Antidote
The aesthetic details at Cienfuegos: one of many things that inspired me this week
As an antedote to yesterday’s post – not to nullify it, only to surround it with other things that are also true in my life right now (good old “yes, and”) – I offer up this jumbled list of things that have inspired me in the past week:
- Poetry by Billy Collins
- The latest issue of HOW Design (thanks, @dloehr)
- Stinky, a beautiful food shop in Brooklyn full of beautiful things
- My friends – their strength and grace and humor and spark
- Party Down – good comedy
- Peonies
- Hydrangeas
- My parents’ photos from their trip to Europe – the gardens in southern France, the vistas in Spain
- Defying Gravity
- The beautiful decor and attention to aesthetic detail at Cienfuegos, where we drank pink rum punch served from a shiny silver bowl
- Photos of brownstone apartments
- Volunteers who are helping clean up the BP oil spill
- The “Tweets of Old” Twitter feed – so simple and creative
- Jonsi
- The Artist’s Way – paging through it for inspiration
- And so much more
What inspired you this week?
Try Something New
I hate the gym. Always have, and always will. For a while, I’ve been thinking about taking a dance class as an alternate cardio workout, but for whatever reason – latent fear, laziness – I haven’t pursued that instinct…until now.
Today I took a Zumba class at Peridance Capezio Center. (If you haven’t heard of Zumba, it’s a mix of Latin dance and aerobics… or, as the New York Times puts it, a “cardio-dance routine.”) I have no formal dance training, and I haven’t done an intense cardio workout….well, ever. So today’s class kicked my butt. But also: It was so much fun.
I looked ridiculous (more…)
The Artist’s Way
“Life is a creative endeavor. It is active, not passive…When we experience our lives as flat and lackluster, it is our consciousness that is at fault. We hold the inner key that turns our lives from thankless to fruitful.” – Julia Cameron
In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron writes about two essential tools for creative living: (more…)
Getting Unstuck
Stuck in the mud
A friend of mine is feeling stuck – needing a push to do the thing she wants to do. I gave her some advice that I thought might be helpful for anyone needing help moving from dream to action:
- Surround yourself with people who support your dream, and you. (Some people energize us; others drain us. Pursue the former.)
- Do things that make you feel like your best, most powerful self. For me, this often = yoga.
- Turn the abstract into the concrete. Make a schedule of all the steps you need to follow to turn your dream into a reality, and commit to it.
- Write about your dream. Write down what scares you: why aren’t you taking action? Don’t censor your response – why try to keep information about you, from you? YOU will know that you aren’t getting the full story. Tell the truth. The sooner you can start admitting what you want to yourself, the sooner you can articulate it to others, and commit to doing what it takes to make it happen.
Then, of course, there are opportunities like the blogathon in which I’m participating – a structured challenge that takes the choice away from you, in part, and puts you on a track to just doing something, without deciding whether to do it.
What else do you do to get unstuck?
Photo above by David Schenfeld on Flickr
Related Reading:
- Be in the scene you want to be in
- Sage advice from Martha Graham (from my former blog, Creative DC)
- Creativity: daily practice, or fevered state? (Creative DC)
The Practice of Meaningful Work
Cartoon by Steve Heath
As I’ve said before, I consider my yoga practice a template for how I live my life (credit for the “template” metaphor goes to Cyndi Lee, though Kimberly Wilson was the first to introduce me to the larger concept). Once you immerse yourself in yogic philosophy, it’s hard not find connections between yoga and, well, everything (I feel the same way about improv). And yet, despite the fact that finding meaningful work is one of the major themes of my adult life, I’d never connected the lessons of yoga practice to the process of finding my “right livelihood”…that is, until I came across this article by Tama J. Keives on the Kripalu website. (more…)
