Boat by MorBCH

The Changemaker Library has been divided into ten categories. These are core, creativity, exercise, food, health, meditation, peace of mind, personal development, spiritual direction, and stress reduction. A few of the books have been recommended for more than one category.

Creativity is the secret to being in our passion. We are in our “flow” when we are working and time seems to disappear. Joy can’t be discovered by the mind. Joy happens when our total being–thoughts, words, feelings–are all focused at the same time. Joy comes from the heart.

Mihaly Csikszentmihaly states that flow has the following components:

1.  Usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing
2.  We must be able to concentrate on what we are doing.
3.  Concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and provides immediate feedback..
4. One acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes  awareness of the worries and frustrations of everyday life.
5. Enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions.
6.  Concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over.
7.  The sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes.

Also to create harmony in whatever one does is the last task the flow theory presents. Athletes call this phenomenon being in the “zone”.

The Changemaker Library recommended these books for creativity:

The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

Julia Cameron

ISBN 0-87477-694-5

Amazon link

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

Peter Levitt

ISBN 0-609-61048-1

Amazon link

Prosperity Pie: How to Relax About Money and Everything Else

SARK

ISBN 0-7432-2920-7

Amazon link

The Vein of Gold: A Journey to Your Creative Heart (Companion to The Artist’s Way)

Julia Cameron

ISBN 0-87477-836-0

Amazon link

Tags: creativity, prosperity, relax.creative, spiritual, writing

Procrastination is one of my favorite methods to stay in my fear and not move forward. I have had to put several action thoughts, prayers, and deeds into affect to change my old self into new and better action goals.

1.  I use the focus–refocus –then review action steps to plan my day.

2.  I always keep small legal pads at each place I use in the home and/or office. I work at home but have three work places. The variety gives me new scenery and different computers. A writer’s life is a solitary profession. Writers also have to be relentless about rewriting. I have found physically moving to another work space helps to help me find a new train of thought.

3.  After I have several ideas on several note pads, I do a “brain dump” of organizing for all the material I have notes. Sometimes I do a mind map (xmind) to see what is the direction I want to go in. I have been training my brain for 30 years how to be my servant instead of my master. I believe this is one of my life issues. I call my main lessons life lessons so that I can remember they will be with  me for life. Prior posts about what I call finding the observer mind:

Retrain Your Brain Quick Links

We Feel What We Choose

If You Want to Change a Habit, Use Reframing

4. Writing down my goals or plans in a large, hardcover notebook that I have divided into 3 sections helps me to keep it simple. Then I use a red pen and circle my goals for the day. I may use a different colored marker for each day as I move through the week. But usually I have to move on to new topics.

5. For translating my goals and plans into action steps, I use clipboards. I learned clipboards from the Navy when I worked in Guantanamo Bay. I keep 5 clipboards focused on 5 different directions I may or may not be following. If something loses favor with the direction I want to go in, it is easy to discard that topic. I generally keep a clipboard free for home care and/or personal errands.

Some goal-setting links:

Goals are Dreams With a Deadline!

Living a Balanced Life

6. In the past few years, I have kept alphabetized white cover notebooks to keep all aspects of a topic I am researching. But, for now, I have so much material I no longer follow that smaller notebooks serve me better.

Photo credit.

Enjoy the following links to awaken your creativity:

Time management secret: do it tomorrow–“trick your reactive mind into doing what your rational mind wants.”

From the blog, How to shut up and enjoy the silence–”Silence is becoming a luxury—the kind it’s still okay to want. Silence lets you rest and reset, ponder and pontificate. The ideas that seem just beyond your mental grasp the rest of the day float effortlessly into your mind. And the world slows down, perhaps by just a few seconds, but enough to catch your breath.”

Fast company slideshow–What’s Disney’s Inspiration? This slideshow features 8 creators with answers to what inspires them.

The powerful link between creativity and play–video from TED ideas worth spreading–”Here’s an incredible video for people struggling with the tension between being “creative” and “playing”. Tim Brown does a wonderful job explaining why “play time” is mission critical to any creative person’s workflow. Hint: We have a lot to learn from children.“

How much is your creative time worth? “One of the biggest lessons I learned from reading a bunch of stuff on entrepreneurialism was not how to make money – it was how to put a price tag to my time. Honestly, the first book I read that made me think about that was The Four Hour Work Week, but for one reason or the other, it didn’t click.”

Finally, I will list the main ideas from this link as I need to remember them daily–from David Pierce writing for LivDev–

Finding and storing the creative juices–

“My solution to this dilemma has been to create a system that takes advantage of my creative moments to make my uncreative ones less problematic. In my experience, I’m feeling uncreative far more often than I’m feeling creative. Creativity comes in furious spurts, and I’m slowly learning how to take advantage of those in order to make feigning creativity easier, using tools like these:

1.  Keep a list   2.  Don’t finish what you start   3.  Find new directions 4.  Ask around  5.  Bail

Photo credit.

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.”

The Emerald Waters by Chi-King

The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

Julia Cameron

ISBN 0-87477-694-5

Amazon link

Julia Cameron teaches the methods she created from The Artist’ s Way in Hollywood, California. The co-founder of “The Artist’s Way Wookshop” is Mark Byron. She recognizes that the path to unblocking creativity is a spiritual path.

Spiritual Electricity: The Basic Principles begins the book and includes such knowledge as: Creativity is the natural order of life. Life is energy: pure creative energy. Creativity is God’s gift to us. Using our creativity is our gift back to God.

