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Taking a walk in the divine path Victoria Leo and friends. Submitted photo Friday Feb 10, 2017 at 8:15 PM Feb 10, 2017 at 8:15 PM By Victoria C. Leo I’ve never done this before in my life: 240 pages, written, rewritten, edited and polished in a little over six weeks. George Frideric Handel did his Messiah in about that much time, but he was a genius — I’m no genius! But it is a great tool that takes you from your worry mind, the tunnel vision that stress creates and into the realms of divinity. After all, in most faith traditions, there is a deity who creates the world from the raw materials at hand. The Bible creation story (and the Babylonian Tiamat story that it cribbed from) involves breath and clay soil and the transformation of dead nothingness into glorious something-ness. God is God because he, she, it brings forth life. God is the Creator in Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, the Norse pantheon. There is nothing that so closely mimics the divine as this simple path of creating something with your own hands and your own soul. What flows through your mind and what frisson of excitement flows through your body when you first behold the works of YOUR hand? Regardless of how imperfect it may be — and when you do anything for the first time, it won’t be Michelangelo’s Pieta, so if you are perennially in the humor to tear yourself down, plenty of scope for it — it is creation. It is beautiful in the same way that all newborn babies are beautiful. Creation of any kind, whether it is a vegetable bed or an oil painting, puts you in a mental and emotional place that transforms your physical body as well. The adrenal stress cascade stops or slows. Neurons remain intact and new ones are created from neural stem cells; your memory improves and the clarity of logic sharpens. Your kidneys stop laboring; your immune system, especially the T-attack cells and the Natural Killer cells that go after cancer as well as invaders, generates its full complement of soldiers, ready to protect you from killers within and without. Chronic inflammation quietens. The chemicals that scratch the walls of your arteries and allow plaque to attach become fewer and far between. From your skin to your bones and everywhere in between, the deadly effects of stress are muted. Time spent in a creative fog is time that exists outside of the normal minute-by-minute “real time” that we are all used to. The first time you can put aside your OMG, I’m Doing It Wrong, I Know I’m Doing It Wrong thoughts and really deep-end in the process, narrow your thoughts and focus to simply what you are doing, you will sink deep into the Time Without Time. Time simply ceases to exist as a reality. And the act of creation doesn’t seem to even involve you. People have reported feeling as if a power took control of their voice, their typing hands or the hand holding the brush or the glue pot while the Real Me just watched. They are absolutely right, if the Real You is your thinking, planning, analyzing Pre-Frontal Cortex, the part of you most active when you are consciously, and logically trying to “figure something out.” In order to create, you need to let your PFC step back [“take a nap,” in a hypnotherapy journey] and let the part of you that knows how to play and that knows the real agendas and the real goals of your heart take over. This is the part of you that passionately wants to express those agendas and goals — dreams — in whatever medium you allow. Let the real Real You come out to play, and to express to you what is truly Real, and you will have a gold mine of Truth about yourself and how you truly perceive your world and your life. I’m not immune from the glorious results of allowing Truth to flow. I thought my new book, "101 Stress Busters for Energy, Joy and Healthy Longevity," was about health through blunting the deadly ravages of stress, and it is. But if you look at the page count, and at the chapters that flowed out of me like a mighty stream, it is the power and glory of a life spent creating that the book is really about. My subconscious was so insistent on this book that I bumped my other business plans, and I worked at a fever pitch to finish it, rewrite it, polish it, edit it and produce it in six exhausted weeks. My soul wanted your soul to create. Join the divine dance and make it so. Learn more about Ashland resident Victoria C. Leo at www.soaringdragon.biz.