Alysse Aallyn

Category: #Diaries

  • Sleeping Orchid – Creativity Boot Camp for Sensitives & Empaths with Alysse Aallyn

    Solitude – Self-Sufficiency

      If This Archetype Chooses You – You’ve been mothering yourself, now make friends with yourself. Are you good company? Have you been fearing time alone? It is vital that we carve out time to reflect on all that is happening to us and the part we play and want to play. Our dreams alone could fill a shelf of books – plus we have to cultivate, curate and care for our daytime creative. Sometimes we have other people to care for and relationships to manage. We need to learn how to be our own best friend.

      Your Mind Is Your Most Important Tool – Sun Tzu reminds us that all battles are won and lost in the brain. Your mind determines your experience which controls your mind which develops your experience in a perfect feedback loop. In a culture based on “likes” from strangers we are all too ready to hand the reins of our brain over to some algorithm. Advertisers, influencers and partisans do NOT have your best interests at heart. We must learn how to turn that feedback loop into an upward trending spiral.

      After the Party Comes Cleanup – We have been taking control of our routine, our trajectory, our dreams and our thoughts. Now we need to develop self-confidence. Frustrated Creatives devour themselves. We need to trust, not fear, our responsive reactions. This takes practice – “reps” in the words of the physical trainers. There is no need for two weeks alone on the Appalachian Trail (nice as that would be) because we are already alone inside our heads. Check your voices: what are you saying to yourself? “Good effort” or “Idiot”? It matters! Many of us treat ourselves worse than we would treat any other human (or animal.) That must change today.

      Creative Danger – We are not proposing a life without feedback or a divorce from reality. If you really were your own best friend, you would protect, not exalt yourself. You would strategize towards health and having something worthwhile to share, not secrecy and isolation.

      Do You Hate Your Thoughts? – A recent poll discovered that most people would rather experience electric shocks than spend time alone with their thoughts, doing nothing but thinking. Just as mapping your future is a Creative’s job, so is mapping your brain. Make yourself a person it’s a pleasure to spend time with. You are not lonely when you enjoy your own company.

      Your Training Journal Is Your Mirror – It anchors you with its reflection. It is not necessary to write long pieces – lists or single words are adequate. Visual thinkers may want to sketch out or paste in pictures. Your Training Journal answers the following questions: Where Have I Been? Where Am I Going? Who Am I? Meditate 20 minutes a day on these issues.

      Creative Opportunity – find a voice you respect and admire on which to model your new internal voice. Can you check with this person that you are on the right path? We all need a life coach or a cheerleader in our corner. Learn to enjoy time alone by building in rewards – indulging in nourishing hobbies as simple as walking and reading. You don’t need rocket science, you need a healthful day to day peaceful retreat inside your own head.

      Ask Yourself What You Take For Granted – This is the part of the picture that’s hardest to see. Because we take it for granted! Here is where your study of models can be helpful because you will be surprised by other people’s automatic assumptions. For example, some people assume being a creative means putting yourself at the mercy of fickle public taste, whipsawing between hedonism and rejection in an atmosphere of deprivation and hardship, but to me, Creativity is the peace of totally owning oneself, exploring one’s ideas and being responsible for oneself. It is serfdom to the malignant or shallow minds of others that spells suffering and hardship.

      Gratitude Practice – Gratitude must be part of your everyday practice. Give thanks for this wonderful body, with its aches and cuts and bruises, as it eagerly shapes itself according to your efforts. Give thanks for the freedom of your mind. Give daily thanks for the honor of being a Creative.

      Models & Mentors – “Loneliness is the poverty of self – Solitude is the richness of self.” – May Sarton

      “The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude” – Voltaire

      “Solitude is necessary for creativity” – Picasso

      “The best thinking is done in solitude” – Thomas Edison

      #Haiku: Selfish Armor

      Imagination untrammeled –
      My alone time’s
      For your protection

    1. Sleeping Orchid – Creative Boot Camp for Sensitives & Empaths with Alysse Aallyn

      Torpor – Addiction

        If This Archetype Chooses You – Uh oh. Something’s preventing you from launching on your quest. Time to wake your Sleeping Orchid, but…It’s hard to even formulate goals with this monkey on your back, chattering in your ear. What is it?

