THE WHEEL OF CREATIVITY®

I sat down to work this morning and browsed my iTunes library for a bit of music to accompany my work. I came across a name I had not noticed there in quite a while. A little distraction ensued, which has now led to this post. That name was Ben Solee.

I’ll let you discover the wonderful talent of Ben Solee on your own, but I want to share where this little distraction has led me today. Track number eight in Ben’s album “Learning to Bend” is called “Panning for Gold.” It’s a tender and soulful tune about God that moves me deeply, as God asks that, with all the beauty he has left us in the world, we help him remember where he’s put it. Ben can say this much better than I can, so I’m going to let him do so. Enjoy!

 

 

If there has ever been a time in history when the world’s in need of beauty, it’s now. What is the unique beauty you’re here to add to the stream of life? It could be the smile you give the shopkeeper or the song you sing on TV. Whatever corner of the world you’re in today, show me the beauty. Let your creative light shine.

This Sunday, April 21, I will share mine. Please join me for a half-hour of beauty in a free live teleconference

“Discover the Wheel of Creativity: Your Compass for Creative Living.”

Click here to register for the call.

Share on Facebook

I just watched a very inspiring video of Michele Obama speaking to a group of influencers in Chicago about young people and gun violence (which is a terrible problem in certain areas of Chicago).

She spoke very personally about her experience growing up there and how the only thing that made the difference for her was opportunity – opportunities created by her parents who made sure she had the chance to be involved in things that stimulated her.

She talked about Hadiya Pendleton, the 15-year-old girl who marched in the parade for Barack’s inauguration, who was shot and killed in the park a week or so later.

She talked about, of course, not only gun control but the need to create alternatives for kids who now spend all their energy watching their backs. I was very moved. At the end she talked about words versus actions, and making a real difference.

I guess it struck me so deeply in part because I woke up this morning feeling very weary of words, still thinking about the film I watched last night: PINA. What a powerful testament to the work of choreographer Pina Bausch, Wim Winders’ love letter to his dear friend.

Pina Bausch is dead now, but the dance company she worked with for more than 20 years is still performing her work. They spoke about how she saw them, and how she called them to go places in themselves they had never gone, or didn’t even know existed.

The film opened with her talking about the limitations of words and the power of dance to say what words can’t. It ended with her inviting one of her dancers simply to “keep on searching” to keep looking for the place in herself she had not found yet. And I was struck with the emptiness of words when they are not inspired with the energy of that personal discovery.

“You can’t take someone where you haven’t been yourself,” it is said. I am up against this every day now, as I must confront my own personal limitations (fears, judgments, insecurities and preferences) if I am to keep evolving and help create a better world. So for me today, my intention is to speak less, act clearly and live from the center of my being. Maybe I’ll succeed; maybe I won’t. But it will be worth a try.

Just for this day, what is your intention?

Experience the Wheel of Creativity’s power to help you discover the undiscovered in yourself with my FREE Daily Centering Meditation. Click here to download the recording.

Share on Facebook

Traveling back and forth to England during these past few years has introduced me to a culture of people who know that the sun will not always shine, and it must be enjoyed right now. This has been a powerful mirror for me to see myself.

One of the things I’ve learned about myself over the years is that I wait. Sometimes this is a wise choice. Sometimes it’s not.

Let’s look at the first kind of waiting first. There have been a few times in my life when I’ve made decisions because I felt a sense of urgency, external pressure. People were waiting on me. Things needed to happen. Someone else was going to get it first. Even as I signed on the dotted line, I knew. “This is not right.” But I went ahead anyway. That kind of decision has always cost me, usually financially.

But there is another kind of waiting that’s more a habit than a choice. And it’s not particularly helpful. For example, I’ve observed over the years my tendency to buy beautiful fresh fruits and vegetables at the local farmers market, bring them home with joy, and then let them sit in the fridge until they have lost their luster. All too often, I’ve found  myself waiting until they are too far gone to eat. This in fact makes me very sad, because I hate for anything that has lost its life to be wasted.

The first kind of (not) waiting taught me to honor my uncertainty: “I don’t know, and I don’t know and I don’t know. And then one day, I know.” The second kind of waiting has taught me how to seize the day. Both taught me about the  power of knowing what I want and taking action on it.

