Affirmations, goal setting, inspiration, journaling, meditation, mindfulness, Personal Development, spirituality

Getting to the Core of Things

Each year I receive a theme for the following twelve months. 2020 found a lot of us rediscovering what we enjoyed doing most when we were young and didn’t have the responsibilities of being an adult, and as I was reading everyone’s reflections of the past year, I realized that the theme for 2021 is CORE. Getting back to the center of things.

As a kid, I loved being in Nature.. wandering the woods looking for mayflowers and magic.. Laying on my belly looking at things up close, and just being. Just being has often revealed so much to me.

In getting to the core.. to the center of who one is, letting go is also a crucial step. Here’s some wisdom from past me around letting go, moving forward, and becoming.

What burdens to you cherish and nurture? What negative mythologies about yourself do you believe to be your unshakable truth? The blocks- real and imagined_ that others and yourself have put in your path? What are your “I will never”s.. your “yeah,buts”… your “I always”? Your “I am not worthys”. Your “those sorts of things are for other people, not me.” Your “I want it, but deep down I don’t believe I deserve it”s. Your armor. Your shields. Your crutches.

Now think… what is your deepest desire? Your core truth. What you have worked to become. Your “someday I want”s.

Our past experience shapes us, but does not have to continue to define who we are, or who we want to/are destined to become.

Truth changes breath to breath; it based in the past. Are you willing to release your burdens, your mythologies, your negative tapes so you can begin to become your Self?

When we are babies, every thing we do and see is a new experience. each step a risk, and often a delight. As an adult it can be a challenge to see life as an unfolding of newness, but it is possible… and it can also feel frightening.

Take a moment to inhale deeply, then sigh it out. If water flows from your eyes, let it flow. Exhale until you feel the cracking in your spine. Feel the burdens fall off like scales. Stretch your fingers and toes as far as you can and release. Feel the pulsing of life.

Internalize:
I am open to receive all the good things.
I am unstoppable.
I am serenity.
I am jou.
I am worthy.
I am strong.
I am powerful.
I am humble.
I act for The Greater Good.
I am Love, and I am loved.

Thank you for reading. I love you.

Affirmations, Attachment, Creativity, focus, goal setting, inspiration, journaling, mindfulness, passion, Personal Development, Personal growth

Shining Brightly

I’ve been working through Danielle LaPorte’s “The Desire Map”, and at one point she talked about burning journals. So radical, so empowering.. so…. scary!

Journals are archives of our lives. A way to go back and revisit, and perhaps relive past pains and triumphs. Some of it, to me, might be worth preserving, but a lot of mine are deeply private thoughts I just had to let out “somewhere”. It’s an odd attachment to the past, even if they lay like mine, hidden away in a closet for years, or like the one I started this year with the intention of writing every morning. I stopped March 18th- the day everything shut down due to the pandemic.

I’m seriously considering it. It sounds freeing and energizing… much the way clearing out closets is. I don’t want to cling to the past, to who I was. I want to celebrate who I am, and who I am becoming.

In the first exercise, there is a writing prompt “What I know to be true”. Without hesitation I wrote “I am an amazing person who has deeply internalized that shining brightly is arrogant and vulgar. Whoa”.

The pen dropped out of my hand. I realized that has so long been a mantra shaping my life. Odd a little, as for many years I was an oboe player, and they are a bit the rock star of band and orchestra music. One hundred bars of rest, and then a sweet solo to open people’s hearts.

But that is a skill I channeled and honed with hours of practice. I applied my intuition to interpret what the composer wanted to convey. It’s not me being me in all my quirky, sometimes inappropriate, glory. Or expressing my thoughts, or creating my own music and art. I’ve long served and supported the ambitions and ideas of others, but often put aside my own passions “for later.”

Thing is, I have learned along the way I can be of service to others, while also honoring my own passions. Even my life mission statement of two years ago “I am a life long artist dedicated to creating excitement and enhancing life experience using my creative gifts while walking with others on our creative journeys” puts others first.

I can put myself first, and still be compassionate, loving, intuitive, and of service. I can incorporate the current life mission into my new one.

I’m going to create my new life mission statement.. right here, right now.

I am filling myself up with so much love, expressed through my creativity, that I cannot help but shine brightly and be a guide for others by the example of my own life.

Whew?

Are you ready?

I am!!
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You can read Danielle LaPorte’s blog entry about burning journals here: https://medium.com/@DanielleLaPorte/burn-your-journals-maybe-either-way-heres-some-inspiration-on-letting-go-a3f5ff67fcf6

and learn more about the Desire Map process here:
https://www.thedesiremap.com/

Adventure, Affirmations, creative block, Creativity, focus, goal setting, inspiration, meditation, mindfulness, passion, Personal Development, Personal growth, spirituality

Creativity Embodied

“Even if you don’t call yourself an artist, you have the potential to be a
dynamic creator who is always hatching new plans, coming up with fresh
ideas, and shifting your approach to everything you do as you adjust to
life’s ceaseless invitation to change.

It’s to this part of you — the restless, inventive spirit — that I address the
following: Unleash yourself! Don’t be satisfied with the world the way it is;
don’t sit back passively and blankly complain about the dead weight of
the mediocre status quo.

Instead, call on your curiosity and charisma and expressiveness and lust
for life as you tinker with and rebuild everything you see so that it’s in
greater harmony with the laws of love and more hospitable to your soul’s
code. ” ~ Rob Brezny
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What do you envision when you think of creativity? An artist/writer/musician/performer of some kind? The act of making? Do you feel uncreative if you you don’t have output? Or if it isn’t “perfect”? If it doesn’t get recognition?

To me, scientists, mechanics, gardeners, teachers… anyone really, are just as creative as what is often thought of as such.

What if instead you shift your perspective to envision creativity as a state of being, rather than a state of doing? To being a continual process of making meaning in one’s life, rather than completion of a painting/novel/song/performance piece? To make for the joy of making, how it warps time and space and you get lost in it.

Being willing to seeing things differently.. to reordering routine.. having the courage to try something new… all of these can open up dimensions of reality and possibility that have remained hidden behind old perceptions.

For example, the next time you go for a walk, focus fully on the experience. The sounds around you, and of your feet, step by step. The textures, visual and felt. The smell of the air- the feel of it against your skin. How if the walk is strenuous enough, everything falls away other than the act of walking and your breath.

Do you feel other things arise? A solution? A song? A poem? A dance? Someone you’d like to visit?

All of this is creating and being creative.

We are, from birth to death, through all our experience, the embodiment of creativity.

Thank you for reading.

I love you.
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photo I took while hiking. And wondering if coyotes would play fetch with a tangerine.

Affirmations, Creativity, focus, goal setting, inspiration, meditation, mindfulness, passion, Personal Development, Personal growth, spirituality

I am passionate about…..

” I’m passionately involved in life. I love its change, its colour, its movement. to be alive, to be able to see, to walk, to have houses, music, paintings- it’s all a miracle. I’ve adopted the technique of living from miracle to miracle.” ~Arthur Rubenstein

I invite you to write on a piece of paper: “I am passionately involved in life”, then add your own list. How will you adopt the technique of living from miracle to miracle?

Put it somewhere where you will see it every day. Breathe it in as your mantra. When you stop seeing it, take is as an opportunity to revise it, and move it somewhere else.

Make the invisible visible.