All art practice is based on repetition as we attain mastery. It's practice, right? Music, dance, theater, visual art, and writing. These are called "disciplines" of course, because they require discipline. Repetition is how we get there.

As musicians we practice scales. As artists and writers we show up in the studio each day. As performers in theater and dance we attend rehearsal after rehearsal until opening night.

Repetition also brings release into spirit.

The structure and composition of arts involve rhythm and recurrence: repetitive chants in poetry and prose, motifs that repeat in dance and music and so forth.

Repetition in art often is the goal itself, and makes a statement. Many modern artists (especially women) have incorporated this element into their work.

Quilting is an example of repetition of stitching and piecing that is highly labor intensive. My friend Lucy Arai who incorporates Sashiko (a traditional Japanese quilting form) into her art pieces has to guard against carpel tunnel syndrome. Lucy also has told me that she uses the repetition in the techniques she uses as spiritual practice.

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A writer who rides horses shares:

Yes, definitely riding. I remember the first time I rode my mare, the dear departed Cherie, who was schooled in dressage up to third level, I realize halfway round the ring, trotting, her pace was steady as a metronome. Very reassuring.

When I was teaching, I somehow got involved in a writing-across-the-curriculum project with architecture students. Their assignment was to design a building for a women’s studies center and to come up with trope to hang their design ideas on. The professor gave them a visual to begin from, the Greek statue of the Three Graces.

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A poet and dancer says:

I use dance as my primarily form of renewal--especially when life is too demanding to write. I carry myself with more grace and poise through whatever the daily demands are.

I think the sheer repetitiveness of a form like belly dance nurtures me in some way, rather like the rocking a baby needs. Also when I can’t unwind from my night teaching, if I put on a belly dance DVD and the repetitive movements and music will have me off to sleep in about 20 minutes. I feel a bit weird about this, as I feel I should be meditating instead, but whatever works: go for it.
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My work in art school was filled with labor intensive work. Building in clay is labor and time intensive by definition. The larger the scale of the work the more magnified this becomes. I made a 5-foot boat made of hand-pulled sheets of paper that took weeks. We all have our stories.

Meditation explicitly relies on repetition. You need to do nothing more than dance or ride horses as your spiritual discipline if that works for you. Release the idea of "meditation" as a separate activity.

Many daily tasks such as peeling potatoes, walking, rocking the baby, petting the cat involve rhythm and recurrence and can lead to comfort and even spiritual growth and transcendence. Our view of creativity as a society tends to be far too narrow.

Three of my merry band of creative friends (Hal Manogue, Eden Maxwell, and Hal Zina Bennett) wrote extensive comments to make for a lively dialogue. Here's what Hal says. I invite you to read the Creative Catalyst post, and the comments it generated. Hal's extensive bio is below his article.--Janet

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Creative Process: Getting Inside the Inside

by Hal Zina Bennett

The bugaboo of “it’s inside you” is locating where that is. I remember reading "The Alchemist," by Paolo Coelho years ago. It's an entire book about discovering the heart (the inside) with many adventures and lots of discussion between the boy and the Alchemist about what that meant.

Similarly, when I taught workshops I had people do an exercise called Writing in The Present. For some, it was instant connection with the inside, for others it was a frustrating puzzle. But what always amazed me was that even when writers had done it–connected with the inside, and almost instantly–they didn’t recognize it or didn’t know where to go with it.

Why? Partly because inside is scary. We expend a huge amount of energy in our lives trying to stay away from it because “there be the demons, the shame, and crawly things.” But it’s not really that simple, either. Sometimes the inside just seems too banal to us. It’s too familiar. We live with it everyday. Why would anyone else be interested? Where’s the poetry? Indeed.