More than any other station in the Wheel of Creativity, I hear new clients identify with the Anorexia station. Anorexia is the place in the creative process where you are paralyzed with the automatic No. Over time, self-protection becomes compulsive avoidance. And years can pass as you wait to become worthy of your dream.

Wherever you are in your life today, you will never be younger, never have more energy, never have more time ahead of you to achieve your dreams. When your heart calls to you, stop, look and listen. And then get up and cross the street. Tomorrow it might be raining.

What are you waiting for? What calls you to cross the street?

If you’d like to read more about the Wheel of Creativity, click here to buy the book on Amazon.

See you in the Wheel!

Share on Facebook

Today is the first day of Spring. 

Harbinger of all things new and vibrant and pure.

Like the four seasons in each year, The Wheel of Creativity is divided into four quarters.

As you move around the Wheel from Home to Chaos and back again, these four quarters, like seasons, take you into new energetic places.

 

 

Four Quarters of the Wheel

1. Vision is the domain of the mind and corresponds to the element of air. It is where your thoughts rule, and where ideas are generated.
2. Exploration is the domain of the spirit and corresponds to the element of fire. It is where your intuition takes you out away from what you know, and where you do your research.
3. Incubation is the domain of the heart and corresponds to the element of water. It is where your emotions nourish the seed of the new growing within you, and where you begin developing a prototype.
4. Cultivation is the domain of the body and corresponds to the element of earth. It is where your sensations connect you with the world around you, and where you do the work to make your idea real and useful in the world.

Four Seasons in One Day

Your thoughts are the lines you draw on the canvas of your life. They outline the pictures you make, whether a single creative project or an overarching career track that leads you through your life. They give the structure to the creations you will develop in your day and in your life.

Your intuitions – hunches or instincts – lead you out of your head into the world around you to discover what you don’t know, to engage with others and with what’s already in the world around your idea. Your spirit inspires the work and makes it universal, taking it beyond your limited personal vision into the context of all of life.

Your emotions and your feelings are the colors you use to paint within the lines you’ve drawn with your thoughts. They give richness and depth and texture and your original idea. They give space for the character of the new thing to emerge on its own and restore your passion as you fall in love with the work you’re doing.

And finally, your senses connect you with the physical world around you. They put you into the real experience of life. They connect you with other human beings who share that experience, those who will view your work, connect with it and be moved by it.

Whatever Comes… Be Inspired

Your circumstances are the subject of your creative work. They are the model in your figure drawing class, the protagonist in your story, the rhythm of your poem.

Everything in the world around you inspires you, either by your love or hate of it. Your work of art is what you do with those things, the forms you create with your mind, spirit, heart and body. Every one of us has a different vision, and every vision is important and valuable and creative. Your sketch comes only through you. The world is richer when you let it come and poorer when you don’t.

Reach out and Take Action

If you’d like to find out more about how you can use the Wheel of Creativity in your life, have fun exploring this blog. And sign up for updates on my Spring book tour itinerary to find out when I’ll be in a city near you.

Share on Facebook

There was a lot of talk last night in the “Love the Life you Live” telecourse about reviews and rejection and Grammy speeches. The members of the group dared to share their best and worst case scenarios, most of which I’ve indulged in myself along the way. They are the fears we all have for the creative work that comes from our hearts.

What came through to me so strongly is a feeling we’ve learned alongside math and spelling:

 

“I only want to do this if I can be sure it’s going to work.”

 

“Work” is defined in ways unique to each of us, but always occurs somewhere in the future. And it always seems beyond our control. There is an alternative.

Well trained as consumers from our first digital image, we learn to do what we do…

• because it’s going to make us famous
• because it’s going to make us rich
• because it’s going to make us attractive

…because it’s going to get us something we think we need to be enough.

But creative people learn that there’s an incomparable sense of aliveness only attached to doing what we do…

• because we can
• because it pleases us
• because we love it
• because we must

Internal, External

 

The first of these two points of view is  externally oriented while the second is internally oriented. The first is designed to increase your value in the eyes of others, while the other fulfills you as you are. The first leaves you at the mercy of others, while the second puts your worth into your own hands.

