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How Can Winter Inspire Your Creative Genius?
The winter season is a wonderful time to immerse yourself in the creative process! It brings a rich opportunity to awaken the “creative genius within” by exploring the gifts that are found in nature’s darkness. It allows us to reflect on our personal and creative journeys, taking a closer look at who we are – underneath the layers of life. By looking for the “light” – and knowing that it’s there, somewhere, waiting to be discovered – we can reach a place where our personal reflection begins to shed its own light. It’s a time to ponder where we’ve been on our creative journey, how we got to where we are now – and where to go from here. It’s an opportunity to explore new ways of…
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Exploring Life’s Pivotal Moments
Fiction writer, Sandra Kring once noted, “We work hard to disown the parts of our lives that were painful, difficult, or sad. But just as we can’t rip chapters out of a book and expect the story to still make sense, so we cannot rip chapters out of our past and expect our lives to still make sense. Keep every chapter of your life intact, and keep on turning the pages. Sooner or later you’ll understand why every scene, every chapter was needed.” Throughout our life journey, we encounter a variety of different experiences. We meet new people, we make friends, we get an education, we take certain jobs, we change our career, we explore certain hobbies, we find love, we experience break-ups, we make…
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Ten Poems for Difficult Times
Our world seems to be filled with chaos and confusion these days – with many people searching for purposeful meaning and a deep desire to find their place in the midst of it all. This is where art comes in. Whether it’s on the page, the canvas or the screen – art has a way of bringing meaning to everyday challenges and to a complicated world. It allows the darkness to be filtered through a mechanism of creative self-expression that brings light to a deeper understanding. Poetry has often served in this way, as an artistic vehicle for capturing life’s most complicated abstractions – weaving them into a symphonic language that feels meaningful and comforting. In my work with highly-creative women who are on soulful…
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Dancing with the Contrast of Darkness and Light
Our lunar goddess is rich with wisdom. Through her phases, she teaches us how to move from darkness into light with the gracefulness of a ballroom dance. We step in, we step out – and we circle back around again. And with each step of this dance, we gain a new experience – a new awareness. What do we receive in darkness that we may not see in the light? And how does the light magnify what’s tucked away in darkness? This is where the gift of contrast comes in – and how the wisdom of the moon serves as a wonderful teacher. Imagine looking up at the night sky during a first quarter lunar phase – and seeing a moon that’s half lit. It…
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From Anxiety to Love
Ever since I began my entrepreneurial journey, I’ve been told by business coaches and consultants, “People pay for speed.” I’ve watched companies compete for contracts saying, “We can do it faster.” I’ve observed executives and managers pushing their employees and team members to “get it done NOW.” And as a mother of two teenagers, I’ve noticed this same obsession showing up in the area of education. I’ve heard countless politicians, analysts, and various experts go on and on about “the race to the top” – where states (and countries) race to get student test scores to the top of the list as quickly as possible. I’ve even noticed in the medical field, our tendency to over-prescribe medications, looking for that “quick-fix.” No one has the…
