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  Bathe for Creativity

Bathe for Creativity

Ashley Glenn

Try a ritual bath as a way to go inward and access your own healing medicine.

I believe that we are all born with creative spirits. It’s the defining, conditioning, and categorizing that takes creativity and crushes it. So many children are amazing actors, artists, writers, or painters; and then they are told that they can’t make a living doing what they love, so they go to school for something more sensible. Later on in life, they find that their inner artists aren’t satisfied with the stale bread and water they have been handed.

If they are brave, they return to the truth of who they are. They start taking acting classes or pick up watercolors.

As adults reconnecting with our creativity, we need help along the way. What was once natural is now difficult, forced.

Sometimes we can feel a new idea coming, but for some reason we are blocked. Usually it’s our controlling ego that stops creative energy from coming in.

In the past two decades of offering medicine readings, I’ve noticed that blocked creative energy is the main source of depression. Your body, mind, and spirit want to express themselves a bit differently, but for some reason you are pressuring and trapping yourself.

You don’t need to focus on the big masterpiece you are meant to create so much as the small creativity boosting changes in your life. Try making adjustments that break up the routine and monotony. Any little change you make will free up your creative energy.

Ritual helps us concentrate our intent and clarify our minds while committing ourselves to continuing on. I’ve designed this ritual bath specifically to unblock creativity. Feel free to make any changes that make sense for you.

INGREDIENTS

1 cup Epsom salt

3 oranges, sliced into rounds Leaves from 1 bunch of fresh basil 3 cinnamon sticks

A pot of chai tea

One 8-ounce can coconut milk

10 drops each of vanilla and sweet orange essential oils Citrine, moonstone, and carnelian crystals Harder to find, but these are dreamy additions: Vanilla bean orchids and a sapphire crystal

STEPS

1. Place all the ingredients in the bath at a temperature of your choosing.

2. Light a candle.

3. Cleanse your aura with a selenite wand (if you have one).

4. Step into the bath and dunk your head underwater.

5. Place a sapphire or moonstone crystal on your third eye.

6. Place a citrine on your belly.

7. Take ten deep powerful breaths, inhaling the scents of your bath.

8. Release your jaw.

9. Feel the energy, the pure energy, in your heart.

10. Let that energy travel up your throat and out through your mouth, releasing the sound of your heart.

11. Bathe in this sound. Bathe in the water.

12. Ask all that you are soaking in and the light you carry within to send you creative inspiration.

13. Soak in the medicine you’ve created.


Ingredient Interpretation

Selenite: to cleanse your aura of any charged vibes

Epsom Salt: to cleanse your spirit

Fresh Oranges: for enlivining, grounding in joy, inspiring

Fresh Basil: for activation, stimulation, abundance

Cinnamon Sticks: for when you need protection, awareness, warmth

Chai Tea: for productivity and inspiration

Coconut Milk: to soothe

Vanilla Essential Oil: to attract sweetness

Sweet Orange Essential Oil: to create from a place of joy

Citrine: for abundance

Moonstone: to ground the dreamer

Carnelian: for when it’s time to get to work

Vanilla Bean Orchids: symbolic of love, enchantment

Sapphire: to help speak your truth

An adapted excerpt from Ritual Baths by Deborah Hanekamp. Copyright © 2020 by Deborah Hanekamp. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow Gift, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

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