Search Results for: suzanne murray

Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray and the power of commitment.

| mcullen

Today’s blog post is by Suzanne Murray. THE POWER OF COMMITMENT Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray. – Rumi   I’ve been thinking about the difference between trying and doing and how it applies to our creative lives.   Consider how it feels to say “I’m going to try to write a book versus I am going to write book.” The word try brings with it a lot of resistance and a sense of effort, whereas I am going to do it carries the sense “I can do this.”   Perhaps the most well-known line in the Star Wars movies is when Yoda says to Luke Skywalker “do or do not, there is no try.”   Yoda is encouraging Luke to commit fully because he know that if Luke is uncertain that he can achieve the goal,…

Suzanne Murray: Using imagination for creativity

| mcullen

Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray writes about using imagination with a quote from Thoreau. This world is but a canvas to our imagination. – Henry David Thoreau   We use our imagination all the time, whether we realize it or not. When we are worrying about a future event we are imagining the possibility of a negative outcome. When we are thinking about our next dream vacation we are imagining the place and what we may be doing there. When we are being creative we are imagining scenes as we write, the cake rising as we mix the ingredients for baking, or the blank canvas giving rise to color. Yet most of us don’t think much about the ways we use our imagination and the mystery of how it works. Most of us hold tight to the confines of the mind, living from its repeating pattern rather than being open to the infinite…

Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray

| mcullen

We are lucky to have Suzanne Murray as today’s guest blogger, encouraging our writing. Excerpt from Suzanne Murray’s Post, 2/14/2018 Are you feeling uninspired? Has your got-up-and-go got-up-and-went?  Say that three times! Then read Suzanne’s inspiring message:   FALL IN LOVE WITH CREATIVE PROCESS by Suzanne Murray. A lot of people think that when it comes to creativity, inspiration is the key. Yet those moments of insight or revelation never occur without the willingness to commit to the work and continue to show up. This perseverance is just as important. You get a creative flash. You show up to the work and what wants to be born becomes more clear. Nobel prize winning Canadian short story writer Alice Munro once said, “I threw away all my early writings and it wasn’t because I was the mother of three small children. It was because I was learning my craft and it took…

Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray explains How Nature Can Enhance Your Creativity

| mcullen

When I received the inspiration for the name of my business Creativity Goes Wild, I was on a modern day vision quest with Bill Plotkin in an extraordinary canyon in southern Utah that allowed me to really open to the flow of new ideas. Along with the name, I also got that the essence of the work included three different elements: Nature, creativity and the soul which are aspects we can connect to that can really help us live full and authentic lives. I have long thought of nature as the original artist. If you spend any time in nature and pay close attention, you become aware of the beauty and design and patterns in both small things like the symmetry in pine cones and snowflakes or on a grander scale the patterns in the erosion of mountains or the movement of clouds across the sky. At first glance nature…

Your Creative Self is Eager to Explore

| mcullen

Today’s Guest Spot goes to Suzanne Murray. I recently watched a video of a 42-year-old neurosurgeon from California who dances for his patients to cheer them up during their check-ups. He gets them dancing too, including a young woman in a wheelchair seen waving her arms and shimmying her chair. I love that this doctor had found such a creative way to tend his patients spirits as well as their bodies. I imagine it’s a great help to their healing. It has me thinking more about how being creative can help heal our world. Creativity allows us to access new ways of looking at a problem and find fresh solutions. We touch expanded capacities and find ourselves capable of more than we think. We connect more to our heart and spirit. We are often surprised and delighted by the unexpected inspirations that arrive. We can learn to bring the creative…

Freeing Your Creativity

| mcullen

Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray writes about: Freeing Your Creativity. Does it feel like your creativity is locked up tight in a box you are afraid to open? You put it in there long ago when your third grade teacher didn’t like your drawing or your father disapproved of you wasting your time writing poems or your grandmother told you that you didn’t have as good a singing voice as your sister. It happened to me in junior high school when my in my design class the teacher exclaimed about a drawing I actually really liked, “Suzanne, you can do better than that.” Decades later I’ve yet to pick up another drawing pencil. The Creative Self The creative self is a tender and vulnerable part of us, so it doesn’t take much to discourage it. I could have left the creative urge locked up with my drawing pad. Fortunately, I found…

Creativity Is A Practice

| mcullen

Suzanne Murray writes about the rewards of engaging our creativity. There is a growing awareness that creativity is a capacity that everyone has, though they may not understand what is involved in accessing it. One of the main things that gets in the way of people embracing their creative gifts is a belief that creativity should be easy; that it should just flow out. They think they should be good at it immediately. If they are not and it’s not easy, there is a tendency to think there is something wrong with them and it’s never going to work. Yet creativity in whatever form you choose to pursue is a complex process that actually asks a lot of us. This is why is feels so good to engage since it helps us discover that we are capable of more than we thought possible, including working from expanded abilities. It is…

Show Up And See What Happens

| mcullen

Photo by Marlene Cullen Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray writes about the power of commitment and practice. Whether it’s for writing, meditation, exercise, or anything you want to do but feel resistance to, establishing a practice can help you move forward in magical ways. It signals to the universe that you are committed. Having a practice means that you show up every day, no matter what. Release all expectations of outcome or where you think you want things to go. It doesn’t matter how good you are or what you accomplish or what happens with the practice. You sit down to meditate and your mind goes wild with chatter the entire time, that’s fine. You show up to write and find yourself whining on the page, that’s okay. The point is to show up and practice. A lot of things are happening when you show up consistently to something. You begin…

Imagination and Mentors

| mcullen

Imagination is everything. It is the preview to life’s coming attractions. – Albert Einstein Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray and imagination: I’ve been asking myself, how can I best help empower others at this time of great global change. The first answer that came in the flash of inspiration was the word imagination. Einstein regularly insisted that imagination is more important than knowledge. But the thing is, it’s not just for geniuses. It’s for everyone. We have been taught to favor the rational mind at the expenses of capacities that actually can help us in amazing ways. It’s easy to reclaim. Years ago, I learned an exercise from Jean Houston, noted author, visionary and one of the founders of the human consciousness movement. It involves working with an imaginary mentor to get advice on any question that we have for any area of our life. Using our imagination and intuitive mind give…

Just Walk!

| mcullen

Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray suggests walking to inspire creativity. WALKING HELPS YOUR CREATIVITY When you are engaged in a project and feel the creative inspiration has dried up, take a break. Anything that occupies the consciousness mind in a physical way can open you to the flow of fresh ideas and insights. Doing the dishes or taking a shower are good ways. One of my favorites is taking a walk. You could simply stroll around the block or walk deep into nature. I have not been alone in my awareness that walking opens creative channels. There is a long list of well known creatives who walked to allow ideas and connections to flow. Charles Darwin, Virginia Woolf, William Wordsworth, Nikola Tesla, Aristotle, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Jefferson, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, Beethoven to name but a few. Scientific studies have now found that creative problems can indeed be solved by walking,…