        You’ve Become Too Attached. To … what? Investigate. Something’s controlling your mind, controlling your actions. Take it slow as you consider. Is this attachment harming your principles? Values? Relationships?

        The Creative’s Fiercest Battle – Do you dream of imprisonment? Blank walls? Chains? Our neurocircuitry mandates habit-making behavior, but our intelligence recognizes entrapment, and our dreams send out distress signals. If you’re human, there is no way to avoid addiction. Welcome to the unpleasant Club!

        We Are Wired for Addiction – If there’s no escaping it – that means you will have to fight this battle. But the good news is, this is exactly how you become Free. Anyone who hasn’t done it is still a slave to their hormones, instincts, patterning – just as animals are. Here’s the very thing you become a Creative for – your best chance to develop a free will and a free soul.

        Study Your Opponent – Turns out we have tremendous choice over what we become addicted to. Some addictions are less corrupting than others. Visit an AA meeting and the consumption of sugar and tobacco is outright alarming. Are you addicted to gambling? Do you work in sales? Were you raised in a ritualistic faith? We easily become dependent on praise, on safety, on gratification, and our brains (and our general health) show our dependency. They threaten and panic when the “treat” is withdrawn.

        Creative Challenge – This parasite doesn’t care if it kills its host. If you fear you are approaching a cliff-edge, you probably are. One test is to go on a “retreat” where your customary gratifications are not available, and attempt to form new gratifications. See what happens! Does your personality threaten to disintegrate? Great time to ask yourself: who am I really? This is such a good idea, we should build it into our lives, periodically. Just to keep us recognizing that cliff-edge where Soul and Self become separated and Free Will is lost.

        Creative Danger – We always live with the possibility that we will lose our autonomy. We want to evolve, we know we SHOULD change, but we CAN’T. There’s no shame in needing outside help. This is the purpose of interventions, to demonstrate to our eyes and ears that we are harming ourselves and our relationships. Denial is a powerful defense mechanism, especially when we think we’ve finally found a substance/process that “magically” allows us to live on our particular cliff-edge – a dangerous job, risky sexual behaviors, risky recreational behaviors.

        Worst-Case Scenario – is that our addiction becomes our identity. We always have the choice of refusing to listen to our interveners – giving up on our relationships just to keep up our self-abuse. Some hardened wretches tell anyone who listen that life itself isn’t worth it without their life-threatening self-abuse. They choose to die as slaves.

        Creative Opportunity – You not only CAN free yourself, you MUST to deserve and preserve your Creative Power. It is your spiritual obligation to live this territorial existence as an enlightenment opportunity. Familiar with the saying, “Live simply so that others may simply live” ? That mandates sharing. That means ALWAYS studying your consumption, NEVER allowing yourself to turn into a greedy pig and scheduling time to be alone with the universe and with God. To check on the hardiness of your Soul.

        Models & Mentors – “You can’t defeat the darkness by keeping it caged inside you” – Seth Adam Smith

        “All addictions are ways to not feel our feelings”
        – Ellen Burstyn

        “Sometimes you can only find heaven by backing slowly away from hell”
        – Carrie Fisher

        “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out”. – Robert Collier

        “The most common way people give up their power is thinking they don’t have any” – Alice Walker

        #Haiku: – Addiction

        Brain cells beggared;
        Lovelorn
        Oxytocin receptors misfire:
        “Feed me!”

      1. Sleeping Orchid – Creative Boot camp for Sensitives & Empaths with Alysse Aallyn

        Duality – Ambivalence

          If This Archetype Chooses You – How many people are you? It’s a subject for deep study as you try to decide. Twinning is Entwining. Sometimes we dream disturbingly about things we don’t want and people we aren’t. Feminists dream of rape, vegetarians dream of meat, pacifists dream of fighting. It’s unsettling. What gives?