The two pivotal tools in creative recovery are the morning pages (a daily journal) and the artist date. The morning pages are the primary tool of creative recovery. An artist date is a block of time, perhaps two hours weekly, especially set aside and committed to nurturing your creative consciousness, your inner artist. Doing the moring pages is sending your thoughts, dreams, etc. and the artist date is receiving inspiration, insight, and guidance.

The rest of the book is divided into chapters about recovering a sense of: safety, identity, power, integrity, possibility, abundance, connection, strength, compassion, self-protection, autonomy, and faith.

She require her students to sign a creativity contract and includes one for her book students.

An excerpt from Week 1: Recovering a Sense of Safety:

“One of our chief needs a creative beings is support. Unfortunately, this can be hard to come by. Ideally, we would be nurtured and encouraged first by our nuclear family and then by our ever-widening circles of friends , teachers, well-wishers. As Young artists, we need and want to be acknowledged for our attempts and efforts as well as for our achievements and triumphs. Unfortunately, many artists never receive this critical early encouragement. As a result, they may not know they are artists at all.”

Cameron uses quotations in the margins of the pages for inspiratin and also includes many experiences she has had in helping others to regain the creative path. I say recreate because I believe we are each born with creativity and I believe life to be a return to bing our joyful, playful, creative child.

In the chapter in the first week, she dwells on the foundation upon which we each live—our beliefs. If you are telling yourself that you can’t—you are probably helping to make that come true. None of your core beliefs that are negative needs to be true. Beliefs aren’t facts. Your allies for replacing negative beliefs with postitive ones are creative affirmations. She lists several suggestions for these. At the end of each chaper, she assigns tasks (homework) to be completed before moving on the next chapter. Some of the tasks for week 1 are: to take $5.00 and go to a discount store and buy goold stars, stickers, glitter, glue crayons—buy what you’d like to play with.

Sunset at Oceanside by surfcrs

The Vein of Gold: A Journey to Your Creative Heart (Companion to The Artist’s Way)

Julia Cameron

ISBN 0-87477-836-0

Amazon link

This journey to your creative heart begins with a chapter about setting out on your journey. The basic tools of morning pages, weekly artist date, cluster list, walking daily, walking an hour-long walk weekly, walking prayerfully, manifesting, and your creativity commitment.

The main chapters of the book take us to the kingdoms of: 1) story, 2) sight, 3) sound, 4) attitude, 5) relationship, 6) spirituality, and 7) possibility.

The last chapter deals with breaking camp. In this chapter, the artist’s tribal rules are given.

The tribal rules are:

Survival rule number 1 is acceptance. “I seem to want to be an artist.” Accept the fact that you’re an artist and stop second guessing yourself. Just do it.

Survival rule number 2: Don’t Judge It. Focus on process, not product.

Survival rule number 3: Defend your process. Sooner or later, you’re going to run into somebody who won’t want you to do it, or will want you to do it only a certain way. Consider the source. Are the making your art? Do what you need to do.

Survival rule number 4: Never Let Anybody Tell You What To Create. Create for you. Create something every day.

Survival rule number 5: Maintain Your Creative Health. Artists are athletes. Creativity is like distance running. Log ten slow miles for every one fast mile. Consistency—process—builds stamina, what horse people call “bottom”, what we may call the bottom line. This brings us to:

Survival rule number 6: Grieve Your Losses. In any creative life there are losses. Some of them are grievous. Only one thing makes them go away—more creativity.

Survival rule number 7: Create for Revenge. Be a spiritual midget. Skewer the bastards. Create right at them.

Survival rule number 8: Remember That the Part of Us That Creates is An Inner Youngster. Allow your creative child to have playmates and playthings.

Survival rule number 9: Find Your Believing Mirrors and Stick Close to Them. You deserve a cheering section.

Survival rule number 10: Ignore the Odds. We are all equally sourced in an abundant Universe. Our dreams come from the God within, and that God has the power to fulfill them. Trust yourself. Accept divine help from whatever human source offers it, remembering always that God is the Great Creator—and artists love other artists.

Tags: acceptance, creativity, God, grieve, journey, manifesting, play, process, walking

Reflections by lensburg.chandru

Prosperity Pie: How to Relax About Money and Everything Else

SARK

ISBN 0-7432-2920-7

Amazon link

SARK (which is short for Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy) has written several highly-creative books. They are published in her handwriting—or, in someone’s handwriting—and contain drawings carttons, lists, etc. I love mind-mapping so this book appealed to me as a way to remember to color outside the lines.

Prosperity Pie, as explained in the author’s foreword, means plenty of everything, with enough to share. As with most books that guide us toward greater self-discovery, she begins by talking about our inner critics. She states that as soon as we improve in area of our lives that our inner critics have been harping on, the critics start harping on something else.

Some of her statements from this book are:

1) Whatever has happened to us has contributed to us.

2) You are enough. You have enough. You do enough.

3) You are not alone.

4) Even when we are surrounded by and with love, we must still face ourselves alone every day. How much love gets inside?

5) As humans, we need to give ourselves mental, physical, emotional and spiritual care on a daily basis.

6) There are specific ways to practice healthy self-talk, and I frequently use writing to calm and center myself.

7) Challenges help us grow in prosperity and every challenge is a teaching.
We can relax into our tension.

The chapter headings for Prosperity Pie are: self—challenges—love—work—money—time—inspiration—teachers—adventures—and, prosperity pie.

More about her and her work can be found at www.planetsark.com.

The website is as creative as her books. Enjoy!