Today’s Guest Blogger Lara Zielin: I often have the feeling I’m in trouble. It’s this pervasive unease, like I’m doing something wrong. The problem is, I don’t know WHAT I’m doing wrong. Which means that if or when I get in trouble, it’s going to be a terrible surprise. Because of this, I have my antennae up all day, scanning, looking, wondering what I could be doing that’s awful. I mind my P’s and Q’s and I try so hard to do everything right. I try to stay busy. I try to be so, so good. But some part of me knows it won’t be enough. Trouble is still a-comin’. Which means by the time I get to the end of the day, there is this exhausted part of me that is BEYOND…
Tag: Suzanne Murray
Cross new thresholds into being creative.
Today’s Guest Blogger, Creativity Coach, Suzanne Murray, asks: DO YOU RESIST ENGAGING YOUR CREATIVITY? Suzanne’s thoughtful answer: Recently I got a note from one of my writing students saying that she was really enjoying writing when she managed to find the time. The three top reasons that people give for not being able to fully show up, move forward or change some area of their life are, “I don’t have enough time, I don’t have enough money or my health isn’t good enough.” On the surface these excuses appear valid and hard to argue with. In truth they always cover up some deeper resistance. When we really want to do something and commit to it we can always manage to find the time, the resources and a way to work around any physical limitations. Robert Olen Butler who won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection of short stories A Good Scent from…
Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray and the power of commitment.
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,…
Ignite Your Creativity
Today’s post is inspired by Creativity Coach Suzanne Murray. Photo by John Pierce. Suzanne writes: CREATIVITY COMES FROM BEYOND THE MIND All the things that truly matter – beauty, love , creativity, joy, inner peace – arise from beyond the mind. – Eckhart Tolle Once years ago when someone asked me what we did in my writing workshop I laughingly responded, “I’ll teach you to lose your mind.” I was delighted when they signed up on the spot. One of the reasons most people don’t think they are creative is that the mind doesn’t understand how creativity works. I remember early in my writing life when one of my personal essays won a significant award, including a grant to support my work, I went into a bit of a panic because I wasn’t completely sure how I had written the piece. I was…
Suzanne Murray: Using imagination for creativity
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…
Trust your intuition for creative writing.
Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray inspires our writing to flow from a dream-like state of consciousness and to trust our intuition. Suzanne writes: How Do We Allow Creativity to Flow? When we get lost in a good book it’s because the writer got lost in letting the story come through as they wrote. I remember the first time when I got on a roll with my writing, where I knew I was writing something good. I stopped and looked around the room to see where it was coming from because I knew it wasn’t coming from my everyday self. Since then I have come to understand writing comes from a dream-like state of consciousness of allowing what wants to be written to unfold. It doesn’t involve thinking or trying to figure it out but rather feeling and sensing what wants to be born and following that golden thread. All creativity comes…
Finding Magic in the Mundane . . . Prompt #328
Today’s writing prompt and title for this post is inspired by Suzanne Murray. “I have many favorite poets but, the Nobel prize winning Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda tops the list in his elegant celebration of common things. These poems help me find beauty and wonder in the everyday and give me a fresh perspective in the face of the difficulties in the world. Early in his writing life wrote serious political poems . . . One line from his poem I’m Explaining a Few Things written in 1935 during the Spanish Civil War has long stayed with me capturing the intensity of Neruda’s work, …and the blood of children ran through the streets/without fuss, like children’s blood… Later in his life, as if weary of the burden of protesting atrocities and political corruption, he began to write Odes about everyday things: salt, cat, dog, dictionary, tomato, to name a few. His Odes celebrate the ordinary…
Relax To Enhance Your Creativity
The Write Spot Blog is all about writing: Writing Prompts to inspire you; Just Write tidbits to motivate you; Quotes to let you know others are in the same boat as you; Places to Submit to get your work out there; Book Reviews to share authors’ work; Guest Posts for all kinds of writing-related things. Today’s Guest Blog Post by Suzanne Murray talks about increasing your creativity by relaxing. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? But what about cortisol, adrenaline, and epigenetics? Factor those in, and it becomes apparent that relaxation isn’t as easy as drifting in a hammock. Fortunately, Suzanne Murray offers strategies to help us learn to relax. HOW CREATIVITY CAN HELP US RELAX We all know that relaxation makes us and our bodies feel good whereas stress causes us to tense up and feel less that optimum. New scientific research shows just how important relaxing our bodies and minds is….
Let Go And Create
Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray writes about how surrender can help creativity: We can’t force creativity. We know this intuitively. If we told a painter that we wanted a masterpiece by five o’clock tomorrow, he or she would look at us like we were crazy, that we clearly didn’t understand what being creative was all about. An important part of being creative is learning to surrender to the flow of the universe, allowing something greater than our everyday self to move through us. It’s not something we can figure out with our linear mind. Of course, if we want to paint we need to learn how to work with our chosen medium and studying the work of the masters can help. If we want to write it’s really valuable to read widely and deeply, to show up daily to put pen to paper and perhaps take a workshop on form we…
Cultivate Creativity
Cultivate creativity: Grow awareness and eliminate distractions. Like gardening: Pull what you don’t want (those darn weeds) and nourish what you want to grow. The following Guest Blog Post is an excerpt from Suzanne Murray’s 1/14/17 blog post. I started writing before the development of the personal computer, when cut and paste meant I was down on the floor with a pair of scissors and a jar of that thick white glue that smelled vaguely of peppermint. It was in many ways a simpler time with far less pulling on my attention.Every morning upon rising I would make my single cup of French roast coffee, dripped through a Melitta, and then sit down to write. There weren’t thoughts like I’ve got to check my email or Twitter feed to interfere with putting words on the page. If I needed to do research, I went to the library, the sacred hall…