I have a confession to make.

In writing this blog I talk a lot about the creative process which makes it sound like it's something that's kind of abstract. Or at least part of the workings of my own mind. Which isn't exactly the truth.

I've been avoiding telling the truth because I'm afraid that if I do the next time I open the front door I will be greeted by the proverbial men in the white coats with their clipboards and soothing voices and dripping syringes of Thorazine ready to cart me off to some place where I can learn more than I ever wanted to know about basket weaving.

But in all fairness to you, my dear blog readers, I think it's time I stopped being chicken-shit vague in the service of preserving any appearance of sanity.

So here is the truth.

I often feel like my creativity ( AKA my muse) is a separate being.

No, no, no.... see I'm STILL waffling.

OK. OK. One more time.

I KNOW that my muse is a separate being.

Yes, you could say It's another part of my mind. And maybe she is. But she clearly doesn't think so and she certainly doesn't act that way.

I mean, do you get into whiny, pissy fights with something that's just a part of your mind? And routinely lose those arguments?

There are definitely clues that point to her independent existence, such as the fact that she often wants things other than what I think I want. Like I thought I wanted to write this post about the futility of planning but she thought it would be a much better idea for me to write a post about her!

She so clearly has a mind of her own and needs of her own. She has her own rhythm and her own sense of flow. She comes, she goes. She talks to me louder sometimes than others. She feeds me, entertains me, supports me and gives my life an incredible sense of meaning.

And like any relationship with someone who is not you, she is unpredictable. I have no idea what she's going to do next.

Whenever I start a new creative project- whether it's writing or painting or designing a workshop- I never  know where it's going or how it's going to end up. I mean, sure, I have some general outlines to work with. Like right now, I am writing this blog post for you all. I know that it will be about creativity and maybe will have something to do with the futility of planning. ( Although you can see exactly how far THAT has gotten me).

But I don't really know what I'm actually going to say about all that. I have no idea how it's going to come out or what tangents I'm going to go off on. I don't know if I'm going to like what I end up with. If it will please my critic or my audience ( that means you, dear readers) or if it will even please me.

All of that is a total mystery. My job when I enter into a relationship with the creative process is to put in a request (one article about planning and creativity, if it's OK with you), invite the creativity goddess to pay me a visit, pick up the brush or put my fingers on the keyboard and then sit back and see what happens.

And this is something that makes my stomach clench and my skin crawl every time.

Because, you see, I am rather addicted to feeling safe.  I want the money-back guarantee. I want to know for sure where it is that I am going and what the final outcome will be. I want the map and the destination and everything in between. And I want to know that I will be happy with where I end up.

But I never get that sense of confidence when I invite my muse in because she's wildly capricious.

Sometimes she gives me tons of good stuff and sometimes I have the distinct impression that she's holding out on me. Sometimes she floods me with more words and images than I know what to do with and sometimes she is slow and halting and meandering and I end up spending a great deal of time staring out the window .

It's very clear that I don't have any control over her. And because I can't control her it actually scares me.

I'm scared because I'm not all that crazy about facing the void each time I am creating something. I don't like feeling so lost and wondering, again, if this time I will finally find out that there is nothing more left.

I'm terrified of the possibility that I will discover that maybe the creative well has finally dried up. That the creativity goddess has abandoned me and left me high and dry with my fingers perched expectantly over the keyboard but no words, or images or stories cascading  through my brain and out of my hands onto the screen or paper in front of me.

I'm afraid of the silence. The empty space. I forget that this silence and emptiness is so much a part of the creative journey. I forget that I need to empty myself before I can be filled with the creative fire. That I need to make room and get out of the way.

And then even if she does deign to allow the words or paint to flow and I end up with a painting or a blog post I get scared about other people seeing it and what they will think about it.  I get worried that they won't like it or think it's weird. And because they don't know that it's really not me writing or painting they will think that I'm not a very good writer or painter. Or that I'm weird.

They don't understand that it's completely out of my hands.

Whenever I start worrying about other peoples reactions I get confused. I forget that whatever shows up on the paper has nothing to do with me. I forget that I can take no credit or blame for how my creativity manifests.

