Daily Actions for Creative Flow

Cultivating Transformative States of Mind

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

Teaching Gems: Sharing Favorite Practices

This week I’m kicking off a new series of posts for you all coming out of my teaching at the university and favorite practices I’ve collected over years of mentoring and witnessing transformation and growth. I’m excited to create a generous space here to share facilitation and teaching practices from my life and projects, and hear about yours!

10 Year Anniversary of the Interdisciplinary Research Studio

This semester marks the 10th round of my annual interdisciplinary research studio and I love it! It is such a blast to facilitate this 14 week creative journey every year.

I love co-creating a diverse, collaborative, and nonjudgemental community and witnessing the risks folks will take in that space. I love the profound connections that are made and creative leaps that come from freedom to follow what feels good. And the transformation of everyone reaching outside their perceived limitations is infectious!

I grow right along with my students every year. I gain new information and perspectives on the world and see wonderful genre-bending and paradigm shifting work and play: writers performing embodied installations instead of “readings,” performers finding rich articulations of their practices, scientists discovering freeform connections between their lives and research, and everyone playing and collaging in visual journals and experimenting in immersive intermedia environments. It is beautiful!

Research Studio for Everyone?

So far this course is only for folks at the university but I’ve had enough community members asking about it that I think it is time to create a version for this Livable Futures community! What do you think? Want to embark on a creative co-work journey together?

Daily Actions for Daily Flow

One of the foundations of creative play and transformation is a practice I call Daily Flow. I’m drawing on a long line of beautiful work done largely by feminists on supporting creative wellbeing. I love Carol Lloyd’s book Creating A Life Worth Living and her Daily Actions practice which she describes this way:

"The daily action is 15 minutes of a focused activity performed every day at the same time of day. Choose an activity that creates an empty space where your creativity can assert itself. Let the action be solitary and process oriented. You are giving yourself fifteen minutes of emptiness within the blur of living...In choosing your daily action for yourself, avoid activities that require you to respond to stimuli or follow a formula too carefully. Activities like organizing papers, exploring the Internet, writing letters to old friends, reading or reciting prayers can be extremely useful, calming, and life affirming, but they don't create the simple, empty space necessary to bring your mind and your mind alone to the fore. Also beware of actions that can become to product oriented and therefore tarnished by anxiety about success or failure."

The book is full of ideas and interviews and although a bit dated now (1997) still relevant. I hope she’ll do an update soon.

Here’s how to create your own practice for Daily Flow:

• Start with a spirit of experimentation and personal exploration. If you start doing the practice and it doesn’t feel good, release it and revise it until you find what works.

• Establish a time of day when you can carve out 15 minutes just for you.

• Determine a practice that helps create empty space for you to be in process. This is not about being “right” or “productive.”

• Avoid actions that put you in a responsive mindset (email, social media, interacting with others, radio/tv).

• Choose an action that feels good. Common practices that work include:

  • Visioning and meditation, still or moving.

  • Reading (but not something you have to read for work or class), poetry can be great or a longer text that you dip into or read a single line each day and reflect. Check out The Artist’s Rule for a secular twist on the lectio divina practice of Catholic monks.

  • Collaging, knitting, or other tactile play (but not if this is your professional practice).

  • Journaling (audio, visual, or written).

  • Dancing to your favorite music, a neighborhood stroll, or a backyard barefoot wander.

  • Any movement coordinating breath and motion.

  • Continuous timed writing (for more on this, check out Nathalie Goldberg’s wonderful work Writing Down the Bones).

  • Drumming, humming, chanting.

  • Or something else you know helps create flow for you.

• If you’re not sure what do, I recommend starting with Morning Pages, a practice shared widely by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way. Morning Pages is a proven strategy for making mental space, here’s how:

  • Find a notebook and pen that you like writing with but aren’t too precious (I usually lovingly discard these notebooks in the recycling bin once they are full).

  • Write in a notebook for 15 minutes or approximately 3 pages every morning.

  • This is your brain dump. Don't go back and read these pages. Don't edit yourself, judge, or worry about what's there. Don’t try to be nice, spiritual, literary, articulate…just use this as a brain dump and enjoy it letting it all out on the page. Then set it aside until the next morning when you go again. I highly recommend this practice and go back to it often in my life.

  • In short, meet yourself at the page.

The key to your Daily Flow time is simplicity and making it something you can easily achieve! I’m going to pick up the Morning Pages again this year and I love my morning reading practices.

Enjoy and let me know what is working for you.

Big love

Norah

Closing Note:

Let Livable Futures be your collaborator for living and thriving on a planet in need. Together, we can build beloved community turning worry into action.

Share widely!