The Muse is IN Blog

Creative Call + Deep Longing = Overcoming Resistance

 All sorts of subterranean dynamics ranging from messages we received in early childhood to our concentration hijacked habitually by fixations with media and the refrigerator are stealing our time and rendering us creatively pissed.  I either have to abide to my creative calling or be cranky. It's a law. 

Creative call + do something to answer it = content, generous, kind, energetic, cordial, witty, insightful (at times, grandiose)

Creative call + ignore/avoid/resist it = cranky

 Kahlil Gibran said: There is a space between man’s imagination and
mans attainment that may only be traversed by his longing.

• Evidently longing is important for traversing big spaces. 
• How's your longing doing?
• Does it need to be longer, deeper, more nourished? 
• Take a moment now, (I'll wait), and recall why you were drawn to the whatever endeavor you may not be getting to as much as you'd like. What was the allure in the first place?
• Write it down, obsess about it, think about it constantly. (For the next several decades)
• This question works in marriage counseling -- creativity is like a relationship:
  What drew you and your creativity together in the first place?
• Remember what it feels like when you're in that timeless, ageless flow with your creative passion. You can do this while showering, walking, feeding the cat, or shaving. 
• Or other activities work as well. 
• This exercise ramps up your longing.
• Evidently longing is important for traversing. 
• Simply ask: What would it feel like to render distractions useless by ramping up my longing?
• You may need to tweak your focus, your approach, your technique just a tad so it best matches up with what would spark a more passionate devotion. 
• Remember what has worked in the past- it has treasures, strength, and proven successes handy for application to the present.

  

Kaizen-Muse Creativity Coaching

How Tolerance is Essential to Perserverance

 

Download Permission to SLIP Up

 

“Take the first step in faith.
You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”
~Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.”
~Confucius

 

On this day that honors a man who taught tolerance, I'd like to propose another kind of tolerance that will make your creative life easier if you buy into it. If you don't, good luck.

 

  Once I decided creativity was going to be my life, I knew I had to either develop a "tolerance muscle" or be among the 85% that gives up on their dreams because they have an unrealistic expectation of accomplishing things quickly, easily, and the way they look in their minds.

(hahahaha snort haha). 

 

Creativity has another plan for us.  She says, this isn't about getting your way immediately, it's about searching the depths of your soul to muster up devotion to a process who's rewards go far beyond your acrylic landscape or chapter four in your book. Perhaps the world never showed any faith in you.... do you have the strength to show faith in yourself by showing-up for your creative call? Can you show-up if not for the product, for the process of being true to yourself? Don't worry about showing-up perfectly - do it as inconsistently as possible if you must.

 

 To stay on the path of my passion I got to tolerate my ineptness, blunders, inadvertently published typos, and the fact that my painting and writing didn't look like other people stuff that I liked a lot. I got to tolerate projects taking three and four times as long as I planned, hitting walls, looking foolish and coming face to face with my ugly shadows. I got to tolerate my habits of procrastination and continually starting something new without completing anything. I got to tolerate people not liking me, thinking I'm strange, unsubscribing from my newsletter, not "getting" my art. I got to tolerate proposals getting rejected and once, I got to tolerate ripping up my favorite painting because I was looking at the wrong side.  If you're a warrior, you've tolerated these things too.  And changing the language from "I had to tolerate ..." to "I got to ...." makes it clear that it was an honor to do that for myself. 

 

Self-love is required to stay the course and in that love you discover an unmatched contentment which is a light for the contentment of others. I like being strange.

 

Creativity reassures you that when you passionately persevere through the tumult of detractors, the reward is far beyond the painting and the piece of writing.  Creativity awards you with a strength, self-respect, and confidence that applies to every area of your life, breaking limitations, presenting a new perception that widens your existence beyond what you formerly knew what was possible. There's a faith that you can get through anything, have the company of, and share with the world, your brilliance.

Along those same lines, here's my interview last year with the illustrious Nikol Peterson- The Unstoppable Artist:

Audio: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fpf74leuwp2ouja/Jill%20Badonsky%20AUDIO%20only.mp3?dl=0

 

Video: https://www.dropbox.com/s/aeqinjho45gj63c/Jill%20Badonsky%20VIDEO%20Interview.mp4?dl=0

 

Creativity, Politics, and Digestive Problems

I have digestive problems. I’m one of those creative people some call an empath, others consider highly sensitive, and my family deemed, “Oh, why do you have to be so sensitive?”