And then I start IMPROVING what she is giving me. Making value judgments. Behaving as if I know better than her. Forgetting who is really in charge here.

Which is a monumentally bad idea. Me forgetting that she is the boss of my creative life, that she is the source of all creative goodness  makes her incredibly cranky. And when she gets cranky she pouts and sulks and won't give me anything at all.

I call it being blocked. She calls it being unappreciated.

Ultimately what it comes down to is that I need to trust. I need to trust that there is this other intelligence operating inside of me that I call the muse, or the creativity goddess or my intuition. I need to trust that this part of me is not only alive and well, but knows exactly what it is doing.

And to try and remember that if I just give in and let her have her way with me I actually enjoy the whole process immensely. It's really wonderful to be in that creative flow. To not feel like I have to be responsible. To be in that place where I am inspired and surprised by what shows up. It's endlessly fascinating. It's a lot of fun. It's energizing and relaxing and incredibly fulfilling to just let the spirit move me.

I am actually the happiest when I am doing exactly what she wants me to do without question. Which may seem a tad sick and twisted to someone looking in from the outside.

But truthfully, I didn't want to write that blog post about the futility of planning anyway.

Today is the day when we all celebrate love. Or are at least thinking about love.  Or trying not to think about love.

And mostly what gets celebrated is romantic love. Which is great. But it's not the only love game in town.

There's another kind of love that we all have some difficulty with that would certainly be worth honoring today. And as dicey as romantic love can be at times it's nowhere nearly as problematic as learning how-to-be-loving-to-your-own- sweet-self kind of love.

We need all the help we can get with that one. We need reminders. And support. And permission.

We have loving ourselves (which is a very good thing) all mixed up with things like being selfish, or too big for our britches, or self centered or egotistical or greedy. Which we have in the category of not so good things. We get all confused about what it really means to love ourselves.

So sometimes it can be very helpful to approach the whole self love thing through the back door. Sometimes we have to be a little bit wily and kind of sneak up on it without really approaching it head on.

And one way we can do that is through our art. We can learn to love ourselves by actually giving ourselves time and space to do our art. But we can also learn how to give our art some of that juicy love first... which is just one step away from bringing it back home.

Now, my dear friend and Creativity Goddess Connie Hozvicka of Dirty Footprints Studio fame has come up with a fabulous way of doing just that! She has created an online experience called Art Journal Love Letters which is designed to help you learn about this tricky self love business through being more creative.

She calls herself the Cupid Of Creativity ( which I don't doubt for a  minute!!)  and through 20 daily blog posts and 4 of her amazingly inspiring creativity videos will encourage and galvanize and spark you to fall head over heels with your amazing creative self like nobody else can.

I'm definitely planning on participating because I trust that Connie will pour every bit of her huge and generous heart and soul into creating something that will be fun, wildly entertaining and deeply motivating to me in my ongoing quest for a creative juicy life.

It starts today... of course, and I hope to see you there!

I have been on a quest lately to find out what it is that truly makes me happy.

I'm trying to learn to tell the difference between the considerable fulfillment I experience when I am being productive and simple, straightforward happiness.

I have actually had them very confused my whole life. I have often thought that satisfaction with a job well done was the same as happiness. And it kinda-sorta is.

But happiness is grace. It often feels totally undeserved. I certainly don't have to work for it. In fact, I don't have to do anything at all. It's like a visitation. And I can't really make it happen.

But I do know that I can invite the possibility of that grace into my life when I am out in nature, or spending time with people I love, or being present while one of my students  has a creative breakthrough.

And one sure fire method for stepping into the path of grace is making time and space for my own creative expression.

So simple, huh? Creativity=grace=happiness. One completely no-brainer answer to the "how to be happy" question is just be more creative.

But maybe it's not so easy as all that. Because even though I am crystal clear on the connection between the two, even though this whole creativity thing is my mission in life, I often don't do it. And I don't like to admit it but I have the same excuses as everyone else.

