Your creative business is a fire

Your Creative Business is a Fire

A note before you read: this piece sits in a different register to my clinical writing.

Working with me is not purely clinical. The name Energy Gardener probably already signals that. My work is grounded in psychology, neuroscience and trauma-informed practice, but it is also shaped by something more personal: a long engagement with hermetic, mystic and esoteric teachings, both ancient and modern. Science and the sacred are not, in my experience, in opposition. They are two ways of describing the same territory.

In time, this strand of my work will have its own home within a dedicated mystery school teaching space. For now, I am dropping it here, because it is part of who I am and part of what working with me involves for those who are ready for it.

This particular piece is a channelled meditation for creatives. It is about originality, about creative sovereignty, and about the difference between drawing genuine inspiration from the world around you and simply lifting what someone else has already made. In a world where AI can generate a reasonable facsimile of almost anything in seconds, that distinction feels more relevant than ever. Most things are a remix. But there is a difference between taking a spark from another fire and fuelling it yourself, and taking someone else's fire whole.

If that is not your current territory, my other writing may be a better starting point. If it is, read on.

Your creative business is a fire.

You are energetically connected to any fire which you have started. You have birthed it. You can watch intuitively how it is developing, control the fire and keep it under your command. You can fuel it and you can choose how big or small to keep it.

Each creative fire has its creator's energy, their will and their direction.

If you take some fire from someone else's creation to start your fire, that part of your fire will hold their energy, their will and their direction. It is going to be very difficult for you to control and be the master of that part of your fire.

Because it is one thing watching another, learning from them how to light a good fire. Watching how they create the spark, watching how they construct, collect and pile the timber and the kindling. Learning how to do that for yourself by watching another and then doing it for yourself.

It is quite another thing entirely to take a burning log from someone else's fire to place it in your own to accelerate your fire.

Because an energetic principle of fire, that the ancestors knew, is that each fire has an energetic master. Fire is sentient and it is connected and energetically entwined with the one who struck its first spark.

So if you take another's burning log to start your fire, to get yourself ahead, a large part of your fire is under the command of another master energetically.

And this is why copying someone else's work may get you ahead in the short term, but ultimately you are at the mercy of how that other person is energetically directing their fire.

So gather your own kindling, your own wood, and by all means learn from another how to start a fire, but always start your own fire.

Once we have started our fire we often take a log from another fire to accelerate our own. Most of us do this creatively through paid training. This is a fair exchange, however, part of your fire will still be under the energetic command of another, albeit with a fair exchange, often beneficently. You can both burn stronger and brighter through this fair exchange. Which is fine, you have taken it with permission, but you need to know that energetically that part of your fire still responds to the original sparker.

Now if you have taken another's burning log without permission, the master of that fire holds energetic command over that part of your creative chi without you necessarily even realising it. You may find yourself blocked, creatively depleted, or pulling in a direction that does not feel entirely your own.

Never take another's fire without permission.

Please bear in mind, if you are taking burning logs from another, you also do not know if it is a fire that they sparked themselves, or if they have taken that log from someone else too.

And there are some who are generously lighting large fires and knowing that there will be embers flying from that large fire, knowing and intending for embers to land and help others to spark their own creative fires. Fuelling large fires with intention, openly allowing, so that others may use those embers of deliberate inspiration.

And this is how it is.

And this essentially is how knowledge spreads.

But to retain energetic sovereignty of your creativity and creations, you can warm yourself on someone else's fire. You may watch and learn and glean how another guides and masters their fire, how they fuel it, so you can be inspired by them. But don't just take fire. Always create something new for your own fire.

And you must never take the whole of someone else's fire to warm yourself and leave them with just embers. That is a disaster for them but also for you, because they are then in full control of your creative chi and they can take it back from you.

With their breath.

Why this channel came through when it did

This message arrived during the long, uncertain early years of building my own work. The therapeutic and coaching space had shocked me. I had not expected it to be quite so rife with the taking of other people's fires.

In those years, whole programmes I had built were copied and reused for others' gain. A fairly prominent practitioner in my field lifted my personal story from my About page and submitted it to a publication I was due to be featured in. I felt I had no choice but to withdraw from the feature, because to stay would have made it look as though I was the one who had copied. Swathes of copy from my website disappeared into other people's. All of this before AI arrived and gave everyone a new justification for not starting their own fire.

It took me a long time to reckon with it. The anger was real. So was the confusion about what to do with it.

What this channel helped me understand was twofold. First, my own responsibility to be clear about where I had kindled my own fire from, the teachers, the training, the lived experience that had shaped the work. And second, something I had not anticipated: that I still held the energetic thread of what had been taken. It was still connected to me as the original sparker.

When I consciously redirected that energy, withdrew my creative chi from the stolen work and reinvested it in what I was building, something shifted. The copied work became a dead end for those who had taken it. It stopped working for them in the way they had hoped.

What I came to understand is that we are not as powerless as we feel when this happens. When someone takes your work without permission, they do not take the creative energy behind it. That remains yours. You can consciously withdraw it and redirect it. When you do, you are back in the stronger position, not them.

That is worth knowing if you are a creative who has had their work taken, or who is tempted to take someone else's.

©Energy Gardener 2021

Photo by Hannah Troupe on Unsplash