Nevertheless my creativity runs on sensitivity so despite its inconvenience, despite it being a pain in the ass when my feelings get easily hurt and I get irritable from the noise other people tolerate, I’m grateful for my sensitivity.

Sensitivity not only gives me profound spiritual experiences in nature, helps me design creative work for my audience, it also feeds the intuition that wakes up when it senses an overheard conversation could be the first line of a poem or when an image wants to be painted in my whimsical style.

The highly sensitive nature of being creative finds that clouds are more than dry air mixed with water drops. Joni Mitchell recalls that they are angel air and ice cream castles, Paul Simon’s thoughts are cloudy -- “They echo and they swell from Tolstoy to Tinker Bell”, and they’re in Carly Simon’s coffee.

So why do I have digestive problems? One of my theories is that what is happening in the world, our country – our sweet land of liberty – is disturbing and hard to digest. It’s worse than a bad burrito.

When you’re a sensitive creative person you may find yourself experiencing metaphors literally. You may have a hard time digesting the news therefore your turkey club sandwich just sits in your belly and fatigues you. You may have a leaky gut because you have a hard time setting boundaries with yourself and the world's consternation.

Creativity is also my go-to for almost all my maladies because I’ve immersed myself in writing and art for many years and the resourcefulness, tenacity, and flexibility required to endure the ebb and flow of the creative process are also available for confronting what life throws at me. It throws a lot.

On Facebook today I posted one of those feel-good posts about our need to love everyone not just the people that love us. A friend asked this:

"Nice sentiment. How do you love the neighbors and countrymen who elected Donald Trump for their leader and the congress who is dismantling every progressive, cultural, financial, gender based, environmental, and educational achievements we've made in the last few decades? I’m trying but it’s hard to keep an open heart. Pointers appreciated from anyone out there. It hurts to be a hater."

Excellent question.

As a recovering perfectionist, I know I can’t go from disgust to love. But I know now that unlike a perfectionist’s thinking, the world is not either black or white. It’s not either disgust or love. There are others ways to process love. Being in disgust all the time is not loving myself, it gave me have an allergy to rice, night shades and waffles.

Expectations can psych us out. We simply avoid, dismiss, or give-up when expecting ourselves to love a president we feel is destroying our country. I will probably never love President Trump and those who refuse to save us from his infantile bullying and narcissism. I have some empathy for the lost and discouraged who believe in him, but not the government officials who know he’s not good for our country and do nothing. But if I continually condemn him in my mind because I can’t fathom how he got in office or why he is still there, I’m in a world of condemnation and can’t eat anything but a blended spinach, blueberry, and collagen powder shake. 

Everything we think and say affects the way we feel. If you’re highly sensitive, how you feel affects your health. We are wandering around in disgust and getting sick. Curiosity not only feels better, it also opens our centers of creativity for EVERYTHING.

Questions move me from toxic thoughts and feelings to curious ones. Creative thoughts and feelings not only are healing, they are either neutral or enjoyable. The questions don’t even need answers. The simple asking of them shift your internal landscape.

Question Medicine:

Which one of these questions are you willing to use to replace your disgust?

• What would it feel like to be kinder to my body right now by choosing kinder thoughts?
• What would it feel like to love people who do things I don't like?

You don't have to love them, just wonder about the question.

At the very least asking these questions feel better and do more for my health than the things my smaller mind obsesses about when I'm not able to digest the weirdness happening.

If if that doesn't work, I seek the healing sphere of painting clouds in bowls or writing words about imaginary worlds. 

Lunch break.

Join me in a Journey of Creative Spirituality this January 2018.
Finding Uber Bliss: A Wildly Creative Journey to the Present Moment 

 

Don't Fall in the Fountain

 

 

“Unlike a fountain that circulates the same water in an enclosed, perpetually
recycling system, a human being circulates thoughts in an unlimited
reservoir of self. Don't limit yourself to being a mere fountain when you contain an ocean.”
~Vera Nazarian

 

Don't fall in the fountain. 

