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Today’s Haiku: A Moment of Creative Presence

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Garavogue/
river water gushes round/
unmoved rock.

 

Haiku instructions


Go Creative Tool #4: Create Dates

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The Creative Date With Self  (create-date for short) is a once-weekly, fun expedition to explore something you find compelling or thrilling. An expedition, by yourself, to do something that enchants or excites you.

It can be something you think of as a bit scary, like skydiving or bungee jumping, or a bit silly or childish, like going to a kid’s movie or doing some finger painting.

It doesn’t have to be something that is normally considered creative. It could be playing with a dog (not your own) for two hours or spending the afternoon naked. A successful create-date is spent doing something that 1) you’d really like to do 2) you haven’t done before or for a long time and 3) feels like play, not work.

images-1That’s the number one rule, the one that really matters. The create-date should always feel playful. Somebody else’s idea of hell, maybe, but your idea of pure pleasure and jollification.

Fun.

It may be a trip to a children’s bookstore or a luxury fabric shop; to a warehouse party or a walk by the canal; to a museum or art exhibition; a field or a beach. But be careful of anything that smacks of “high art” or duty. This shouldn’t be something improving, the opposite.

“Every child is an artist,” said Picasso. “The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” Create-dates go a long way to solving that problem. For some of us, it can help to think of our grown-up self taking our childish self on an outing.

“I found this tool the hardest of all,” said Megan, a Go Creative! student, reporting back recently.

“Harder than F-R-E-E-Writing for 20 minutes every day?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Really? Harder than sitting Inspiration Meditation?”Create Date: Cinema

“Yes. Harder than Mindfree Movement too.”

Megan is not alone. Why is this? Why should  so many of us find taking timeout with ourselves, to do something enjoyable, so  challenging? Shouldn’t it be the easiest thing in the world?

At some level, we are all scared of being alone with ourselves.

The Joy of Solitude

In the Phillipine Journal of Psychology, Eric Julian Manalastas who teaches the psychological benefits of solitude at the University of the Philippines, reports on his experiments on what he calls The Date with the Self: “I presented sample activities as suggestions, including going to a cinema, eating at a restaurant, visiting a park or museum, enjoying a walk in nature, etc., with the self as their date. Students were instructed not to think that they were not going on this date alone; rather, they would be going with a companion who is very special, i.e., themselves.

“In addition to this fundamental cognitive frame, I posed a number of specific behavioral guidelines that would apply to any other type of date, like discouraging mobile phone use and book reading.” 

create date: solitudeManalastas found that the act of dating the self was undeniably positive, providing “context for self-renewal and a tool for the pursuit of creativity and insight, as one basks in the freedom and serenity it can offer. The capacity to handle and enjoy solitude is linked to psychological adjustment, including less depression, greater sense of personal agency, and higher life satisfaction. This appreciation of time spent alone can be developed using an active learning exercise such as the date with the self.” 

Preparation

  • Prepare for your date with as much attention as if you were going out with another person you wanted to have a good time with you.
  • Announce to yourself, well in advance, that you are going on a date and so unavailable for anyone else.  (Watch and see resistance for what it is, how Create-Dates can be easily derailed by an unexpected phone call, or impromptu visit, or important errand, or “must-do” chore.
  • Put the date in your diary, just as you would any other appointment.
  • Ideally know what you’re doing a week or so before you do it, so you have time to look forward to it. But leave room for spontaneity also.

As Create-Dates become a weekly habit, the resistance fades.

After The Create-Date

Afterwards your create-date, you may feel replenished… or you may feel nothing at all. At a deeper level, your inner well of images and inspiration has been fed but it may take some time before this surfaces as a feeling.

Like all the Go Creative! tools, the create-date fosters presence and awareness. It helps us notice synchronicity and serendipity throughout the week.  Through this simple act of spending a little time with self, we find that somehow, mysteriously, we’re more immersed in the flow of creativity.

We spontaneously find ourselves more conscious, more connected, more creative.

Some Create-Date Suggestions

  • Home Turf

Take an hour’s walk around your area but take a different route to the one you normally follow.  If you never gone that way before, so much the better. As you walk around, choose the less familiar route at every turn. Go to a new coffee-shop and write or draw what you saw. What do you learn about the place you thought you knew?Create Date

  • Unusual Shop

Creativity guru Julia Cameron recommends a similar practice, what she calls an Artist’s Date, for the blocked creatives, artists and writers she works with. “My most recent date entailed a visit to a store called “Feathered Friends”, she says. “I met with finches, cockatiels, lovebirds and parrots of all sizes, colors and descriptions. I found myself enchanted, and, long after I left the store, birdsong echoed through my consciousness.” Here she gives 101 suggestions for Create-Dates

  • F-R-E-E-Write

Ask yourself: If money and time were no object, where would I most like to go? What environment do I most want to hang out in?  What are most like to do?  What little longings are down there that I haven’t satisfied? F-R-E-E-Write your answers and you’ll have plenty of suggestions for further Create-Dates.

