Is This Not a Good Time For You? Here's Some Help Figuring out Why

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How do you correct negative feelings?

This is such a seemingly simple question.  How you feel is how you feel.  Perception is reality.  Many times I find that when I sit down and get real quiet... real honest with a situation I am able to get at the heart of the matter.   

Pay attention to when you are having these negative feelings.  Pay attention to the people around you, the setting, your mood, the time of year, the day of the week, morning vs evening.   

Really look at the situation like you are an investigative reporter.  

 What do you realize about the situation?

Place those awarenesses against other situations that are causing you incredible stress.

  You may find some simple ways to shift the way you are approaching these types of situations.   

For me if I have am especially difficult week at work,  I simply cannot commit to a social outing until I have some quiet time.  I am simply unable to engage in the situations like this  without feeling extremely depleted.  

 That is a difficult line to draw: self care the way I need to experience it vs the societal norm which is to be ready to socialize at a moment's notice.

ACTION MOMENT:

What are some realizations that you are having from this exercise?  What realities do you need to acknowledge about your self care?

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So Do you Really Need MORE Information Before you Make that Decision?

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what is true vs what feels true

Tommy Newberry defines feelings as "data you must filter through your reason."

What happens when your way of reasoning is misaligned?  

Think about it this way: 

Are there certain things you used to believe to be true as a child that you no longer believe?  What changed?

  You had access to more information. Other people have different experiences than you shaping them and causing them to form different opinions, have different outcomes in their lives.  You begin to widen the view of your feelings.  Possibly noticing how they can control you... give you misinformation. 

Action Moment:

Is there a decision you need to make that your feelings are not lining up with?  

Where are you experiencing the discontent? 

Is there a story that you are choosing to tell yourself?  Is there new information that has come your way that you have turned a blind eye to?

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The Decision to Seek More Joy in Your Life

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What Do you Believe About Your Future?

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What do you believe about your future?

How much time have you spent assessing how your life looks now versus 1 year ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago?  If you have not spent much time really getting a clear vision for your future this exercise will reveal the results of that type of living.

The same is true for how much joy you are experiencing.  There needs to be some clear cut agenda for allowing more joy in your life.  What activities do you need to incorporate more of in your life?  What experiences have you had that are causing you anger/misery which you need to make peace with and let go of?  What relationships you need to eliminate all together or to enhance/deepen?

Proverbs 29:18: Without vision, the people perish...

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Who's Your Hero?

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Whose Dream is it?

I have begun listening to the archives on Monica Lee's website Smart Creative Women. 

I go back and forth on listening to these types of podcasts because I am so struck by how many people seemed to have had a bit of an advantage moving into a career as a creative entrepreneur but minimizing that fact a bit.  How many stories have you heard of someone trying to do it with family in tow, no backing from family, refusing to go into credit card debt and no creative community around them. Those are the stories I would like to start hearing about.  

What I have found refreshing about Monica's podcast is that I have stumbled upon a few creative entrepreneurs who did not have the rosy beginnings or who are NOT giving advice such as it's just because I am afraid of having financial abundance in my life.  um.... well I will resist the urge to get snarky.

OK so for this week's Linger question:

The dream that you are working to see come true - have you forgotten whose dream it is?  Are you allowing others to tell you all the must dos to bring it forth, has the dream been pushed and flexed and possibly even gotten so huge that you have forgotten the beauty of why you started to pursue it in the first place? 

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Hello Again

Well where should I begin?  One of the things I appreciate about those who I admire in the helping fields is that they come clean about their need to stop. rest. regroup.  These last few weeks of silence have been just that for me.  Taking my own coaching advice if you will.  Some things just were not going well and I thought I could keeping chugging my way through the sludge and then suddenly I couldn't.  

I needed to stop.  Stop trying to convince others that the path I am on is the right one.  Stop trying to apologize about how different the path was from those around me.  Stop trying to still accommodate the old image of me to keep others feeling comfortable while feeling like a big fat imposter to myself.

So yes I can now see the real me coming through.  The life I know is waiting for me not filled with fear about finances.  Letting go of the need to get approval from those I mistakenly chose as my muses who never made time to cultivate what I wanted so badly in my life.  I forgive them for what they could not give and I forgive myself for not realizing that there were others who have been standing in this void of my life though I still chose to look in the wrong direction for support.

