How many first-thing-in-the-morning assignments can you squeeze into your day? Can you get out of bed half an hour earlier for each new self-help program that wants a commitment?
Oversubscribing to everything continues in my learning mode. We're not even half way through the 52-week online writing course, "Extreme Writing Makeover".
Last week I started back-to-back ten week art classes, Wednesday and Thursday evenings at the Grand Marais Art Colony. The first time I took a Life Drawing class was a year ago this month. Until now, January through March was all the time I had for creativity courses. Life Drawing has no instructor, but Neil Sherman, a very busy artist, monitors the evening, and he draws.
A course based on the book, The Artist's Way, subtitle: "A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity", is instructed - by Kelly Dupre. You also may find her at work at the North House Folk School in Grand Marais. Only four students registered. That fits the definition of a Sacred Circle, according to the author, Julia Cameron.
As the instructor and we students introduced ourselves for the first time, I agreed that our coming together was meant to be. Like synchronicity, unlikely circumstances bring people together, and in this case can be explained by common interests in creativity.
I read Julia Cameron's books more than fifteen years ago. I immediately followed The Artist's Way by reading The Vein of Gold. I studied both on my own. I also studied Drawing On The Light From Within, by Judith Cornell, about the same time.
I hadn't thought about The Artist's Way as a recovery program. I got with the program right away the first evening. "The Morning Pages" task wants that extra half hour first thing in the morning, three handwritten pages in a journal. I've been doing that for over twenty five years. Now I have some useful recovery tasks to write about. I have some unlearning to do.
I blurt. I write about those negative responses. Go to the top of this blog post to read one of my blurts. Did I write three pages every morning this week? Why not? I had good reasons why I didn't. I won't beat myself up for missing the mark. That's a recovery step. I always wrote something. The time required to write three pages ranged from 40 to 55 minutes.
Extreme Writing Makeover wants me to write better and faster. That first in the morning journal writing I do in 20 minutes. This week my Publication Coach, Daphne Gray-Grant, wants only five minutes.
I drift off in my own thoughts while writing. I'm in Dave's World. When that happens during a conversation, one my friends sometimes brings me back by saying, "Earth to Dave!" Returning to focus also is a recovery step. Intense focus happens for me during a life drawing exercise. I'm in the zone. That's healthy. At home, working with intensity the other night, the sound of my wife cutting a sheet of gift wrapping paper was like a shotgun going off. That's not healthy. I'm irritable.
Among my blurts, there were two things I was unwilling to share within my new Sacred Circle that first night. The level of trust we established was amazing, but we must trust each other much more deeply to get past the intimate darkness.
2 comments:
I'm intrigued by this statement, " . . . but we must trust each other much more deeply to get past the intimate darkness." Please say more about the intimate darkness.
Intimacy and trust isn't established on first meeting. Intuition may suggest the possibility. Confidentiality must be honored. Some of us don't have that experience. Some have had that level of trust broken.
One of the exercises has us draw a protective circle. Inside the circle we list words and phrases describing what we need to protect. Outside the circle, list the things and people we must protect ourselves from. For me, some of those negatives are my own self-imposed limitations.
For a different view, see the book, "Pictures of the Mind", by Miriam Boleyn-Fitzgerald. Recent developments in neuroscience suggest new tools for training the multiple dimensions of the mind. Bioethics addresses some of the trust issues. I won't pretend to address these subjects as a professional counselor would.
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