Create-Dates: FAQ

There is nothing I love to do more than gardening. Can another session in the garden serve as a Create-Date?

No. It must be something new, not your usual hobby but something you don’t normally do.

Can I go on a course I’ve wanted to do for ages?

You should go on your course but not as your Create-Date. Courses inevitably mean other people, the facilitator, the youngest students. Create-Dates have to be taken alone and are one-off activities. A core part of the exercise is doing something create date: joy of solitudedifferent next week.

What About Reading?

Would you read a book on a date with another person? When Carl Jung gave this assignment to an overworked Minister, he used the time to listen to music and to read.  “But you didn’t understand,” Jung is said to have said, when he reported back. “I didn’t want you with Herman Hesse or Thomas Mann or even Mozart or Chopin. I wanted you alone with yourself.”

 

Creative Can Do

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Boosting Self-Belief.

“Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right,” said Henry Ford. Or, as my old Irish auntie used to grumble, “You get what you put in for.”

It would be hard to find a philosopher, sage, counsellor or coach who’d disagree.

It’s no secret that self-belief is the central pillar of success — but it’s easy to forget. Or to underestimate its importance in the creative process.

To give your self-belief a boost at any time, do this F-R-E-E-Writing Exercise. Set a clock for 15 minutes, allowing 3 minutes each for the following five questions.

  • What do you believe in?
  • Do you believe enough to convince others?
  • Do you believe enough to succeed?
  • How are your success and your belief intrinsically linked?
  • How might you strengthen your belief?

F-R-E-E-Writing is a much more creative way to where you want to go than setting goals or plans.

Regular free F-R-E-E-Writing (where you F-R-E-E-write for a set time or number of pages, putting down whatever comes to mind will), over time, really boost your belief.

As if by accident, you’ll find your horizons expanding — and yourself soaring right over them.

BUY Orna Ross BOOKS HERE

Opening Creative Doors

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What happens when you start to turn a door knob that won’t budge? First, you turn it harder; then perhaps you pull up on the knob or push it down.

Then maybe you wiggle it. Eventually, you shove the door with your shoulder or kick it.

What you try will be a combination of your history with doors and your creative inclinations.

When we are “unsuccessful” in an attempt to do something, it makes us frustrated but, most importantly for creativity, it generates a resurgence in us of any other behaviour that ever worked in this situation before.

This is why “failure” is a key (pardon pun) to creative breakthrough. And why a great way to accelerate your creative flow is to put yourself in difficult, even impossible, situations — real or imagined.

That’s what will give you the idea that blows the door wide open all by itself.

Try This: Attend a function or take part in an activity where you know you’re going to feel frustrated and confused. A contest in which you’ll publicly come last, for example. Or a meeting of people who are experts in something you know little about. Observe your frustration and the confusion as it arises. Feel it, allow it. Stay with it as long as you can. Then go away and F-R-E-E-Write about it.

Try This: Take a short course in something that really doesn’t interest you, the last thing you’d ever want to know about.

F-R-E-E-Writing

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How to Freewrite

Now on pre-order

The wo/man who doesn’t write has no advantage over the wo/man who can’t.

Those of us who are lucky enough to be literate can take writing for granted. It has become so everyday we forget that writing is magic, and magic of a very advanced kind.

These simple dark marks on a light page manage to hold millennia of  information, and knowledge, and opinion, and emotion, and entertainment, and inspiration, all capable of being communicated to each other across time and space.

As a human breakthrough, the invention of writing ranks with that of fire.  Writing is, actually, the uniquely human achievement.  Dolphins, birds and other species can communicate; only we write.

In school, we are taught to write to communicate with others – our teachers and examiners, mainly – but a number of psychologists, scientists, medics, behaviour specialists, healers and educators are increasingly interested in the power of writing when we use it to communicate with ourselves.

The most important thing about F-R-E-E-Writing is to just do it.

And, in the words of the mystic poet and saint of India, Kabir, “wherever you are is the entry point”.

How to F-R-E-E-Write

The main difference between F-R-E-E-Writing as I teach it and other methods is speed. The F in F-R-E-E stands for Fast; when F-R-E-E-Writing, we always write as fast as we can.

There are other differences too, some gross, some subtle. If you’ve never done it before, or if you haven’t done it for some time, or if you’ve done a different writing-for-self method, like Julia Cameron’s “morning pages” or Natalie Goldberg’s “writing practice”,  begin again with this method.

Try it and see how you go. The most important thing about F-R-E-E-Writing is not what method you use but just to do it.

That means F-R-E-E-writing completely freely, without an exercise or set topic in mind, without reading back.

For F-R-E-E-Writing to work its magic, it  has to be experienced.

Don’t content yourself with reading about it, or telling yourself you did something similar before, so you know all about it. The simple addition of speed is enough to change the experience radically for most people.

PLEASE NOTE: The F-R-E-E-Writing book will publish early in 2016, as part of the Go Creative! series. You can pre-order your book here. The Notebook is already available through Amazon and Ingram.

