BOOKS ON MY SHELF
1.The Creative Habit by Twlya Tharp
2. What We Ache For by Oriah Mountain Dreamer
3. The Nine Modern Day Muses and A Body Guard: 10 Guides to Creative Inspiration by Jill Badonsky
The Creative Habit
by Twyla Tharp
If you want to become inspired to rise at 5:30 a.m., hail a taxi for a ride to your local gym, eat hard-cooked eggs for breakfast, read only top-notch literature and collaborate with highly accomplished people, let choreographer Twyla Tharp be your guide. In her book The Creative Habit Tharp shares her best tips for establishing a rigorous work ethic and productive creative lifestyle.
From preparing to being creative, to organizing one’s time and projects, engaging the world deeply and climbing out of ruts, Tharp shares stories about her own creative process and activities for the reader to try. Her book brims with artist anecdotes—how John Lennon and Paul McCartney got the idea for their song Eight Days a Week to Igor Stravinsky’s getting-started ritual of playing Bach fugues. The book is a gold mine of interesting stories about people living creative adventures.
Following are a sample of her ideas:
1.Prepare to be creative by establishing a Getting-Started Ritual: Every morning Tharp hails a taxi to take her to the Pumping Iron Gym. It’s not the two hour workout that constitutes her ritual. Tharp says her ritual is over after she’s told the driver where to go. According to Tharp, rituals eliminate the question of why am I doing this and erase the question of whether or not I like doing it. In addition, a ritual helps cut through the fog of pessimism, fear and distraction. For Tharp, the beginning is when an artist is most at peril for turning back, checking out, giving up or going the wrong way.
2.Write a Creative Autobiography: Tharp lists several questions to be used to stimulate thinking about one’s creative past. This activity can reveal buried childhood passions and dreams, as well as shed light on what has worked in the past and what has derailed.
3.Improvisation: Tharp urges readers to spend 45 minutes a few days a week improvising. “It’s your one opportunity in life to be completely free, with no responsibilities and no consequences. You don’t have to be good or great or even interesting.” Similar to Julia Camerons’ artist date, improv happens in your studio vs. out in the world– a date with yourself and your art form.
4. Field Trips: Tharp says she can’t think her way into an idea. She needs to move. When she’s stuck, she leaves her studio and makes a field trip, one of her methods for “scratching” the world for ideas. According to Tharp, “reading, conversation, environment, culture, heroes, mentors, nature” are all “lottery tickets for creativity.” The question for Tharp is not WHERE she gets her ideas—they’re everywhere—it’s HOW she gets her ideas. She distinguishes between good and bad, big and little ideas. Big ideas usually have an ulterior motive, fame or fortune, while little ideas are the building blocks to creativity. She encourages readers to make the world their museum by going on field trips and walks in search of ideas—to a museum, local gallery, hospital emergency room, bus station, construction site, mall.
What We Ache For
by Oriah Mountain Dreamer
According to author Oriah Mountain Dreamer, What We Ache For is an invitation to cultivate one’s essential creative impulses within the context of one’s deeply sensual and sacred nature. For her, creative work is an accessible road to wholeness, to the unfolding of one’s soul, to what is real and deeper and larger. Through creative work we marry meaning and matter in our lives and in the world. Offering questions for contemplation, suggestions for doing creative work as well as writing exercises, the author encourages and guides readers to build lives that support and inspire their creativity, that allow creative expression to happen. Whether it’s setting up a space in which to work or developing a daily practice, each person who aches to create must call on his or her will in the service of the creative impulse, all the while surrendering the process to something larger, something spiritual.
Creativity requires us to begin again and again and again—with faith each day, at the beginning of each new project, sometimes within the context of a single work session. While we can’t make creative expression happen, we can, suggests the author, increase the odds by showing up. By treating creative work as a practice, she suggests, one that engages you fully for its own sake, you develop a structure for showing up and doing your work, even when you don’t feel like it.
Here’s What Works for Me:
When I experience resistance or procrastination, I seek to understand the energy at work. Trying to blast through resistance with will power and discipline is a cognitive effort. How does that work for you? For those of us who need a bodily or emotional method of romancing resistance, EFT is surprisingly easy, elegant and effective. Please take a look at Thriving Now’s program Self-Sabotage: Removing Your Sub-Conscious Blocks. I am an affiliate of Thriving Now because I’ve experienced how tapping/EFT brings clarity and energetic shifts that move me from not working to working.
The Nine Modern Day Muses (and a Bodyguard)
by Jill Badonsky
The Modern Day Muses offer gifts of playful and profoundly practical ways to tap into your creativity and overcome blocks of fear, overwhelm, perfectionism, procrastination, low self-confidence and self-sabotage. You can call on the muses if you have difficulty making time for your creativity or experience problems staying focused.
Jill Badonsky, author of The Nine Modern Day Muses (and a Body Guard): 10 Guides to Creative Inspiration, has made the creative process modernly accessible by personifying her ten creative principles in the personalities of the Modern Day Muses and the quirky Body Guard Arnold. Jill is also the founder of Kaizen-Muse Creativity Coaching ® and author of The Awe Manac: A Daily Dose of Wonder.
Meet the Muses:
1. Aha-phrodite: The passion of an idea is moved to the next stage by using the powers of paying attention in its myriad of ways: observation, questions, shifting thoughts to possibility and the present, embracing inspiration with laser focus.2. Albert: The ability to think and be different differentiates the idea, the process and the person from everyone else. It begins the process of innovation and in many circumstances moves one from playing small to … joy and expansion.3. Bea Silly: Playing with ideas, making the process fun instead of serious, lightening up instead of choking the process with rigidity, these approaches allow creativity to arise as it would for the uninhibited child.
4. Muse Song: Abundant self-nurturing, kind thoughts and surrounding the self with believing spirits has an underestimated effect on creative output. Techniques to give oneself credit and to focus on what works, shift the creativity seeker to coming from a full place instead of an empty one.
5. Spills: The permission to be imperfect, to lower standards, to relax into the process has busted blocks for an untold amount of creative seekers. When practice is touted as essential and is made easy and enticing – progress and joy is inevitable.
6. Audacity: Courage, confidence, liberation from the opinions of others = creative freedom and grand leaps into creative evolution even when small steps are taken.
7. Lull: Do not underestimate the importance of taking a break, allowing subconscious connections to take place during inactivity, taking stock of gratitude, daydreaming, dappling in other areas… for these are dynamic tools in the creative process.
8. The Shadow Muse: Embrace your darkness for its potential to inspire art, for the freedom it gives you to be human unapologetically, for the understanding, compassion and connection it provides you with for creative breakthroughs and light.
9. Marge: One must actually show-up and engage in the process for creativity to happen, but there are ways that make it easier. Small steps, structure, classes, partnering, creativity-coaching, all these things give the sometimes distracted creative seeker a container in which to thrive.
10. The Bodyguard: Because of all the detractors to the creative process, there needs to be ways to ruthlessly protect the idea, the intention and the time set aside for creative endeavors. The Bodyguard has answers, anchors, comebacks, and a few other secrets.
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