If you’re experiencing any blocks in your writing, art or creative expression, our workshop will provide you with methods for connecting your work with the embodied experiences of your inner resources. We will guide you in exploring some self-coaching skills we have found to be the most effective at breaking through barriers to creativity!

Dreams and visions can be an important aspect of using your imagination in service of creating your artistic and/or writing projects. They live in that emergent and liminal space. Sometimes, we need some extra support or a more formal invitation into entering this space for ourselves. Our day-to-day lives can get filled with so much that carving out time to exist in the dream smoke just doesn’t happen. In this lesson, I will guide you through the dream smoke to breathe new life force and energy into your projects as you reconnect with your heart, dance with your visions and remain true to the wisdom of your inner voice.

As a Soul-Based Coach, I am trained to hold space. Perhaps you have heard of this phrase before. It is what it sounds like: creating a literal space into which the Shakti life-force within and around you can dance and flow. For this lesson, I invite you to wake up early (an hour or more before the dawn) to write morning pages. Only bring yourself, a notebook, a pen (and if you’re like me, a warm cup of coffee!)

The Life/Art process is about healing our body, mind, soul and spirit. Because when we express the truth of our beings, the whole of what and who we are, we express our humanity, our life force, our vitality and what makes us alive. And that is healing in a world that wants to take our humanity from us and have us forget that we are vital, alive beings full of creative life force energy. For this lesson, I will provide you 31 Life/Art prompts to get your creative life force energy flowing through a daily practice.

Through creative play, unlock your emergent knowledge of what you don’t know you know.

Creative flow is a balance between right and left brain. We need to have structure and organization or a project will remain unfinished and lack direction, but we also need fluidity and room to change direction if the creative energy takes us somewhere unexpected, as it so often does. Our individual personalities and habits have some determination in what comes naturally and instinctually to us in our creative processes, but it doesn’t mean we don’t have access or the ability to cultivate the things that don’t come naturally to us. Learn one way to cultivate this balance in this lesson!

It’s not unusual to ask our art what it knows about our body. Especially as women, our art is more than willing to render expressions about the nature of our physicality in one way or another. And yet, how often do we ask the body what it knows about our art? One of our most fundamental ways of knowing resides in the body. Children learn about their reality by touch, physical movement and manipulation much sooner than they learn through language. In this lesson, experience how space itself can hold transformation.

Think of fire elements, fire energy, images of fire, your personal experiences with fire—both metaphorical fires and literal ones. Where is your fire energy? And does that have a shape, a size, or a color? What are you fanning the flames of right now in your life, or maybe those flames have been extinguished? Artist Sam Francis says: “Color is light on fire.” This workshop will begin the process of attuning to your own “light on fire” and the colors of your whole self expression.

Often, I learn more about myself by examining with a more honest eye the stories I’ve told myself about myself, and that only happens by expanding my horizons, meeting new people, reading new books, going on new adventures…In short, welcoming all that is new into my life. I bought a book called After the Ecstasy, the Laundry (best title ever), and this was exactly what I, in this period of personal and professional growth in my life, needed to read. It brought my attention to the stories that clutter our brains to reinforce thought and behavior patterns and that enable us to take on familiar roles (always being the victim in difficult situations for example)—but has brought my attention to this through the very mechanism we perpetuate: storytelling. But not personal storytelling. Archetypal storytelling. This lesson will explore storytelling through the work of fairytales.

Whether your creative project is artistic or narrative, your composition will likely have a focused subject: some sort of I-perspective. In memoir and creative nonfiction, that may be some version of you. In fiction, it will be your main character(s). In an art piece, it may be more abstract, impressionistic, or non-human, which puts it in the realm of archetypes. Archetypes can serve as symbols who carry universal themes we can relate to like the hero, the rebel, the warrior, the artist, the wounded, the fool, the queen, the fallen angel, and the list goes on. What roles do you cast yourself in? And how do those roles play out in your life and art? Let’s explore them in this month’s lesson!

Now is a funny thing—it is the moment in which we exist, and yet, somehow, we do our best to never notice it. Instead, we let the long list of projections—of what ifs, could-haves, have-tos—push down on us. Or we look the other way: back to the long road of the past, old memories of times past that are tinged sepia with nostalgia around their edges. The present—our now—hardly gets noticed. I offer the following exercise to combat our ability to push the many gifts of the present aside.

Our feelings and responses to what we’re experiencing creates who we are, but who we are is not static unless we stop using our creativity in how we respond to our life circumstances. We each hold darkness and light, joy and despair, shadow and spirit, human compassion and human fallibility. In my line of work, we play with and use our very humanness to connect to as many parts of ourselves as we can, allowing them their full range of emotiveness in a safe container that honors our own capacity to tolerate and be with it. And that presence and ability to be with it and acknowledge the edges of our capacity is the difference between purely cathartic emotional release and the creative play that leads to healing and art.

The holidays can somehow become a stressful time of year despite the many joys they bring. This holiday, I invite you to make it your own. Here is a brief guide that I hope inspires you to celebrate this time of year in a way that nourishes your soul and prepares you for the new year ahead.

The Red Spot (or some cultures call it dantien or the sacral center) is where our life force energy is held. We have worked with this energy in the Inspire Your Fire Retreat and the Resources available in this course. This lesson builds on those practices to connect you more deeply to your creative power and guide you in embodying it for increased potential in your projects and in your life.