In traditional creative arts training, most schools give you exposure to tools and concepts that help you develop your creative toolkit and your overall creative process. It's a time of exploring how and what you want to create. How do you bring something to life from words on paper or a vision in your own mind?

At the same time, this is not a container without pressure or confrontation. Anytime we are attempting to birth something new into this world, there is often tremendous pushback, especially if we're doing this for the very first time.

Creatives are also learning how to conceptually embrace the roadblocks, the rejections, the failures. All of this helps to create a toolkit to persevere on the path of bringing your creative vision to life. In a sense you now have a kind of map for navigating the process of creativity.

Our spiritual process is very similar, though there's a key difference: the creative process is one you choose to enter, while a crisis chooses you. You find yourself there to relieve the pressure and to make sense of things.

Eventually, if you stay long enough, you don't just learn the tools to regulate and integrate whatever threshold experience you are going through. Now you're creating your world from the basis of your spiritual discipline.

Meditation helps your concentration to stay steady, pranayama is giving you more clarity and energy to show up with. It starts helping you construct the vision, not just process what happened. When a sudden crisis does hit, as they inevitably do, you know enough to fall back into your spiritual training net and begin the process of transforming your spiritual self yet again.

Virgo season is where this gets literal. The sign that governs process also governs the organ that runs it.

In medical astrology they say Virgo rules the stomach. Not just the desire for delicious food, but the internal breakdown of that food. In eastern traditions the stomach is viewed as a vessel for transformation, metabolizing our day to day experiences. It doesn't always have to be food that backs up our system.

The gut doesn't just receive. It decides. Every day it's handed something incoming, food, yes, but also trauma, media, other people's opinions, and it has to sort what gets to stay from what has to go.

In yoga philosophy there is samana vayu, responsible for assimilation. The vāyus are five directions of prāṇa that govern different functions in the body and mind. Samana sits toward the center of the body; its focus is digesting, breaking down, and integrating.

Where in your mind do you think you are over something, but maybe your soul is not?

Virgo rules the stomach, but Virgo is ruled by Mercury, which is mental. That feels a bit at odds. Mercury is a fast moving planet, and assimilation naturally takes time. So does refinement and precision, another common Virgo trait.

Virgo gets to refinement by not giving up, even when the process is taking longer than the mercurial mind can already envision and sense as realized. What we do in that in between space to keep our focus, to hold the vision close to our hearts, to remember why we set off in this direction in the first place, all of this is part of a profound process that helps us to eventually accelerate our creative vision. The care, the attention, the prayers and the love are what help us to execute the refinement.

In tarot, Virgo aligns with the Hermit. People tend to picture the Hermit as someone hiding from the world. But the card is really about a solitary search for truth, and Virgo's qualities, discrimination, refinement, close attention to what's overlooked, are exactly the tools that search requires.

This Virgo new moon, look for where your own digestion is asking to be slower and more deliberate. Notice where a creative process could use a Hermit's kind of attention, less rushing to the finish, more care for what's easy to overlook. This week's practices will embrace these themes as we move through a gentle flow and into deep restoration.

ACCELERATE THE PROCESS

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