          Language Isn’t Subtle Enough to Explain You – Your personality manifests all feelings, all thoughts, all ideas, rippling through you in a vast subconscious river. Your unconscious connects with the “collective unconscious” of other peoples – dead, alive, even fictional. Why isn’t “hate-love” a word? You experience that regularly. How about “fear-attraction”? Common! What I’m suggesting is that we need to accept the fact that a “personality” is a dynamism, not a label.

          Creative Challenge – Facing this ambivalence might seem the toughest part, but it isn’t for artists, who routinely “play” along their edge, peeking over it and imagining life on the other side. Art is the best way to express this, an enormous relief, since it’s essentially non-committal. We are “playing”. Of course, you’ll have to face the surprise of your relatives when your work becomes public: “Where did THAT come from?” But if truth be told, we’ve always been surprised to be related to those people who claim they are our family.

          Creative Danger – Society seeks to label, limit and stigmatize. Everyone is afraid of becoming our fear but Creatives need to explore every fear we have. A simple safe word can’t work when people – bankers, politicians, therapists, employers – are so fundamentally untrustworthy. That is why our identification of ourselves as Brave Creatives is so vital. The vastness of our potential cannot be controlled by language. We will never be butterflies pinned down in a museum box for the instruction/curiosity of others.

          Creative Opportunity – Appreciate your Self. Don’t slam the door on your potentialities too soon. Sometimes the worst labeler, the most determined jailor, is Us. We are deeply afraid of wandering in the forest and losing the way to get home safe. But Creatives carry Home within them. As Nelson Mandela used to quote from his prison cell, if we are the captains of our souls we can be the masters of our fates. (Henley.) We can learn to tolerate a little ambiguity/uncertainty/ambivalence.

          Creatives Tolerate Uncertainty – Being a creative is all about balance. The experience of balance-seeking is indescribable linguistically – it must be felt experientially. Creatives learn to live in a world beyond language where we can savor uncertainty and foretaste eternity.

          Creatives Relish Paradox – Two contraries not only exist together but empower each other – that creative tension is the lifeblood of emotion, imagination and personality.

          Creatives Coast on the Knife-Edge of Ambivalence – The desired is undesirable, the only possibility is impossible and the act of wanting forbids getting. Creatives become comfortable with the pleasures of this dance: “My future dissolves in beads of sweat, my present is my mirror, my past’s a shape-shifting whirligig.” (Aallyn)

          Leaders Must Surrender – Physics is magic and dreams embody history. This quantum world of “spooky entanglements” is one in which we creatives become expert. We accept not only that the cave we fear holds the treasure we desire, but that we are both cave and treasure, indeed, fear itself.

          Models & Mentors – “It seems we are capable of immense love and loyalty and as capable of deceit and atrocity. It is this shocking ambivalence that makes us unique.” – John Scott

          “Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.”
          – Erica Jong

          “The Simpsons is about alienation and the ambivalence of living with a family who you love but drives you crazy”
          – Matt Groening

          “Poetry is the home of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty.” – Billy Collins

          #Haiku: Yin/yang

          Inclined to spring forward
          Fade back; yin;
          Urge to return?
          Float forward;
          Yang.

        1. Sleeping Orchid – Creative Boot Camp for Sensitives & Empaths with Alysse Aallyn

          Synchronicity – Education

            If This Archetype Chooses You – Time to Educate Yourself so that you can manage risk intelligently and get what you want out of life!

            Never Quit Learning. Synchronicity makes the magic of daily life, but you can’t see it without Education. Do you dream of longed-for events and fulfillment? Glorious parties of blissful happiness where life finally seems to be unfolding exactly the way it should? Synchronous events are harmonious, as if the universe is a vast perfectly working clockwork machine.

            Understanding machines, systems, attribution and calibration are the subject of the educational process. This is the reason we spend the first twenty plus years of our lives in instructive settings.

            Creatives Learn for a Lifetime – You are a fierce absorber of knowledge. Advertisers know this, as do the designers of games and entertainment generally. We adore self-educating mazes. The complex dance between our skills, our bodily manifestation and the physics of reality is never-ending. Creatives determinedly master the synchrony of Right Thought, Right Instruction & Right Action.

