What has Death got to do with Creativity and Fertility?

This was a question I received from one of the participants in my online course “Regenerative Chakra Nutrition” (new edition starting soon!).

When talking about the second chakra, I pointed out how creativity, fertility, menstruation, emotions, sensuality, sexuality and our ability to let “die” are all related. Everything in this world moves through cycles of constant death and rebirth, decay and renewal: nature with its seasons, all living being over their life-span, women every month through their cycle, our cells even die and renew on a daily basis. Every morning a new day is born and every night is dies again. This is the principle of yin and yang in action. We need this duality; in fact, day could not exist without night; summer could not exist without winter; no new leaves could grow if the old never faded away.

This cycle of Life and Death is the cycle of creation and regeneration. The old needs to die to make space for the new. If it was sunny always, this planet and all its Life on it would quickly die from draught. If no plant, animal or human ever died, we would eventually arrive to a point of over-saturation and suffocation. You might even have heard of constructive destruction, that proactively destroys the old, so something new can be born in its place. You might also know from experience how creativity needs periods of rest and calm to be at its best. If you try to always be productive and find solutions to your challenges only by actively thinking about them, in other words, if you try to always be in your “yang”, Masculine energy, you eventually burn yourself out. If instead you know when to take a break, relax and focus on something else, the answers might come when you least expect them; even in your sleep, when your mind is quiet and you are most connected to your “yin”, your Feminine intuition. Sleep and night time is when we experience a little death and in fact our ability to fall asleep easily and sleep through the night are related to our ability to let die.

So if you want to maximize your creativity, of which fertility is one expression, look at how you relate with Death, with change, with letting go, with the Yin side of Life.