But when you get into that place, or your pen or computer takes you inside, it’s electric for the reader and for you. I reread Hemingway a couple months ago, The Sun Also Rises: he’s banal, in one sense. He’s just telling how his days are going with his bunch of drunkard friends wandering aimlessly around Europe trying to figure out what their generation’s war was about and what the hell bullfights are about, and who Brett is screwing now and why Jake Barnes is such a pain in the butt. Not much goes on but what goes on is close to Ernest’s heart.

We miss the point of what he’s about if we think he is reporting what’s really happening in his life; rather, he is doing a crackup job of shaping the memories of his with words. He’s touching that place that Yeats talked about, when you cannot tell the dancer from the dance. And he was an awful good wordsmith.

Between the lines the book is about the words, his love of the words, a certain simplicity that takes him and the reader not so much into what Brett or Jake or any of the rest of them are doing but into the ecstatic place of a man writing a book, the love of the craft that Ernest had and that mattered to him more than anything else.That’s where his heart was.

And, incidentally, if you look very closely, and you also read your Bible–King James and his band of scurvy scribes–you’ll discover where bold, brash Ernest got his rhythms of language, the simplicity for telling a story, and a good part of his existential angst, in the process.

Look at a passage like this (from Oxford Bible: Mark 5:35): “That day, in the evening, he said to them, ‘Let us cross over to the other side of the lake.’ So they left the crowd and took him with them in the boat where he had been sitting, and there were other boats accompanying him.” Finding the inside isn’t about bleeding onto the page or about flowery language or clever metaphors. It’s more about being present with what you’re doing right now, especially how it feels as you’re putting words on the page–or rewriting for the 17th time. That’s where the beauty of the writer in the act of writing and touching that inside place.

The long and not so short of it is that touching the inside is the most elusive part of our craft. After publishing more than 30 books, there are maybe a few pages I love in each of them when the inside drives the writing. I like to believe that every writer knows it when they touch that place. It lifts you, literally, and is as difficult to explain as orgasm.

Chaucer said, “The life so short, the craft so long to learn.” That’s pretty much the story, isn’t it?

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Hal Zina Bennett has been my unofficial writing mentor. He offers writing classes, individual coaching and publishing expertise.

Hal's writings, workshops and lectures have reached millions of readers and writers the world over. With more than 30 successful books of his own, he also coaches upcoming writers, helping them with everything from initial conceptualization to finding agents and publishers.

His gifts as a teacher and writing coach have proved invaluable for the more than 200 authors he has helped toward successful publication. Several of his clients have become national best-sellers and Oprah guests. His client list has included: Phil McGraw (Dr. Phil), Judith Orloff, Shakti Gawain, Jerry G. Jampolksy, Dharma Singh Khalsa, Stanislaf Grof, Michael Samuels, MD, and many others.

Hal's own list of published works includes novels, poetry, magazine articles and non-fiction-writings that open hearts and minds to the expanding range of the human experience. You have a great treat in store, whether reading one of Hal's books or taking one of his workshops.

His new book"Living Behind the Beauty Shop" has been embraced by the Down syndrome community and homeless advocate groups. I'm happy to be part of getting the word out about Hal's latest wise and probing book.

In "Living Behind the Beauty Shop" a Middle Tennessee boy understands that the psyche is able to communicate with the self experiencing other dimensions. The boy, Mase Russell, is living with Down syndrome. He is considered disabled in our normal reality, but he is far more enabled and connected than we are to that stream of consciousness that flows through all of us.

Read on to discover how Mase is able to communicate with other aspects of the self while dreaming, and he accepts his dream experiences as real. He is even able to remember those experiences and express them in his own way.

And then, of course, buy Hal's book!

Janet

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What The Hell Are You Trying To Say In That Book?
by Hal Manogue

Beliefs and perceptions play an important role in what we experience in this physical reality, but we're not taught to recognize these energy forms as creative expressions. They are capable of creating the reality we find ourselves experiencing, but we give credit to outside forces and situations.

I'm not here to change anyone's beliefs. I am here to share some of mine. They may be strange to some of you and others may feel a vibration in your psyche that resonates with my thoughts. The psyche of course is hard to define using our physical terms, but let's say it is that aspect of the self that experiences the whole picture of who we are.