Too often, we want others to find the value in what we do because it means (to us) that they find value in us, especially when it is the work that comes from our hearts.

But each of us must define the value of our work, and we can only define that value for ourselves. As a creator, part of your work is to be clear about why you do it and what it gives you. As a viewer or listener, you also determine whether a work has value for you; that is your own personal response.

• Finding the value for yourself has to come first. Why must you do what you do? What does it give you?

• The value to others is discovered as you put it out there, test it, keep working and refining it.

• Value to society is yet another question, a commercial one.

Why Create?

 

Your experience of success depends on your intention for your work in combination with what others need and want.

• To create only because others will buy your work is to industrialize the process.

• To create only because it’s what you must do is to purify the process.

• To create what you must and then go about the ongoing process of connecting it with others is to find the deepest connecting links between your work in the world and what makes us all human. It’s also to accept that not everyone is going to like it or find the value in it.

But the value is still there, at least to you.

 

If a plant can’t feed us does it not have value?

If a stuffed doggie has no bark, does it not comfort?

If an unknown painter paints, does it not enrich the world?

 

What if you were to do your creative work just because you can? Because you love it? Because you must? And keep doing it until it connects with others who find the value in it. What kind of life would that be?

But what we tend to do when someone may not find our work valuable for them is to connect with them in the negative: “If they don’t find value for them, they don’t find it valuable, which means it has no value for anyone, which means I have no value.” A very deadly chain of sentiments for a creative person.

And how could anyone create under those conditions?

 

Best Case, Worst Case

 

On the other hand, if you start with the inherent value of doing the work because you can, because you must, the value is there already. Then you are free to engage in the creative process that comes after, which is promoting the work.

Many creators, it must be said, are not publicly recognized in their lifetimes. But we live in a world today where our work can spread to millions like wildfire. There are hundreds, if not thousands out there who will find value our work if we are willing to take that journey too.

I think we have to be very honest with ourselves about why we do what we do. We can’t afford to be surprised at the end of the road if we get something different. We have to tell the truth about what we are really seeking and decide if that is really what we want. Only then will our work be rightly aligned with the results we produce.

Even more important, we cannot expect our creative work to fill the voids within us for recognition for respect for someone else to tell us that we have value as human beings. I wonder if this isn’t why fame is so destructive to so many: “You mean, I went through all that, and I still feel this way inside? Damn!”

If the work itself does not fulfill us, we are risking a great deal indeed. We are risking our lives. And we’ve missed the value of the gift we’ve been given for ourselves.

 

And you?

 

I’m taking a poll on The Wheel of Creativity Facebook page. Please take a few seconds to head over there and let me know… How do you define the value of your work? Why do you create?

 

Share on Facebook

For the past four weeks, I’ve been running a tele-course about the creative heart. What is the creative heart? It’s your passion for something. It’s what you love. It’s what gets you out of bed in the morning. It’s what you long for and can’t live without.

It’s Not the Goals

Just a couple of months ago, we started another new year. Seems to me that with each passing year, the sense of longing for what I’ve still not managed to achieve grows stronger. A lot of people set resolutions, make new goals, commit to themselves that this will be the year. And more often than not, by the end of February, it’s becoming clear that this may not be the year either. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

In my experience, most of us hit points in our lives where we just stall. And this occurs more frequently around the thing we really want. What we said we were were committed to doing doesn’t get done again. We run out of fuel. And the fuel is not better goals, less distractions, better time management (though all those things are part of the equation).

It’s the Passion

The fuel the fuel is passion. It’s love. It’s excitement. It’s being in love with your life (at least one aspect of your life) in a way that keeps you showing up not because you have to, but because you just can’t stay away. And the truth is that what we call creativity and what we call art it has this quality. It’s the kind of thing that we just absolutely love and we can’t really live without it.

Passion’s Close Companions

But stuff comes up and gets in the way. Fears. Judgments. Self-censorship. Self-judgment. “I’m not good enough.” ” I don’t have what it takes.” “Who do you think you are?” When we get close to the thing we value the most, these are the voices we hear. I hear them all the time from the people I work with; and yes, I have them too.

