How to Find and Listen to That Little Voice Inside You to Eliminate Negativity, Stress, and Allow Your Creativity to Flourish
by Carole Dean
Every other Saturday at 10 am we have Film Funding Class for our fiscally sponsored filmmakers. These are some of the kindest people in the world, intent on educating themselves and moving their films forward. They allow me to share books with them on the power of our minds.
Some days I get on a roll and I don’t want to stop. I work too hard and end up exhausted. After reading Amit’s work, I intend to recognize when my energy is getting depleted. I will immediately stop, meditate and take my vitamin C.
This week we are studying Quantum Spirituality by Amit Goswami. There is a wealth of information in it aimed at moving you to a higher consciousness and improving your ability as a filmmaker.
From the massive amount of exercises and information Amit has in this book, you might want to read only one chapter a week and integrate that into your life. Perhaps you could take a year of reading and integrating. With this approach, you could become a much more enlightened being with a better understanding of your incredible human potential.
I highly recommend Quantum Spirituality. Here are some of the highlights that will help you thrive in life and your filmmaking career.
Realizing a Transformational Journey
Amit tells us about setting the stage for a transformational journey. He talks about the chakras and their importance. He shows us where, via a map, they are located on our body.
“The brow chakra: the initial vital function is rational thinking for which the organ is the prefrontal cortex, right at the back of the forehead. The associated feelings are clarity of understanding when the energy moves in, and confusion with depletion of energy.”
This is very important for filmmakers to know. Filmmakers work long hard hours and often hit this depletion of energy. One thing that can help you is to find a quiet spot to meditate for 20 minutes and get back on track.
They say 20 minutes of meditating is like one hour of sleep for the rest it gives your body. Dr. Linus Pauling said Vitamin C is a healer and that it helps clear your mind you when you get tired. It has been proven that people do better with tests and under stress after taking vitamin C.
Amit goes on to say, “With further opening, this brow chakra is the one that funnels the intuitive energy associated with the archetypes that are attracted to you. This is why this chakra is called the third eye or the eye of intuition. The associated feelings of archetypical exploration are satisfaction, when energy is gained, and despair when energy is depleted.”
Some days I get on a roll and I don’t want to stop. I work too hard and end up exhausted. After reading Amit’s work, I intend to recognize when my energy is getting depleted. I will immediately stop, meditate and take my vitamin C.
Communicating with Your Audience
Amit teaches us how to recognize signs from our body and how to restore our balance.
“This brow chakra is an important chakra for all of us because we need to be connected to our intuition.”
We are all blessed with psychic abilities, we learned that from Dean Radin in his books, and using those abilities is very important for each of us because we are connected to the universe and to each other.
For filmmakers this is important because you need to tap into people to know what they want.
You want to tap into what your audience likes and learn how to communicate with them. What better way to get in contact with your market and your audience then through your own intuition?
Always trust that little voice.
Building Positive Emotional Brain Circuits
Amit proposes that we need to loosen the structure of the ego by developing more authenticity as to who we are and what we’re doing. We need to understand the chakras in the body where we experience emotion and the mental thought that accompanies this. We want to pay attention to what we feel.
He believes the science of the chakras is also very important. When doing yoga, he suggests that you need to focus on the chakra for each yoga position. Yoga will benefit you even more when you add this newly learned behavior to your life.
All of the practices he talks about are effective to building positive emotional brain circuits. These are good to help balance our negativity in general situations of emotional management. (Here, I think he means so that we don’t lose our cool and are able to handle a lot of stress.)
This is perfect for filmmakers who are learning to shoot with COVID-19 rules.
Imagination and Preparation
“Creativity begins,” Amit tells us, “with the stage of preparation according to creativity researchers, three “I” words play a huge role even before that: inspiration, intention and intuition. Inspiration is what we experience when, with or even without reason, the quantum self touches us, and we feel expanded.”
Amit calls this — A beginning of curiosity.
“As we make an intention for such visits more often, it is then that we become aware of our intuitive faculty and the law of attraction: the archetypes are attracted to us. And now the word begins in the form of the four stages of creativity. As “I” words they are imagination, aka preparation, incubation, insight, and implementation aka manifestation.”
An Academy Award winning producer I know uses this “I” word, imagination, before each shoot day. At night, she imagines the next morning. She goes through everything from hearing her wind-up alarm clock along with the call from the front desk to wake her up. Then she imagines everything that should happen until she is on the set and the first shot is made.
It is in the imagination phase that she discovers anything she may have forgotten to do or say to someone. She catches her mistakes before they happen using her imagination.
Grist for the Unconscious Mill of Your Mind
“Focused imagination and preparation: preparation firstly consists of catching up on existing knowledge and extending it through imagination.”