 

Originally developed by Abraham Maslow in 1964, "peak experiences" are described as
"rare, exciting, oceanic, <(really?!), deeply moving, exhilarating, elevating experiences that generate an advanced form of perceiving reality, and are even mystic and magical in their effect upon the experimenter."

 

I've been swimming a mile at La Jolla cove at sunrise a couple times a week for the past couple of years. I'm accompanied by sea lions, Garibaldi fish, pelicans, occasionally my friend Reba, and sometimes, off in the distance, I can see dolphins and whales romping . One day, Jonathan Livingston seagull floated by and said "Baaach!" I think he meant Richard Bach.

 

The activity feels like a peak experience; Maslow is nodding. In fact I actually say to myself, THIS is a peak experience as I watch the sun emerge from the clouds, feel the waves' perpetual cycling and relish the water suspending me. I'm not sure if announcing that to myself counts but despite the current way of the world and the daily dribble of my life, when I'm swimming at dawn, there's nothing there but the ocean and a space for creative ideas to float by my consciousness. Bliss.

 

 

I'm present with this sea because my focus on the creative process has prepared me for it. Focusing on the creative process is practice with being present with every aspect of being alive, not just my art and writing. And in a world where focus is constantly hijacked by the myriad of shiny and chocolate covered things, that's a blessing.

 

Creativity requires a love affair with the present moment –it is the pinnacle of mindfulness because in the creative process we are lost IN the moment. And it is here where our spirit is alive with expression and we are experiencing a freedom like nothing else.

What if we were so present with THIS moment, the one we're in right NOW, that we would be able to write about it two months from now? You don't have to do that, but what if you played with the possibility? What feelings, sensations, visuals, realizations are in this moment for you? What do you notice about your mind when you do that? Is there more space? Let's go for oceanic.

 

What love affair is all about being present for you?

 

Quotes like the one with the mermaid at the top are inspiring … but how do you put it into

operation?  How indeed, do you begin to experience yourself as an ocean of consciousness versus a fountain circulating the same thoughts over and over?

Habits drive us, are familiar and comfortable, and when life isn’t as comfortable as we’d like, they take over more than ever.

 

Finding the Ocean :

1. Remind myself that there may be more possibilities than what’s currently circulating. I ask small questions: What tiny way can I look at my world differently? How can I  approach my creativity differently? Withe curious expectation? Childlike fascination? Mischievous irreverence? Chocolate coated? What new thinking can I expand into? Just asking is enough but if you do this, be ready to write things down should they bubble up from the depths of your uniqueness.
   
   
2. Expose myself to something inspiring and ask the small question: How does this inspire my own version of creativity?
   
   
3. Set the stage for expansion. When I’m feeling resistant toward starting, sometimes simply doing something mechanical to get me out of my habitual zombie avoidant strategies makes it easier for the creative work to happen. Opening a file, reading a passage, listening to a podcast, going for a walk or a drive, reading a quote. None of those bring up resistance, all of them set the stage for the next small expansive step.

I have to remember to routinely reset my thinking settings from "fountain" to "OCEAN."  Less pigeons that way.

David Crosby as a Modern Day Muse

 From a recent NPR interview about his creative process, David Crosby shows he a disciple of the Modern Day Muse, Albert:

“’If you want to talk about something you can't go straight at it,’ he says. ‘It doesn't work that way. If you want to write about the Eiffel Tower you don't say, 'It's big and it's tall and it's made out of iron!' You don't. You look at the Eiffel Tower through somebody's eyes who's watching it in the mist over their lover's head. In Paris. On a quiet night. And then, you see the Eiffel Tower.’”

 When the Muses were upgraded to the Nine Modern Day Muses, Albert, the Muse of Thinking Differently became part of the pack, (named after Albert Einstein, one of our most innovative rule breakers).

Albert teaches that thinking differently is easier when contemplating what everyone else sees but using a different perspective,  trigger or trick to sacrifice the obvious in the name of the novel. Free associating, modifying what's in existence, deviating from the directions, defying the predictable, combining two unrelated concepts... this is the art of discovering a "different" often brilliant idea.