READ MORE:

F-R-E-E Writing: Using images to release your creativity

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Writing exact-but-easy is the instruction that most new F-R-E-E-Writers find hardest to follow. Fast, they get. Raw, they get but what does it mean to write exact-but-easy? Are these two not contradictory? If I’m worrying about exact, how can I flow easy? And how can I then follow the first injunction, to write fast?

The key to this dimension of F-R-E-E-Writing is not to think about how you are writing at all but to focus on the content. Specifically, on the images. What you see, hear, taste, touch and smell.

patchwork

Looking around me I see: A crack in the glass that looks like the map of the Mississippi river.  The vein in the temple of the woman across from me, knotted and bunched. The rucksack weighing down a slight girl walking past, a patchwork of blue and red, and as tall as herself.  If I turn to what I’m taking in through other senses, I get different images. The smell of over-roasted coffee beans, the sliver of spinach that got caught between my teeth, that my tongue can’t loosen.

Detail triggers in memory, an association, an image. And “an image is always the deepest wellspring in writing,” says Pat Schneider in her great book, Writing Alone and with Others. If we just describe it as our senses experience it, we catch the heart and soul of something, and it turns around and speaks back to us, and tells us something we didn’t know we knew.

How precise do we need to be? As precise as possible. Here’s Schneider again: “If I tell you the bedspread is green, you will not care very much. If I tell you the green is as vivid as a lime gumdrop, and the blue is as deep as antique blue glass; if I tell you that the spread has been chewed by a small animal in one place on one side, but that’s OK because it’s reversible, with blue predominant on the chewed side, green predominant on the unchewed side… I have set the scene for the reader.”

It’s the same when writing for self. The detail tells us what we need to know. F. Scott Fitzgerald said: “Start out with an individual and you have created a type – start out with a type and you have created nothing.” In other words, the particular is universal.

So make a note of your particulars. Here’s how:

Start With One Image

Advertising firms know that if you want to communicate that millions of people are starving in Africa, you do not give people statistics. You show one child with a swollen belly holding an empty bowl. Give us one child, and we grasp famine. so, without knowing anything at all about what it is going to be, lift your pen and write a single, specific, concrete image. See it in your mind, and as fast as you can, write it down.

Add More Detail

Describe it in extreme detail. Be very concrete. Get specific, get intimate, get down and dirty if necessary.

Change the Viewpoint

Zoom in to see a deeper level of detail, zoom out to get an overall picture and perhaps a different impression

Draw On All Senses

We always favour sight but those who cannot see develop keen hearing and sense of smell. Close your eyes. What happens to the image now? What are you perceiving?

Follow The Writing

One image will lead to another. Don’t predict where it is going, just write down the details as they appear. Skip around if you must. Abandon one thing when another appears in your mind. Trust that the images know more than your conscious mind.

Nabokov said, “Caress the divine details.” If we write clearly and truthfully, we will find in our own imagery something we didn’t know was there.

Freewriting For Healing, Transformation and Liberation

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Freewriting Creative tool

Freewriting Notebook: A Go Creative! Tool

Most of us write far too carefully. We’re trying to do it right.

We’re trying, full stop.

Hanging out on the page doesn’t have to be an effort. That it is for so many of us is largely because since our schooldays, or earlier, even the most privileged of us has been trained to self-doubt, self-deprecation and self-censorship rather than self-expression.

Can’t Write

Those who can’t write know how important it is. “Literacy salvaged my life. It is as simple and fundamental as that,” wrote Sharon Jean Hamilton, now Ph.D, in My Name’s Not Susie: A Life Transformed by Literacy (1997).

Hamilton was a lonely, abused child shuttled from one foster home to another until she was adopted, aged seven, by a woman who opened her eyes to the world of reading. To channel the child’s incessant chatter, her schoolteacher mother suggested that she write what she could remember from the early years of abuse, fostering and orphanages.

That exercise, and the stories read to her by her mother, allowed her to transcend her beginnings, become an English Professor and live a life she loves. Her book is a homage to the role of literacy in the evolution of the self.

Those who aren’t allowed to write similarly appreciate its necessity. Prisoners scratch messages into stone, onto the dirt on the floor. Sailors shove messages into bottles and cast them out to sea.

And many people have fought, with their lives, to preserve their right to write.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was denounced as a traitor by the Soviet regime and the Kremlin confiscated his manuscripts, stopped publication of his new works and, when he fought back, expelled him from the Writer’s Union. His oppositional writings gained the force of prophecy as he revealed the underbelly of Soviet Communism in some of the most powerful works of the 20th century.

He wrote that all wo/men were obliged “not to participate in lies” and those who could write had the power to do more; they could “defeat the lie!”

So many people have been done to death and dismemberment and imprisonment, rather than give up writing. I wrote here recently about Hashem Shabaani, in Iran, who died saying “I have never used a weapon to fight these atrocious crimes [of the Iranian government] except the pen.”

But what I want to say today is that authoritarian censorship is only one way to muffle self-expression.

Another is to train a population to self-doubt and hesitancy.

Won’t Write.

