My Insights from The Creative Revolution Summit

Shereen Sun recently put on an amazing free event called The Creative Revolution Summit. She interviewed a bunch of artists, musicians, and spiritual teachers who all talked about their craft. I love events like this. I love listening to other creative people talk about their chosen art form and hear about the fears or struggles that they face. I always find that I can relate to other artists so much. And I always learn a lot. There were so many great interviews and I ended up having a few favorites. One super shiny pearl of wisdom that I gained from the summit was from an interview by Lainie Love Dalby. She talked about how she gave her ego a name. She gave all the voices of her inner critic and fear a name so she could see things more objectively and sort of more outside of herself. She named her ego JEFFRY, which stands for judgement, ego, fear, failure, resistance and yielding. Naming her ego Jeffry also allows her to keep things light hearted so she can have a good chuckle about these attributes that we all share. The great thing about this though is that she’s able to counter Jeffry, with WILMA, which stands for Widsom, Intuition, Laughter, Mastery and Artistry (or Authenticity). When I heard this, I thought, wow… this is so brilliant! I LOVE it! I’ve heard a lot of talk about the ego from various spiritual teachers, but this just kind of clicked for me. It helped me to keep it kind of fun and playful and not so serious or scary.

So it got me thinking about all the ways in which my ego keeps me stuck or fearful. I liked some of her words to describe the ego but also had a few more that felt important for me. So I came up with my own version of Jeffry, which I call GEOFFRI S… which stands for guilt, ego, overwhelm, fear, failure, resistance, insecurity, self-doubt (and/or the biggie… self-sabotage). I added an initial for his last name since self-doubt and self-sabotage felt so big to me. So having done this, of course I needed to come up with an image or name to counter Geoffri S. so I created SHIRLEY C., which stands for Spirit, Heart & Healing, Intuition, Receiving, Love, Light and Laughter, Energy (or Earth), Yeah Baby!, and the biggie… Connection and Creativity. Woo hoo!! YES! Shirley C. is exactly what I need to counter Geoffri S.! It was actually really fun to come up with my own names of essentially my ego and my spirit or true self. And it’s a great way to keep things light when those inner voices of fear start to creep in. I highly recommend giving it a try!