What To Do When You Can’t Think Straight

I recently had a discussion with a client about this topic and I think the ideas talked about would make a good basic list I’d like to share with you so here goes:

1 Clear the physical clutter

Let go of the old to make some physical and psychic space for yourself. Tidy up and rearrange neatly the stuff you DO want to keep. Sounds so obvious but it really does make a difference in the energy and how you feel straightaway. Aim to make your immediate environment beautiful, peaceful and uplifting – don’t allow anything else in your sacred space.

2 Clear mental clutter

by writing down a stream of consciousness – the “Morning Pages” of “The Artist’s Way” book. Write 3 pages of thoughts without censoring or abbreviating anything. Do this once a day or at ad hoc moments when you are feeling particularly confused. Continue reading »

Software Review Continued

If you didn’t read my last post Personal Brain is  software designed to keep your thoughts, files, images etc all in one place. I love the way it’s animated (java based) interface moves when you click on a “Thought” – that Thought then becomes central to the screen. Click on any Thought attached to that one and that then becomes the focus. This is pretty intuitive and makes it really easy to  navigate up and down, backwards and forwards through your Thoughts. Having some Thoughts “pinned” at the top of the pane makes them available to get “home” when you feel the need to orientate where you are. Continue reading »

More than Just Mind Mapping: Software Review

I have been looking at ways of trying to capture all my “data” from various different sources and haven’t found a solution that really works for me – I’ve tried using Outlook tasks – that got really out of hand. Yikes! I use paper notebooks all the time but have found it’s impossible to link, categorize and search easily for information – the major disadvantage of a paper based system. I  started having a look at various mind-mapping systems as tools to capture all and everything I put my focus on in the spirit of GTD.  My rationale is that being a visual thinker,  a mind-mapping system might be a better way of getting a “picture” of all the things I want to keep tabs on; a way to see the connections between projects, ideas, tasks, and people that have meaning for me.  Typically creative people have many and varied interests running at any one time. I am no exception from my coaching, healing study and progression log, textile projects, gardening, nature, history, music, photography, ballet, films, travel, writing, poetry, books and so on. Then there are all the organisational things like tasks, expenses, calendar dates to be remembered and actioned, people to call.  Not to mention keeping a note of all those interesting websites and blogs and why I bookmarked them in the first place (most of the time I can’t remember).  I have had a tendency to keep various notebooks with different lists and post it notes, Word documents, PDF e-books, PowerPoint presentations and excel spreadsheets, image files etc etc scattered all over the place. It’s hard to get a handle on because these things are spread throughout various folders and paper systems and even when neatly filed with naming conventions there is no one single place for all of it and no practical way of linking things together easily. It’s the connections we make that help us be more creative. Hierarchies of folders are totally inadequate for this. So this is where the mind-mapping idea comes in. I have tried mind-mapping software in the past (it was quite a number of years ago) so I thought I would give it another go because I reasoned that things have moved on quite considerably since then and perhaps there is something out there that is visually pleasing and graspable, intuitive, and connects things where I want them connected. I have done a quick scan of some different mind-mapping offerings and rejected a few straight away as being too basic. At the moment I am trialling PersonalBrain. So far so good, I really like it and I can see it’s potential for personal organisation despite lack of integration with other applications (apparently they are working on that). I will post the results of my trial soon.

Birdsong as Balm for the Soul

It’s Spring! And after the long dark days of Winter the wonderful sound of birdsong wafting through the air in the most delightful mixture of wild music is most welcome. I tend to forget that birds are singing to literally save their own genes; competing with each other for territories and mates. As a human it’s easy just to see everything through the lense of “what’s in it for me?” – like all birds are put here for our benefit.  But I can’t help enjoying, nay revelling, in the deliciousness of the dawn and dusk choruses. They fill me with such joy that I can only describe the feeling as heavenly. I remember once hearing a song thrush calling repeatedly in the darkness of a deserted train station. I became lost meandering in the undulations of what felt to me as a spectacularly soulful expression. It was so beautiful I was spellbound and transcended into another plane and was quite sorry when the train finally arrived and brought me back down to earth. 

There have been many studies done on the effects of birdsong on human mood and wellbeing - the general conclusions being that people are uplifted, calmed, have an increased sense of happiness and a decreased need for pain relief. Perhaps the sounds trigger some primeval connection to nature that make us feel part of it again which is why we find it healing and uplifting. I feel that anything that brings us into harmony with nature has a healing effect on the mind and body.

What does all this have to do with creativity? Well, I noticed that if I play sounds like this over and over in a loop it helps to induce the trance like state of being “in the zone” or in a state of “flow” which enhances creativity allowing me to tap into my subconscious much more easily and produce art which is more profound, more integrated, less self-conscious. Any music that has an ambient uplifting quality can do this if it’s in harmony with your own ideal of what is beautiful. It helps if there is no break in the music and no outside interruptions so that the rhythm can continue to wind itself continually around the consciousness. I find that birdsong and natural sounds like wind and trickling water work especially well for me as well as music that contains foreign languages because I haven’t got a clue what they are singing about so my mind doesnt’ get hung up on the meaning of the words. To refine this process one step further it’s better if the birdsong is native to my area of the world, perhaps because I have a personal connection to and affection for the birds that I have heard and seen all my life. Listening to birdsong of american birds for example didn’t have the same powerful effect even though it made pleasant listening.

