How to Become a Vessel for a Vision
Part I of the Unraveling the Creative Process series
A few weeks ago, I asked my community what they were most interested in reading about, and the creative process emerged as the clear favourite. So, in this multi-part series, I’ll dive deep into that—sharing insights, reflections, and practical advice on bringing visions to life. Let’s begin.
One of the outstanding qualities of being human is that we can, with consistent practice, become exceptional at something. Whether through sheer will or the guidance and encouragement of parents, guardians, or mentors, choosing a path and focusing on it has proven to lead to success again and again. My definition of success is a Venn diagram of living a life in alignment with your values, contributing to the evolution of humankind and the betterment of the world, and doing work that makes you feel like you are expanding into your potential—work that is challenging (in the right ways), fulfilling, and impactful.
While many people zero in on a specific skill or a niche early on, I never had such clarity growing up. I played the violin, piano, clarinet, and guitar. I studied theatre, dance, photography, and film. I explored spirituality, psychology, technology, systems, society, and culture. I painted, sang, sculpted, designed, and solved problems. I wanted to build cities, communities, and businesses. In time, I ended up doing it all.
There was never one thing that drew my attention entirely. While I struggled and judged myself for decades, eventually, I realized that despite the breadth of my curiosities, I have been mastering something over the past 25+ years, and that is the creative process—the journey a vision takes from inception to realization.
We often think about becoming great at something as becoming great at a specific skill, but mastery can be applied to broad things, too, and sometimes it takes decades to define a specific medium or entity to which we want to devote our energy. There are significant individuals in history, from Bruce Lee to Leonardo Da Vinci to Maya Angelou to Paul Graham, who took a more interdisciplinary approach—which led them to create a notable impact on the world.
The creative path is your unique path of contribution, and it cannot and should not be compared in pace or likeness to any other path. Although it may and often does intersect with others, the long arc of the path will lead you down many roads alone. If you’re genuinely on your path, you will often have no clue what you’re doing or where something is going, which is part of the inherent design of the creative process—it is filled with uncertainty and requires complete surrender. We don’t know what we don’t know and only learn by trying.
The pressure I felt to focus and become great at one thing, and my continuous rejection of that idea created an inner tension that constantly pulled me in two directions. When the world pushed for specialization, I pushed back. Somewhere between being challenged to fit into a specific mold and being driven to do things my way, I learned how to channel that tension as a creative conduit.
Allowing myself the freedom to follow my truth and explore different creative facets and mediums shaped my unique approach to the creative process. I became interdisciplinary, almost by accident, learning to blend my passions to produce new forms of expression. I developed a deep confidence in my ability to be thrown into the deep end and find solutions to almost any problem. Going through this process again and again not only taught me how to create but also how to trust myself.
The act of creation is humbling because if you’re creating, you’re failing. And after facing enough failures and rejections, you learn to detach from outcomes. The focus shifts from ‘this needs to succeed’ to ‘I am fully committed to what the vision wants to become and what this experience wants to teach me.’ You fall in love with the process, and all the noise fades away.
When Jung said, ‘The first 40 years are research,’ I believe he was referring to this: becoming and unravelling, creating and destroying, failing and succeeding until a clear path, or at least a few steps, begins to reveal itself. Through this process of trying and exploring, you land on what you most want to do.
I have spent my entire life as a creative mother (and sometimes doula), giving birth to visions and making the intangible tangible. Co-creating with reality and community has been an extraordinary love affair and my most intimate relationship. I want to share my philosophy and approach with you in this essay series.
Part 1 - Inception
How to Become a Vessel for a Vision
Visioning is the act of perceiving and responding. Akin to Elizabeth Gilbert’s hypothesis in Big Magic about where ideas come from, I, too, believe that visions come to or through us rather than from us. Based on this core belief, the first step in bringing a vision to life is recognizing that visioning requires paying attention.
Paying attention to our curiosities.
Paying attention to the messages we’re receiving.
Paying attention to the synchronicities in our lives.
Paying attention to the problems that we feel passionate about solving.
We must pay attention to what captures our attention and why and the subtle or not-so-subtle feedback we constantly receive from our environment and the people in it. This heightened state demands that you be present with fear, joy, discomfort, the mundane, and the painful experiences—whatever the moment brings, you must meet it. It’s a depth of presence that’s an invitation for connection. It sends a clear signal that you are ready to receive,
A vision is an energetic force that aligns with the clearest path to manifestation. It seeks only to be realized without attachment to any particular form. Beyond our understanding of time and space, visions can move through different moments and dimensions, not constrained by the limitations of the physical world.
In one of our back-and-forth voice notes, my friend Jenn Mansell once said that ‘desire is the seed of creation,’ which makes the relationship between a vision and who brings it to life even more intimate and mystical. If a vision aligns with the most explicit path to manifestation, desire creates that path and magnetizes that vision. Or, in Rumi’s words, “What you seek is seeking you.” Desire can be complex because it’s often rooted in attachment, identity, or a strong sense of self, but beyond the ego, desire is a powerful tool for manifestation; it empowers us to name that which we most want, and in doing so, we unlock potential and possibility. The challenge in modern society is that we desire in excess. Just as we’ve misconstrued the essence of abundance (which is, according to Indigenous wisdom, having enough), we’ve entangled desire with power and control. The purest form of desire is rooted in alignment with our higher purpose and the collective good.