 Test-driving the Powers of the Modern Day Muse, Albert

• What's one way you can think differently about your next creative move? 
• Write about your creative project as if you were looking at it through someone else’s eyes: A child’s, an  intellectual, a down-to-earth hippie, someone greatly in need of whatever it is you are doing.

Joni Mitchell as a Modern Day Muse: Both Sides of Ideas

 

"Aha-phrodite" inspires mortals to pay attention.

She's a modern day Muse from my first book The Nine Modern Day Muses (and a Bodyguard): 10 Guides to Creative Inspiration which was about ten creative principles personified as nine new and improved Muses and the all-important, Bodyguard.  The Greek Muses were rendered obsolete because they couldn’t keep up with the modern day distractions including Netflix, Facebook, and computer solitaire so a new gaggle of Muses was required to get creative inspiration to mortals. That’s what Muses do. 

Each Muse has a story about how she or he, (yes... he) were part of the new Muse upgrade. Included in each of their chapters is their power to free the modern day mortal’s creative potential, hobbies, modes of transportation, quotes from great creative people inspired by each Muse, and a treasure trove of creative prompts that demonstrate their prowess and give you an opportunity to test drive their powers as your own.

Despite the whimsical humor, these are ten legitimately practical ways to go deeper with your creativity and move you through all the blockades to which mortals typically butt heads. When we listen to the voices of fear and ego we get stuck. Our creative voices empower us... if we pay attention to them. The modern day Muses are the voices of creativity. Those Muse principles are here.

What brings their principles alive in a way we can relate are stories from people who have been visited by these Muses (whether they know it or not), accompanied by questions that your creative mind will want to ponder in a way that makes someone else’s story a catalyst in your own journey.

I just heard such a story yesterday on NPR’s morning edition where Joni Mitchell was described as David Crosby's Aha-phrodite :

“Crosby says his habit of writing anything and everything down came from a lesson Joni Mitchell taught him.

"I said something to her and she said, 'Write that down,'" he recounts. "I said, 'Huh?' She said, 'Write that down!' I said, 'Why?' 'Because it was good! If you don't write it down, it didn't happen.'"

It seemed like such basic advice, but became an important part of Crosby's creative process.

In fact, he put Mitchell's lesson to use in a song called ‘Sell Me A Diamond.’ Its hook includes the lyric, ‘You said it was conflict free / Such a beautiful concept, that such a thing could be,’ which came from a phrase he heard that caught his ear.”

Writing down what you notice that can become fodder for creative alchemy requires PAYING ATTENTION. Joni Mitchell was Crosby's Aha-phrodite.

You hear interesting phrases or see something that triggers creative possibility?

Simple things out of context like Crosby’s example "conflict free" can be great springboards for titles, writings, lyrics, photographs, painting. Take a moment and think of what you might write and envision for those words.

Are you aware that you sometimes say and think things that are really “good” maybe even if you don’t think so? Write them down! Anne Lamott says, always have paper and pen and if you can’t have paper, at least have a pen because you can write on your hand.

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A Frisbee, a Spatula, and the Sun

The other day on a walk, a little roly-poly kid cut through the middle of someone's lawn heading straight toward me. As soon, as SOON as he saw me he held up three quarters of an old ragged Frisbee and announced with great verve, "Look what I found!"

I didn't know this kid, never saw him before in my life.  He added, not missing a beat, "And I have a dog!" not doubting for a minute I would know the connection of dog and Frisbee. He was elated about this imperfect booty, I was honored that this kid shared the moment with me but mostly amused.

After that I wanted to connect to my fellow humans with something similar. I imagined myself finding a ratty old Frisbee and LOUDLY announcing at the next random person, "Look what I found!"  I couldn't see myself doing that and appearing sane especially because I'm the consummate introvert.

Then I tried to apply it to a more age appropriate acquisition, "Look, I bought a new purse, ... and I have lipstick!!!" Then I realized there are some things kids have license to do that we really DON'T get away with as adults without seeming like we have poor boundaries, have mistaken someone for someone else, or are on drugs. But I went and bought a new purse anyway (and lipstick too!!!).  

 

Enthusiasm is contagious. And it just feels good.  We make gratitude lists that often list the obvious but leave off worlds of blessings that a little enthusiasm might turn into treasures ... you know ... it's the simple things that make life grand.

