Take Back Your Life!

“Jump and you will find out how to unfold your wings on the way down.”
~ Ray Bradbury

I’m sure you’ve heard over and over that you need to be mindful, you need to be aware of this moment, you need to somehow focus on it and then the it after it and the it after that. And anything that falls short of that is that terrible mindlessness.

As a challenger of assumptions, that makes no sense to me.

Sure, you can be mindful at times and it makes sense. But to be mindful 24/7 means you are not in the flow because you are too busy trying to focus on the flow.

That is not good advice for creatives. Much of the creative time, you do want to be mindless, to be in the flow, to drop into your subconscious, to not be fixated on this moment that no one ever defines.When I’m on a creative roll, I am all out mindless and I love it! My mind is roaming all over the place grabbing and taking what it needs from everything I have ever been exposed to.

I do not want to be standing on an X focusing in on myself. I want to forget myself and birth this creation and to do that I need to be free in mind, body and spirit.

We need a blend of mindfulness and mindlessness. Some people will be more adept at mindfulness and others at mindlessness and no one is better than the other. Nor should anyone be castigated for not wanting to be all mindful or all mindless.

Everything in moderation, as they say. (more…)

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” – Oscar Wilde

About 7 years ago, I ran a local program called, “Let Go Of Who You Aren’t: Be Your Perfectly Imperfect Self.” It had a few brave people in attendance. Honestly, like so many of my ideas it was simply ahead of its time. More and more, I’m hearing people discuss that topic. Sometimes, I’m just too early for the party.

Okay, we come into the world screaming to be ourselves and for awhile we are. Little kids tend to be honest and forthright. They speak their own little truths and its so refreshing. I worked with some children a few years ago. One of the little girls — an old soul in a young body — gave me a wonderful compliment: “You let us go wild in a good way.”

I loved that!

As for myself, I was wild for a lot longer than most because my mother did not send me to kindergarten. I went briefly to a nursery school in the bottom of our church where all we did was sit on our blankets, take naps and eat crackers. I remember doing little else and I have an excellent memory. (more…)

“Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It strikes me as ironic how liberated in thought were some of the folks who lived over 100 years ago. Folks like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau. They didn’t have access to the Internet and all the mega knowledge you can find on there, yet they seemed to have this intuitive grasp of the human condition.

I’m big on experimenting with life because it leads you to places the “permission” and “perfection” blueprints would never take you. I know I say this a lot, but children are naturally curious and explorative. Yet, we decide around first grade that only certain people should have the power to decide what are youngest folks will do. Why not let the children take on more responsibility for their own lives? They are wiser than we believe them to be. That will empower them to achieve full selfdom instead of molded, someone else’s selfdom.Lately, I’ve been a mad, creative scientist of art! Trying all sorts of art techniques, mixing it, freeing it and I must say, wild experimenting! is super fun and liberating. Talk about a natural high. In one painting, I might start with watercolor, then add acrylic paints, then scribble with acrylic or water color markers or regular markers or add some fibre paste or glitter or stick-on bling. (more…)

“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Okay, so I’ve had this history of jumping around from one new program I create to the next. The thought of doing something twice can put me into a creative tailspin. I’d spend a lot of time creating a program, offer it once and then move on to the next one. My program content was piling up on my hard drive!Yet, two of my friends kept urging me to run my programs monthly. The. Same. Ones. The horror, I thought, of doing something more than once.So I resisted. And resisted. And years went by. I spent a lot of time continuously creating new programs. Because … that is what creative folks do, right? (Read, crazy folks?)Finally, I agreed to try what my friends said and am running my writing and wild painting programs on a regular basis.You know what?

They were right. It works. People sign up more often when they see a program running over and over. They might not be able to take it in January, but they can take it in February or May or November. It helps you and them plan.

Yet, I resisted this notion!

Sometimes, even rebellious folks can get in a rut. You can jump out of one rut and land in a different rut and not even know it because you are blinded by your own narrow field of vision.

Thank god, I listened to them and experimented like Mr. Emerson suggests above. It’s made a huge difference!

Now onto you.

Is there anything you are resisting that might actually be good for you? In business? In life?

If there is, try to dive into that resistance and see what you swim up to the surface with in your teeth.

Do you have it? Yes? Great.

Okay. How can this thing you’ve been resisting help you enhance your own life? How can you embrace it and experiment using it in a different way? A way that probably makes you want to stomp your feet and scream that it is going against your own personality grain?

Take this pièce de ré·sis·tance and work it into your life. Then see what happens!

Muse thanks!

PS, interested in joining us in Holliston for Painting Wild and Imperfect Faces. Click HERE

Believe In The Beauty of Your Own Dreams!

Reawaken The Spirit Of Your Intuition

Young children follow their hearts and intuition. Mine guided me into the woods where I spent most of my days hanging with the trees, the fields and the streams. They spoke to me. They told me to be wild. They told me to question everything. They told me to find my own path.

Unfortunately, we teach children to stop listening to themselves and listen to others. If they don’t stop listening to themselves, they get a punishment of some sort. Something to keep them in line.

“Well, they have to be quiet, so they can learn,” education czars say. Is that true? Can you not learn and feel alive at the same time? Maybe we need to redefine learning.

It’s interesting but I wrote most of my college speeches in a room booming with disco and rock music. I found that the music loosened me up and allowed me to write really imaginative stuff. I aced all my speech classes and had a reputation on campus as giving the best speeches.

Some folks like to write in a quiet place. Some like to write with some background noise. And some like it really loud. No right or wrong way. Just what works for you.

At the time I wrote those speeches I didn’t even know what intuition was. No one really spoke about spirit or intuition that I recall. Looking back, I can see that my intuition guided me to write in noisy places.

Just going with your inner flow and self-knowing is what I encourage folks to do in my Wild Painting! and Wild Writing! classes. Let “it” go and see where you go. The “it” being the voices of others you hear in your head. The ones that say, “You’re doing it wrong” or “that looks terrible” or “you’re no good” or “you look foolish.”

It can be difficult to let go after a lifetime of being told what to do. It’s unlearning what you learned so you can learn from the inside out.

Pablo Picasso said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

If someone sees your “let it go” work and says with a frown, “that’s childlike,” understand that you are on the right path to reclaiming your spirit of intuition because children are naturally in touch with it. They paint with feeling rather than thinking.

Reclaiming your own intuition will empower and allow you to take responsibility for your own decisions. The earlier you do this, the more powerful you will feel.

Here is something to try: Finger paint to music. It’s fun and liberating and messy and glorious. If you want to protect your fingers, buy some barrier cream. Don’t try to make it look like anything. Let it look like something your intuition dreamed up.

“Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.”