Emotions: Driving Force of Creation

For much of my younger adult life I prided myself on what I perceived to be discipline and self control. When emotions did ‘slip’ through, they came through malformed and harsh.

I believed that ‘I’m no artist’….I can still hear the piercing thought ring out as I write.

I felt frustrated that I ‘had no creativity’

What I didn’t understand at the time was the two were linked.

The Event

I had this moment about a year ago now while I was watching some television with an emotional scene. I noticed that I felt this emotion boiling up inside me from my gut. I instinctively suppressed it in a fit of self protection, refusing to let some television get me ’emotionally stirred up’

This time was different though. I became of aware of the inner turmoil at play. I felt a twisting knot rise from gut to neck. As it continue to try to rise and turn to expression it was suddenly stopped by another force. I felt as though hands from my gut rose to catch the emotion and pulled it back into an abyss.

This observation startled me and demanded further attention. ‘What just happened?’, I asked myself.

I found myself coming face to face with myself. In that movement I saw myself in a mirror and knew. I knew that I have done this same thing my entire life. Not just emotions from television shows but my mirage, life, joy, sadness, all of it.

I have repressed emotions as a vile thing, something to be feared something that left me ‘out of control’. As a result my life was a shade of gray, no color, that of a Vulcan.

In childhood I identified with the Vulcan character Spock from Star Trek. I was allured by the cold calculating logic unswayed by emotion. Now, in this inner mirror, I see that is what I had become.

The decision was made. The next time I felt emotion rising, I would not push it down. Instead, I would feel into it.

I clearly recall going for a walk now longer after this experience. On the way I saw a deer recently killed on the side of the road.

I felt emotion begin to arise, and again I felt those dark hands reaching from the abyss. ‘No’ I said to myself. ‘I must feel this.’ the hands released. The emotion swelled like foaming waves.

I can feel myself there again in that experience as I write this.

I was overcome but a sense of sadness and loss. I thought it felt almost too overwhelming for a deer on the side of the road. Then again, I had to remember it was like feeling for the first time. There was extra sensitivity, so to speak.

I sat. just experiencing what it felt like to feel.

That is an odd thing to write. Feeling what it feels like to feel, but it is a perfect of a description as I can give.

I sat with the emotion for a long while. Some small tears came to my eyes. Then slowly, the emotion, now expressed in tiny droplets and sensations, seemed to integrate somehow. It was now part of me.

That raw feeling of unintegrated emotions lingered for months. I felt lost in a fog trying to understand things I had not felt before. Wondering how and why I got here and what this meant. I was searching my inner world with a small candle barley see past my own eyes.

Months later I see a small glimpse of something in the fog reflecting my small candle light back to me. It came in the form of a random tarot card pull.

Building Understanding

Emotion -> Flow -> Creation

I started to give a lot of consideration to emotions

In present society we value being analytical,, measuring, and reasoning. This is the very way I saw the world. This rigid view for me lead to a block of emotional flow. When emotions arose out of fear, distraction, or lack of understanding, I did anything to avoid feeling them.

Over the months of pondering this I continued to intentional allow myself to feel. One morning I felt myself wanting to write something, though I thought I had nothing to write about.

A small spark came to me to do a tarot spread; no goal, just curiosity.

May 11th, 2025 I pulled Page of Cups, Queen of Swords, Temperance, The High Priestess, The Star…

From there, the flow deepened. Intuition after intuition came through. Past thoughts and journal entries began to weave together into a tapestry of new understanding.

It was the peak of the Scorpio Full Moon at the time. I found myself drawing connections, not just ideas, but sensations, energetic movements felt viscerally in the body. Synchronicities in the sky and in cards seemed to be everywhere.

All this from following a small spark of an idea that started on that day. Now six months later I feel that I am staring to grasp what was being communicated to me then.

Page of Cups – Allowing Feeling

“I noticed that I felt this emotion boiling up inside me from my gut. I instinctively suppressed it in a fit of self protection…This time was different though. I became of aware of the inner turmoil at play. I felt a twisting knot rise from gut to neck.”

I have come to learn that this is the nature of flow: it doesn’t begin with logic. It begins with willingness and openness.