Addicted to busy in all the wrong places

The big one of course is finding time in my busy-busy life to be creative. Which more often means making time and choosing to be creative. It means making creativity a priority. Putting it closer to the top of the list. And for many people it means putting it on the list at all.

But why oh why is that so incredibly hard?  Why do we fight so ferociously to keep the things we want most out of our lives? Why do we continually make choices to do things that don't feed us and in fact often drain us of our precious life energy?

Good questions, all... and I'll be darned if I have the answers! Because even though I am ( as my husband is so fond of reminding me) Ms. Creative Juices Arts I still struggle with this one as much or more as anyone. But as the saying goes, you are compelled to teach what you most need to learn.

So even though I can't claim to be the kind of an expert who has it all figured out I HAVE spent a large portion of my adult life asking these questions and so here are some things I've discovered on my path to creative fulfillment.

Creativity nurtures me. It fills the well and GIVES me energy. It calms me down and makes me happy. It takes me into other realms where I feel connected to spirit and brings me experiences of pleasure and grace and a sense of being blessed.

It allows me to feel whole and on purpose and like I am connected to what my dear departed grandmother with her Polish accent and questionable grasp of the English language referred to as my "Oomp".

Now why, you may be wondering would someone avoid doing something that made them feel so bright eyed and bushy tailed?

It's mostly because  I'm not USED to feeling that way. I'm much more used to feeling depleted and harried and worried and stressed. Those are emotional and physical states that I have experienced a lot and that I identify with. In some unsettling and twisted way they make me feel more like me.

So making myself happy just plain makes me feel weird.... although a very, very GOOD kind of weird.

Underneath the feeling of having my identity tweaked when I'm having too good of a time lies an even more painful place which is the feeling of not deserving to feel that good. I have a thermostat for pleasure and that thermostat is set to be very, very low.

It's something that I see all the time in my classes and workshops. Someone will be painting away and they will tap into a place of tremendous energy and delight. And before too long they will start to get a little panicked. They will start to worry that maybe these positive, glowy feelings are a bit over the top.

And if I don't watch them like a hawk they will immediately try to find ways to shut those troublesome, blissful feelings down.

We all have that invisible automatic shut-off valve because having that much fun and that much joy brings us up against ancient feelings of shame or inadequacy.

It gets too close to all those times when we were made to feel bad for being too energetic, too alive, or just plain too much. Which means that being creative can also bring up feelings of grief for the many the times we weren't supported to be our full radiant selves.

And lastly we often simply don't know how to contain that much pleasure.

There's just not enough room in our nervous system as it is currently configured to hold a large amount of zippy wonderfulness.

It's like we need to go to the creativity gym. We have to get bigger creativity muscles. We have to create a larger creativity and juicy aliveness container.

We have to grow larger to hold that much vitality and at the same time learn to tolerate a certain level of discomfort that comes with being that much bigger.

That much more ourselves.

I have a couple of retreats coming up in my Oakland studio in the next few months. One of my long time local students came to me today with tears in her eyes . She had already signed up for one of the workshops and had told me earlier that she couldn't do both because of money. But she recently had a realization that the money issue was totally bogus.

She really WANTED to come to both. She actually DID have both the time and the money.  But she was afraid of what people would think if she treated herself that well. She was afraid of the envy and the judgment that would come from the outside and the self attack she would suffer internally if she made the choice to be so frivolous, so lavish, so self indulgent.

Listening to her tell me this made ME want to cry.

People, we have GOT TO STOP THE MADNESS!! We have got to STOP putting our own needs and desires on the back burner forever.

Oh dear... I'm so sorry... I don't mean to yell... and to get so cranky and bossy with you all... It's just that I have some incredibly strong feelings about this. I see people denying themselves things that they want, things that are good for them things that would make their lives so much better...all the time.... and I guess it just makes me a tad testy.

What I  want to say is this: It's really, really, super really OK to feed your hearts desires. To be generous with your everloving bodies and souls. To take care of yourselves. To give yourselves what you long for and need to be happy.

And not just a little bit happy. Not just happy for 5 minutes stolen here and there. But happy as a baseline. Happy as something that we expect and even begin to take for granted.

