Category Archives: Creativity

Everyone has creativity. To get in touch with new energy in you, try one of the following exercises. 

Action board—use a large bulletin board to post 3×5 index cards for the 5 main categories of your life. You may wish to use general categories; such as goals, deadlines, dreams, etc. of be more specific, such as marketing, sales, etc. Using different colored 3×5 cards may help you to see the categories more easily.

Every Sunday evening or another evening of your choice, review your boards and update them for the upcoming week/month/year depending on your system. This update will go quickly and will give you a clear, concise review of where you are and where you are going. This will lead to greater confidence. Remember if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.

Begin keeping a creative basket—pretend you are 10 years old or ask a young friend and/or family member to help you. Take a large basket with a handle and put all the things in it you might enjoy using to create a new project. You may include sequins, glitter, paste, colored pens, watercolors, sketch pads. You may use these materials to play with often as way to express your creativity.

Love Jar—collect a glass or clear plastic jar. Using bright construction paper, cut into strips. On the strips of paper, write down short suggestions for yourself of ways you can feel greater love in your life. These activities will also add new confidence skills. For example:

• Clean out a cupboard or drawer today.
• Take a warm bubble bath.
• Explore a new lake or a nature retreat.
• Make a list of 15 of your strengths and put it in your wallet
• Create a bulletin board of special cards others have sent to you or go to a card store and pick out 5-10 cards that you really love.
• Make a picture wall of your favorite picture.
• Make a cassette tape of your favorite inspirational quotations.
• Trade skills with a friend to explore new ways of doing things.
• Choose a new hobby or improve on an older one.
• Have company for dinner and create an original menu.

Begin keeping a loose-leaf notebook I call my “life-book”. The 5×8 size is convenient. I keep everything I might need to know in the immediate future. I also keep an index-sized Rolodex but the lifebook goes everywhere with me. It is a great companion when you’re remodeling or moving. You may have a companion on your computer.

Play is essential everyday for everyone. Plan to play everyday. The time you allot to play will repay you in increased productivity. Be sure to set time limits for play so that you don’t use play to prolong procrastination for some work you need to do.

By K Hurley

Everyone has creativity. To get in touch with new energy in you, try one of the following exercises.

Action board—use a large bulletin board to post 3×5 index cards for the 5 main categories of your life. You may wish to use general categories; such as goals, deadlines, dreams, etc. of be more specific, such as marketing, sales, etc. Using different colored 3×5 cards may help you to see the categories more easily.

Every Sunday evening or another evening of your choice, review your boards and update them for the upcoming week/month/year depending on your system. This update will go quickly and will give you a clear, concise review of where you are and where you are going. This will lead to greater confidence. Remember if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.

Begin keeping a creative basket—pretend you are 10 years old or ask a young friend and/or family member to help you. Take a large basket with a handle and put all the things in it you might enjoy using to create a new project. You may include sequins, glitter, paste, colored pens, watercolors, sketch pads. You may use these materials to play with often as way to express your creativity.

Love Jar—collect a glass or clear plastic jar. Using bright construction paper, cut into strips. On the strips of paper, write down short suggestions for yourself of ways you can feel greater love in your life. These activities will also add new confidence skills. For example:

• Clean out a cupboard or drawer today.
• Take a warm bubble bath.
• Explore a new lake or a nature retreat.
• Make a list of 15 of your strengths and put it in your wallet
• Create a bulletin board of special cards others have sent to you or go to a card store and pick out 5-10 cards that you really love.
• Make a picture wall of your favorite picture.
• Make a cassette tape of your favorite inspirational quotations.
• Trade skills with a friend to explore new ways of doing things.
• Choose a new hobby or improve on an older one.
• Have company for dinner and create an original menu.

Begin keeping a loose-leaf notebook I call my “life-book”. The 5×8 size is convenient. I keep everything I might need to know in the immediate future. I also keep an index-sized Rolodex but the lifebook goes everywhere with me. It is a great companion when you’re remodeling or moving. You may have a companion on your computer.

Play is essential everyday for everyone. Plan to play everyday. The time you allot to play will repay you in increased productivity. Be sure to set time limits for play so that you don’t use play to prolong procrastination for some work you need to do.

Photoshop by Wolfgang Staudt

Fingerpainting on the Moon: Writing and Creativity as a Path to Freedom

Peter Levitt

ISBN 0-609-61048-1

Amazon link

Peter Levitt has worked for over 30 years with writers, artists, and others who wanted to explore their creative depths. He relates that before starting something new, we feel excited, anxious, frightened, hopeful. Often times a feeling of joy—that feeling that comes from expressing ourselves in a new and creative way. In the author’s note he refers to our inner critics which he calls the “hungry ghosts”. My favorite name for them is the “committee”. They ran my life for many years until I learned how to shut off the voices.

Levitt weaves stories throughout the book from his students to suggest that the path to joy includes: starting in silence, risk, everything is permitted in the imagination, how to feed a hungry ghost, the narrow place, a need to know, when the stone woman dances-the mute bird sings, divine breath, naked mind, naming, the bones beneath the bones, the riddle of the hands, there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground, a matter of chance, paradise now, time to die, and bull’s-eye.

The following is an excerpt from “there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground” (I have chosen it because he found this title from one of my favorite poets—Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi who lived in the fourteenth century).

“I want to explore prayer from a perspective that may be quite new in the West. Afterward, when you write, I’m sure you will see how to use this teaching to creatively bring your deepest self to life. In the Sufi tradition it is taught that all things in the universe are constantly in prayer: every leaf and tree, every stone, the snowfall on every mountain, and all the night sky stars that whirl invisibly throughout the day. According to this teaching, all things seen and unseen, know, and unknown, are simultaneously and constantly in prayer. When you hold a flower, or a baby, or your friend’s or lover’s hand, you are holding a life in prayer. I think it is fair to say the tradition also believes when you hear a song coming from across a field—for example, a song filled with its own beauty as the prayer of gratitude I somehow became—then singer and song and field are prayer. In other words, being and prayer are synonymous.”