The self is multidimensional. In some innate way we all believe that fact. Religions teach that, and science is confirming our multidimensionality using transformational psychology, quantum physics, and other new age metaphysical technologies. We are finally recognizing that we are more than what we have been told we are, and we are much more connected to each other than we realize. That connection is not only defined by the physical aspects of the human species; it is defined by the non-physical aspects of the self that communicate through vibrations and interactive consciousness units.

All physical things are qualities of consciousness, and they all experience a reality regardless of how foreign those realities appear to us.

Our consciousness senses its physical connection on several levels, but we tend to discount those levels because they don't conform to the limited beliefs that are formed by external as well as internal means. Different elements of consciousness become physical in order to expand the awareness of the stream of consciousness that connects all of us to all that is.

So, we all are a quality of consciousness that creates a physical reality in order to expand other aspects of the self and psyche. We are not aware of it, but the self is functioning in several dimensions simultaneously.

We divide our physical life into at least two realities each day: the wakeful state and the dream state. Each night or in some cases each day we fall asleep, and have experiences. Many other dimensions appear clearly when we dream. Those dimensions are not limited, but we try to compact them in our world of limited beliefs and perceptions so we usually get a distorted view of the dream. We forget that we not only participate in dreams we are actually the audience in dreams as well.

When we sleep we use psyche images and languages in pure form. When we wake up we try to squeeze our psyche's language into our physical language, but it usually doesn't work. The psyche uses the true language of our consciousness, but we don't consciously translate it into our physical language even though we have that ability.

The dreaming psyche is as awake as we are when we are wide awake. It is organizing and sending impulses. But the impulses that are received from these other aspects of the self are usually discounted and overlooked in some way, especially if they conflict with our core beliefs. Our focus is on other physical things, but at times we capture this aspect of the psyche in daydreams, hypnotic trances and, psyche flashes--which we call déjà vu.

Dream activity contains perspective alterations, different viewpoints, and chaotic events that feel real and are, but we discount them because our belief system tells us they are not real. In other words, in the waking state we deal with what we call normal reality. We only operate on one level when awake, even though there are many other levels of the psyche that have experiences we can appreciate when we are aware of them.

When we dream, we enter some of these other levels of reality. These are quite native to the psyche. At times we try to view them through our normal reality, and they may become the dreams we remember. Those dreams are then interpreted using the brain frequency that is familiar. We use just one frequency while we are awake, and we believe there is no other reality that the one we recognize. Only our beliefs about the psyche and the self limit our experiences in the waking reality.

In dreams we find ourselves communicating with the dead or we visit old houses that have been torn down or destroyed. We sense true freedom where time and space are at our disposal, and we can do what we want with them. We feel infinity with the connected portions of the self that are crafty, creative, and knowledgeable. We could easily put science and religion out of business when we begin to understand the greater reality of the psyche.

"Living Behind the Beauty Shop" tells the story of a Middle Tennessee boy who understands that greater reality where the psyche is able to communicate with the self that is experiencing other dimensions. The boy, Mase Russell, is living with Down Syndrome. He is considered disabled in our normal reality, but he is far more enabled and connected than we are to that stream of consciousness that flows through all of us.

He is able to communicate with other aspects of the self while dreaming, and he accepts his dream experiences as real. He is even able to remember those experiences and express them in his own way. His family begins to sense that his disability is a challenging gift not a sentence of suffering.

His family is like any other family. They experience the typical dramas that we all create in our waking reality. His grandfather, Warren Russell is a wealthy business man that lives on his family's 1000 acre farm in Leipers Fork, Tennessee. The farm was a land grant given to his triple great-grandfather after the American Revolution.

Warren and his wife Claire considered the farm their right of passage until they both experienced a near-death experience on a trip to Florida in their Cessna. After the accident Warren decides to donate 500 acres to a non-profit foundation he formed called Perception Farms. Perception Farms is a self-sufficient community off the grid that gives the homeless a fresh start.