            Creatives Have Young Brains but Old Souls – We have seen, known, learned and struggled so much. We have much knowledge to pass on to the brash beginners. But we ourselves confront each day with Gratitude Practice – re-experiencing the thrill of being alive and relishing the challenge of bending the universe toward light.

            As We Fill Our Souls with Light We Confront the Darkness – Remember – always get the oxygen mask over your own face before you try to help others. We need to design a life-long learning plan that benefits US, not one that puts our hard-earned money in someone else’s pocket.

            Beware the Quicksand – The culture seeks to bog us down in titles, degrees, honors, acquisitions and pro forma protocols. Don’t succumb. Our motion is always upward, our benchmark always health. Are we becoming stronger, smarter and more peaceful? Can we pass this flexible, constructive protocol along? Danger: we are seducible. We get tired, we long for reinforcements and approval. We just want to put our feet up.

            You Chose the Synchronicity Archetype – You have something to learn today to calibrate your balance in this uncertain world. Write it out in your training journal before you go to sleep – what new thing have I learned today? Where will it fit along my map? But we are smart! Our self-designed goal system must contain refreshment and renewal breaks. Most importantly, we will be needing a buddy as we go through the system, and a spiritual guru who provably has our best interests at heart. You can recognize them by the fact that they don’t trap you into a dominance/submission matrix.

            Models & Mentors – “Education is the key to unlocking the world. It is the passport to freedom.” – Oprah Winfrey

            “Learning never exhausts the mind.” – Leonardo da Vinci

            “Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world” – Nelson Mandela

            “Tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today” – Malcolm X

            #Haiku: Superstition

            Treasure Learning
            Compassion &
            Trust
            Bastion against
            These Dark Ages

          1. Sleeping Orchid – Creative Boot Camp for Sensitives & Empaths with Alysse Aallyn

            Danger – Risk

              If This Archetype Chooses You – Look out. Are you a worrier? Anxiety driven? Haunted by nightmares and worst-case scenarios? Do you wake up gasping and trying to forget what you’ve just experienced?

              You are Alert – Nightmares mean you’re paying attention. Life is scary, but we need to grow, and growth requires we learn to cultivate risk if we are ever to expand and venture outside our comfort zone.

              The Number One Complaint About the Freedom of Becoming a Creative? – Fear management. The only way to manage fear? Become a Creative.

              Study Risk Intelligently. No point being afraid of dragons if dragons are only symbolic. No point being “afraid” of “foreigners” if the man telling us to be afraid has a reputation for befriending people and then fleecing them.

              Managing Fear:

              1. Don’t rely on rumor and innuendo
              2. Dangers must be proven Real
              3. Dangers Need to be Historically verified by data: “How likely is injury?”
              4. Assemble likely risk-avoidance strategies that have performed well for others in your situation.
              5. What exactly is your situation? Quantify.
              6. Know who your friends are
              7. Be prepared to alter strategy to maximize success and to learn from mistakes

              Creatives Train – Creatives accept, identify and study the challenges. They learn to make sophisticated risk assessments and pick their battles cleverly. To do that, creatives need a Purpose. You get to find out who your friends are. Friends want the best for you, but the relationship must be reciprocal. You have each other’s backs. Know the difference between a Team and a Gang. Gangs work to suck power from individual members and concentrate it in one individual. Teams work for the success of all. Coach can’t win if the team doesn’t win.

              Creatives Test – their and mental physical abilities constantly against life’s games & mazes

              Creatives Transform – The physical pleasure of meeting the moment cannot be overstated. Soon the training itself becomes a rush of joy. You are making love to the universe and the universe loves you back

              What About Defeat? – There are no defeats, there are only lessons. Everything is practice for The Greater Contest.

              Won’t You Ultimately Lose? Truly, we all die, some sooner, some less dignified. This is where your purpose upholds you. Study your models. What allowed Nelson Mandela to be “captain of his soul” after more than 20 years in brutal captivity? Are we just bodies? Or are we also souls? Are our souls so easily defeated? Can we also train, test and transform our souls?

              Remember – a caterpillar’s “defeat” is a butterfly.