Schools tell us how to write in ways that emphasise spellings and punctuation and grammar. Information, knowledge and reason is the chief purpose of writing and anything that stirs memory or imagination or soul is kept separate, like the madwoman in the attic, in a separate category of writing called “creative”.

This is false thinking. All writing is “creative” or ought to be. Creative simply means expressive: revealing of the self who wrote it, telling the truth about a particular moment in time.

So if we’re getting hung up about spelling or punctuation or being clever we are collaborating with our own silencing.  In writing, for self or others, logical and correct is not half as important as authentic and unique.

F-R-E-E-Write.

F-R-E-E-Writing helps us to reconnect with that. In a world where our attention is pulled in many directions, and much of what is pulling it is superficial and unsatisfying, developing the capacity to concentrate, focus on what’s important and reflect on what’s really going on in our lives. Writing down your thoughts brings far more insight than thinking ever can

We don’t best handle our lives, our relationships, our challenges and problems by meeting them head-on with only our logical mind in place. F-R-E-E-Writing allows a more indirect approach.

First we develop fluency in observing our lives in words, learning to describe it as truthfully and precisely as possible.

Once we are proficient in that we move to the second phase: setting the observations in context by reading back our F-R-E-E-Writings once some time has passed .

We explore, neither to diagnose nor to judge, but to enable our life to disclose its meaning. We bring our alert attention, a willingness to be surprised and an open eye to these readings and reviews.

To find out more and pre-order, go here.

Be More Creative Guest. This Week… The Power of Imagining with Debbie Millman

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Debbie Millman artist and creative educator

Debbie Millman artist&creative educator

“We begin by worrying we aren’t good enough, smart enough or talented enough to get what we want, then we voluntarily live in this paralyzing mental framework, rather than confront our own role in this paralysis.

“Just the possibility of failing turns into a dutiful self-fulfilling prophecy. We begin to believe that these personal restrictions are, in fact, the fixed limitations of the world.

“We go on to live our lives, all the while wondering what we can change and how we can change it, and we calculate and re-calculate when we will be ready to do the thing s we want to do.

“And we dream. If only. If only. One day. Some day.

“Every once in a while — often when we least expect it — we encounter someone more courageous, someone who choose to strive for that which (to us) seemed unrealistically unattainable, even elusive.

“And we marvel.

“We swoon. We gape.

“We look at these people as lucky luck has nothing to do with it. It is really about the strength of their imagination.

[… So…]

“Do what you love, and don’t stop until you get what you love.

“Work as hard as you can, imagine immensities, don’t compromise, and don’t waste time.

“Start now. Not 20 years from now, not two weeks from now.

“Now.”

Debbie Millman in Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design


Final Call: F-R-E-E-Writing Book

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Last chance to get your pre-order copy of F-R-E-E-Writing: Unblocking Life’s Flow.

It launches Tuesday next, 30th of September.

But you can order your advance copy now — without being charged until it’s dispatched.

F-R-E-E-Writing 

F-R-E-E stands for Fast, Raw and Exact-but-Easy and this is a creative practice I’ve been teaching — and practicing myself, of course — for fifteen years now.

Each F-R-E-E-Writing session is a new journey without a map in which you simply write whatever it is you have to say at that moment in time — as fast as you can.

When you write like this, you leave yourself open. You allow the words to rise spontaneously within you, to come and place themselves on the page without interference.

And when we allow words to be written in this way, they have tremendous energy.

You can get your copy here.

And you can also purchase a special notebook designed for your F-R-E-E-Writing here.

From the introduction: 

Writing. Who would I be without it? Probably in a twelve-steps programme or taking some very strong medication. The activity of turning words into sentences, stories and poems has made, and kept, me sane and happy for 25 years now.

I know if I hadn’t taken to it as I did during my troubled teens, the side of me that likes to snivel and snark, dramatise and despair would have been given far too much time out in the world. Thanks to writing and F-R-E-E-Writing, I’ve done most of my drama on the page.

All books begin long before the writing starts. This one has its seed in a tiny village in the southeastern corner of Ireland called Murrintown. I grew up there in the 1960s and ‘70s, surrounded by words and stories.

There, as throughout Ireland, the people were great storytellers. I too had things I wanted to say but it was impossible for me to speak them aloud. In those days, in Ireland, public houses didn’t even have a ladies’ toilet because girls and women stayed home  and did what they were told by a trinity of frozen institutions: family church and state. The other option, to leave the country, was taken by many.

Ireland’s literature of the forties and fifties is full of them, those silences and ellipses that I felt so keenly. I had nobody I could talk to about such things. My family and friends didn’t seem to see what I saw and speaking meant shyness, blushes, stutters. Writing, on the other hand, felt like freedom and daring. In the blankness of a blank page, you were allowed to think what you thought.

So I took to words. 

I loved to read and I loved to write and, once I came into adolescence and started attending a convent boarding school, the notebook was the only place I felt completely at home. I never used the words F-R-E-E-Writing in the days when I filled one orange school copybook after another with my troubles and delights, and hid them in a locked suitcase under my bed, but that’s what I was doing.

