Your Creative Self is Eager to Explore

  • Your Creative Self is Eager to Explore

    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 process into every area of our lives to help ourselves, each other and the world.

    The simplest way to work with this process is to ask a question like “how can I help the world today” or “how can I bring more creativity into my life” or “how can this problem I am having in my life” and then let it go. Don’t try to figure out the answer with your mind. Rather let the response drop in as an awareness or intuition, a flash of insight or an ah..ha moment where you sense you are on to something.

    I do this all the time, especially when I don’t know what to do. Like with this newsletter. A few days before I planned for one, I had no idea what to write about. I felt completely uninspired. I silently asked the question “what’s my topic this month?” and let it go. The next day I saw the video about the dancing doctor. That inspired the subject of how to work with creativity to help each other and the world.

    When faced with the events in the world today and the constant bombardment of information we can easily feel overwhelmed and helpless to affect change. Knowing that our creative self is eager to assist us can help. Ask a question on an issue concerning you, someone or something you care about or the world at large, and see what comes. Then take some kind of action on the awareness, no matter how small. See where it takes you.

    Be willing to step out of your comfort zone. That’s part of being creative. We expand beyond who we think we are into more of who we really are. The rewards are many including an increased sense of empowerment and happiness. Play with this. The world, as you know, needs our gifts and inspirations now more than ever.

    Wishing you the joy of being creative, Suzanne

    Originally published as “Adrift” in the March 2006 of Sun Magazine.

    Suzanne Murray offers many opportunities to tap into your creativity:

    THE HEART OF WRITING COACHING
    Do you want to ignite your creativity and show up to your writing on a regular basis or go deeper into the process and craft? Online coaching to support you with any resistance or problems along the way: daily lessons and assignments hold the space of unconditional acceptance and support to nurturing your unique voice  and work on the stories that are really important to you.

    EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques)

    Combining Western psychology with Chinese acupressure, it works to actually rewrite subconscious patterns and limiting beliefs that keep us stuck. I’ve had miraculous results and have been working with EFT in new ways that allow us to laser in on the issue and shift it at the core and change your life from the inside out. We often make significant shifts in a single session.

    Marlene C

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  • Calm Your Brain

    Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray has this to say:

    With anxiety and fear running high in the world these days, I wanted to share how we can make friends with these feelings and use them to our advantage. Anxiety and fear can prevent us from being creative or living a life we love. To live and create fully, we be must be willing again and again to step out of our old comfortable life and into unknown territory. This always feels scary.

    Many years ago I read the self-help book Feel the Fear, And Do It Anyway which presents the premise that just because we feel a sense of fear about a project or moving in a new direction in our lives doesn’t mean we are supposed to stop ourselves from proceeding.

    More recently I’ve been fine-tuning my understanding of what this really means and feels like, how to best use it in my life and creative work, and how it fits the idea of following my internal guidance of my intuition and heart to bring my soul and creative gifts into the world. Any time I stretch in a new direction in my writing or my personal and professional life I have to step out of my comfort zone which gives rise to a feeling of anxiety.

    I’ve found it’s important to learn to distinguish between the kind of anxiety that represents our bodily intuition signaling a real threat (like don’t walk down that dark alley or that new relationship really isn’t good for you or that’s really not the best art project for you to pursue) versus the kind of anxiety we feel when we step out of our comfort zone in a way that stretches our capacities, capabilities and sense of self. The anxiety that is genuinely trying to warn us off feels heavy with fear whereas the anxiety that simply marks stepping out of our comfort zone has a sense of exhilaration to it.

    When I’m at my desk writing and I start to feel a lot of resistance, if I make myself sit in the chair and keep writing, (even when I desperately want to get up and make phone calls or clean the refrigerator), I find that I will usually move through the anxiety into what I really want to say and find myself very excited by the work that results. The same is true every time I do anything new in my life that feels like a stretch. I feel nervous and excited whenever I push past the feeling of fear and take action to make the new idea or vision happen.

    When you are trying to decide what the fear or anxiety is trying to tell you, just take some deep breaths and get clear on the exact quality of the feeling in your body: whether you feel contracted or expanded by the thought of what you desire. If you feel expanded then you need to “feel the fear” that comes with it and begin to take action however small toward achieving your desire. Also new neuroscience shows that the simple act of naming or labeling a negative emotion like fear calms the brain which makes it easier to get clear on what to do.

    Wishing you many blessings and creative flow, Suzanne

    Check out Suzanne’s coaching opportunities:

    Creativity Coaching, Creative Life Coaching, Writing Process Coaching & EFT Sessions

    EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques)

    CREATIVE LIFE COACHING

    CREATIVITY COACHING

    Creativity Goes Wild Blog

    Marlene C

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  • It’s time to . . . .

    It’s time to leave behind the beliefs that limit us and embrace the creative beings we truly are. —Suzanne Murray 

    Join Suzanne in one of her many fabulous writing workshops, or personal coaching, or EFT.

     Yosemite Spring Retreat  April 4 – April 6

    Journey to the west of Ireland

    The Heart of Writing – a four week coaching package

    EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques)

    Check out Suzanne’s Blog for ideas on writing, creativity and life coaching.

     

     

    Marlene C

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