His daughter Cindy realizes that she's gay after she marries her college sweetheart. She returns home from California and finds an ex-nun, who is now called Margie, at one of Perception Farm's fundraisers. Margie discovered her true sexuality when she was in the convent. They become partners and decide to have a child using the sperm of their friend Alan Sutton, a well-educated and athletic individual who works in the shoe business. Baby Mase is born with Down's Syndrome. "Living Behind the Beauty Shop," follows his life and the experiences of the family as he becomes an accomplished poet and artist.

Years later, Mase finds Mischa Eddington who is another Down Syndrome artist, in a local college art class, and they develop a close relationship. Together they watch members of the family experience the pains of getting older. They offer the family another perspective about that aging process. The family realizes that Mase and Mischa chose to be born with Down syndrome in order to help others see that there are no boundaries or limits in physical life unless we put them there through our beliefs and perceptions. They show us that other realities are just as real as our waking reality.

When we consider that consciousness does not have a beginning or an end in the non-physical world we can better understand that the people we call disabled are actually teachers who choose to experience life in extraordinary ways. They teach us that putting limits, judgments, and sterilized beliefs in action is the art of separating one aspect of the self from other elements of the psyche.

When that happens, we find ourselves living in the beauty shop of life, which is filled with exterior self serving nothingness. Mase and Mischa live behind the beauty shop of life and they try to share and explain that aspect of life through their thoughts and deeds. They appreciate life as they know it and the life that all of us believe is only available through death. They show us that all there is, in this physical world, is the now and eternal love surrounds it.

From blog comments to emails to guest post to telephone conversation, gradually our connection grew stronger. Today we’re sharing our views on how do we find our creative path through following spirit? I coined the term Blog Duet for companion posts on sister blogs. Tune in to our conversation about finding the creative source and nurturing it. Here’s the archive for Riehl Life Blog Duets to read more of these.
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Janet: Although you’re a new blogger, clearly you’ve been jamming! How have your new online relationships influenced you?

Selena: I have learned so much from these new friends. Technique, perspective, and new skills to be sure, but also how diversity and connections are so important to my own view of the world. By sharing with each other our thoughts and feelings on writing, I am able to take one step further toward finding the spirit of writing.

Janet: In our telephone conversation we spoke about our families. How do you feel your upbringing influenced your creativity as an adult? When we look at backgrounds of artists like Carol Burnett, we find that adversity often fosters humor and a creative life as an adult. How’s that been for you?

Selena: I feel that family/childhood adversities tend to force us into choosing what we do with how our lives are shaped. Being a rebel I came out swinging when I felt trapped in a place that didn’t nurture me. But it took years of questioning my own right to do that. Those years taught me that the creative drive is more than just the need to express joy. It is about connecting with my own beauty, which was buried by circumstances and fear.

Janet: Have you felt that the lack of formal studies has been a creative challenge—or, has it affected the way you look at yourself as a writer? I feel that I’m a “recovering English major.” My studies set a foundation for decades of my working life with the beginning of writing craft for instance. I found though that having learned all that, I then had to forget it. Tell us about your experience.

Selena: At one point I thought it was a challenge-not creative a creative challenge, but because I am such a hermit it was a challenge to learn on my own the ways of the writing world. I believe I have an innate skill, but it was untutored and wild. That’s not such a bad thing except when it comes time try to fit in somewhere. As I’ve grown I have come to realize that being untutored and wild has given me an advantage. I have a friend that just earned her MFA is creative writing and is struggling to find her way back to her true voice. That I don’t have to do. My muse is still untouched.

Janet: How do you nurture yourself and your creative spirit?