Here’s a nice link to a bird gallery with some clips to inspire you. Enjoy the Spring!

Media Fasting – Good or Bad?

I have seen a lot of stuff recently about media fasting. Here for example. Many years ago, to the horror of some of her followers, the idea was expounded by Julia Cameron in her book The Artist’s Way in the form of a reading fast. Arlee recently emailed to say that she was going to have a media fast for a week and to see what effect that would have on her creativity – I will be really interested to find out the results. So it seems that this is the order of the day. My feelings on the subject are that I completely agree with media fasts. Having only had access to a TV sporadically as a child I grew up doing other things like playing outside, climbing trees, playing musical instruments, reading, writing and making things. I didn’t feel deprived at all and yet when I told my schoolmates that I didn’t have a TV they were shocked and expressed in outraged tones ;So what DO you DO?!;, as if it was impossible to think of life without a TV. I still don’t watch much TV unless I find something that really fascinates me but I usually do something else like stitching while I am watching it. I hate having the news on as I find it really depressing to be constantly told about all the bad things that have happened that day and I loathe the bombardment of adverts which always seem to go really loud for some reason. We always turn the sound off when they come on. I don’t feel afraid of missing something when I don’t watch the news. I feel the same way about it as Louise Hay who said that if she needed to know something then she believed that it would come to her. And I think that is true. If I really need to know something then it will find me somehow. Do I really need to hear a catalogue of disasters read out each day? I am probably not going to actually DO anything about any of them apart from think how awful and sad they all are. Regarding computers, emails, internet, blogs etc I was initially excited about all of these things and they do have a certain element of novelty about them at first. But working on the computer all day in my job leaves me feeling absolutely allergic to them when I get home. I even hate the humming sound the fan makes and the way it makes my body feel sitting at them for so many hours at a time. I really enjoy leaving the computer off when I am on holiday or during the weekend. If I don’t have to turn it on then I don’t really feel the urge to. That is how I feel right now.  I love getting emails from friends and reading interesting blogs but there is a real limit to what one can actually do to get round all of the interesting blogs out there on any given subject. I used to feel guilty about not reading and commenting regularly on people’s blogs and I do try to have a bash at it now and then just to let people know I am reading them but I just find it takes up too much time and I can’t manage it anymore. I also find Flickr can waste a lot of time too, even though I adore it and I love looking at other people’s images and commenting on them. When I think about it there are other more involved things I could be doing like doing my stitching and gardening and spending time with people I care about.  

My one difficulty is that all these things like websites, emails, photosharing and blogging can be a great way of getting to know of other people and for them to get to know of you. If you take it to the extreme they can be a great way of marketing yourself but only if you have the time and energy not to mention money to spend on them. How do you strike the right balance between being “out there” and being present in the real world doing something non-digital or media related? I feel that spending so much time searching for links to post on websites and blogs and commenting and surfing the net can really drain my energy and time I could use on more creative things. If that means that not as many people know about me on the net or I am not perceived to have such a great presence as a blogger then I think that is probably a sacrifice I am willing to make. I don’t want to be a slave to digital technology. I want to use it to my advantage but not so much that it adversely affects my lifestyle and health in the process. I don’t feel that it’s  really worth it. I mean if I don’t have any real experiences what am I going to blog about or what images am I going to post on flickr anyway? The connection to the very thing that is the source of inspiration to communicate about suffers because we are spending so much time communicating about it and a million other things. It’s  like F Scott Fitzgerald writes in his book Tender Is The Night: ”Her experiences became real in the telling of them”(paraphrased). I don’t feel that it is healthy. I don’t want to be a luddite but I wouldn’t cry either if all this technology disappeared over night. If that happened I know that we would start talking to our neighbours more like people did in the war. So, yes I am in greatly in favour of media fasts. I am in favour of fasting in general. I  am in favour of clutter clearing and meditating and any form of system or technique that can clear the mind and bring a calm and peaceful outlook. Next time you feel overwhelmed by so much stuff (either digital or physical) ask yourself “what’s it all for?”, what is it’s  real purpose? In my experience most of the time I don’t really need it and I just want to let it go and breathe a sigh of much needed

Ideas about Creativity

Creativity Article about creativity by one of my favourite coaches Mark Forster. Read also the comments about creativity by Learning As I Go – he/she is an artist and mentions a really interesting technique for developing and tapping into creative energy using a combination of music, sleep and reading. I am going to try this technique and let you know the results as I go! Has anyone else ever heard of this?