We all differ on the extent to which we believe we create our own reality. Perhaps we only create our reality by working to bring certain ‘things’ into our lives. Alternatively, we may believe that we create all that we see and interact with around us.

In either case, our creativity shapes our surroundings. That creativity comes from a spark, which ignites will; this will drives us forward and creates.

As the page I I have began to understand. The spark is born from feeling. Until we fully allow ourselves to feel those emotions, we cannot express them and creativity is left in darkness.

“Emotions are the driving force that propel ideas into constructions…
“Ideas are mental transformation of energy by an entity in physical reality.”

Seth on Dreams and Projections of Consciousness
jane Roberts

The Queen of Swords – Discerning Truth

“I felt emotion begin to arise, and again I felt those dark hands reaching from the abyss. ‘No’ I said to myself. ‘I must feel this.’ the hands released.”

Questions toss to and from for the Page though, What do I do with all these emotions? what do they mean?

To answer the call of the page enters The Queen of Swords. She wields mastery over the realm of emotions with her sword of discernment.

She asks: Is this true? Is this mine to express?

She brings a refined emotional wisdom to rational discernment. She brings the river of emotion into balance with guiding rationality once her skill is tempered..

Without her, it would be like having a daydream that you could fly. And with no discernment you would decide to jump to take off, only to fall flat on your face.

Without her, we find ourselves say things that later we say we ‘didn’t mean’ and ‘were not true’.

This is where the Queen of Swords uses her discernment.

In everything though there must be balance, as the Queen of Swords can become a hidden obstacle.

For me she became analysis. I got stuck here for a long time. Now I was allowing emotions to rise, and be felt, but then I would immediately interrogate them. I wanted to pick apart these feelings. Where did they come from? Why am I having this emotion? What does this mean?

When she acts too early, the Queen of Swords pulls us out of the present. She pulls us into the past to reanalyze what happened, or into the future to preempt what might be.

We simply become too busy in over analysis of past and possible future events to fully feel.

Her sword was never meant for time travel. It’s a blade of clarity meant to be drawn only after the feeling has arrived, moved, and settled.

The tempered Queen of Swords teaches us to wait. To watch. She does not interrupt the emotion. She simply refuses to let it wear a mask and walk into the world untested.

Once the feeling has moved through us fully and passed the test she can then nod to the next guardian: Temperance.

Temperance – Tempered Expression

“Some small tears came to my eyes. Then slowly, the emotion, now expressed in tiny droplets and sensations, seemed to integrate somehow. It was now part of me.”

Where the Queen asks “Is this mine and true?”, Temperance asks “How to express it?” She governs the pace of expression, the mixing of fire and water within us.

Temperance isn’t suppression, it’s sacred pacing. It’s the quiet control that gives emotions form.

Emotions need to be expressed and felt. However, this is not to say when we become mad that we start punching holes in walls around us.

Temperance determines the correct mix. The best time, place, and manner of expression.

We need only look to our prisons to see the folly of what acting out emotions without Temperance leads too.

On the other extreme, though we can mistake repression for Temperance’s presence. The consequences of this mistake can be much more then we might immediately recognize.

For many years this was my mistake. I can attest from personal experience that this creates very real dams in ourselves. It leads to a backlog of feelings, emotions, and energy that often manifests as ‘physical’ symptoms.

As my own emotional river began to flow again I started to notice things. Bodily sensations that had escaped my awareness for all that time.

I took notice of many old tensions and pains that had plagued me for sometime. I started to understand them as ‘pent up’ emotional energy. Emotions never given the chance to be felt or expressed. For the first time I had started to become truly aware of them and was astonished.

For many months I sat and meditated on each spot, whispering “Just feel,” to my self. I was amazed as areas of long time pain began to soften and fade away into forgotten memories. This was all over a relatively short period of months.

Many forgotten memories came back to me during this process. I had not allowed these thoughts to cross my mind in years. Many triggered very strong emotions that I had not wanted to feel before and repressed.

No longer did I pull away when I started to feel these emotions. I became present in them. Soon, there was no longer a need for the body to hold on to them. The physical manifestations began to fade away.