Selena: By doing what I love the most; being alone in nature, connecting with divinity, stopping to smell the roses. I spent a lot of years working at a job that sapped every bit of my focus and required a lot of my attention. After my children were grown, I came to realize that the art of living was so much more than money. So I began to do the things that allowed me to clear away the distractions. I gave up a well-paying job to work in a greenhouse, and learned to simplify all areas of my life. I began to say no to unnecessary demands on my time, and devoted that time to family, friends, and especially to my own writing.

Janet: Selena, your blog gives a precise statement of spirit and the creative life.

(From Solitary Words)

Webster defines Spirit as “the principle of conscious life; the vital principle in humans, animating the body or mediating between body and soul.” Any act of creation, whether it is painting, writing or giving birth, opens up a pathway to a deeper connection to spirit, to that active principle of conscious life that brings forth into the light the beauty that is inherently ours.

Although Solitary Words focuses on the process of writing as a gateway to spirit, the principles are the same, no matter what form creativity takes. It is my heartfelt hope that you take away from these words a spark that will inflame you with a passion for your own journey.

Janet: So, let me ask you, how do you “make that connection that allows the creativity to flow?” Is this your muse?

Selena: For me it is about learning to listen. There is a place that everyone has within them that is like a star shining in the velvety night sky. A pinpoint of light that is pure and clear. Most times it is covered by the clouds of mundane life; worries about money, fear of loss, working at a job that you hate. This little gem hums with life and creativity and spirit. It is hope and joy and creativity. If we stop the madness for just a moment and quiet the chattering mind, we can catch that humming that calls to us with the desire to be heard.

I have meditated for years, seeking that source. But even if meditation or prayer is not for you, spending quality alone time with yourself and learning to trust your own instincts goes a long way toward parting those clouds, if only for a short time. Learning to listen to that sweet hum opens the floodgates for me.

Janet: And, once you’ve made that connection, how to you channel the flow?

Selena: By first accepting it. When I said that the concept is universal, what I meant was that listening to the still, small voice within affects every area of my life. By creative and artful living I become the source, the source becomes me.

And then by focusing it. By becoming familiar with what the creative energy feels like, I can use it however I want. But I must stress here that the channel is a two way street. The act of creative endeavors requires an exchange to remain healthy. For me, that exchange is sharing what I know, teaching others to make that connection, and opening my heart to all of nature, and that includes humanity. That’s what Solitary Words is all about. A big lesson for me, the solitary woman in the woods.

Janet, it’s been wonderful dueting with you. Thank you so much for the opportunity!

Selena, thanks so much for our blog duet. Our readers get a two for one deal! Scoot on over to Solitary Words to read more of our conversation.

Here's a new post from my Creative Catalyst column on the Story Circle Network's blog "Telling Her Stories: The Broad View." Each of you have solved your time/money...money/time dilemna in different ways. I'd love to see a discussion going on how to become creatively independent.

Five Tips for Creative Independence: Don’t sell your soul to the company store

Thanks!

Janet

11 Creative Catalyst Nudges for 2011

East St. Louis resident, Edna J. Patterson-Petty multi-media artist is one of 9 artists chosen
to create art-glass triptychs for freestanding glass wall partitions in Lambert Airport A and C Concourses. There were 7 women and 2 men chosen.

These nine Art Glass Triptychs will be the first public art commissions for Lambert St. Louis International Airport as part of the Airport Experience Program.

The nine artists will travel in two groups to Munich, Germany from November 28, and December 5, 2010 to work with Franz Mayer glass fabricators on bringing their designs to fruition. The works of art are due for installation in the Airport between May to August 2011.

Have you ever wanted to go on a personal writing retreat that you organize yourself? This post for Story Circle Network gives you the complete map to do just that.

This post is part of the Creative Catalyst column I write monthly.

Here's the link:

Multi-talented? Ask the Creative Catalyst

Here's the fourth post in a cycle of five discussing multi-talents among creative people. My guest column Creative Catalyst appears on Telling Her Stories: The Broad View for Story Circle Network.

Multi-talented? Maybe artists and writers and musicians and actors--are like farmers!

Janet