Here I am.  And it is good to be back.

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Sifting Through the Images of the Past

Over the last few weeks I have been sifting through our belongings preparing for another move.  I came across an old memory card and found many "lost" photographs.  We bought our first digital camera when our girl was born hence the time stamps and red eye and all the other newbie mistakes.  

How fast 6 years has gone.  My girl just completed kindergarten, my oldest is heading off to boot camp for the Air Force, my middle son is in college in Oklahoma.  Yes, yes it does all go so fast.

Today we are at 14 days before we head back to where this blended family began: in Arizona.  I watch and wait to see what all these years which have felt like training ground evolve into.  I am ready.

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An Awakening

a view from my living room window in Colorado this week

Have you had an experience that awakened a desire to uncover what inspires your creativity?*

I have always assumed that my son's creative talent came from his father, my sister, my brother.  Though I loved to write, everything else seemed Off Limits to me.  I cannot seem to figure out when I settled into that idea.  Maybe it is simply those roles we choose to take so that we understand where the boundaries are.  I assume that early on in my life I got into the comparison game with family members and just chose to be content with that.

I think my first inklings that maybe I could change my identity in this area was in 2008 when I took a beginner drawing class at a local woman's center.  The first assignment was to draw a piece a fruit.  I chose a pear.  The instructor gave us some instruction on shading techniques and away I went.  And I actually loved the finished product.  There were others in the class who clearly captured the likeness better than I did but there was something else going on for me.  Something about trying it seeing that I was able to draw something that resembled what I wanted to see on the page.  I had experience with that with words.  suddenly I am experiencing this with pencil/paint.  I had pushed passed the barrier that drawing was for others. 

*Question comes from Inner Excavation by Liz Lamoreux 

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Scenes From a Coffee Shoppe

 

Every Saturday morning since the beginning of the year I have had this ritual where I take my girl to a drama class where she is learning scenes from the movie Mary Poppins and then I scoot down the road to sit in a coffee shop.  This has been such a soulful Saturday morning ritual.  I am sad to say this routine will end this week with the final class and official production taking the stage.  

I have taken my copy of Inner Excavation every week along with my lessons from the Hello Soul Hello Business e-course I am currently a part of.  But those first few minutes with my coffee cup and the comfy chair have been just what I need.  If any of you have followed my blogging excursions through the years you know that I have experienced large amounts of solitude in my life.  I am yet again in one of those settings and I am becoming weary.  The e-courses and the artist books have helped me stay connected to the realities that life occurs in seasons and soon I will be on the other side of this.  So in one sense I am sad about this little oasis ending but in another sense it marks the calendar as just a few more weeks until we can move close to friends and connection.

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When You Are Trying to Figure out What is Going on Inside: Just Write

I stand...

taller

stronger

wrapped in prayer

dressed in substance

an inner knowing from within

I stand...

heart filled

at peace

in tune with my life

aligned

present

I stand...

waiting

hoping

striving

gentle

Like leaves on trees

floating to the ground

bowed in adoration

for who I am seeing

I stand...

as me. 

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Clear your Head Take a Walk Breathe in More Life

This is one of the exercises offered in Liz Lamoreaus's book Inner Excavation  where you simply take a walk and record what you see.  In light of our soon departure from Colorado in the next few months I definitely wanted to make a point of doing this. I feel heartsick sometimes about how much I DID NOT document during my 7 months in Germany.  Particularly this one little road that my daughter and I walked almost daily.  We would stop and bleat at the sheep.  We would walk to the pond and feed the ducks.  There was this little ice cream shack that we would sit and have a treat from  - none of these things have a photograph for me to look back on.

So when I tell people how remote the space was we lived in, I do not think I can ever really truly show them.  So THIS TIME I have proof.  Yes we live in a town with a marshal's office.

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20 Words

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Comfort...

Familiar...

Ordinary.

{or}

Come to the Water

{to the}

Dream Giver

Warrior {you are}

{It's} time to 

Journey

Your Dream is

Unique and Important

{and only} yours...

The exercise is from the book Inner Excavation by Liz Lamoreaux.  It is from the section "Creating a Word Toolbox" and invites the reader to take a book off the shelf and pick the first 20 words that the reader is drawn to in the book.  The book I used is The Dream Giver by Bruce Wilkinson.  