As an aside; I find it interesting that when in pain, we often shy away from getting anything done. We fail to create. When those pains lift, our creative fire returns. As if that energy had been trapped somewhere in the system, waiting to move again.

“The effects of trauma are stored in the body. Until they are addressed there, words alone are not enough.”

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Bessel van der Kolk

The High Priestess – Experience of Flow

“Months later I see a small glimpse of something in the fog reflecting my small candle light back to me.”

This is the point where we allow ourselves to give way to the flow of the river. We have discerned with the Queen of Cups. We determined form with Temperance. Now that form begins to take on actuality.

With discernment and temperance we can now let this energy free into the realm of expression.

The High Priestess open the gates and on the river. Was once unknown to us is now ready to be seen. The dams that we had built begin to collapse and the once dry river bed is filled with life.

We sometimes talk about athletes, programmers or creatives seeking the flow state. Perhaps the truest image is a small child. A child isn’t trapped in the past, nor anxious about the future. They simply feel. They laugh when they’re happy. They cry when they’re sad. They move second to second, unencumbered by inner dialogue and over-analysis.

Returning to that childlike openness, not naivety, but presence, might be the deepest wisdom of all. What if we could make our entire lives a flow state? What amazing, unforeseen magic could come to life around us?

“I AM the Door of Life,
The passage from the world of ideas”

meditation on the high priestess
The Book of token
paul foster chase

The Star – Fulfillment

In that state we can radiate like Stars.

The feeling felt, truth established, form of expression found. Emotion turned idea, now takes on life. The Star, the creation of expression, for all to see.

Perhaps that’s what happened here. A single card drawn, the Page of Cups, became a spark. That spark and became a journey through Queen, Priestess, and Star. All of it, born not from a rigid plan, but from a willingness to follow the current.

This single blog entry, months in making draws to end.

I wrote this in my journal and I think it captures it well.

November 11, 2025 4:21 PM

This afternoon I was feeling turbocharged, like I was surging with energy. I had an intense pressure in my head. I just felt this drive to work on a finishing poem for my blog post [[Emotions Driving Force of Creativity]]

Part of me didn’t want to, I like to do my writing in the morning, but didn’t have time to this morning. So I decided to work on it this afternoon.

As I was working on it, the pressure just increased. I kept just trying to fall into the sensations, fall into those feelings, let them say what they needed to say. I started to feel that energy loosening and moving around.

By the end of the poem, the pressure was almost gone and I felt this cool sensation like a breeze almost leaving the top my head. It is kind of like that ‘creative tension’ I’ve written about before. That tension where I have an idea and I just want it to be completed and brought into existence right here and now. That sense of a need to rush forward.

Now though, it is like I’m beginning to understand how to manage that energy a little bit and to harness it in a more creative and steady way.

Still very far to go, but an observation worth making I believe.

The Birth of a Star

I am empty, I am dry, I am dead

I feel something pulsing, something rising
I’ve felt this before, this pushing
I feel my own dark hands rising

No, I hear myself call out
This must not be allowed
Cast this out!

I start to see, I start to hear, I start to feel

I feel something pulsing, something rising
I hear myself cry out
I feel the darkness pull

No, I hear myself call out
This is meant to be felt
This is meant to be known

This time I will see, This time I will hear, This time I will feel

I feel something pulsing, something rising
The darkness loosens it grip
The rising pulses

Tears begin to flow
Rivers begin to fill
Damns begin to break

New waters fill, new waters break, new waters flow

The tears fill the dry river bed
The water in turmoil
The damns built fall away

I chart new rivers
I find new lands
I learn who I am

Now I sit to write, Now I sit to mold, Now I sit to form

I work pen with fingers
I work clay with hands
I work form with tools

The work is imperfect not planned
The river somehow flows out through me
Life becomes a force, Life creates

This post is more than something I set out to write. It emerged when I chose to feel first. It is one of my embers turned into a Star.

\/ “Live Long and Prosper”

“I am the ever-flowing fountain of living waters.
From Me all things proceed, and unto Me they must return.”

Meditation on the star
Book of tokens
Paul foster chase