Today I’d like to call forth a discussion about honoring our identities-our unique, individual gifts and abilities. To be perfectly honest, this is something I struggle with greatly, and through failure have been able to take ownership of my highly individualized soul imprint. What I mean by soul imprint, is the expression of your unique gifts and talents towards a purpose of the betterment of humanity. The betterment concept can be quite intimidating, but it is indeed very simple. Another word for betterment can be creativity. To create is to move forward or evolve. To evolve is to expand, which is the single most important purpose of the universe, and thus, all of existence.

I grew up in a household where creativity was suppressed. There were many intense emotions, as I was born into a culture that is very focused on survival. While my mother is a teacher and my father is a computer engineer, at the heart of the matter my mother is a violinist and my father is an athlete. I am a marketer, but at the heart of the matter I am a poet. I actually remember the first day I picked up a pen and wrote my first poem. I was astounded. I couldn’t believe I could create. Honest to God, I couldn’t believe there was an outlet for me, somewhere where I could find solace and liberation. Through the years I received much pressure to focus on my education, my career and picking a “stable” and “predictable” path. The poet inside of me shrunk smaller and smaller. On cold rainy days, my little friend would crawl out of his cave, and a little glimmer would shine and soon explode with healing, power and light. I would then give this hauntingly beautiful friend some freedom and then again, he would go into hibernation until his voice would grow so loud that I had to set him free again. More and more time continued and I began to suffer greatly. The poet within grew restless, angry, resentful. There was always a bitterness to him, but this time it was a sad bitterness. Sort of like, “How could you just abandon me?”

I was scared of owning my identity as a poet. Who in their right mind could write poems and survive? I envied poets like Leonard Cohen and Arthur Rimbaud. I envied there courage, their devotion, their vulnerability. When my pen would come out on those dark rainy nights it unleashed a power that completed me. It gave me hope for humanity, it gave me hope for every artist living through their soul, it healed me, inspired me. Writing poetry is the single most in alignment activity I know how to do. This is because this is my unique, individual identity. It is when we honor these identities we have deep inside when we can truly grow as deeply creative beings. This is the source of our true happiness, it is connected to our sense of purpose in life, to our personal fulfillment and ultimately contributes to the progression of the universe at large. To create, is simply to listen to a very, very deep presence within yourself. It is to go into that dark, murderous forest within where you’ve told yourself you don’t belong. It is to go there fearlessly, with devotion, with peace.