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

Sometimes in the course of the day, I observe my tendency to take hold of my life and try to control my way through it. Whether I’m trying to make something happen that I really believe in or to keep something from happening that I think is bad or wrong, I close my fists around life and try to have my way with it.

Have you ever noticed that the more you try to force your will on life, the more your desired outcome avoids you? This approach breeds a sense of urgency and desperation that drives you farther and farther from your own true place in the creative process of living. It’s a feeling that if you don’t make it happen, nothing will happen. Big lie. And one I tell myself way too many days of my life.

There are two fundamental principles in creating the life you want. One is receptive and the other is active. Yin and yang. One is about being open and receiving the unforeseen gifts there in every day. The other is about taking hold and making the most of what comes. One without the other is an incomplete system, like a hand that closes but won’t open or opens but won’t close. It doesn’t work.

You are not in control of the creative process. You have a responsibility for how you engage with it, but you’re not in control. The more you close your fists, the less you allow life’s creative energy to flow through you. At the same time, if you only open to receive without structure, and nothing remains. Does this mean you don’t have to work at it? Oh, no. That’s the other big lie.

Life flows like water, seeking the openings to give it direction. How would you hold a sip of water in your hand? Squeeze too tight and you squeeze the life out of it. Open too wide and it will all slip away.

To hold what flows, stay open and give it structure. Show up every day. Set your targets. Then set them aside and focus on what’s in front of you. Don’t think about the past or the future. Just do the work. And then go out with your friends in the evening.

To learn more about the active and receptive principles in creating your life, check out The Wheel of Creativity on Amazon or sign up to get my monthly Creative Adventure Journal over there on the right.

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

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

Share on Facebook

The Call

One of my first big creative adventures came in 1994. I was living in Chicago and had just received a fellowship for a Master’s program in Interdisciplinary Arts at Columbia College when I got the call. The intuitive calling, which came through my morning writing practice, was to leave Chicago and move to LA.

I had no rational explanation, no job, no place to live in LA and only one friend there. I made my living as a writer, but the calling was not to write in LA (though I later did so). Still it was so clear and true that I knew I had to trust it. So I responded. I gratefully declined the fellowship, packed my car and set out.

The Journey

A friend of mine, who agreed to make the cross-country trip with me, gave me a recording of songs he had compiled. My favorite was “In The Garden” by Van Morrison. In this haunting song, Morrison sings about a young woman who returns to a garden transformed; the refrain of the song is:

“No guru, no method, no teacher

just you and I and Nature in the garden.”

I remember at that time feeling how deeply true this was for me, as I set out on the journey that would transform me.

The Mystery

What I was doing did not make sense at all. It was high risk and the outcome was highly unpredictable. Strange things happened from there. The place I was to stay fell through. My car was broken into and later stolen. Someone offered me a gorgeous home with five cuddly kitties. I got the first TV writing job I applied for. I found a community. I made a new life. Life itself took me out of all that I knew, made me very uncomfortable and then transformed me. And that was just the beginning.

The Path

A couple of years ago, I met someone at a party who’s become a good friend of mine since. She asked what I did, and when I told her she replied, “So, you’re a guru!” “No,” I cried, “Not that word, please!” Definitely not a guru.

Ever since my Chicago days, I have felt that when we look to gurus or we name people as our gurus, we often give them responsibility for our own path. Of course there are many things that we can learn from other people. There are many, many people ahead of us on any path who can guide us. But the truth we must live will always be found deep within ourselves through our own connection with Life.

We listen. We live. We learn. The path of truth, as the mystics have always known, is personal experience, validated by Nature in respectful relation to the rest of life.

The Hero… You

Each of you has a unique journey to make in life. There is no one who can teach you what direction you should go, because the path is yours alone. This is why the Hero is an archetype present in almost all stories and myths around the world. You make the journey, and the journey transforms you. This is what it means to…

Live CREATIVE.

With love always,

Katherine xo

To learn more about my experience and the key stops on your life’s creative journey, check out my book, The Wheel of Creativity: Taking Your Place in the Adventure of Life, on Amazon.

Share on Facebook

To be yourself

in a world

that is constantly trying

to make you

something else

is the greatest

accomplishment.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

What would it mean to the world and to you this year if you were to be yourself? To really, deeply dare to take your place in this world and live the creative adventure your life is meant to be?

 

It could change everything.

Join me and a select group of people in exploring this question in a FREE half-hour call:

“From Resolutions to Evolution: Creating Your Best Year Ever”

This Sunday, January 20 at 9 AM Pacific | 11 AM Central | Noon Eastern | 5 PM GMT.

Click the LIVE CALL tab above to register for the call.

 

Let’s make 2013 your best year ever!

Share on Facebook

What are you pulling?

Today I’m going to try something, and I’d love to know your thoughts about it. Today I begin a creative experiment by recording a video journal a few times each week. In each journal, I will invite you into my private world, behind the photos, quotes and status updates I create on the Internet. What’s really going on for me today? What am I pulling?

How can this help you?

For many years of my life, I made my living writing and producing TV/film projects. I still appreciate the candid, in-your-face kind of filmmaking that captures the authentic moments of real life. The more eccentric the people, the more interesting they are to watch.

Well, somehow in the intense process required to write, publish and promote my book, I’ve found myself getting caught up in a lot of should’s lately. I have focused on the things I thought I had to do for people to discover my book and benefit from it. Somehow I lost touch along the way with what I most love doing. And that, as I well know, is a sure-fire way to disappear into the oblivion of my own mind.

I know I’m not alone. So my hope is that my little experiment will help you find your creative process in the midst of your day-to-day life. If we can’t sit down over coffee today, this is the next best thing.

Let me know what you think!

• Leave your comments here below.
• Post your own video response on YouTube.
• Join me for that coffee on January 20′s live coaching call to take the next step

Live CREATIVE! Let’s create the best year ever!

 

Share on Facebook