              Models & Mentors – “Extreme Fear can neither fight nor fly.”
              – William Shakespeare

              “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear” – Mark Twain

              “If you try to get rid of fear and anger without knowing their meaning, they will return stronger” – Deepak Chopra

              “We’re more often frightened than hurt, and we suffer more from imagination than reality.” – Seneca

              #haiku: Everything

              Everything you’ve
              Ever wanted
              Is on the other side
              Of fear

            1. Sleeping Orchid – Creative Boot Camp for Sensitives & Empaths with Alysse Aallyn

              MEMORY – THE PAST

              If This Archetype Chooses You – Check your conscious/subconscious/
              unconscious/collective consciousness levels. How comfortable are you with the very existence, not to mention the depth, of all these levels?

              You Are Multiple People Blending Their Lives With Yours – Do you ruminate about past events? Are you haunted by what was done & left undone? Do you feel nostalgia for a past that never was? Do you have a favorite period in history or a fantasy universe that you wish you lived in, instead of this one?

              You are the Hero of Your Creative Saga – Accept your centrality in your own myth. It doesn’t matter what other people think – they are the bit players. Think of your past as a Quest Saga. What did you want? How did it change? What blocked you? What tools have you got at your command? Where do you go from here?

              Rewrite the Past – You absolutely CAN, but first you first must face its full horror and that effect on you. Generally, because we were immature, we didn’t understand what was going on, were co-opted by our persecutors and prevented from fighting back. Things are different now! The hardest thing to accept is that beloved caregivers didn’t want the best for us – they only wanted us to be just like them.

              “I Don’t Believe in Ghosts but I Never Met a Person who Wasn’t Haunted” is a very wise saying. What haunts you exactly? Or who? Ghosts are malignant – if they weren’t they would be power spirits, fairy godmothers or guardian angels. What malignancies from your past are out to get you and how do they make themselves known? One of Freud’s contributions was to point out that people prefer their neurosis – ie imprisonment – to liberation. Why? What’s in it for you?

              You Define YOU. Yes, you have scars – these are bragging rights! You have been through the wars! ‘Rewriting” the past means understanding what really happened, the limitations of those who surrounded you, and exploring your chances and choices today. Just because parents, teachers or “society” sentenced you to play a role, you can step out of it at any time. Buddhist thought is very helpful here.

              Buddha teaches that life itself is an illusion – a dream. It changes depending on how we think about it. In the present, inside your mind, you hold all the keys to your own liberation. Re-visit Pema Chodron’s Noble Heart and Eckhart Tolle’s Power of Now to explore how you can assume immediate control of your life and your mind and turn your past into fuel to power your growth.

              Creatives Know Who They Are – Remember, you’ve got a purpose. You’ve got a future. You’ve thought about your past and worked out conflicts with a mentor and in your Training Journal.

              Creatives Develop A Sense of History – You understand that history is a spiral, not a circle – the same things do keep coming around but in a different form. You see all around you the operation of karma.

              Choosing Evil is Choosing Chaos – and condemning yourself to death. It can’t work out for anyone except temporarily. You understand the battle between darkness and light and you have committed yourself firmly to The Light.

              Creatives Are Storytellers – You pass the message on with your life, with your words, with your body, with your very presence. You have become one link in the unbreakable chain of Eternal Perfection and you will have your reward.

              Models & Mentors – “You never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory” – Dr Seuss

              “Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things” – Cicero

              “In the end, we’ll all become stories.” – Margaret Atwood

              “Your brain forms the same neural connections and muscle memory whether you are imagining a task or actually doing it”- Yo Yo Ma

              #Haiku: No-Fault Apology

              Atone?
              Conspire:
              Delete:
              Rewire
              My memory and
              Yours; potent
              Fire.

            2. Sleeping Orchid – Creative Boot Camp for Sensitives & Empaths with Alysse Aallyn

              Dreams – Imagination

              If This Archetype Chooses You – It’s Time to Wake up! Do you look forward to dreaming? I like waking up in the early dawn because when I go back to sleep I can set an intention for dreaming – all the best dreams (and the most memorable ones) happen at the very end of sleep while you are coming up through the layers of sub- to semi-consciousness.

