This learning is designed to teach leaders how to encourage creativity in themselves and others. You can learn a great deal about creativity from observing children. When children become bored, a certain fire seems to disappear from their eyes. This is the flame of creativity, the spark of spontaneous vitality, curiosity and wonder that fuels creativity, which a good teacher knows how to inspire. Children are not easily bored. They are by nature spontaneous. Play comes easily to them. They always seem to be having fun. But what many adults do not understand is that child’s play is serious business. In the first three years of life, children learn more than they will for the rest of their lives.
Great artists, scientists, writers, thinkers, even inventors have all spoken about the process of their work as being playful. They are able to balance the great body of knowledge and the many skills and methods they have learned with their own spontaneity, using the impulses and insights that come to them in any given moment. The solid ground of experience and tradition functions for them less as a prison than as a springboard.
In the learning called Spontaneity or Fire, flexibility and conviction develop into agility and spontaneity. These are both elements of play. When a group is encouraged to play while thinking, giving ideas a large berth, and notions, plans and strategies room to breath, the group begins to reach the goals they want to accomplish in a natural way. What may seem at first like wasted time will often produce surprising and unexpected solutions as well as powerful insights.
The solar hindrance to playfulness is the desire to control. This comes from a fear that goals will not be achieved. One way to balance this is to focus less on the end product of your work and more on the process. Paradoxically this focus eventually yields far better results. In addition, the development of ways of thinking that are not linear, including intuition will enable members of the group to yield control when it is appropriate. By investigating this kind of knowing and surrendering to this process, a new and fruitful approach to solving all kinds of problems will be added to your stockpile of useful tools.
The lunar shadow or hindrance to the learning called Spontaneity or Fire occurs through denial. When the lunar aspect of consciousness is too dominant, a state of giddy fantasy is often used to cover denial. Denying your own desires to or fear of putting your ideas into action, you find yourself with many concepts that are never actualized. There is a big difference between imagining the act of painting a big red circle on the wall and actually doing it. A major part of the creative process, even the imaginative creative process, occurs in the doing. When you actually mix the paint, for instance, you find yourself choosing a very particular color of red that may influence the size and even placement of the circle you paint. The antidote to this hindrance is to initiate small, more easily accomplished actions that will eventually lead to the completion of the
project. It is through a series of small steps that large projects become reality.
Mirroring (Water)
Anchoring (Earth)
