Take Back Your Life!

I love coming up with new titles for my life shops. Sometimes I teach the same one 2 or 3 times. Usually, I change the title and the content to take it and the folks who trust me enough to sign up for it in a different, more daring direction.

It’s a creative act – this need to sculpt new life shops, to push the boundaries for myself and those who come in contact with me. I do the same thing with my karaoke singing. I constantly learn new songs, psychologically harder ones that take my voice to higher and wider voice mountain ranges. Every time I encourage myself to go further into my own unchartered wilderness, I come out on a different vista, with different views and altered perceptions.

Net result: I feel lighter, more naked, more stripped of society’s weight.

We come into this world loving the lightness of being, finding it bearable. Under the guise of making us human that changes. We get to run around free for a few years, then a variety of folks strap real and metaphorical backpacks on us and start handing us the bricks of heaviness (aka fears).

No more perfect example than the children I see weighted down with backpacks going to and from school. Instead of the ball and chain tied to the foot, it’s lashed onto the back.

If you were visiting from another planet and learned that Earth people forced their children to lug these huge packs to school everyday, what would you think about those people? What adults fears get stuffed into those children’s backpacks? A fear of not learning? A fear of not being successful? A fear of not living the ‘good’ life, whatever that is? A fear of learning off-script?

Unfortunately, these heavy loads just get heavier as we get older until sometimes I, you, we can barely stand up.

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but beginning in junior high, I often felt so emotionally heavy I could barely lift my legs up. I’d come out of my class and wade through a hallway of molasses. Every footstep took a Herculean effort. Often, I didn’t think I could make it to class. I wondered if others could see me struggling to move forward.

One of my favorite movies is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The characters struggle with feelings of lightness and heaviness. When they get too light, they reseek heaviness.

Half the battle to regain lightness is to recognize the true weight of fear. How much do yours weigh?

If you want to get more comfortable with lightness and agility, consider Naked Writing: Strip Off Your Fears and Get On Your With Life. I’m also having the first Naked Writing Contest this summer. Prize $20. Participants need to be subscribers of my museletter.

I read Amanda Hocking’s latest blog this morning. She titled it, “The Lost Art Of Blogging.”  She says that blogging has lost something for her. It wasn’t fun anymore. She thinks it might be because her blog had devolved into something less random and rambling and more cagey.

What I’ve noticed is the cadre of experts who’ve cropped up to tell you that you need to provide “useful” content and it needs to be in a certain format, etc. Guess one might call it the professionalization of blogging. I’m all for blogging from your heart and whoever needs to hear what your heart says, will find you. (more…)

Hello wild things,

Real writing, the kind that comes from deep inside, will reveal what you want out of life, what’s missing, what’s in the way. We’ve been so molded from the outside in to conform with the consumer mindset, that we sometimes forget our truer selves live inside and they want something different, something unique.

For me, I had to find a way to get that side of me outside so it could free the rest of me. (more…)

Hello folks,

I’ve long thought that a lack of creative thinking ability has stalled the worldwide economy.

A multitude of problems need solving, yet we continue to prop up dead and dying industries or copy existing ones. It doesn’t make much sense unless you see the root cause as an inability to move forward, an inability to create a meaningful economy, an inability to dream up something new. (more…)

Hello caring and loving readers,

I’ve been asked by the lovely and compassionate Hannah Brencher to write a love letter to “Elizabeth” during the More Love Letters “12 Days Of Love Letter Writing.” Hannah and I met on one of our blogs several years ago and discovered that we cared about the plight of others. After college, she went to NYC to do an internship concerned with poverty.

There while riding the subway, she got an idea to write anonymous love letters. On her site Hannah says, “I was struggling to get out of bed every morning and I needed an escape from my own sadness and loneliness. So I began writing letters on the train to individuals who seemed like they, too, could use a boost. And it healed me. It really healed me.” (more…)

I don’t pretend to be a diehard or even a diesoft Bruins fan. Before the Stanley Cup series, I couldn’t have named one player on the team. That changed when Jimmy started to share the unconventional story of the Bruin’s goalie Tim Thomas.

His contradictions drew me in. (more…)

I love horses and period dramas, so the Masterpiece Theatre production of South Riding caught my eye.

Immediately, I adored the lead heroine, Sarah Burton. She’s forward-thinking, bold, rebellious, and sassy. Early in Part 1, she goes for a job interview to be the headmistress of a girl’s school. Unlike most job candidates who’ve been groomed to figure out what the interviewers want and parrot that back, she directs the interview — speaking passionately about her unconventional views (for the time) on life and women. The board of directors almost doesn’t hire her because of her straight-forwardness, but thankfully it’s a mini-series and the story will flop without an “alive” heroine, so she’s offered the position. (more…)

I got the idea for this Musepiration from a comment I left on a friend’s post (thanks Jenna) and from a comment someone left on one of mine (thanks Patty). A good reason to leave comments — it gets everyone’s creative juices flowing.

Adults seem to have a fear of beginning, even activities they desperately want to do. Conversely, children usually have the confidence to leap into new things. If you’ve been reading my blog lately, then you know I talk semi-ad nauseam about the creativity restraints many school and work environments put on folks.

“Here, put on this mind-body-soul strait jacket. It’s GOOD for you.” (more…)

I’ve been doing quite a bit of research for my upcoming newspaper column on education or rather what we call education — it’s really schooling. Two very different concepts. Didn’t even know there was a difference until six years ago when I stumbled on my first book by John Taylor Gatto, “Dumbing Us Down.” Since then I’ve read tens more. (more…)

Hello thoughtful folks,

Think I mentioned a few weeks back during a post on the potentially numbing effects on television that I nonetheless loved Masterpiece Theater. Unlike some sitcoms that push me further into a catatonic state, I find the Masterpiece series always wake me up and get the sentimental writing part of my brain thinking.

I love reading/hearing/writing about the human condition because we so rarely acknowledge it in our day-to-day scrambles. At the end of the day or the end of our lives, we were first and foremost a human with a heart driving us – that fact seems to get lost. (more…)