 

They are medicinal when my spirits sag.

 

I did whatever I could within my little sphere of making a difference and was still feeling down from the tumult in the world, so I made a strange little enthusiasm list. Maybe you could give it a whirl too. 

 

I could get enthusiastic about:

 

1.  A spatula. A spoon just doesn't perform as well, no offense, spoons. 

2.  The way my freezer defrosts itself, sometimes I can defrost myself too.

3.  Smashed avocado with a little lime infused olive oil and salt. Instant gourmet creation.

4.  Plumbing that works without a hitch as often as it does. There used to be outhouses!

5.  My automatic timed drip sprinkler system for the roses. Left to me those roses would wilt.

6.  A handwritten letter from a friend in my mail box. Rare these days.

7.  Wearing headphones and listening to cool jazz in a noisy cafe. Rad.

8.  Leaning against the washer as it vibrates during the spin cycle. A massage. :)

9.  The way the sun creates a moving design on my wood floor. A sun dance. 

10. A kid with a ragged old frisbee. (And he had a dog!)

 

Share your weird favorite things. It's a litany of diversional relief, a different perspective, and the seeds of creative thought.

Mediocre Ukulele Rockstar Superhero

Dear Friend,

 In addition to wanting to be a super-hero when I was a child, rock star was also on the trajectory. The two work well together, especially if you have back-up singers that can double as hero-side-kicks. 

 In my imagination there would be an audience of adoring fans, a bass player I fall in love with, and really cool sequined Bermuda shorts with matching cap (geek DNA). 

 But I failed after only one guitar lesson. I quit because playing like a rock star didn't happen quickly and easily.  I thought I just wasn't good at guitar, but really, I wasn't good at perseverance, patience and tolerance of my crappy playing. Perseverance, patience and tolerance are the superhero-superstars of the wildly successful creative person.  Crappy playing at the beginning is a requirement of being a rock star - or anyone creative.

Ever give up on something because you weren't immediately good at it?

Ever NOT EVEN attempt something because you didn't think you'd be good at it, or because you tried it and you weren't immediately a natural? 

Human figure drawing? Singing? Archery? Writing fiction? Ever have a hard time getting back to something because you used to be good but now need some practice?

 When I hear friends say, "I'm just not good at art .. or writing," I have to bite my lip. Nah, just kidding, I'm unable to be quiet. I start blubbering excitedly about the stuff I'm writing here, but unless people are ready or passionate, they can't hear it and I just piss them off.

 Not trying something because you're afraid you won't be good or quitting on the first or second try are the ingredients of one of the biggest creative blocks in the universe. 

***It's called DELUSIONAL THINKING.***

  To think you CAN be immediately good at drawing, playing a musical instrument, painting, writing, really anything is UNREALISTIC.  Yes, a handful of people have a KNACK for things, but the majority of people must practice to get better. AND THEY PRACTICE A LOT and endure through the parts where they suck. 

 And yes, I'm speaking LOUDLY in caps because I know you can be happier if you add more creative meaning to your life. After all, I'm a Creative Freedom Fighter (who plays the ukulele with acute mediocrity). So in a way, I'm a rockstar superhero (without dry cleaning bills for capes or sequined Bermuda shorts.)

 
 

 

STRENGTHEN YOUR
"TOLERANCE"  MUSCLE

To be good at anything in the creative realm you must be able to accept that you're not instantly perfect or even kinda good. If you don't have a tolerance muscle, your mission if you choose to answer your creative call, is to build it before you build the skill you are trying to cultivate.

You need tolerance as someone who may be competent at many things - your work, your role in your family, Words with Friends, a talent you may cultivated - but as you endeavor to try something new, you will come up against your inability to translate an idea to reality fear that you're wasting your time, comparing yourself to others, etc.

This is part of the creative process and enduring these feelings is the only way you will get better.

I purposely took up the ukulele with the intention to learn to strengthen my toleration muscle; specifically to tolerate myself being bad at playing the ukulele before I got a little better, because I know once this muscle is there, I will be able to use it for exploring avenues I would not let myself explore otherwise.

What I didn't count on was how once I practiced, the feeling of triumph over the urge to quit was just as exciting as starting to sound good as I played Irving Berlin's Blue Skies on the ukulele.

