Things get rough. In the smooth times you don’t believe they will but, sure enough, here it comes again. You feel the ground start to shift. Little pebbles go skittering by. Your gut starts trembling and there you are, right in the middle of a tectonic shift, wanting everything to stay where it is, but it just won’t and what are you going to do now?
Your job is to take the next step toward the light.
Don’t panic. This isn’t end-of-life advice. It just works right up into the end.
You are moving toward the light of comfort and joy.
Comfort is like a wash of warm water sliding over your body so that all your muscles relax. Your mind goes quiet. Your emotions smooth out. You feel content. You need comfort when life hurts too much: painful feelings, sore muscles, crushed dreams, broken hearts.
Joy is like a shiver of pleasure that runs up your spine and through your body so that you feel like you have beams of light shooting out the top of your head and your fingertips and toes. Your mind and heart are open wide and ready for adventure. You need joy when life is too empty: when you’re bored or weary or lonely or out of dreams.
Practicing life as a compassionate creative experiment keeps you going when things get rough. It takes that roughness and makes it part of the fabric of a wonderful, treasured, imaginative life.
Practice means you come back to it over and over. Practice means you are not perfect. Practice means you are always learning. Practice means it gets easier and you get happier the more you show up.
Compassionate means you are kind and tender-hearted toward yourself and others. Compassionate means you forgive and start fresh. Compassionate means you open your arms to the world as it is while you’re out to make it a more beautiful place.
Creative means all yours, unique to you. Creative expresses who you are without you even trying. Creative means you use your imagination with words and marks and sounds and motion and emotion
Experiment means you’re trying different things to see what happens. Experiment means there is no failure because you are gathering information. Experiment means change is part of what’s happening instead of a rude interruption.
This book includes:
- descriptions of the monsters of doubt and uncertainty: why they appear and how to respond to them (both short and long form)
- what creative experiments are, why you might want to play with them, how to learn from them
- parts of the creative process, how to move through them and prompts for experimenting in them
- practices that help us create lives where we can weather the storms, celebrate the good stuff and keep showing up.
Not yet convinced? View the first few pages (PDF)