2019: year of inspiration

New Year's Blessings! I am happy to declare 2019 to be the Year of Inspiration. According to the Chinese horoscope, this year will bring love, joy, and abundance your way. All of these blessings are predicated on your inspiration.

What does that mean? For your whole life, you have been sharing a body with a powerful entity. While you sleep, work, and play, this entity is busy regulating all kinds of physiological processes, including breathing, circulation, and metabolism. The birth and death of cells through your body falls under its influence. Your co-tenant is also looking out for your, offering guidance in the form of intuition.

In Hindu tradition, this entity is called Ishwara, which can be defined as "embodied spirit." Inspiration happens when you allow this embodied spirit to take its rightful place as the primary creative agent in your life. You can always create with your mind if you so choose, but Ishwara can access knowledge that your mind never will. Whereas your mind is good at connecting the dots through logical inference and other reasoning processes, Ishwara can envision new realities through the power of imagination.

Your mind can be resistant to the force of Ishwara. Einstein was referring to this dynamic when he observed that "great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." The great spirit and mediocre mind are both living inside of us at this very moment. We become inspired when the battle between them ceases. This requires the mind to surrender control, at least for a few moments.

This year, I will show you how you can tap into greater levels of creative inspiration by helping your mind get out of the way. Once that happens, you create an opening so that Ishwara can do what it does best: allow fresh ideas, images, and insights to flow in ways that can lead you in productive new directions.

I will be offering a wide range of materials this year to help you in your journey of inspiration. On January 19, I will be giving a presentation, entitled "The Art of Inspiration," at the TEDxTucson "[r]evolution" conference. This talk will be available on video, and I will be expanding upon the same topics in a series of blog posts you can find here, as well as a workbook that will provide practical exercises to elaborate on the ideas I shared with you in Deep Creativity.

One of my New Year's resolutions is to help you master the art of inspiration, so that you can truly make this the Year of Inspiration in your life. Happy New Year!