 

 Cultivating Toleration

1. Be Realistic about Toleration
Don't expect to be 100% tolerant at the start. Try for 5% more tolerant, no need to be perfect at toleration either. Or ask yourself: What would it feel like to be one of those people who is patient and accepting of the awkward part at the beginning of a creative process? Just ask, your subconscious
software will work on the answer while you're daydreaming about chocolate.

 2. Breathe and Belong

When you feel the urge to reject doing something creative or quit when you're disgusted with what you've done, feel yourself as a part of the huge creative community that feels the exact same way, but be in the 15% that stays because you know this is just a part of the process. And breathe.

 3. Practice Relentlessly

I know you’ve heard it a thousand times before, but it’s true… hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. ~Ray Bradbury

 4. Credit

Acknowledge yourself for staying true to your creative call when you do.
Celebrate by dancing around the living room. Try not to knock over the
expensive candle holder.

 

Last Month:

 You Can't Tell Me What to Do Part One

You Can't Tell Me What to Do

Dear Friend, 
 
When I was a mini-muse, I was a wild child. My parents rarely disciplined me to be or do anything in a certain way. Perhaps they were afraid of me because my real mother was Ruler of the Amazons and my dad was Zeus. Oh wait, that’s not me, that’s some woman with spectacular bracelets . 
 
However, I was an imaginative and willful imp who liked to do things my way, which is not rare in the land of creative kids. Maybe you were a wild child too and that’s why we get along so well. My parents kinda gave up, so wolves raised me. Dang, that wasn’t me either, that kid hung-out with a bear. I wish! 
 
The good news is because of the no-supervision thing, I didn’t experience the limitations that came from parental discipline.  I had to figure out by myself how life worked and although a little lonely, it made me ruggedly independent, resourceful, and prone to self-acceptance because experiencing the frequent errors involved in the trial and error of trying to figure out how to maneuver through life, either you learn self-acceptance or hide under a bed and eat Twinkies (too many dust bunnies already living under mine).
 
The bad news is, with no opportunity to develop internalized discipline, the shoulds, have-tos, or directives I used trying to get myself to my creative work were (and still are) met with rebelliousness, because as a wild child I had the words, YOU CAN’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO, tatooed on my forehead. I was my own worse enemy, because I was rebelling against myself telling me what to do. Getting to my creative passions was a battle.   
 
I love what I figured out.
 
Despite lack of discipline, I 
accomplished a bunch of things I’m really proud of including designed my own profession, performed and wrote a full-length play, created lots of art and wrote three books. I'm making a living doing what I love - thank you, creative universe. 
 
How did I do get stuff done given my wild child nature? 
It’s what I teach and it’s not about being perfect, because some days I rebel against having to do anything, and I know that’s okay because 
acceptance is freedom.
(Happy Independence Day).
 
I’m presenting this wisdom in three parts in the next three newsletters in hopes that it may help you stop the battle with you and yourself - why can't we just get along with ourselves!
 
If you’re like me, you have a short attention span and want to go out and play before you’re finished reading a long article. We are still wild children.

 Click here for your Rebel Card
 

 

number one

 

 

 
 
 

"Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger 
pull of what you really love."

Rumi is right, as usual, (we have tea together). Letting myself be silently drawn to my creative call really IS a stronger, wiser, more influential pull than trying to discipline myself do things with force.

 

FOCUS ON WHAT YOU LOVE INSTEAD OF 
ON THE PRESSURE TO GET THINGS DONE

 

“Only love can truly save the world.” ~Wonder Woman said that and here’s how I'll translate that for you because I am a super hero translator in my spare time and I am here for you:

Love will save your creativity.

 

Practice loving what it is that draws you to your creative call, before, during and after you are in the process.  <Reread that three times.

Make the skill of focusing on love as important as the skill of writing, art, living life creatively or whatever it is that sparks your creative fancy.

 

What do you love about your creative call? No, really, stop and think about it.
I find focusing on what I love about my creative call makes showing up effortless without the need for discipline or directives. It's magnetic.

