Courage to create

Please enjoy this excerpt from Braving It, one of my absolute favorite books. You gotta read the whole thing…there’s so much in here about living boldly and freely! This post is from the chapter: “Create your joy”

“Creativity takes courage,” said master French painter Henri Matisse. It definitely does take courage to dance and sing and paint when we feel like we can’t. We don’t know how, and even if we do, we’re not “good” at it. One look at the stores on Etsy, at what people are creating, or anyone whose work is on display at a gallery or museum, or dancers online or on stage is enough to stop us. We could never…

But, beautiful someone, we can.

Yeah, we can

We can move our feet to music. We can open our mouths and make sounds to musical notes. We can put pencil to paper and draw lines. We can look through the lens of a camera, find a gritty urban scene, and capture it in a compelling composition. Read More

Just getting started

Today is where your book begins
The rest is still unwritten.

— Natasha Bedingfield

The theme I have for you this month is “Just getting started” — and beautiful someone, we SO are, in every way.

So what if today is the day the everything changes for you? What if today you realize that you are braver than you know, stronger than you think, and more valuable than you’ve ever let yourself believe?

Because nothing in Braving It is out of reach for us. It may seem that way because our brave has been hiding behind years of conditioning and tons of clutter that we’re having trouble reaching around. But once we clear out the bad memories, unhealthy relationships, preconceived ideas of what and who we should be and are capable of…we can fill that space instead with honest, courageous choices.

As songwriter Natasha Bedingfield sings in Unwritten, Read More

YES changes everything!

Yes Changes Everything!Please enjoy this excerpt from
the opening of Yes Changes Everything!

There is this amazing story about the day John Lennon and Yoko Ono met: in the Fall of 1966, Yoko was in London for an art exhibition. Already an accomplished avant-garde artist, Yoko was displaying her works at the Indica Gallery as part of an exhibition called Unfinished Paintings and Objects.

John visited the gallery the day before the show was scheduled to open. He was skeptical about the displays, and the artist herself, who greeted him with a card that read, literally, “Breathe.”

One piece got his attention, though…

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Gratitude: the miracle-magnet

When the sky brightens, and the day is suddenly new…what do you dream of then?

A friend told me this amazing story: attendees at a seminar are shown a video of two people playing catch. They’re told just to focus on counting the number of times each person catches the ball.

In the middle of the clip, a gorilla walks into the frame and waves at the camera. When the clip ends, attendees are asked what they thought of the gorilla. Every single person is positive there was no gorilla, and when they look at the clip again, they swear they’re looking at a different video.

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