Becoming A Writer

Then, around the age of 23, I came across Dorothea Brande’s classic, Becoming A Writer.  When I bought this book that stated so very boldly on its cover what I secretly wanted, I used to hide it from friends and family. I could hear the sardonic laughter it would bring on: “You?  A writer?  Ha! Ha! Ha!”. Brande recommended that if you wanted to be a writer, you should “rise half an hour, or a full hour, earlier than you customarily rise. Just as soon as you can — and without talking…. Write, until you have utterly written yourself out.”

That’s what I did. And with some success. Soon I was earning money from writing, writing feature articles for newspapers and magazines.

Yes, payment! For putting words on paper!

Now I had “real” writing to do: article deadlines to meet.

Then, as I completed an MA and began teaching at the local university, academic papers.

Then, the deepest dream, writing a novel.

I told myself I didn’t have time to F-R-E-E Write. It wasn’t until I started teaching a course called Creative and Imaginative Practice that I thought about F-R-E-E Writing again.

Those classes were filled with MA and PhD Women’s Studies students, intellectually focussed, academically trained and therefore, mostly, creatively blocked and bound. They would have been resistant to Inspiration Meditation and Mindfree Movement, the two other creative release practices I taught, but F-R-E-E Writing could set them free, I thought.

Returning to F-R-E-E-Writing

It was only as I set out to teach it that I realized how long it was since I’d done any myself. As I started again, I was soon decrying my arrogance in letting it lie.

Returning to the F-R-E-E Writing notebook was like meeting an old, wise relative you haven’t seen in far too long. The first thing it told me was that my focus on production, on getting “real” writing done, had, ironically, been retarding my progress, as a writer.

And as a human being. 

While I had never suffered writer’s block, F-R-E-E Writing broke through many of what are, in the Go Creative! Books, called ABCDEFs: attitudes, beliefs, concepts, denials, expectations and fears of which I had been blithely ignorant or unconscious.

My novel began to grow in ways that my controlled, writing self could never have accomplished. What was true of the novel was equally true of my own life. Once I did my 20 minutes writing each morning, problems unravelled, situations straightened out, life became infused with a meaning it didn’t have when I neglected to do it.

There’s so much I can write in the F-R-E-E Writing notebook that I can’t write anywhere else. Silly haiku that I’ll never make public; details about my family and friends, thoughts and ideas that make me cringe. In the notebook, I can be playful and frivolous, petty and whiny. My life as a mother and wife and daughter and friend gets its proper prominence, as does my home, my garden, my immediate surroundings, my ever-changing here-and-now..

Having freely written these in the F-R-E-E Writing notebook changes what I write elsewhere.

I’m less inclined to waste pages of a novel sounding off instead of sticking to the story, for example.

But I don’t want to imply that F-R-E-E Writing is only or mainly for writers. Emphatically not. F-R-E-E-writing is writing we do for self, to self, about self, so we can get beyond self.

Creative and Imaginative Practice

What tookF-R-E-E Writing beyond being an author’s activity, for me, was teaching. In 2002, thanks to the insight of Ailbhe Smyth, I began to teach an unusual module at WERRC, the Women’s Studies Department at University College Dublin where she was Director of Studies, called “Creative and Imaginative Practice.” There, I first introduced the method in an academic context to my MA class, with fascinating results.

At that time, WERRC ran a variety of outreach and access programes for women who had been marginalized through various life circumstances: immigration, drug abuse, imprisonment, and so on.  In my teaching, I began to use modified and adapted F-R-E-E Writing techniques with women of varying educational and social needs.  It became clear that the method could be used to clear not just writer’s block, but psychic bindings and blockages in any life situation.

This simple writing method proved to be a key that opened up physical and emotional health, spiritual awakening, and creative breakthrough.  The more I used it, for myself and with others, the more miraculous it seemed. 

The evidence I was witnessing with my own eyes was being borne out by research, mainly at the time from the US but now emerging worldwide. (More on this in the chapters ahead and in Teaching F-R-E-E-Writing, a forthcoming Go Creative! book.)

I have passed now on this method to young and old, MA students and returners-to-work, immigrant groups and people recovering from drug addiction, the homeless and the indigent, writing students, writers, and other artists.  I have witnessed its benefits among people of both sexes, in many different countries, and at every level of social and personal development, even those with very weak literacy skills. When you are writing for self, spelling and punctuation don’t matter — just one of the ways in which F-R-E-E-Writing is freeing.

The method has made such a difference in my own life that it is now my daily practice.  And I have seen it make such a difference in others’ lives that I pass it on whenever I can. 

I teach the same simple technique, over and again, without ever tiring of it because my respect for F-R-E-E Writing and my understanding of its complex potential continues to expand and deepen. I’ve come to see it not as a luxury for those with the time to do it but as a simple, significant shortcut to emotional and creative wellbeing. A daily brushing of the psyche that takes a little bit longer – though not much – than a good brushing and flossing of the teeth.

I have come to believe that everybody who can be, should be, F-R-E-E Writing.

