A great creative force demands robust structure.

Today is the last day of our mantra practice in Sacred Sound Circle that invokes the energy of the Great River of Life, and I cannot remember when I last was so grateful for a practice to end.

One the first day of this mantra practice, I wrote:

“There is a force to this creative energy of the Great River of Life, like a deluge.”

And a deluge it has been.

It snowed here on April first.

April second the snow turned to heavy rains, and I began chanting this Ganga river mantra and my mantra for the year, which invokes the energy of Saraswati, another river.

To me, the Ganga mantra is an amplification mantra. You use it to amplify the creative energy of what you’re wanting to manifest and create this year.

I was intentionally thinking about this and how I was going to write to all of you about it . . . but I didn’t get the chance.

Nature moved swiftly and forcefully.

It rained for four days, melting what were still substantial snow banks and saturating the earth with water.

By the second day of my double river energy practice, there was flooding in our basement, where both my husband and I have newly renovated studios. Newly. Renovated. Studios.

Last Fall, we had taken out the bones and remnants of a 60-year-old beauty parlor and constructed ourselves each a studio. In fact, he had just snapped a photo of me working in mine, and I had just shared it with you.

And, now, we found standing water in his studio, and we couldn’t vacuum or bail or mop it out fast enough to make it workable.

I need to stop chanting these river mantras, was now my thought.

But this is exactly what the energy of Ganga, the Great River of Life, is intended to do.

The greater the creative force, the more robust structures we need to support it.

In myth, Ganga flowed so strongly from the heavens that she had to be slowed by Shiva, the eternal essence of the Universe, who caught her in his hair, so she would not destroy the earth.

The role of this energy—the role of Spring—in the creative cycle is not simply to nourish and create new life. It also shows us the relationship between our structures and our flow, between the river and its bank.

A river without a bank is not a river. It’s a flood.

It is the same with our life, our business and our creative work.

The greater the force of creation, the more robust structures we need to support it. Sometimes that creative force requires us to go back and recreate or reinforce those structures for ourselves.

That’s exactly what we had to do, quite literally, in our basement studio.

We took down half of two walls and part of a staircase and broke up a good part of a concrete floor with a jack hammer. Then we dug out underneath the house, with our hands. There is no dirt under this house. There are only rocks. I do not kid. We could not get a shovel into the rocks, so we scooped them out by hand. Then, we mixed and poured 2000 pounds of concrete to create a barrier to future rain run off. Only then could we reconstruct the walls and stairs and reconfigure our studios.

This is not what either of us wanted to do. We were ready to move forward, creating.

It’s counterintuitive but creativity thrives within a strong structure: practice, routine.

So, once we were there, standing in a literal demand for a more structurally sound foundation, we started asking the question: What other structural supports are insufficient for what we’re wanting to create? (And a slew of them revealed themselves.)

I believe now that this is part of the work of Spring, and I invite you to ask:

What structures in my life need to be reinforced or redesigned to fully support what I’m wanting to create?

One of the most powerful structures I’ve found is a daily practice.

What do you want to do every day, but don’t? What wants to get created but hasn’t gotten any traction?

Bring it to 40 Days of Creative Practice. We begin tomorrow. Let’s commit to it together. Click Here to Join.