              Creatives Are in Tune With Their Inner Voice – Jung tells us that in your dreams, you are everyone. Every life you have ever lived and every life you will ever live comes to you through your dreams.

              Remember – As Creative, You’re the Pilot – Do you long for caretaking? Are you eager to give over the reins of your life to someone else? If so, your dreams are likely to become scary, unmanageable and unsatisfying. It is time for you to take charge of your power – to admit that you are in control of your own brain.

              Creatives Are Seekers – We are self-defining. Self-validating. We are on a quest. Creatives experience to the fullest the nature of having a self. Become alert to the possibilities inherent in this particular incarnation and explore. Feel free to release your imagination.

              Dream Journal – Start a dream journal. Date it, and write, “I want to dream about…” Fill in the blank. Be as detailed and specific as you can manage. It is OK to allow your waking mind to construct desirable dreams – great works of art got their start in just this way! You may hear a voice… someone from the past who discouraged your “day-dreaming” and wanted you to focus on your work, on the present and on them. Explore this memory fearlessly. It is not rejecting or “hating on” that person to disagree with them – there are certainly times when the priority is to focus on other things – but right now you are exploring your own brain and testing out its powers. Clearly that’s an important and necessary project. Gently take control from this Remembered Forbidder and say, “This is my time now. I am in charge.”

              Creative Danger – We all know the cautionary tale of Scary Guy Who Lives for Video Games and Doesn’t Have a Life. Do you secretly fear that the power of dreams and the pleasures of daydreaming will suck you away from Real World Competence? They won’t – so long as you are reality centered. Some people only dream of different outcomes, futures that are impossible – instead of finding workable avenues of growth and advancement.

              Positive Dreaming Deepens and Enhances, doesn’t evade reality. It’s just that reality is so much wilder – and we are so much more powerful than we can credit!

              Dream Group – Form a Dream Group with others to share the content of your dreams and listen to their fresh interpretations. You can even try Group Dreaming. Lie on the floor holding hands in semi-darkness playing drowsy music. Share whatever comes up. These are models for your future. Some of us believe this growth goes on forever – even after death.

              Models & Mentors – “I dream things that never were and I say, “Why Not?” – George Bernard Shaw

              “A dreamer finds his way by moonlight…sees dawn before the rest of the world.” – Oscar Wilde

              ‘You have within you the strength, the patience and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world”
              – Harriet Tubman

              “I’ve had dreams, and I’ve had nightmares. I overcame the nightmares because of my dreams.” – Jonas Salk

              #Haiku: Human Clay Sculpts Angel Wings

              We’re all
              Dirt:
              Humble beginnings launch
              Celestial imaginings

            3. Sleeping Orchid – Creative Boot Camp for Sensitives & Empaths with Alysse Aallyn

              Let Go of the Past – Don’t Worry.

                Can Creatives afford to relax? Seems counterintuitive right before a big project, doesn’t it? Well, First Lesson of Creative Boot Camp is that creativity is Counterintuitive. Other people rush away from the burning building – planning on being EVEN MORE SCARED the next time. Well, we are going to master our fear. We are going in.

                Consider the “Letting Go” archetype – swimming, flying, dreaming. Does it speak to you? You’ve summoned up your power – now you’re overwhelmed with fear – are we challenging the goddess? Insulting the universe? This is an age-old dread felt by every human that intended to accomplish anything since the beginning of time. You’re declaring your place in the world. Your past memories are of others firmly trying to “place” you and keep you there. Dismiss them from your thoughts. You’re alone now, with your own potential – and it’s the most exciting place to be in the world.

                Everybody Panics – I had my first panic attack at age 5 (I got lost outside a movie theatre) and another at age 11 when I descended deep, deep, deep into a cave. (I think the guide was deliberately trying to scare us.) I didn’t know at the time what these episodes were – my parents and sisters saw them as embarrassing annoyances – but looking back it’s clear what was happening to me physically was as a result of what was happening to me mentally.

