My muse is quite the bossy sort and has been yammering at me pretty much non-stop lately.

What she wants this time is for me to be writing more. And specifically she wants me to be BLOGGING more often.

There’s a familiar dance that we engage in that starts with her bugging me about something. I do actually hear it as “the still small voice”… at least initially, but the longer I ignore her the LOUDER and more insistent that voice gets. Eventually it starts to feel like muse stalking.

My first strategy in dealing with her stalky behavior is that I try to hide. I will get incredibly busy or read more or get very focused around things that actually need to be done. Cleaning out the refrigerator or returning a backlog of email messages.

I often feel very proud and productive while engaged in these activities and quite astonished that I all of a sudden have energy for tasks that I have been dragging my feet around for days or sometimes ….. longer. Much longer.

Of course , the reason I have motivation for these things that up until now have held little or no appeal is because I am avoiding the bigger, scarier thing. The thing that she wants me to do.

Which is now all about the blogging. It’s not that I don’t blog already. I do. I enter a blog post on my site pretty regularly about twice a month. And that is actually DOUBLING what I was doing a mere 6 months ago which was writing a post once a month.

And even that has been a bit of a stretch. I am 57 years old and it is only in the last 3 -4 years have I claimed my writer identity. Which is much more solid than it’s ever been but still new enough to be a bit shaky.

Writing is still hard for me. Its still fraught with a great deal of anxiety.

It’s scary because I don’t completely trust my writers voice yet.

I have some pretty common and familiar fears around my creative process. One of which is that I only have so much to say, so I don’t want to use everything up too quickly.

So I hoard. And titrate. I feel a bit like a miser counting the gold coins of my blog posts or articles in a little cave in my mind somewhere. Fearful that there is an end to my inspiration. I don’t want to push it and find out that there really IS a bottom to my creative barrel.

I DO know that this is totally ridiculous.

I know that the creative flow is endless and that the more I tap into it the more it has to give me.

However, I am not walking my talk around this.  I am believing the voice of fear. And my muse is a HUGE proponent of me walking my talk. This is what I do on a DAILY basis with my students. I encourage them ad nauseum to trust in the generosity of the creative source.

So she wants me to challenge this belief and assumption in myself in the same way I would do with one of my students. And the way that she suggests that we do this is in public. With blog posts. More often. Much more often. Like maybe MOST days. So everyone ELSE can see and learn from me seeing and learning about this struggle.

She is ,unfortunately, right. And full of some very good ideas. Of course, some of her best ideas are the ones that scare me the most. But they only scare me so much because they are things that I really, really, really WANT to do.

They are things that require that I put my heart on the line.

Which means that I might get disappointed. Or hurt somehow.  Everything that I am trying to avoid by NOT doing what it is I am longing for.

However, I also know from VAST experience ( I am 57 after all and have been around more than a few blocks) that whenever I follow her directives and choose to not believe whatever fear is currently mesmerizing me that I always, always end up experiencing really good things.

Like joy and excitement and self confidence. Sometimes money. But unfailingly greater trust in her and in life and in the longings of my heart.

The only thing I needed was a way to enter into this new commitment. It was too much for me to just all of a sudden announce that I was going to do this unaccustomed thing. I needed some kind of encouraging and helpful support and structure.

This is where the Bindu Wiles blogging and yoga community project comes in. This is an invitation to write. For 21 days. 800 words a day. And also committing to a daily yoga practice ( I’m not sure I can do that one, yet). But the writing is practiced in a group with other people who also want to write but need some support and accountability.

All around a very cool thing. Thank you Bindu!!

So I’m signing up. Jumping in. We’ll see if I can write every day. But I’m definitely going to give it a shot. And see how deeply my creative well really does go.

I also want to give a shout out to the huge hearted Leah Pinkola-Kolidas and her amazing site Creative Every Day which supports everyone to be as creative as they can possibly be!