Sometimes the voices are internal and sometimes external. They are what I call mind fields. The mind is a nuclear device, whose power is at our disposal if we can learn to manage it. It is also perhaps the most defended place on the human landscape. It arms itself against what it does not know, what it cannot explain or predict, what it fears. It buries its mines deep on the very path to our deepest desires. The more precious the treasure, the more treacherous the path. But it doesn’t need rigid control. It needs love.

Disarming Behavior

So what do you do with a mine field? You have to go in there, locate the mines and disarm them. This is not an easy path and a lot of people would rather just avoid it completely. Where your treasure is, there lies danger also. That which you love the most is the place where you are most vulnerable, the place where you’ll feel pain, the place where you’ll come up against all the reasons your dream is still undone. I can speak from personal experience and say the road is hard and there are mines in the way. But you can disarm them. Your passion, your desire and your commitment to get to the other side will see you through.

Whether it’s a piece of art, a new business, a new wardrobe, a fitter body, or a more loving relationship, you will come out the other side having created what you long for. And the journey to it will have created you. My work is to help you find yourself on the journey, to keep moving and to reach your goal transformed.

Sound like a feasible plan? Then let me invite you to join me this coming Sunday, March 3rd, for a free half-hour teleconference:

Back on Track, Here and Now: Creating Your Best Year Ever

which will introduce my next four week course, starting March 5th:

Love the Life you Live: Romancing the Mind

 

Click here to learn more.

 

Share on Facebook

This Thursday, February 21st, I’ll be waiting for you at The Nomad Chef Secret Restaurant in Central London for the UK launch of my book:

The Wheel of Creativity: Taking Your Place in the Adventure of Life

Will you be There?

This party celebrates more than the launch of my book.

It is also a celebration of all your dreams still being dreamt and all your plans waiting to be laid down. It is a celebration of what you are here on Earth to do.

The Adventure Starts Here

Come join me and a select group of creative spirits — from artists to entrepreneurs — as we share an evening of solace for body and soul. This evening offer you safe harbour from life’s creative storms, just for a little while. Come get inspired to embark on the adventure of your lifetime.

Canapés and bubbly will be provided by The Nomad Chef.

Register Now

Click here to register and get directions to the secret restaurant.

liveCREATIVE!

Katherine

 

Share on Facebook

Whatever their shape, size, color or creed…

there is a great big world of people to love.

We all have a Valentine.

Let love flow through you today.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

from The Wheel of Creativity

and

Katherine Robertson-Pilling

 

Share on Facebook

Can science tell us where creativity comes from? No. Can it tell us what creativity gives us? Perhaps. Makes for an interesting conversation anyway! And a worthwhile 16-minute break with Dr. Charles Limb.

 

 

Any thoughts to share? Post a comment!

Oh, and while you’re at it…

liveCREATIVE!

Love,
Katherine

Share on Facebook

I’ve always loved the work of the artist Yves Klein. The blue he created, now known as Yves Klein Blue, is so intense and beautiful and profound and bright all at the same time that it always just shoots straight to the heart of me. I’m touched by this color, and thus by the man and his work.

Process versus Product

Reading this quote this morning, I was reminded of the struggle that I think many of us face, which is finding the balance between our creative process and the product we produce through it.

We are all in the world to produce products, and we long to see them enjoyed by other people. At the same time, if the work we produce in the world  comes at the cost of the process, if we don’t fully experience the creation itself, then our measure of success rests only on what other people think.

Creativity exists in both the creative process and the products we produce through it. The cycle is not complete without both. This, I believe, is why so many of the people I speak and work with are frustrated. Either they are so focused on making a living that the work they long to do never gets done. Or they produce the work but no one is buying it.

Both are Required:

1. We need to make space in our lives to listen to and honor our creative longings.
2. We need to continue the process until the someone is touched by our work.

Believe me, this takes much more than inspiration. It takes courage and diligence and years of work. It also takes presence and allowing and trust. We do the work for the work itself. And we keep doing it until it reaches others.

What Needs to Shift?

So I’d like to ask you today to think about Yves Klein’s statement, and  leave a comment about how you interpret these words for yourself. What, for you, is the right relationship between your creative process and the products you produce? What needs to shift in your life to bring the two together?

I look forward to reading what you have to say.

liveCREATIVE!

Katherine

Share on Facebook