For filmmakers, this would be doing your research using your creativity and your imagination to extend your idea and expand it to be fully creative.
He recommends that you read voraciously. Read the good books, read current materials on archetypes, read whatever you can get your hands on, and imagine, imagine, imagine. The idea is to generate new and divergent thinking, ideas that will act as fodder for the second stage of incubation which is unconscious processing.
Amit also suggests that you “listen to lectures by people of transformation, go to workshops, talk to like-minded people. Always to generate new grist for the unconscious mill of our mind.”
Clean up the Thoughts in your Mind
He wants you to watch your mental preoccupations; if your mind is preoccupied with old stuff, clean it up.
“Clean up your unconscious,” he advises. “I am putting on a new persona to feel good about myself. So, we need to clean up our persona and eliminate inauthenticity as far as we can in our present state.”
And he recommends that we meditate.
“Many people believe that meditation is a complicated technique to be done for hours on end, but this needn’t be the case. If you’re new to meditation start off easy, 10 to 15 minutes a day of a simple technique is enough in the beginning.”
Here is his sample meditation:
“Sit comfortably wearing comfortable clothing. Close your eyes and relax your body. Start off by paying attention to your jaw. Like almost everyone you’re likely to hold tension in this area so place your attention on relaxing your jaw.
“Then relax your belly, your shoulders, the muscles around your eyes, and allow your shoulders to drop. Take a deep breath or two and the muscles all over your body will start to relax. Now place your attention on the following mantra, you can coordinate the mantra with your breathing, say AUM as you breathe out and focus on staying present.
“This meditation is called concentration-meditation. It is focusing on an object. You can use your breath and focus simply on the breath or focus on a lighted candle.”
Amit states, “The mind needs discipline while the heart needs freedom in order to explore the new. Usually we’re in the opposite situation, our mind runs freely around without control, but our heart is locked away closed to any contact with new reality.
“To change this status, we have to train the mind and bring it under control by means of practice on concentration and to learn to let the heart express freely without the mind interfering. The best way to strengthen the heart is via the exploration of love.”
Think of some of Clint Eastwood’s films like his Oscar winning Million Dollar Baby. That was full of love. You left that theatre with love in your heart. Love is contagious.
Slow Down the Mind to Hear the Thoughts in the Gap
“It is said in these spiritual traditions,” Amit writes, “that meditation appears spontaneously in the mirror of a mind that reflects a heart full of love. The practice of concentration is relatively easy to build into a success when we love what we’re doing. If the exercises are done in a flat and boring way, without putting heart into them, success will not come easy.
“In this way the daily practice of mental concentration is very important for your health. Even if you practice a little each day the constant practice is a very important aspect of the mental training, first because the nature of the mine is to change, and this consistency in practice is helping to regain control over the mind.”
He provides a Zen story that describes the lesson of it all.
“A student went to his meditation teacher and said, my meditation is horrible! I feel so distracted, my legs ache, or I’m constantly falling asleep. It’s just horrible.
“It will pass, the teacher said matter of factly.
“A week later the student came back to his teacher. My meditation is wonderful I feel so aware so peaceful so alive is just wonderful.
“It will pass the teacher said matter of factly.
“And indeed, although my day-to-day experience would differ as described above with time, I found that there was more space between my thoughts, my mind was slowing down. “
This is exactly what you want because, “slowing down the mind allows the information from your extrasensory perception to make itself heard.” Deepak Chopra has always said, “listen to the voice in the gap between your thoughts.”
However, when your thoughts are moving rapidly it’s hard to hear your little voice. When you slow down your thinking, the little voice becomes easier to hear and that enhances your intuition.
I have found that the more I use my intuition the stronger it becomes and the more information I get.
It’s as if they know I use it and then they give me more information. I always feel like I am being guided,
I know that I am never alone.
Carole Dean is president and founder of From the Heart Productions; a 501(c)3 non-
profit that offers the Roy W. Dean Film Grants and fiscal sponsorship for independent filmmakers. She hosts the weekly podcast, The Art of Film Funding, interviewing those involved in all aspects of indie film production. Her new class “How to Fund Your Film” is available on Vimeo on Demand. She is also the author of The Art of Film Funding, 2nd Edition: Alternative Financing Concepts. See IMDB for producing credits.
Heather Lenz – Director/Producer – Heather Lenz is an award-winning filmmaker who is particularly drawn to telling true stories of trailblazers, underdogs, and people who have not walked the beaten path. Lenz is best known for KUSAMA-INFINITY, a feature length documentary about Yayoi Kusama, a Japanese artist who overcame sexism, racism, and mental illness on her path to becoming the top selling living female artist in the world.
Michael Culyba – Director/Producer/Editor – Michael has been editing documentary films in New York City for over seventeen years.