I know, I know. Things are difficult and crummy and scary and hard for lots and lots of people. The suffering is real. But there is a level of it that is self inflicted. There is a part of the suffering that we bring upon ourselves for no other reason than that it's always been done that way.

It's what our parents and grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles did. It's what most people we know are doing now. And we don't want to stand out to much from the pack on this one.

Plus misery and depletion is a time honored tradition.

But it's time for a new tradition. It's time to begin the process of waking up to a pattern of self-neglect and soul starvation that is largely unconscious and even supported by the larger culture.

It's about recognizing that pattern and making the choice to change it, which includes nourishing yourself creatively.

It's about asking your self (and myself!) the question "When did my own pleasure, my sense of well being, my own self care become such a low priority in my life? How did that become something that I willingly agreed to? That I became complicit with?"

"And what kind of help and support do I need to begin to change that pattern?"

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One of the reasons I get confused about the whole productivity issue is that my work truly DOES make me happy. It makes me incredibly happy to create the space where other people can be fully, creatively alive.

I have three opportunities for that kind of happiness (for me AND for you) that are happening in the next few months. They are truly great ways to nurture that deep hunger of the soul. ( And body too.... one of my students recently said to me "Hell, I would come to one of your retreats for the food alone!!)

So if your creative spirit has been hounding you for a nice big dose of creative expression time go to my schedule page and see if any of my upcoming workshops might be just what you're needing right now!

I have a new creative project that I am in the very beginning stages of and it is a big project. It's something that I've been thinking about for a long time and haven't been able to get to because of lack of time  and because I couldn't figure out exactly how to make it happen. But some time has opened up and the shape of it has now become very clear.

I'm very jazzed about it and my muse is totally onboard with it signaling her approval by  continually feeding me ideas. It's something that I really want to do. I think it's going to be pretty awesome once it's completed.

And I'm avoiding it like the plague.

I am hopelessly and madly in love with the creative process, but like any relationship where you are hopelessly and madly in love there are times when your beloved drives you crazy.

And the creative process is no exception.

One of the ways that it makes me wacky is how inexplicably linked it is to my inner critic. As soon as I'm ready to launch into virgin creative territory the judging mind is right there breathing down my neck, sometimes whispering and other times shouting in my ear. It wastes no effort in finding numerous tactics all designed to make me miserable and with the ultimate goal of stopping the creative show.

It reminds me of those fairy tales where the hero or heroine is searching for the treasure and they find the cave where the all the shiny, gorgeous stuff is hidden but have to deal with the big, scary fire-breathing dragon before they can get anywhere near it.

And that's kind of how it feels. When I am at the beginning of a new creative venture I start off feeling tremendously excited because I'm so very close to the source. The treasure is right there where I can practically touch it. I can imagine all the pleasure and satisfaction I will have diving into the creative energy and birthing this never before seen thing into the world. But before that happens I have to do some fancy footwork around that dragon.

And my initial responses to that dragon are not always very heroic.

At first it just looks so darn big. And I feel so small in comparison. It sits there blocking the door looking all smoky and fangy and intimidating while telling me all the ways I'm not good enough and why I don't deserve the treasure.

The treasure is only for people who are really talented and have something worthwhile to say.The treasure is earmarked for real artists and real writers. The treasure belongs to someone who is brilliant and full of genius.

In other words, the treasure is obviously not for me.

So my first non-heroic response is to hang my head and mope around for a while. I feel tired. And vaguely crummy. I keep telling myself that I just need to rest a little bit more or that I need to answer a few more emails or finally clean out the freezer. And the time that I set aside for writing or painting just slips away.

The dragon is happily sitting there feeling mighty smug. And I get more panicked and more distracted and less and less able to focus. Which of course makes me feel smaller and less confident and more avoidant. And like maybe this whole project was not such a good idea after all.

This goes on for a while. The length of time I spend wandering around in circles of misery varies with the size of the project. Since the project that I have in mind is pretty ambitious I was able to spend the last two weeks of December (which I had set aside by taking some time off work ), frittering away my precious creative time.

