MINI RETREAT WEEK 3
HEALTH and ABUNDANCE: the pathway to Strength
AFTER you have meditated (outlined in Weeks 1 and 2), let’s focus on your strengths, the good things in your life, where you wish to go and what you wish to create.
What sort of space/place do you thrive in?
Describe the community around you? Is it supportive?
What is your relationship to Nature? How long do you spend outdoors?
Who are your closest friends? Do you see them often? Is there someone you would like to be friends with but haven’t reached out to yet?
What calms or soothes you?
What is your relationship to learning?
Do you love music? Would you like to engage with music more often?
Do you engage with your local arts community? Galleries? Theatres? Libraries?
So here we are, creating our core knowings of abundance and strengths rather than focusing on what we lack.
With this solid base of abundance, we build our dreams and potential to create deeper meaning and awaken what has been forgotten.
We are a vehicle for discovery, and we are beginning to understand that we must focus on process rather than product.
The road we are travelling on, the path where we stand, right here, right now.
Let’s focus on your path, knowing that the destination will take care of itself. Take action today: identify one step you can begin immediately to enrich your creative potential and share it with those around you. Draw this if that is useful. See Exercise 4.
We Can Do Hard Things, by Lennon Doyle, Abby Wambach and Amanda Doyle
EXERCISE: DRAWING OUR PATH THROUGH THE YEAR
Draw a path, a road, divided into parts.
Label these parts as the steps you wish to take this year to enrich your creative potential.
Write about your road, using Natalie Goldberg’s prompt. Begin with “What I really want to say is…” or use another of her prompts “I am looking at…”. Adjust accordingly. You could also use the phrase “…And by that i mean” (Proprioceptive Writing).
Record what you have written and listen to it out loud.
We know that every human born has the potential to dream their life's path.
But something happens to the Western world when capitalism takes over.
We are forced into a square peg to fit the system, rather than the system supporting the health and well-being of the individual or group.
There is no longer time to sing or dance together each day.
Instead, we become part of the “improve yourself” routine.
“Only then shall I reap happiness”. Oh, my.
“I will be expert at my art. I will be expert in my craft”.
And of course, you do, and you will, but at what cost?
Is it all pain and struggle to hold to your creative life this year?
Is it worth it? Yes, it is. And no, it isn't.
It is worth it when we work as Group.
It's not so easy if we're a solo affair.
If we constantly compete, “I'm better than that”, et cetera, et cetera, we meet envy, jealousy, and exhaustion.
To be an artist, to be a creative, is a wondrous thing. We notice the little things, but when we are exhausted, we miss the light through the doorway, how it lands on that particular book, and we pick it up, and we randomly open it, and there it is, something we have been searching for ...
You didn't know you were searching for it, but your ‘unknown’ did.
We have lots of unknowns.
What we don't know, we know.
And we have a lot of knowns.
And when we are feeling wobbly or anxious or isolated, we hold on to the knowns, the familiar, because they are the only thing holding us upright.