The Fiery Muse: Creativity and the Spiritual Quest
A young mother takes up meditation and discovers a hidden flair for art; a middle-aged homemaker opens to the voice of her inner spirit and develops into an internationally recognized poet; a down-and-out young actor incorporates his Native spiritual traditions into his work and eventually wins acclaim for both his acting and playwriting abilities. If you are like these people you may have found yourself on a spiritual path, longing for a deeper understanding of the Divine – and, at the same time, experienced a powerful yearning to express yourself creatively. In The Fiery Muse: Creativity and the Spiritual Quest the stories of people like yourself are woven together with those of the great visionaries like Hildegard of Bingen, Rumi, and Walt Whitman in order to explore this yearning and show how the creative spirit is actively transforming lives today. Also included are the stories of the celebrated: British composer John Tavener describes how he comes to be "steeped in the holy ethos" of his work; renowned Jungian analyst Marion Woodman explains how embracing the images from our deepest unconscious can produce powerful waves of creativity, and ground-breaking author Sylvia Fraser explains how the creative process can heal wounds we never even knew we had.		To create a meaningful framework for these varied experiences, The Fiery Muse delves into the deep, underlying source of creative inspiration and reveals its relationship to the powerful force known in the yogic tradition as kundalini-shakti. The book also contains exercises that can focus creative energy, increase inspiration, still the harsh voice of criticism, and help you experience – in both your every day life and your creativity – the spiritually transformative energy Degler calls the fiery muse. "The Fiery Muse is one of the most practical guides that I have ever encountered to helping us tap into our reservoir of creativity. This is a book I would like to give to all my friends—it is a celebration of both our creative gifts and our inner wisdom." Courtney Milne Photographer Courtney Milne is the creator of such critically acclaimed books as Visions of the Goddess (Penguin, 1992) and, along with his wife Sherrill Miller, The Sacred Earth (Penguin, 1988) Visions of the Goddess. He is the recipient of Canada's highest and only rarely presented award for photography. Back to top of page Back to top of section

Excerpt from The Fiery Muse: Creativity and the Spiritual Quest
From the story of "Christine", a young woman who began Jungian analysis after spending a year traveling and studying yoga in India…. ...After the dream, all these raw emotions started to pour out of me, and I was seized with this incredible compulsion to "make" the face I saw in my dream somehow. Since I am an elementary teacher, I know how to make paper maché, so I made a wire form and started building it up with strips of paper. I worked on this over a number days—working each layer and letting it dry. During this time, I felt a very strong need to work with my hands. When the paper maché head was done, it looked like my dream image. I know this sounds crazy, but I had such powerful feelings about this image and the wounding it represented that I wrapped it in a silk scarf and carried it around with me for several days. As the analysis went on I started to write poetry; I also went out and got paints and began to paint. I'd wake up in the middle of the night or first thing in the morning and I would just have to paint or write. It would just flow out of me. I wasn't trying to 'create' anything specific like a poem or a picture—it was just a vehicle for expressing what I had no words to express. I knew I was moving with my self, and I had to do it. I began to realize that the symbolic language is beyond words. I didn't have the language to process all the feelings I had inside. But the symbolic language would tell me what they were. The paintings would look 'angry' and I would realize all the anger I was feeling. Part of this came from abuse I suffered as a child at the hands of a family acquaintance. Eventually I also realized that I had a great deal of suppressed anger because, like so many women, I had spent much of my life trying to be "good" and "nice" and covering up my real feelings. In a sense, the feeling part of myself had been lost within my body. When I began to realize this, it was as if something that my body had locked in had suddenly been freed. And although all this anger hasn't been resolved yet, instead of judging myself when I get angry, I can now give myself permission to feel those feelings and observe them, instead of denying them.		As part of my therapy I would sometimes participate in intensive weekend sessions and body work seminars. Around this time also began to write spontaneous poetry. Sometimes this would occur during or just after the seminars—the poems would just come to me and so would dreams and images that I simply had to paint. Sometimes when I would paint the pictures, words would flow out of me that went along with them. These experiences also occurred at other times—especially in the middle of the night or early morning. All this was a very powerful experience for me. I had never written poetry before; I had tried when I was younger but I just couldn't do it. But now I was writing poetry, and I'd read it and I'd say, 'This is it! This is exactly what I was feeling!' It didn't matter how good it was at all. I had no need to show it to anyone—just a need to create something that was an expression of my soul. That was all. That was everything. When I interviewed Christine, she had been in Jungian analysis and doing the related body work seminars for about two years. During this time, the deep, primal urge to paint and write continued. So did her yearning for spiritual fulfillment. She had already decided to return to India….and hoped her creativity would continue to flow. One of the most interesting things about Christine's story is how she took the development of her urge to paint and to write so completely in stride. Although she was amazed and thrilled by her creative output, it seemed to be such a natural part of her inner exploration and spiritual growth that she never stopped to wonder why it was happening or what it was. One explanation for this link between the creative and the spiritual can be found in the teachings of the ancient yogis of India…. Back to top of page Back to top of section