Another really charming aspect of this process is that while I am in this state I don't fully realize what is causing it. I go unconscious. Develop temporary amnesia. It's like I am under a weird kind of spell and I go in and out of forgetting that this is just what happens when I start something I've never done before. I forget that the dragon is doing a number on me and that the reason I am unable to make much headway is that I am feeling powerless and helpless in the face of the fear that the dragon is so good at engendering.

Eventually, something shifts. I get frustrated by and sick of all the inertia which allows me to wake up enough where I can begin to see the dragon for what it is. I will read something or have a dream or a conversation with my husband or a friend that allows me to shake off the poison trance of creative paralysis.

At that point I don't even need to be very heroic. Once the scales have fallen from my eyes the dragon loses much of it's power.... at least for the time being... and I am able to simply walk into the cave and claim some of the treasure as mine. Until the next time that I am abducted into the underworld of the dragon's lair.

It has always seemed so unfair that opening to my creative muse immediately whips my judging mind into a frenzy of activity. For a long while it was a puzzle to me. It didn't make any sense as to why I would be so crippled by fear and doubt whenever I was inspired to create something, which unfortunately for me happens on a regular basis.

But eventually I started to figure a few things out. I began to notice some patterns.

Bringing something new into the world it means going into unfamiliar territory. My creative process is constantly goading me and leading me towards the unknown. It is fascinated by what's around the next bend and what it hasn't experienced. It feeds on experimentation. It is an adventurer that thrives on risk and has no interest at all in repeat performances.

Ultimately what it wants is for me to continually grow and change and to express as much of me as I can in the short time I have here on the planet.

And all that gung-ho, let's just go off willy nilly without a map and a guaranteed outcome makes the judging mind, which is terrified by anything that it hasn't done before, go totally bonkers.

It simply doesn't like strange new things. It's convinced that any foray into places it hasn't been before is just plain dangerous. The unmapped world is full of dark alleys and muggers and maybe a touch of bubonic plague thrown in for good measure as far as it is concerned.

And so it tries to stop me. I know, I know. It's only trying to protect me. It's trying to keep me safe and in one piece.

You could say that it loves me. I'm actually pretty sure that it does. But it's the kind of love that wants to keep me so protected that I'm like a bird in a cage, my wings clipped  and my freedom to fly seriously curtailed. If I let it run the show, I would end up leading a very small and unchallenged life, littered with unused potential.

So I keep choosing to live a life propelled by my creative longings. Which means regular run ins with the dragon. And predictable periods of time trying to struggle out of fear induced creative stagnation.

The best I can do as I make this sometimes arduous creative journey is be enormously kind to myself. To be as compassionate as possible whenever I find myself lying flat on my back having been pole axed once again by the dragon's latest "tough love" attempts to keep me out of harms way.

And to try and remember that the dragon wouldn't be so fired up unless I was really, really close to something wild and sweet and wonderful that will probably change my life in the best possible way.

I have a new intuitive painting student who has been surprising herself by how often she finds herself asking the question "You mean it's really OK to do that?"

This question comes up around simple things like " You mean it's OK to make a mess? Is it really OK to use this much paint? Or to use two pieces of paper if I want to make a really big painting?"

On the one hand she knows all these questions are absurd. I have made it totally clear to her that she has complete permission to do whatever she wants. But it was incredibly eye-opening for her to see how many unconscious assumptions and rules were governing her creative life.

One of the reasons it's hard to be as fully creatively as you might want to be is that we are all riddled with these types of erroneous expectations. We are constantly being bombarded, both internally and externally, with different messages around what is allowable, what is permissible, what fits in with who you think you are and who you think others will allow you to be.

We get pigeonholed. Locked into an identity. We all have a story about who we are creatively. And that story generally comes from what we've been told by other people.

Some of us were granted the artist title. But that designation can be just as inhibiting and suffocating as being told you don't have a creative bone in your body. When you are the "artist" you always have to be proving yourself. You are constantly trying to outrun the critiques. You can't make bad art, you always have to be  original and you don't dare expose yourself as having substandard technique.

Some of us were stamped as "creatively defective". So we never even bother to try and pick up a paintbrush or write a poem because we are led to believe the myth of talent and the even bigger myth that we don't have any.

