This weeks focus was on recovering a sense of compassion.
It was all about forgiving yourself for being creatively blocked in the past and recognizing that words like laziness and procrastination are actually fear in disguise.
“Use love for your artist to cure it’s fear” – Julia Cameron
This week felt like a breakthrough week for me and it all started with taking action.
One of the activities this week was to go through your morning pages and highlight things that seem like nuggets of truth. Did something keep coming up day after day? Highlight it. Let the pages be revealing to you.
I know that one of my big creative projects that I had been avoiding due to fear was writing and working on my one-woman show. I would make goals for myself to work on it and then would fail to and felt guilty for NOT working on it and making it a priority.
Now that I can recognize that it was simply coming from fear instead of laziness/avoiding, etc I am able to just simply push past the fear and take the first step which is: take action.
Once I did this, I felt I couldn’t stop. This week I was overcome with this urge to just keep working on it and now I’m so excited about it that I have to share it.
At this point, most of my fears of what if it’s not good enough, what will people think about it, will I embarrass myself, who am I to hold up space and tell this story, are in the far far back of my mind and the need to simply tell the story is at the forefront. The simple recognition of “okay, those are my fears, and that’s okay. That fear will always be there a little bit, I just have to ignore them and do it anyways”.
Successful people aren’t people who create without fear. They accept the fear and then do it anyways.
You can’t let the fear control you. You control the fear.
Morning Pages
I did my morning pages every day except for Sunday. I traveled to Washington D.C. this weekend to visit with my best friends and so didn’t get around to it Sunday, but time with friends was more important.
On Saturday, I almost forgot to do them, but then my boyfriend texted me to remind me to do them which was so sweet to have that accountability especially because I had never asked him to.
One morning, I read my show before doing them and then the words just flooowed out of me. It’s like since I was already in that creative state, I was just open and didn’t give anything a second thought, which was cool to experience that creating like that put me in the same flow as does meditating.
Artist Date
I took the evening for myself on Tuesday to watch some of the student’s plays. One of them was called “What if Sex Was Spiritual?” which is crazy because that’s exactly what my play is about. Watching the student’s work just inspired me to keep writing and creating my own worlds because it’s so fun to hear other people’s worlds.
Exercise of the Week
List your creative goals for the week, month, and year. I thought this was perfect to do since we are nearing 2019 and I love planning and setting goals for the new year ❤
creative goals for the week
- -work on show, practice, rehearse, work on it.
- -practice songs for audition on monday
- -paint without inhibition ❤
creative goals for the month
- -do reading at the o’neill for the students
- -make a guided meditation
- -audition and get into next to normal
- -record a holiday album?
- -learn christmas song on guitar?
creative goals for the year
- -keep developing and performing one woman show to audiences across the country
- -write navy play and russian play
- -learn to play songs on guitar
- -write my own songs and play it on guitar
- -do ocean cabaret
- -do arrangements of fun songs
- -sing more
- -act in a musical again
Synchronicity of the Week
-what even caused the catalyst for working on my one woman show so fervently is that I was searching online for something totally unrelated, came across this woman’s website and saw she had done a one-woman show at the United Solo Fest in NYC. I started researching the festival and dreaming about submitting my show which caused me to work on it seriously again. I know this was divine intervention, so thank you ❤ I feel like I’m getting signs from the universe, left and right, so thank you. I am open to receiving.
-more free theater!! remember last week when that is what I seemed to have manifested? It just keeps on coming and I am not complaining. I literally got an invitation in the mail for free theater this week, got to leave work early to go to NYC to see the hottest show right now because my work had tickets, and visited my friend in DC who works at Arena Stage and got to see both Anything Goes and Indecent all for free! That’s four shows in one week! I see you, universe. Thank you.
Mermaid Musings 