Excerpt from The Fiery Muse: Creativity and the Spiritual Quest
From the story of Gopi Krishna, the renowned Kashmiri yogi, philosopher, and author… Before his death in 1984 at the age of eighty-one, Gopi Krishna would write seventeen books on higher consciousness—three of them entirely in verse. One of the three, The Shape of Events to Come, a volume of some two hundred pages, was composed in three weeks while he sat on the living room floor of a tiny four room house in New Delhi that housed not only him and his wife, but their son, daughter-in-law, and two children. The first stirrings of this prodigious ability began with a simple urge to create that first appeared near the end of the twelve years of suffering. In his second autobiographical work, Living with Kundalini (Shambhala, 1993) he explains… We walked leisurely, discussing our work, when suddenly while crossing the Tawi Bridge I felt a mood of deep absorption settling upon me until I almost lost touch with my surroundings. I no longer heard the voice of my companion; she seemed to have receded into the distance, though walking by my side. Near me, in a blaze of brilliant light, I suddenly felt what seemed to be a mighty conscious presence, sprung from nowhere, encompassing me and overshadowing all the objects around, from which two lines of a beautiful verse in Kashmiri poured out to float before my vision, like luminous writing in the air, disappearing as suddenly as they had come. When I came to myself, I found the girl looking at me in blank amazement, bewildered by my abrupt silence and the expression of utter detachment on my face, Without revealing to her all that had happened, I repeated the verse...She listened in surprise, struck by the beauty of the rhyme, weighing every word, and then said it was indeed nothing short of miraculous for one who had never been favored by the muse before to compose so exquisite a verse on the very first attempt with such lightning rapidity. I heard her in silence carried away by the profundity of the experience I had just gone through.		Returning home, Gopi Krishna thought about the exquisite composition of the lines and how he could, in no way, claim them to be a product of his own deliberate thought….His ears were filled with an enchanting and melodious humming like that of a swarm of bees, and he was aware of a pervasive silvery radiance. He sat, absorbed in this condition, but somehow still linked to his everyday surroundings. He writes: (I was) conscious from within of an immediate and direct contact with an intensely conscious universe, a wonderful inexpressible immanence all around me.… (The state) assumed such an awe-inspiring, all-mighty, all-knowing, blissful, and at the same time absolutely motionless, intangible, and formless character that the invisible line demarcating the material world and the boundless, all-conscious Reality ceased to exist, the two fusing into one; the mighty ocean sucked up by the drop, the enormous three-dimensional universe swallowed by a grain of sand, the entire creation, the knower and the known, the seer and the seen, reduced to an inexpressible sizeless void which no ordinary mind could conceive nor any language describe. Before coming out completely from this condition and before the glory in which I found myself completely faded, I found, floating in the luminous glow of my mind, the rhymes following the couplet that had suddenly taken shape in me near the Tawi Bridge that day. The lines occurred one after the other, as if dropped into the three-dimensional field of my consciousness by another source of condensed knowledge within me. They started from the glowing recesses of my being, developing suddenly into fully formed couplets like falling snowflakes which, from tiny specks high up, become clear-cut, regularly shaped crystals when nearing the eye, and vanished so suddenly as to leave me hardly any time to retain them in my memory. They came fully formed, complete with language, rhyme, and meter, finished products originating, as it seemed, from the surrounding intelligence, to pass before my internal eye for expression…. Back to top of page Back to top of section

What's being said about The Fiery Muse: Creativity and the Spiritual Quest
"Anyone who is on the creative-spiritual path, or aspires to be on it and jet-propelled along the way, should read this book. Like all great books it possesses an energy that communicates itself to the core of the reader. This derives from its central topic, which is the divine energy pressing for expression in every human soul. Teri Degler tells us in clear simple prose how we can employ that power in our living and our other forms of art. By relating the high consciousness experiences of the known greats and the unknown greats who are our very selves, she assists us into the higher dimensions toward which the world is speeding. To read The Fiery Muse is to be uplifted; to put its principles into practice is to be inspired." Patricia Joudry Patricia Joudry is an author who has received widespread recognition for her writing, particularly for her work as coauthor of Twin Souls: A Guide to Finding your True Spiritual Partner (Crown, 1995) "Through the personal experiences of questers both celebrated and unknown, Teri Degler humanizes and enlivens the abstract concepts of spirituality, creativity, enlightenment and transcendence. The Fiery Muse is a wise and luminous guide, drawing inspiration from many rich traditions." Sylvia Fraser Sylvia Fraser is the critically acclaimed author of many novels and works of non-fiction. A long-time journalist, she gained even greater international recognition with her ground-breaking book My Father's House: a memoir of incest and healing (Doubleday Canada, 1987). Her most recent work is The Rope and the Water: A Pilgrimage to India (Thomas Allen, 2001).		"Teri Degler has written a sparkling book that will captivate and challenge anyone interested in spiritual experience and how it relates to the creative process. By combining the testimony of famous saints and artists from many cultures with experiences of people from all walks of life today, Degler challenges the notion that artists are special kinds of creative people, suggesting instead that each person is a special kind of artist working in and through the universal divine energy that our human destiny calls us to realize together. Degler provides both a passionate witness and a practical guide to the joys and trials of the spiritual quest. In this timely book, she catches the heartbeat of an emergent global spirituality." Patrick Grant, Ph.D. British scholar Patrick Grant, Ph.D., is a winner of international academic awards and is an authority on the both literature and mysticism. Author of A Dazzling Darkness: An Anthology of Western Mysticism (Collins, Fount,1985) and many other books he is a professor of English at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. "The creative process has baffled, fascinated, and liberated countless artists, writers, composers, philosophers, and scientists who never knew from where the wellspring flowed. By focusing her investigations on kundalini as the source, Teri Degler has made an invaluable contribution to knowledge. We are all in her debt." Gene Kieffer Gene Kieffer is the director and president of The Kundalini Research Foundation in New York. He edited Kundalini—Empowering Human Evolution: Selected Writings of Gopi Krishna (Paragon Press, 1996). He is the author of The Secret Teachings: Unveiling the Luminous Sun Within (Bethel Publishers, 2000). Back to top of page Back to top of section