But there are myriads of other messages that we get around what is allowable creative expression, especially as adults.

One of my favorite activities is to go to a certain local city park where I can be out in nature. This particular park has a wide asphalt trail that winds through the trees and around a lake and is filled with birds and beauty and silence. It's popular but not overly crowded especially during the weekday afternoons which is when I like to be there. I also love bringing my iPod, wearing my Bose headphones and playing music as I walk.

There is one eensie-weensie problem which is that when I'm listening to some of my favorite tunes cranked up to maximum volume on my headset I am inspired to do more than just walk. I'm already pretty jazzed and energized just being outside but then the music makes me want to start toe tapping and even bursting into a little "the hills are alive" tra-la-la-ing , as well as indulging in some of my "I am a rockstar singer" fantasies.

I usually don't follow that impulse, however, because the ironclad cultural message that we all have deep in our bones is that we DO NOT sing and dance out in public on the streets if we are a grownup.

Now, singing and dancing where other people can see you is not COMPLETELY prohibited.

There are certain very proscribed places that it's OK to sort of spontaneously move our bodies to music. It's acceptable to shake our booty on a dance floor in a club or at a wedding. It's still within the realm of acceptable behavior to open wide and sing along with the performers if we are at a concert.

But walking along a trail in the forest and trying out my version of tap dance moves while gamely attempting to hit the high notes on an old Joni Mitchell song? Nuh uh. No way Jose. That is just wrong. If you do something like that you are plain weird. Unacceptable. Not normal. Way far out on the farthermost hinterlands of the bell curve.

However, even though I'm well trained in most popular social mores sometimes I just can't help it. My body simply wants to move when the beat takes hold of me. So I would find myself out there on the trail torn between the desire to appear sane by simply walking in an orderly fashion while fighting off the urge to break into a little impromptu twist and shout and risk being branded as a crazy person.

Occasionally, when I could stand it no longer, and only after making sure the coast was clear by furtively looking behind me and hoping that no one would appear around the next bend in the direction I was headed, I would allow myself to briefly prance and gyrate like Gwen Stefani on stage singing her hit song Hey Baby. And as soon as someone would come into view on the path I would immediately stop my hip twirling and pretend like I was doing nothing more than strolling.

This sneaky strategy was exhausting, completely unsatisfying and at a certain point became patently, obviously ridiculous. I actually like to think of myself as someone who is fairly uninhibited around the whole creative self expression thing. After all, it's MY JOB to help other people gain more freedom around their creativity.

I feel like it's important that I hold down that particular fort, providing some support and role modeling for people to let their creative freak flag fly, hopefully giving them permission to maybe take a few more creative risks. And trusting that if I am seen putting myself out there, it can help other people feel a little less scared and maybe even give it a try.

So I knew I had to change my approach to this whole thing. I knew I had to stop being so constrained by a cultural expectation and limitation that I think is total bullshit anyhow. I had to risk being thought of as weird and crazy. I had to break a social contract.

It was time for me to start dancing in the streets. Or at least on the city park asphalt.

I took the plunge while joyfully jumping around and belting it out to one of my favorite songs by the Ramones, I Want To Be Sedated. Because I was scared, I started my little experiment when I was alone on the path, but when a group of 20 something guys appeared coming over the next hill, I didn't stop.

This was NOT the group I was hoping would be my witnesses on my maiden street dancing voyage. I would have been much happier if it had been a group of 90 somethings who maybe couldn't see and hear all that well. But I knew it was now or never.

I needed to make a stand. And a shimmy.

I was highly uncomfortable because I could feel that it made them uneasy. I could see them looking at me out of the corner of their eye with a WTF? look on their faces that I could easily interpret as being judgmental. And they were also edging away from me slightly as if worried that my obvious unbalanced state could lead to something even more unpleasant than shaking old lady butt.

But we all survived.

They had a story that they could tell about this weird white haired woman they saw making a total fool of herself in the park. And I reclaimed a tiny bit more of my creative freedom to sing and dance wherever I damn well please.