April 2010

My dear invisible audience: it has struck me that it is time I treated you with some real goodies.

I'm talking fabulous free inspiration and encouragement! I am presuming that, my dear readers, you are of the artistic persuasion or at the very least, wildly creative but perhaps a tad stagnant in following that path of creativity to it's very delectably juicy promise of artistic success....?

I have just finished reading Martha Beck's Steering By Starlight for the second time-I speed read, so forgot most of it by the time I got to the end of the book.

The fabulous realization that came to me as I was sharing her ideas with a sad artist friend who visited me recently was this;

I had consciously forgotten some of the mind shifting truths I had uncovered while reading, but I had unconsciously already started implementing them in my life!!

It was such an awesome and fantastical thing to discover!

What Ms Beck's Steering By Starlight Taught Me

In the aforementioned book, Martha speaks about 'living backwards'. In other words, starting from the future and going towards the Now-as I understood it. What she suggests one does is to write out your fabulous dream as if it is achieved. Enjoy and savour every moment of it in the making.

Then, working backwards from where you are now going into your past, list one by one the bad things/mess ups/disasters/dramas/sad turns of fate that peppered your path to where you are now. With each 'bad thing' that happened you will notice there was not long after it, a fairly 'good thing' that happened and then maybe another bummer thing and then...so it goes, until eventually you are in this moment writing...and you realise that it's gonna

TAKE 'SOME GOOD' AND 'SOME BAD' STUFF TO HAPPEN TO GET YOU WHERE YOU WANT TO GO!

Then she offers an exercise where you write out your beliefs behind your personal blocks. In other words, the beliefs you have about certain things, that make you not move forward in certain areas of your life.

Once you've done that for a couple of what you may think of as well-justified-reasons-why-I-can't succeed-at-xyz, it starts dawning on you that a belief is not The Truth.

A belief can be altered, can be changed. Can be totally WRONG. So I twiddled around with pen and paper and changed my beliefs (on paper...yawn) and thought nothing more of it.Yawn. Just another exercise in self help that just proves that you can't help yourself when YOU REALLY NEED HELP.

I read over my delicious future vision and sighed at least 50 times.... Next thing I know I'm going through a mini depression. What Joseph Campbell refers to in A Hero's Journey as Refusal of the Call.

I was just too poep-scared of actually doing anything that would move me out of my comfort zone. Which, by the way, you'll have noticed in your own life, is never truly comfortable-it's just better than what you don't know OUT THERE.

The Magical Helper

Then one day I get a call out of the blue from an old school friend who I haven't heard from in years. (Joseph Campbell calls this: The Magical Helper.) She happens to be a newly qualified web designer. She helps me get online fast and makes it suddenly appealing and easy to do.

I start writing a book from the wealth of fascinating drama and intrigue in my old journals. My studio starts to slowly transform into a lovely place to work from - my husband makes me a great work table. I start eating more fresh raw food and discover that the more I do that the more powerful and energetic I seem to become! I can work for hours with enthusiasm and a low level of excitement coursing through my veins...This is GOOOD.

Time Out

Now, I have to go to bed, BUT I promise to write more next week on this. In fact from now on every two weeks (God willing). I have masses already written in my handwritten journal so will be applying it here. I am on an invisibly Guided course of TRANSFORMATION and you can come along for the ride and transform with me!