WHAT IS ARTLIFE, AND WHY DO WE NEED IT?

The creative ability of the future will emerge…in the realm of creative living, and not so much in the realm of creative art. Alice A. Bailey, in The Destiny of the Nations, 1949

         We humans are inherently creative in ways that abide within us through thick and thin. Artlife process arises from allowing ourselves to break through established assumptions and conventions about how to live and reconnect with this deep creativity.

         In doing so we encounter the possibility of opening up our lives to more interesting, experimental and innovative paths. As we dare to reawaken the childlike curiosity still buried within us and so fulfill our deep yearning for play without competition, endless exploration without “inevitable” consequences, our capacity for generative self-renewal spontaneously reawakens.

 

 WHAT IS CREATIVITY ITSELF, REALLY?

…my subjective view of the world…is not a product of rational thinking. It is…a vision such as will come to one who undertakes, deliberately, with half-closed eyes and somewhat closed ears, to see and hear the voice of being. If our impressions are too distinct, we…have no way of knowing how our ancestral psyches listen to and understand the present – in other words, how our unconscious is responding to it.

C.G.Jung, in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. 

           Creativity stems from seeking after all that is still wild and untamed in the human soul and it includes not turning away from our crises of unknowing.

         Creativity is not only hearing but also responding to the Beingness, or Suchness, that we are, opening to expressing the other voices of our selves speaking to us from our hearts and from around many windy corners.

         Creativity involves daring. It involves following our inner hunches no matter where they may lead us, against all conventional “sense,” and can definitely include risking feeling like a Fool, as we are thrown back into beginner’s mind, once again, once again…               

AND WHAT IS CREATIVE LIVING?

The art of life isn't controlling what happens, which is impossible; it's using what happens.
Gloria Steinem, in Doing Sixty.

         Creative living brings the life back into everyday realities. It breaks the old molds of how things have been and supposedly “should” be done - in the realms of the everyday and the esoteric, both - by generating new options. Creative living encourages the deep patterns underlying our lives to emerge from forgotten obscurity, so that we can once again perceive the uncanny rhythms and intentionality within our own life journeys.

SO WHERE DO WE START?

Now I know why people worship, carry around magic emblems, make up talking dreams they teach their children: the world speaks. The world speaks everything to us. William Stafford

            So how do we enter into artlife? We practice, of course! Starting anywhere, playing at reinventing known reference points, we shift the quality of how we engage with gardening or making love, of singing arias in unknown languages in the shower, even of picking up the kids and doing the dishes, for the most mundane actions can morph from draining to more enlivening experiences. The world once again speaks itself to us, and we once again listen to it, and ourselves, interweaving being and doing.

            We use our hands to reinvent and reshape fragments of our world, re-discovering something wise and long forgotten, which becomes, anew, mysteriously familiar and nourishing.

            Reflecting and recording our process as we go along - perhaps through journaling or drawing, or photography, or how else? - we begin to reclaim inner power and passion that we have often given away to endless repetitive outer demands.

            We simply start, somewhere, and go on from there, in halting, or surprised, or now self-activating and expanding realization that we are the world.

 

Preview of PART TWO:

What does Artlife Process have to do with planetary healing and the accelerating emergence of the Transformative Feminine?


SPEAKING FOR MYSELF...

We are not here to find ourselves, we are here to create ourselves. Author unknown

            I’ve spent my life exploring how to heal, create and transform who I am, in order to fulfill my Self and to be able to share multi-disciplinary, heuristic and experiential discoveries with others on diverse paths of Self-creation.

            I lived in an Indian ashram for a number of years, then sought another kind of knowing through undergraduate and graduate degrees in art, psychotherapy, and cultural transformation. Yet my essential life-long search has mainly led me far from various well-known beaten paths, where necessity has indeed been the mother of resourceful invention. And what are we here for, ultimately, but to see life as an infinite process of forever morphing itself into new and ever more interesting possibilities?

            More practically, I am a multi-media artist and a writer. I teach art as personal and cultural healing and transformation. I am the author of a Sounds True tape set, Artlife: Creative Journeys for Life Healing. I am also a transpersonal, art-centered psychotherapist, and currently nearing completion of my first book, Transformation: 

The Feminine and our Planet and the Art of Life.

        

 OFFERING ARTLIFE PROCESS TO OTHERS

   PLEASE CONTACT ME FOR INFORMATION ABOUT:

·      Programs of long distance individualized sessions, which combine meetings and assignments via Skype/phone, e-mail, e-photography and more

      Online ongoing artlife classes

      Upcoming experiential workshop schedule

      Purchase of my Sounds True tape set about exploring Artlife Process

   Invitation to speaking engagements

 

All of our inquiries can lead to creative interactions, 

mutual discoveries and synchronicities….