Roots and Routes: The Energy Behind Creativity and Intimacy
The energy that fuels creativity and intimacy extends beyond relationships - it shapes our connection to life itself. As the foundation of creation, both physical and energetic, it influences how we experience and engage with the world.
Science is for Knowing, Art is for Being
Recently, I made a new friend who happens to be a therapist. Over lunch, I found myself having an honest conversation with her, free from the political correctness therapy often requires.
She asked me a simple yet profound question: “With whom do you feel most comfortable being around?”
When I tried to imagine specific traits in a person, I found myself at a loss. “I can’t,” I told her.
She responded, “I didn’t ask whom you imagine; I asked with whom you feel comfortable being around.”
That question lingered with me long after our conversation. It wasn’t just about psychology; it touched on something deeper, something rooted in energy. I began to think about how the energy center associated with creativity, intimacy, and pleasure - the sacral chakra - interacts with others and shapes not only our relationships but also our connection to life itself. Physically it corresponds to places in our bodies that could start the journey of an embryo.
Embryos Come with Their Own Narratives
The circumstances of your birth, your generational history, the time, place, and context, form the foundation of your roots. Our relationships and creative expressions are biologically and socially constructed, which makes uncovering what is uniquely ours a lifelong challenge.
In late 2023, one of my closest friends, who often encourages me to step out of my analytical mindset, persuaded me to join a Tantra Yoga training called The Art of Conscious Relationships. During this journey, one lesson stood out:
“The purpose of relationships is not to find happiness. Relationships are about exploration and growth.”
Your Relationship History Is Speaking: Are You Listening?
I started to reflect on how we often compare people in our relationships, consciously or unconsciously. Yet what we don’t often do is examine how our understanding of creativity, desire, pleasure, and intimacy has evolved across different periods of our lives.
Have we repeated the same relationship patterns with different people, or have our relationships helped us grow into healthier versions of ourselves? How is it that certain people completely shift the way we relate to intimacy? How have our roots shaped not just our relationships but also the way we experience creativity and life itself? And are there areas where we feel stuck, endlessly repeating the same patterns, either personally and professionally?
A Neuroscience Theory: You Attract People with Similar Nervous Systems
When it comes to attraction, energy plays a powerful role. Setting aside spiritual explanations, consider a claim I came across by the neuroscientist Dr.Tara Swart: we are often drawn to people whose nervous systems mirror our own.
Looking back, I can see how my nervous system’s wiring was reflected in a relationship I had between 2008 and 2010. At the time, I didn’t realize how much that choice revealed about me. I was too focused on the wrong things. Only recently, with more self-awareness and life experience, did I begin to understand how my own wiring made love more complicated.
Going back to the question my therapist friend has asked, it makes me wonder: Could it be that we sometimes miss the right person because we’re caught up imagining the wrong thing; shaped by past wounds, fears, or ideals that no longer serve us? Or do we avoid discomfort and uncertainty, escaping something meaningful that could help us grow? Maybe we choose familiar pain over unfamiliar joy because familiarity signals comfort in the wrong way due to a lack of imagination.
And what if attraction is less about choice (conscious or subconconcious) and more about forces we don’t yet fully understand?
Working With Your Own Energy
I don’t claim to have the answers to these questions. But what I’ve learned from years of exploring both science and ancient wisdom is this: our struggles in love often reveal what our nervous systems need to unlearn (in a way Adam Grant recommends) for us to grow into a better version of ourselves. Parental patterns (psychology), neurochemical reactions (neuroscience), and social constructs (sociology) are all forms of energy stored in the body.
I’ve found that working with these energies is essential for uncovering your own truth in life. There’s a reason yoga feels magical: the nervous system is the very first system to form during embryonic development, beginning as the neural tube that eventually becomes the brain and spinal cord. The spinal cord, housed within the spine, serves as a critical part of the central nervous system, transmitting signals between the brain and the body. Yoga, with its focus on poses that align, strengthen, and flex the spine, enhances its flexibility and health, offering improved protection and function for the spinal cord. Technicalities apart, yoga enables you to figure out what your body is telling you.
Satya: Being Nice or Being Real
If you can’t receive the messages your body is telling you that means you are disconnected. The truths we avoid keep us disconnected from ourselves. And from that disconnected place, it becomes impossible to create a life that we find pleasure and meaning in it.
Satya, a Sanskrit word meaning “truth,” is one of the five yamas (ethical principles) outlined in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. It encourages living in alignment with your inner truth and practicing honesty in thought, word, and deed.
My biggest lesson in 2024 was that only truth can set you free. I had to confront what was real and not real about me. Ironically, my name, Aslı, means “genuine,” “authentic,” or “the essence” in Turkish. My father, who struggled with his own tendencies to be overly “nice,” gave me this name as a reminder for life.
Suffering from his own creative block, he encouraged me a lot to move abroad to live more authentically. Somehow, life brought me to Portugal. It turns out you can’t escape certain patterns by changing your environment alone. The irony in my relocation pointed out a certain fact: Searching for your true self covered under all the layers requires shadow work and the courage to face the realities you’d rather avoid.
“For Heaven’s Sake, Don’t Be Nice People”
Alan Watts’ “The Unspeakable World” keeps me coming back to the idea of Satya. Anytime I hear him say, “For heaven’s sake don’t be nice people,” I feel an inexplicable joy.
What I’ve learned from my own journey and the stories of others is this: True connection demands realness. “Nice” people in relationships are often unknowingly searching for their real selves in others. But if you’re looking for “you” in a connection, what happens to the person you’re trying to connect with? And how long can they stay interested in your “me-game”?
The Real Question
Your connection with others reflects your connection with yourself, and with life itself. It’s the foundation for your creativity and your ability to let life create through you.
So, can you dare to be real? Can you dare to create what you’re meant to create?
And can you face the uncomfortable truths that life reveals to guide you toward your personal awakening?
In July 2024, during a psychedelic breathwork session at Costa de Caparica, I experienced a profound moment of confrontation. The clarity of that moment marked the beginning of significant change.
Just a month later, I embraced a leap I had long contemplated: I began singing classes. In that act, I found a deeper embodiment of a truth I had discovered. Art is for Being.
“If you wish to comprehend the difference between chaos and meaning, simply contemplate the difference between noise and music”