"The list is interesting to me.  The words that jump out really capture how this day (1/8/12) was for me.  I feel empowered.  The ideas were flowing and the tone of 2012 was set in an instant."

Reading over the list almost three months later, I feel like I have moved deeper into them.  The projects I am working on are not bringing instant gratification like the etsy shops usually do - meaning there is some cash flow.  I find myself second guessing the projects as a waste of time.  But I am following all the rules of my favorites creativity coaches and believing to God that when I am working out of my DEEPEST passion,  this will bring the success I am desiring.  I want to be able to support my family given the enormous sacrifice that has been made to pay for my education.  It seems somehow that this is the way the world is supposed to work, right?

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Take A Walk Through Your Life and Take Your Camera with You

 

I just completed the assignment from Liz Lamoreux's book Inner Excavation to take a walk.  For me with the cold weather, I reinterpreted it to mean to take a walk in my life.  And my life is filled with my girl.  Even at 6 years old and full day kindergarten, I am still quite an integral part in her life.  For most of the last seven months I have spent quite a bit of energy just normalizing life for her.  My hubby came home after almost three years away and he is still learning to adjust to civilian life.  Add to this, our big move to Colorado where a support system has never really materialized in this mountain town.  Plus seven months of unemployment for my husband has all of us fighting to stay positive.

My role - which I take very seriously - is to build hope around my girl no matter what.  I remember when I was young and not having much.  I remember being teased for wearing the wrong clothes.  I had the added bonus of being a mixed kid in the 1970s and it was not as cool as it is (in some places) now.  I will confess we are not living in a town where it is "cool" and I am in disbelief about it.  But such is life and I will find a way to hope in the midst of my circumstances.

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Self Portrait

 This exercise from Inner Excavation is definitely one I am going to attempt to take on once a month

 I realize that there are HUGE blocks of time in my life where I have ZERO pictures of myself

As my little girl begins to ask me questions about when I WAS LITTLE, I realize that I am doing her a HUGE disservice by not keeping good records.

A lot of this stems from when I was 14 years old and my mother made the decision to leave my father.  She basically left Michigan for Arizona with her 4 kids and one suitcase each.  I have no photographs of myself as a child.  Then for many years after I had a reckless way about my life so of course who wants that photographed?

It wasn't until I was about 20 and had my first child that I sporadically took pictures of him. There are not many pictures of me during that time either. Honestly it isn't until I started blogging in 2008 that I began to put myself in front of the camera.

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A Day in the Life...

 

It is 2012.   I feel like I need to have my creative space back online for me to explore where I am heading.  I have spent the last few years blogging about my business adventures on my blogs and as a guest on other blogs.  In 2011 I transitioned to devoting my blogging time solely to highlighting other Christian artists. But I was drawn back into tbe journey again by the Lovely Liz Lamoreux, author of the Book "Inner Excavation" and though I had completed a portion of the exercises before, I felt it was time to start again. With fresh eyes.

My mornings are filled with washing the previous day's dishes. I wash them by hand because our rental does not have a dishwasher.  Most mornings (when I am lucky) some journalling and reflection time occurs.  I just recently came back to writing in a physical journal about six months ago. I tend to do that in transition times to help me feel like I have some semblance of control of my situation.  I find that as I write I can purge the fear and open up to hope for a new day.

 I make it a point everyday to go into my "lady cave" and do a little doodling or crocheting or anything in between.  This is a therapeutic lifeline for me.

This particular "day" is during Christmas break.  At least once a day my girl and I have some sort of crafty time together.  We either work on a project or we work side by side on separate projects.  I LOVE that she enjoys this.

 

A new thing I tried towards the end of 2011 is zumba.  So funny that quite a few friends wanted me to try it before now but I "thought" I would be too uncoordinated.  But an investment in a Groupon when I first came to Green Mountain Falls, CO and what do you know? Another avenue that GOD has provided for me to release pent up stress.  This definitely was the catalyst for picking my word for 2012: DANCE

I am preparing eggs for tuna fish sandwiches. It is about 12:30pm.  I am recognizing as I reflect on these few pictures how FULL my life is.  The stress is definitely there. As I type this, we have been in Colorado for five months and my husband still has not been able to find a job.  We have learned to pray the Lord's prayer in a more meaningful way: Give us THIS DAY our daily bread.  And GOD has been faithful.

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