If you’d like to start F-R-E-E Writing , go here

You can also purchase a special notebook designed for your F-R-E-E-Writing here.

Feeling Anxious or Overwhelmed? Try F-R-E-E-Writing

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Yen writes: I’m a novice at F-R-E-E-Writing and I was lucky to have the chance to learn it from Orna, at a class she held last year.

As a writer, I had my reservations about using this technique for personal thoughts. And, as someone who is very pragmatic in my life approach, I had doubts as to how this would be useful.

Though I am still exploring F-R-E-E-Writing, the most obvious result that I’ve gathered from it, already, is how it has helped with my worries and anxieties.

It’s common today to be juggling various projects, while trying to maintain some kind of acceptable work-life balance. No matter how organised we are, we often find ourselves worrying.

What I didn’t quite realise was that, most of the time, this worry stems from something else. Something outside of the projects or tasks we’re working on.

We exploreMy first few F-R-E-E-Writing sessions helped me figure out what my anxieties and worries stemmed from. They weren’t work related, at all, as I thought. They were deep rooted anxieties from my personal history.

These thoughts rarely get time in the open, as they don’t relate directly to my day-to-day life, but from allowing my stream of consciousness to flow, it has come to light that they do still matter to me. Deeply.

Orna talked about this in her post about F-R-E-E-Writing for Healing, Transformation and Liberation, and I am just discovering it for myself.

Now that I have been able to recognise the source of my anxieties, I have started to work on diminishing them to improve my personal well-being.

I’m also looking forward to taking F-R-E-E-Writing further after this, in applying it next to my creative projects.

(Post by Yen Ooi)

If you would like to learn more about F-R-E-E-Writing from Orna, sign up here.

You can buy the F-R-E-E-Writing Notebook at Amazon or through Ingram.

Ten reasons to F-R-E-E-Write

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  1. F-R-E-E-Writing Notebook Cover-1

    Available from Amazon. Buy now

    F-R-E-E-Writing rights.

  2. At a daily level, it improves your psychic state, elevates your mood, makes you feel centred, sets you up for your day. We almost always feels better after a F-R-E-E-Writing session than before.
  3. F-R-E-E-Writing uncovers.
    Because we write as fast as possible, thoughts and emotions are allowed to rise without the internal censor kicking in. This brings us to new understandings — concealed meanings and significances are brought to the surface. Author, Virginia Woolf, calls them “shocks”, those moments of profound insight that come from examining our past, because of how they force an awareness we wouldn’t otherwise have had.
  4. F-R-E-E-Writing EBOOKF-R-E-E-Writing unblocks.
    The new recognitions, ideas and emotions overcome habitual anxieties or self-sabotage. This is a very different dynamic from attempting to control what we perceive to be our flaws or bad habits. Consciously disciplining ourselves into change is generally doomed. We manage it for a time but our old, ingrained ways resurface, stronger than ever. (We see this dynamic clearly in binge drinkers or compulsive eaters but it is there to an extent in us all.) With regular F-R-E-E-Writing, the shells of our bad habits fall away as new experiences and preferences emerge – without conscious manipulation.
  5. F-R-E-E-Writing connects.
    We connect with the outer world, by increasing our awareness of our relationships, with other people, with certain experiences, with places, with things. And when we write fast, we also connect with our inner world at its deeper levels: the unconscious emotions, the intuitive, insightful, creative and inspired.
  6. F-R-E-E-Writing contextualises.
    Over time, we realise that our lives have been going somewhere, however blind we may have been to the direction. We find the connections that lie beneath the surface fractures and puzzles, the meaning that has been trying to establish itself in us. 
  7. F-R-E-E-Writing supports.
    F-R-E-E-Writing allows us to take risks from a place of safety. Re-entering the experiences of our lives allows them to serve as starting points for new, often unpredictable inner movements that yield profound transformations. We are protected by the inherent safety of the process, that moves and shifts us at our own pace.
  8. F-R-E-E-Writing empowers.
    F-R-E-E-Writing teaches us to trust our own experience of the world, our own intuition – essential to enable us to live as free and full human beings – and gives us confidence that we are able to express them. 
  9. F-R-E-E-Writing stabilises.
    Truly allowing all the voices inside diminishes the power of any one.
  10. F-R-E-E-Writing clears.
    Sometimes, yes, we may be overwrought in our F-R-E-E-Writing. Or whiny or irritable or sad or angry or miserable. Or joyful or elated or carefree or blissed out. Over time, all our emotions will find their way in and we come to see how transient they are. Allowing all the “negative” emotions, ideas and feelings within us and giving them free vent in our notebooks, siphons them off. This greatly lessens their hold on us. This is why some people see F-R-E-E-Writing as a form of meditation.
  11. F-R-E-E-Writing transforms.
    In order to change ourselves, to grow, to feel less pain and more happiness, we don’t have to push or strain or strive. All that is necessary is that we see what is there and stay with it, accepting it for what it is. Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh calls this “looking deeply”. Once you do this, he says, “you get relief and you find out how to handle that emotion… It’s like a mother when the baby is crying. Your negative feeling is your baby. You have to take care of it. You have to go back to yourself, recognize the suffering in you, embrace the suffering, and then you get relief. And if you continue looking deeply, you come to understand the roots, the nature of your suffering, and you know the way to transform it.” F-R-E-E-Writing is the ideal way to do this, a form of active meditation that sets us free by opening doorways, dissolving blocks, unleashing binds. It delivers a larger, livelier, more expressive you.