• I love the way my subconscious sometimes takes my writing places I hadn't intended.
• I love when I write something I like - I can read it over and over again.
• I love the rhythm of alliteration, luring me lusciously like a likeable litany.
• I love when the watercolor paint creates an unexpected effect.
• I love it when I doodle something and it surprises me what it becomes.
• I love the feeling of completing something I've created that I love.
• I love the self-respect and feeling of resilience that comes from persevering through the hard parts and the things I don't like.
• Etc.

But I have to mindfully keep the love of my craft in my awareness or fears and pressures sneak back in.  The trick is to OBSESS about what I love so much that it becomes irresistible and then my subconscious is on-board, (what I focus on becomes my world). 
 
Focus on your procrastination, resistance, and inability to show-up, on what others are doing and you’re NOT doing, or on not feeling good enough, those messages becomes your world too. Ick. That doesn't work very well and it feels like crap.  And if that’s been your usual focus, it’s going to take a little gentle practice and lowered expectations to shift over to a more helpful way of thinking, so don't give up if it doesn't happen immediately.  

  Ask these questions:

• What do I love about my creative passion? Ask: How do I love thee, let me count the ways... and count them as they come to mind. Or just ask the question and let it percolate.
• How can I show up for myself with love? How can I make that easier?
• How does my creative call love me? (suspend logic all you literal thinkers).
• Where can I get some Wonder Woman bracelets?
• Click here to get your own Creative Rebel PDF

Just ask those questions without needing an immediate answer and watch what happens. When we show-up with love not only is the process sweeter, we are more likely stay longer and that benefits the end product. 

Tuning into your Intuition

 

 

I was listening to the radio while driving last week and the weatherman launched into local temperatures, but when he got to the desert he said, “And the desert has hotter temperatures… as usual.” Just a slight afterthought interjected where one usually isn't. Insignificant to many, perhaps, but the “as usual” struck me a funny, seemed like a bit of an attitude, and as such, it stirred the simmering soup of creative play within me.
 
What if there was a story about a character that was enamored with a weatherman who had an tendency to add his opinion to the forecasts?  Aha! I was inspired to at least play with a shitty first draft just for fun. That's how stories begin... and then, you know if you are a writer on-fire, your subconscious takes control and it's as if someone ELSE is writing - both in fiction and nonfiction. All three of my books were like that. 

 
Optimal conditions for intuitive creating, (my favorite kind), include driving while awake enough to the moment to be gently startled by a singular stimulus – an image, a sound, a sentence, a thought that snaps you into a connection, that summons a possibility, flirts with the “what if …” and seduces your passion to create.
 
Optimal conditions also include showering, walking, daydreaming, sitting and beginning and trusting your intuition to ignite a parade of willing ideas, characters, images, songs, kindnesses, surprises, new thoughts about your existence on a regular basis. And showing-up so the creative fireworks can shoot off.
 
This not only applies to writing, but art of any kind including the art of living your life with amplified awareness, to how IT IS ALL ART, the good and the bad, the gifts and the losses. It’s the art of being human and all of it can be alchemized into creative expression - the antidote to reality.
 

Mindfulness in collusion with creativity = colossal contentment.

 

Ray Bradbury speaks of this:
“What is the Subconscious to every other man in its creative aspect becomes, for writers, The Muse. Here is the stuff of originality. For it is in the totality of experience reckoned with, filed and forgotten that each man is truly different from all the others in the world. All that is most original lies waiting for us to summon it forth.”
 
This is why the material for my trainings and workshops emphasize instinctual, intuitive creating over linear, forced, should-infested pressure.  Right brained drawing, free writing launched off of clever devices and media that catch the critic off-guard, guided relaxations to connect to the intuition and imagination - all set the Muse free.
 
How do you get into the instinctual flow? Many of you are there already, you just need to acknowledge it. Others need to get out of your way. Still others, and this is the biggest number, need to show-up - which is not easy this days without a few tricks.

 

A few tricks:
Make a list of those things that distract you.

Make a list of what you love about your creative pursuits.

Compare your feelings about these two lists.

When you feel yourself gravitating toward the distractions remember what you love about your creative pursuits, somehow short circuit your distraction by a little small movement to dislodge you from the habit: closing a computer window, standing up and walking, saying STOP to yourself and just intending to spendi a small amount of time with something that is more than a hollow reward.