During the past five years, I’ve lived the transformative power of today’s reading from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way Every Day – A Year of Creative Living:
“People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined. As we lose our vagueness about our self, our values, our life situation, we become available to the moment. It is there, in the particular, that we contact the creative self. Until we experience the freedom of solitude, we cannot connect authentically. We may be enmeshed, but we are not encountered. Art lies in the moment of encounter: we meet our truth and we meet ourselves; we meet ourselves and we meet our self-expression. We become original because we become something specific: an origin from which work flows.”
To begin the search for my long-lost authentic self, I primed the pump with immersion in a plethora of creative endeavors. I had no master plan. Only a vague recollection of feeling happy to be alive when I was making art as a child. Art is the language our souls still speak even when, especially when, our brains and mouths cannot form words to tell our story. Through our art we self-disclose without ever planning to, even when we try not to. We can’t stop our hearts and souls from speaking through our creations – whether we sing, garden, write, paint, cook, sew, repair cars or fix computers. Always, in all ways, we tell what must be told.
Three years into that search, left on my own for the first time in my life, guided by love, respect, curiosity and compassion, I found myself. Only then could I begin my first real connections with others. As Cameron observes, before that solitude, before that encounter with my self and my values, I was often, maybe always, enmeshed with others, but I never truly encountered them or they me.
Dear One, Julia didn’t just write today’s meditation for me. She wrote it for herself and for all of us. It is time, past time, to fall in love with yourself. Only then will you be able to fall in love with anyone else.
You are loved and loving. You are blessed and a blessing. Namaste.
© Copyright 2011 DJW Life Coach LLC. All rights reserved.
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About djwlifecoach
I am retired from 40+ years of helping individuals and teams build lives and organizations they love. One of the great joys of my retirement from professional practice is having greater bandwidth to donate my professional and creative talents to support and promote animal and social welfare charities.
During my 30 years as an organization transformation consultant, I served as a senior partner in four of the world’s largest, most prestigious global professional services firms. In 2005, I took a five-year sabbatical to find healing and peace because non-stop work had taken its toll.
My recovery from burnout led to finding my purpose guiding others on their journeys. As a board-certified coach, author, consultant, radio host, Reiki Master and EFT/tapping practitioner, I share hope, possibilities and empowerment with the world.
111419 DJW Sid CH Pet Corner Photo ShootI help clients achieve rapid, extraordinary, sustainable results by connecting who they are with what they do, a connection often lost through stress and the sheer busy-ness of daily life. Courageous self-awareness and unconditional self-love lead to honest choices based on priorities that nurture you and those around you on a journey to wholeness.
Decades in coaching, consulting, change management, organization development, human resources and mixed media artistic expression honed my business sense, professionalism, creativity, intuition, leadership and communication skills. The result? Practical tools that help you become more insightful, creative, committed, productive and fulfilled.
Even the most dedicated and hard-working individuals can shift from frustration to a sense of futility when their values, passion, work, and lives become disconnected. One of the problems with not taking care of our health is that the effects of ignoring it are often slow to show up. We continue to juggle family responsibilities, work and finances until we lose ourselves, waking up one day 50 pounds heavier in body and soul—no good to ourselves or anyone else.
I love working with people who are ready to take life-changing action to make their dreams a reality. At each moment, you have inside you all the wisdom you seek to choose your life and your way of showing up. Limiting thoughts, beliefs and feelings can block you from moving forward. An absence of love and concern for yourself can result in negative head talk that holds you back with discouraging messages about who you are and what you can do.
By listening and caring deeply, I guide you in connecting with your own inner wisdom. We identify the way you’d like to live. We determine what’s blocking you and release you from the hold those blocks have over you—unleashing the positive energy that will fuel you forward. Together we develop a plan to move you closer to your heart’s desire.
My books, blog, radio show and signature coaching programs help individuals and organizations harness the transformative energy of love to turn unexplored possibilities into fulfilling realities and step into their greatness. What’s love got to do with it? Everything! My book, Choose Your Energy: Change Your Life! (Hay House/ Balboa Press 2013) shares my story and the stories of 10 of my clients along with my signature Discovery Framework.
For fun, I love reading, sewing, knitting, yin yoga, afternoon tea, opera and movies. I live in Williamsburg, Virginia with my spouse, Wilson Abney, and the cat who runs our life, Maisy Jane.
To begin the search for my long-lost authentic self, I primed the pump with immersion in a plethora of creative endeavors. I had no master plan. Only a vague recollection of feeling happy to be alive when I was making art as a child. Art is the language our souls still speak even when, especially when, our brains and mouths cannot form words to tell our story. Through our art we self-disclose without ever planning to, even when we try not to. We can’t stop our hearts and souls from speaking through our creations – whether we sing, garden, write, paint, cook, sew, repair cars or fix computers. Always, in all ways, we tell what must be told.
Choose Your Energy: Change Your Life! 
I love this – and the picture speaks volumes. You might add “sing” to the list of ways we speak through our creation. I know that I am often happiest when I am singing.
What a fetching picture! How old were you then?
It certainly shows how you have been able to express yourself not only with words but also through your art. My mother was an artist, as you well know, my brother was much more talented than I, but she still made both of us get involved in all manner of projects. My father loved his gardening and photography.
Currently I am floundering through the art-scape, singing in the choir and shower being the only art-sy endeavors. However, that may change, eventually. Everything in its good time. The last time I was in an Art Museum was in San Antonio during the IKE evacuation. Somewhat painful, still then, because Steve & I had gone to so many art shows together.
Again, I am working on being open. Trying to gently soften my heart-y shell, better image than cracking it open. Hard work, as you well know. But, and this is quite a discovery really, things really do take time. I therefore pray and wait for divine guidance as in so many other things.