“Be yourself,” said the great wit Oscar Wilde. “Everyone else is taken.” 

More than anything else, that is what F-R-E-E-Writing enables: your personal self-expression. Each session is another opportunity to see, to allow, open up and become. 

Three more pages.

Twenty more writing minutes.

Go!

 

Why not print this list? Download it here! 10 Reasons to F-R-E-E-Write

Seven Go Creative! Guidelines: Email

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Emails — and Facebook Messenger, Slackchat, Asana, any way that other people send you tasks, thoughts and ideas — are great for communication, giving you the power to choose what you say, to whom, and when.

But only if you use them well.

Email (and all communication with others, including social media) is a peripheral creative activity. It can bring us all sorts of exciting and delighting news from the outside world, it may deliver us an important creative nugget, but it can never be core. Because emails are full of what other people want us to do with our time.

And what’s core to creatives and creators is what we’ve chosen to create.

1. Core Before Fringe: Never open your email manager until you’ve completed your core creative activity for that day, ideally until you’ve colored in the day’s complete landing log – more on that soon.

2. Divide Email in Two in Your Mind: There’s Proactive Email, messages you send that move along whatever it is that you’re creating. And Reactive Email, messages from others that you read and respond to.

3. Proactive Before Reactive. Your first action on opening your email manager should be sending, not reading.

  • Draft your own mails in Evernote, or whatever notebook you prefer, before opening.
  • As soon as you open up, cut and paste into email, do final tweaks, and send.

Only when you’ve sent all your own mails should you turn to seeing what other people have in mind for you.

4. Use Folders and Rules. Shame they call it “Rules” — as creators, we’re not great for rules or filing — but don’t let that put you off using the tools that Macmail, Outlook, Gmail and most email programs, provide that allow you to sort messages into an appropriate folder as it comes in.

For instance, you might have signed up for various newsletters or Paypal may be sending you sales alerts. Set up a rule in your email program so you don’t need to manually file these emails. You can still see what’s happening, but again, on your timing, when you choose to look at them.

5. Change Subject Lines. When an email conversation is pinging back and forth, with a change in subject or emphasis, change the subject line each time you resend, so it represents everything in email is about. This will save you hours of search time later.

6. Flag Fun Stuff. The conventional way is to flag what needs doing but pressure from others will keep that happening, so you don’t need another alert. Save your flags for what excites and delights you. Your email inbox should be an exciting and delightful space for you. If it isn’t… it’s time for your email box to go creative!

7. Turn off notifications. Everywhere. Put email back in its box.

Haiku on Instagram

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It’s my daily hobby to play with a form of poetry called haiku, as a way of fostering creative presence in the moment.

And lately I’ve started posting them on Instagram with a photograph of that moment.

Haiku is an act of transcription. Here are a few recent ones:

Park walking.

The time of bluebells, my hand

in your hand.

~

Night pressing

the window. Our neighbour’s tree

waits for light.

~

Daughter’s dress

has mirror circles. Sequins

of myself.

~

Now your turn: Capture a moment of creative presence: Write a 3-7-3 haiku.

  • Use the thirteen syllables to give a short summation of a moment: what you saw, heard, touched, tasted or smelled.
  • Turn the moment in time into an image.
  • Don’t tell us what happened, show us.
  • Don’t tell us how you felt. Trust the images, the sense perception, to hold the emotion. A good haiku conveys a mood, without mentioning the person or mood.

Every place, every moment in time, is full of poetry. All we have to do is open up to it, allow it, express it.

Poetry is always possible.

Your Monday Motivator: Don’t Think, Just Do!

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The theme of this week’s Monday motivator mailout is “Don’t Think, Just Do!”

Each week I send a Monday mail as a reminder to creatives and creativists. The pull of the outer and conventional world is strong, so we all need reminding to focus on what we most want to create.

This weekly reminder is full of tips and techniques to motivate and inspire you – and offers simple creative maps and tools to help you prioritize what’s most important to you this week.

I’ll also bring news about what I’m creating myself right now, offer a free-writing prompt around our theme of the week, and link to the latest episode of the Go Creative! Show.

This week, our theme is “Don’t Think, Just Do!” and on the show, I’m interviewing National Novel Writing Month’s (NaNoWriMo )’s CEO Grant Faulkner about the novel-writing phenomenon that is NaNoWriMo and importance of fiction.

Everyone has a story to tell and, like ALLi, NaNo wants to see them told.

If you’d like to join the mailout group, just click the pic. (You’ll also get a free book!)

