Category Archives: Inspiration
How to Stay Energized During Long Stretches of Creative Work
When we create we are directly connected to Source energy. Pure, undiluted, deep remembrance of who we are. When you are in the flow, your spirit doesn’t recognize the constraints of time. It’s free, fluid, energizing. It empowers you.
Your body and mind, however, get tired.
So how do you sustain yourself during long stretches of work? When you can’t set a project aside for a few days, when you must show up on set, when the deadline looms?
Basic Tips to Keep You Going ( we’ll explore more in-depth ones below):
- Recognize and acknowledge that you will get tired. Don’t waste energy insisting that you’re not.
- Take breaks. But don’t work through your break! Do something different, even for a few minutes. The change will give relief.
- Eat. Your body needs energy. Healthy energy.
- Drink water.
- Walk away, close your eyes, breathe.
- Go into your spirit.
Advanced Tips to Deal with What’s Really Going On
All of this is essential to well-being. But when you’ve been in the business long enough, you probably find that you run out of energy around specific issues.
A tough emotional scene. A character who won’t tell you what you need to know. An area that you need to express but just can’t get quite right.
Your body, mind AND spirit wear thin…and you have to find a way to work through it, because other people are counting on you. No one else can help you out of it. Here are some things to consider:
- It’s spiritual and it has to do with you. Our work is part us, part other. When we stumble up against it, it’s usually about us. So look inside. Your spirit isn’t always ready to embrace what you ask of it in your work. You may have your own issues with what you need to do. Recognize that it’s okay and separate yourself from the work. You are part of the work, but the work is not you. The work flows through you. Make an agreement with your spirit to let it flow through you.
- If you’re having a tough time or something touches you deeply. Stop. Let it touch you. Sometimes our deepest work comes out of our own emotional reaction to what we are creating.
- Remind yourself why your work matters. You do know it matters, right? You wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t. Work has to be meaningful to you before it can matter to anyone else. Remember why you are an artist. Why this project matters. The good that you do.
- Breathe, meditate, pray. Ask Source for help. You’ll get it.
When You Need to Walk Away
You may come to your work from a place that is unfocused, something has disturbed you, you’re off-center. It’s not the work at all, it’s your life or some unkindness you have experienced. You may not even know what’s bothering you, but you just can’t get into the work.
Stop.
If walking away from the work is possible, do it. Tend to your spirit first. Refind your center. You and your colleagues will be grateful that you did.
If you can’t walk away, then acknowledge where this energy is coming from. You’re a person first, an artist second. Tend to your spirit.
Trust the Tides – It May Not Be You at All
You may be in a position working alone in your studio or at your computer. You know you should work. But you just can’t get into it. This is where you need to trust the ebb and flow of creative tides. Sometimes it’s not about you at all. Sometimes the work needs you to wait. Sometimes a character’s not ready. Sometimes the Universe needs time to give you a different thought. Learn to trust your creative energy and what it needs from you.
I’ve had times where illness, an unexpected delay, or lack of motivation has produced creative ideas and thoughts that would never have happened if I hadn’t been sidelined. So pay attention and look underneath.
Energy is about connection and staying balanced with rest, play and downtime. Listen to your spirit.
Can You Do It?
When you set out to do something you’ve never done before (and even when you start a new project in a media that you have done before) this is the question that raises its head.
Can you do it?
Can you?
Unfailingly, I stumble on this question on every project. Usually midway through. When the first draft is solid and ready for revision. When revision is half-done. When I think I’ve got it just right and then something in me says: not yet.
This question disguises itself as a murky “there’s no way in hell I can do this” sensation followed by “who do I think I am?”
Ahh. These questions may have once caused me to slip under the silky waters of doubt.
Now I know they’re just part of the process. They mean I’m getting close. Close to achieving it. Close to doing it and doing it well. They mean I’m stretching, growing, gaining strength. Does it matter that this question appears in every project, even when I’ve done something many times over? Not at all.
Feeling uncertain about your ability to achieve your dream is a crossroads. You stop, you look all ways, you decide. Because you’re the only one who can decide if you can do it.
And you can.
And you decide that you can, over and over again. You choose to believe in yourself. In the Universe. In the project. In all the beautiful synchronicities that brought this project to you and you to this project – and all the talent, emotion and soul that you posses to pour into it.
Yes, you believe that you can. Because you know what? You are the only one who can.
No one else will ever be you. No one else will ever create what you will.
No one else can.
Turn off the media; turn on your power.
As you plan for 2012 and how you will shape the new year, remember that you have the power to make a positive difference.
If you listen to the media (which I no longer do), you’ll be inundated with messages of fear, despair, uncertainty – negativity of all sorts.
How much of that actually has to do with your real life?
When we stop allowing others to feed us fear, when we say “thanks, but no thank you” to fear, life settles into a far more realistic and optimistic state of being. The fear that the media creates draws listeners, pays advertisers. It separates us from our natural sense of power to shape and create our world.
So, as you move toward 2012, remember that you ARE powerful. Choose to stop letting the media influence your emotions.
If you or someone you know is facing a challenge, don’t wallow in fear. Ponder what action you can take to make a difference. Then do it. That’s how our world becomes a better place. One person at a time.
We are incredibly powerful. The sphere of influence that we each have is what we are responsible for. Use your power for good, to uplift, to encourage.
What we think about our world, is the kind of world we experience.
Create your world in 2012.
When You Can’t See Clearly
What do you do when you don’t know what comes next? When you can’t see the way ahead?
When you are between where you are now and where you want to be?
David Bayles wrote in Art & Fear that “Fear comes in when vision outruns execution.” When you can’t see the way clearly. Fear that you won’t get to where you want to be. Fear that you don’t know how. Fear that you aren’t enough, that you don’t have what it takes.
When you have a great dream, a deep desire, a wish that resonates across your spirit – when you know how you want your life or art to be, but you are completely blind as to how to get from here to there – what do you do?
You trust. You breathe. You remember that you are exactly where you are meant to be.
You open up to being vulnerable, to accepting that you are in a place right now where you can’t see.
I call it being blind. And I learned early on that blindness is a part of the natural rhythms of life. When you can’t see ahead, you have to trust. You have to surrender to not knowing.
That’s not easy to do, but it’s necessary. We think that we must be in control, that action is always the answer, that it’s wrong to “not know.”
It’s not wrong. It’s necessary.
Because to get to where you want to be, you have to trust that the path does lie ahead of you; you have to put one foot in front of the other and keep walking. Sometimes, you have to stop and rest.
And sometimes (maybe often actually) the Universe needs you to wait patiently, unseeing, while it arranges the circumstances and timing that will take you forward.
Patience and faith. Faith that you are okay when you are blind. That vision will return. That you will see the path clearly again.
You will know what comes next.
Be There
Be there. Go there now and never leave. Imagine that your dreams have already come true. Live your life from that mindset. Predicate your behavior on that reality, not the illusions that now surround you. Filter every thought, question, and answer from there. Let your focus shift and be born again – because dwelling from, not upon, the space you want to inherit is the fastest way to change absolutely everything.
– Mike Dooley http://www.tut.com
How would your life be different if the biggest dream you have right now, already came true?
Put yourself out into the future. Be there. Feel it. Feels good, right?
How will you be different when you are standing on the other side of your dream, looking back?
We grow into our dreams by living them, feeling them, imagining them as if they already happened. Not by striving or hoping or wishing.
Your ability to imagine is the most powerful force you have.
Isn’t it amazing?
creative inside out 