For those like me, visions often arrive unannounced. They might knock on your door during an intimate conversation, nudge you on your daily mental health walk, or show up in your dreams in unexplainable ways. In that moment, something either connects or unlocks within you.
Connects: You’ve already been experiencing subtle whispers of this vision, so you’re not surprised but energized by the clarity.
Unlocks: You have never consciously thought about this, but you now feel jolted alive by the possibility and must take some step toward formalizing it.
You know a vision wants to manifest through you because it won’t leave you alone (and if it does, it’s found another path). It cannot be ignored—if you don’t act towards it, it will keep you up at night. In the inception stage, a vision doesn’t arrive neatly folded and wrapped up in a box with your name on it. It’s more like a puzzle piece or a thread to pull on, a seed that holds tremendous catalytic power.
This experience can be overwhelming and intimidating, which is why so many of us ignore the call. Even when we feel pulled toward something, we may reject it, delay it or find endless excuses for why it may not work. Or the opposite, become inflated with the idea that this is the best thing ever, and we must succeed because everything—from our future to our reputation—depends on it. The hardest thing to do is remain equanimous throughout the creative process and recognize that a vision does not have an agenda; humans have agendas, and the biggest killer of creativity is the pressure to make it mean something or become something too early in the process.
If the vision is the energetic seed travelling through time, looking for the clearest path to manifestation to plant itself in the garden of realization, what exactly is your role?
You, the creator (the leader, entrepreneur, artist), the energetic force in temporary physical form, must bring momentum. Momentum is to a vision what water is to a plant—it is non-negotiable. Without momentum, the vision will eventually travel elsewhere. Momentum is your way of saying to the vision: ‘I see you, I hear you, I feel you, and I’m going to take action.’
When you receive a vision and respond with momentum, a bond forms between the physical and metaphysical realms. You become a vessel for actualization, a portal between this world and every other possible world beyond space and time.
I call this first stage, where a vision travels to bond with the clearest path to realization, ‘Inception.’ This is where the work begins.
A vision is not timebound because it does not exist within the constraints of how we experience time. It looks for clarity and momentum but is not concerned about efficiency—efficiency is a human-made concept. The desire for something to occur faster is rooted in our relationship to control and attachment to outcomes (and heavily influenced by capitalism). We need to be efficient (or think we must) because we will die, and we’re deeply concerned with ROI, legacy, and immortalizing ourselves somehow, but the same constraints do not bind a vision. It is objective, timeless, and immortal.
So whether it takes two years, ten years, or 100 years doesn’t matter; as long as there’s clarity and momentum, the process will continue. When I say clarity, I don’t mean knowing what to do, how to do it, or even when. Clarity, as it relates to visioning, is the openness to give life to a vision. And let’s not confuse momentum with speed. Momentum is the opposite of resistance—doubt, self-deprecation, procrastination, fear of change, failure, being witnessed—it simply means that you have agreed, despite all the uncertainty and discomfort, to be in service to the vision, and there’s a consistent pace at which you’re moving and evolving. It’s not a game; there’s no winning or losing. It’s a dance—you’re either dancing or not.
Agreeing to breathe life into a vision simplifies a very complex experience. Clarity, or clear people, are generally people on a mission. Going back to Rumi’s quote, they are inherently seeking something, desiring something. This is necessary for the connection between vision and vessel because a person on a mission already has some clarity and momentum, making them magnetic. If you’ve ever been curious about why some people are prolific creators, it’s because we’ve tapped the wires between the physical and metaphysical realms, we’ve created a symbiotic relationship with reality—we’ve got clear lines of communication. We exist somewhere between this world and the next.
We are on this planet to explore and nurture this mystical relationship with the universe, a gift available to all of us. Because there is no more extraordinary act than the act of co-creation (or destruction, which is a part of co-creation), and if you zoom out and look at evolution, you’ll see that all things have gone through this process in some form. Although most people are creative or want to be, few understand the creative process or have the capacity to surrender. It is non-linear, unpredictable, and iterative, but it is the great ‘why’ of our existence. You are here to create. I am here to create. We are here to create.
To prepare for inception, you must become a clear vessel to channel the creative force.
You must be clear about who you’re serving, why you want to serve, and what impact you want to make.
The clearer we become, the more open we become to receiving. The more open we become, the better we can serve.
Your mission is to understand how you must grow, change, and transform to become a vessel for a vision. Otherwise, you may wander—and there’s nothing wrong with wandering—but you’ll roam from place to place, thing to thing, person to person, searching for something that can only be found in the quiet moments between you and G.O.D. (Great Original Designer).
With this shared understanding of visioning, let’s uncover the creative process.
Next week, we’ll explore Part II of Unraveling the Creative Process. Stay tuned.