Monday Motivator email

On The Go Creative! Show This Week: Collaboration For Creative Succcess

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Click here to the show here

Today, in the creative living segment, I’m introducing Sondra Turnbull, who will moderate the upcoming creativist club, launching in January.

In creative publishing, I’m hearing about the three most significant publishing stories for authors in the past month.

And creative writing in this show focusses on how to write haiku. It’s a fun habit — join me on Instagram to see mine — and guaranteed to bring more creative presence into your days.

You can find out more about the show, read the transcript and subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher or YouTube on the Show Page.


This week’s F-R-E-E-Writing prompt: What We Leave Behind

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This week’s F-R-E-E-Writing prompt explores how we think about ourselves and the legacy we’ll leave

TRY THIS: WRITE YOUR OBITUARY

a) Sit in stillness and quiet, with your notebook open before you, your pen beside it. For two full minutes, sit with silence, letting your breathing become progressively slower and deeper. Prepare to write fast, raw and exact-but-easy. Let your thoughts rest, waiting to begin.

b) Write a one-page obituary for yourself, beginning with the sentence:

“The death has occurred of _____________” (your name).

Write it in the third person, as objectively as you can, what a journalist might write if you died tomorrow. Write quickly, without thinking too much about the details.

c) When you’re finished, read back over what you have written. Is there anything you would like to read differently? What might you do about that? F-R-E-E-Write for three pages.

d) The next day, see if you can think of a suitable epitaph for the person described in the obituary? How does it make you feel?

e) F-R-E-E Write any feelings that are arising from this exercise.

You Can Buy A F-R-E-E-Writing Notebook With Full Instructions Here

Book 4 - F-R-E-E-Writing-Notebook

Haiku of the Week Features: Evening Sun

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Golden path. /
Evening sun on sea calling /
walk this way.

Now Your Turn: Capture a moment of creative presence: Write a 3-7-3 or a 5-7-5 haiku. Here’s how.

  • Use the 13 or 17 syllables to give a short summation of a moment: what you saw, heard, touched, tasted or smelled.
  • Turn the moment in time into an image.
  • Don’t tell us what happened, show us.
  • Don’t tell us how you felt. Trust the images, the sense perception, to hold the emotion. A good haiku conveys a mood, without mentioning the person or mood.

Every place, every moment in time, is full of poetry. All we have to do is open up to it, allow it, express it.

Poetry is always possible.

Haiku On Instagram: Most days I share my #creativemoments on Instagram. I’d love to know about yours.  Share a picture of something you’ve made, an experience you’ve enjoyed, or a moment of creative presence. To ensure I see your posts, hashtag #creativemoments or #gocreative and tag me: @ornaross

Haiku of the Week Features: Manhattan

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Manhattan /
finger of stone trying to /
touch the sky.

Now Your Turn: Capture a moment of creative presence: Write a 3-7-3 or a 5-7-5 haiku. Here’s how.

  • Use the 13 or 17 syllables to give a short summation of a moment: what you saw, heard, touched, tasted or smelled.
  • Turn the moment in time into an image.
  • Don’t tell us what happened, show us.
  • Don’t tell us how you felt. Trust the images, the sense perception, to hold the emotion. A good haiku conveys a mood, without mentioning the person or mood.

Every place, every moment in time, is full of poetry. All we have to do is open up to it, allow it, express it.

Poetry is always possible.

Haiku On Instagram: Most days I share my #creativemoments on Instagram. I’d love to know about yours.  Share a picture of something you’ve made, an experience you’ve enjoyed, or a moment of creative presence. To ensure I see your posts, hashtag #creativemoments or #gocreative and tag me: @ornaross

Haiku of the Week Features: Dance

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In the park /
Most people ignoring a /
dancing girl.

Now Your Turn: Capture a moment of creative presence: Write a 3-7-3 or a 5-7-5 haiku. Here’s how.

  • Use the 13 or 17 syllables to give a short summation of a moment: what you saw, heard, touched, tasted or smelled.
  • Turn the moment in time into an image.
  • Don’t tell us what happened, show us.
  • Don’t tell us how you felt. Trust the images, the sense perception, to hold the emotion. A good haiku conveys a mood, without mentioning the person or mood.

Every place, every moment in time, is full of poetry. All we have to do is open up to it, allow it, express it.

Poetry is always possible.

Haiku On Instagram: Most days I share my #creativemoments on Instagram. I’d love to know about yours.  Share a picture of something you’ve made, an experience you’ve enjoyed, or a moment of creative presence. To ensure I see your posts, hashtag #creativemoments or #gocreative and tag me: @ornaross

Be More Creative With Bruce Springsteen: On Keeping Creative Faith

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“We’re all honorary citizens of that primal forest, and our burdens and weaknesses always remain.

They are an ineradicable part of ourselves; they are our humanity.

But when we bring light, the day becomes ours and their power to determine our future is diminished.

This is the way it works. The trick is, you can only brighten the forest from beneath the canopy of its trees . . . from within.

To bring the light, you must first make your way through the bramble-filled darkness.

Safe travels!”

Excerpt From: Born to Run

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