A week ago Monday, I lugged home a (clean) trash sack stuffed with ten (very clean, empty) cigar boxes all the way from Pasadena. It seemed like a good idea at the time because I’m excited about collage and assemblage right now and sturdy wooden cigar boxes are a handy size for small assemblage pieces. […]

Do you allow your perceived limitations to stop you from starting? I do it, all the time. The other day I had an absolute bolt of inspiration about how to begin the first of  a series of recordings I have been wanting to create for about two years. I have had the tools to make […]

I’ve been thinking a lot about the subject of  “Time” lately, especially in terms of how we view it and use it and abuse it. Since watching the time and meeting deadlines and so forth seem to be fairly common concerns among  so many creative people,  I’ll be writing about time and our beliefs and […]

Deep in Chapter 8 of Eric Maisel’s Coaching the Artist Within, we come across a nugget on identifying and dealing with perfectionism. Maisel argues that we are culturally conditioned to value a high gloss perception of perfection over reality. Reality, of course, includes both glossy and matte, highs and lows, successes and failures, perfection and […]

In Coaching the Artist Within, creativity expert and psychologist Eric Maisel devotes an entire chapter to “Achieving a Centered Presence.” He describes a simple, six-step, one minute process for carefully breathing and thinking yourself into a grounded state of calm so you are ready to create and take the next right step for the project […]

In his self-coaching creativity manual Coaching the Artist Within, Eric Maisel offers four specific tactics or strategies you might adopt to help yourself create more consistently and more easily. “Don’t Snivel” Stop complaining. Take that time and energy-sucking, self–indulgent complaint/excuse-generating habit and redirect its power and intensity toward doing the work instead. Do you seriously […]

Creating in the middle of things is admittedly not easy and often difficult, fraught with all kinds of risks and fears and do-ability issues. If “Just do it NOW!” doesn’t push you to take action, then you may need to work on some strategies to help yourself get moving. In Coaching the Artist Within, creativity […]

According to creativity expert Eric Maisel’s Coaching the Artist Within, we must all learn to create in what he terms “the middle of things” — things being both external and internal constraints limiting what we believe we can accomplish. Facing External and Internal Barriers Certainly we must create while life goes on, whether we face […]

In Coaching the Artist Within, creativity expert Eric Maisel discusses the mental energy required to create. Unlike physical energy which is based on food/sleep inputs, mental energy depends on your interest, passion, desire, concern – the intensity you apply to creating. Your mental energy is depleted by mental activity, including creating – and not creating! […]

According to Julia Cameron, many creative people spend years mislabeling themselves. When we do not create the way we think we should, we label ourselves lazy when in fact we are blocked by fear. The way past fear, asserts Cameron, is through love for your inner artist. Your inner artist is like a child in […]