the idea of God becomes a cross parent who wants to lecture you about morality.
Imagine if that bond and obligation was not of a Parent-Child relationship, but a collaborative effort?
What if God didn’t want you to be good and so then reward you, but was more interested in helping to guide you to reconnect your divine and human selves?
The ancient Greeks had this kind of view of the relationship between humans and Gods. They believed that we each had a being, like a higher self, that they called The Daemon. This Daemon mediated between Man and the God’s. Translating human into divine and vice versa, so that together they could create a heaven on earth. The Roman’s had a different name for their version of this idea, The Genius. The name has stuck, but through time and translation, the story changed to become, someone is a genius rather than someone connects with their genius.
This changes everything, because now you are personally responsible for your work. Criticism of it is personal and therefore is an attack on you. This creates much of the anxiety that holds us back from creating our best work. For a much clearer and more vivid, thought provoking presentation on this idea, watch this video, where Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the phenomenally successful book and film, “Eat, Pray, Love” explains her discovery of and experiences with this concept.
Your Responsibility To Your Daemon/Genius/Higher Self
Your responsibility to your Genius is simple. To be there. It’s simple to state, but it is your life’s work to achieve.
Much of the time we are ‘somewhere’ physically, we aren’t there as a whole being. We aren’t there psychologically or emotionally. If you think about it, at any given moment our thoughts are in one of five basic categories.
We can either be in the moment, fully experiencing what is happening. We can think about the past or the future and we can think of it in either a positive or negative way.
When you are beating yourself up about what you could have, should have, would have done, you are not showing up.
When you are worrying about what might go wrong, you aren’t showing up.
When you reminisce about the good things that happened in the past, you aren’t showing up, though it can help you in opening up to your Genius.
When you are looking forward to your coming success you can get glimpses of inspiration, but you’re still not fully showing up.
To merge with your genius you need to be fully focused on creating your art. This complete level of attention, alongside the technical skills developed from your 10,000 hours practice, merges divine inspiration with technical excellence to produce a work that looks like it has been inspired by the Gods. And in that timeless instant, a portal is opened where the blueprint of perfection can be seen and replicated in the everyday world.
Every Time Perspective Is Valuable
I have a belief that everything that exists has a worthwhile function. And while many will preach of the need to be in the moment, or in the case of Law of Attraction Devotees to be optimistically expectant, I believe each perspective has it’s own unique benefits.
Being in the moment is for show time. When we want to perform, to create our art, to connect with others and to explore the inner or outer world, deeper than ever before.
But there is also a time to disengage. A time to revel in achievements, a time to reflect, a time to prepare and a time to anticipate. To live in the now, without the benefits of the other perspectives is to lose what makes us distinctively human.
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Thank you I needed that.
You’re welcome, Alicia.
This is great: “…I believe each perspective has it’s own unique benefits.” I appreciate this approach. Between religion, psychology, etc. we may be confused by the varying answers and information on how to think and live. It would be short-sighted to believe that there is only one way. I’ve drawn from many resources and would agree that accepting and applying different perspectives will help most of us get closer to contentment.
Absolutely, we have to mix and match from every source to find the right blend that really sums up what we believe. To only draw from one source is the origin of bigotry.