                Relaxation In the Face of Panic – Learning to tolerate psychic dissonance, to be interested in it and challenged by it is what we’re all about. It’s a sign that we’re in the presence of the Deep Stuff – the things that galvanize our deep subconscious and if we can just seize control of that, we’ll access our true power.

                Learn Relaxation Techniques – There are so many and you should experiment with all of them! Learn what works for you and – key – what you enjoy. You will find yourselves using these techniques all the time. To get to sleep, to get through difficult experiences or just to access your subconscious when you have a question.

                Breathe Deeply – The very first thing is mastering control of the breath. Pregnant women learn all kinds of helpful breathing techniques in Lamaze; panting, counting; deliberately slowing down and speeding up your breathing. In yoga you will learn Lion Breaths to make you feel powerful. They are very similar to the gasps and shouts in martial arts and will affect your opponents. Watch the Maori war dance on YouTube.

                Get Out Your Training Journal – write down the techniques and your reactions. Appoint a time to practice these every day. Your breath connects you to the universe and all living things.

                Models & Mentors: “The first thing to learn is the breath.” – Confucius

                ‘Breathe In. Let Go. And remind yourself that this very moment is the only one you know you have for sure, and give thanks for that.”
                – Oprah Winfrey

                ‘Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor” –
                Thich Nhat Hanh

                “While we breathe, we hope” – Barack Obama

                #Haiku: Every Breath You Take

                Life isn’t numbered
                By breaths you take but
                Moments
                That take breath
                Away

              1. Sleeping Orchid – Creative Boot Camp for Sensitives & Empaths with Alysse Aallyn

                The Goddess – Power

                  When This Archetype Chooses You – Is this your archetype? You are one of the Elect. Most people feel that because the Goddess archetype represents power it’s the most valuable archetype in the Creative Oracle. But creativity builds over time, and power can destroy in an instant. We are well familiar with fires that get out of control, rage-fueled spirals, explosives that blow up in your face and escalating weaponry. How do we master such an overwhelming force?

                  You Must Own Your Power – Accept that you have the force within you to get things done and to bend unfriendly circumstances to your desire and will. To others, creativity looks like magic. Accept that. Isn’t that what we all want – a little magic?

                  You Are Iconic – But the Goddess archetype is about the inherent magic that is especially, irreplaceably You. You have a power no one else has, incorporated in your being, your possibilities, your desires and your memories. This takes a lifetime to accept because we all nervously want to be Someone Else and experience existence through the armor of Having only an Outside instead of just the very vulnerable Inside in which we all feel imprisoned.

                  Dreams Instruct You – Your dreams bring all these passions together as psychic poetry, elucidating what you think you want, what you hope you want and what you are afraid you want. The ultimate magic will be to seize conscious control of this potent power source.

                  Creative Challenge – The challenge is to truly connect with others, reveal our world Inside, and avoid blasting their apparently impenetrable Outside with our terror, our longing and our fear.

                  Creative Danger – We cannot take hostages and we must never become a hostage. Freedom is a fine line to walk. If we wish to reach out, we must treat others with respect and claim like respect for ourselves. Accept your “experiments”; do not fear them but allow them to take you where you need to go.

                  Creative Opportunities – There will be stumbles and terrors aplenty, also successes that LOOK like stumbles and terrors, but which we only realize on reflection were real leaps forward. This is why we must carefully assess our daily efforts without being harsh with ourselves. Speak gently to yourself as you would to a most beloved child. You are your own Most Beloved Child. It is not selfish to commit to this belief, it is simply placing the oxygen mask over your own face FIRST so that you can administer this life-saving force to others. Find someone with whom you can share your journey, without fear or judgment. This connection will teach us everything we need to know about how to connect with others.

                  Fear & Trembling: Where would we get the courage to become creatives? Human history begins with an enormous fear of God or whoever is causing all that lightning, those earthquakes and striking everybody down. Killing small helpless, pretty things was meant to be flattering and propitiatory to this God (I don’t get it either.) then Jesus came with a message about how God was really loving, generous and wanted the best for us. We know how that turned out.

                  Becoming a Creative: As children, we struggled to understand where we fit on the power spectrum. I tried killing a snake and experimented with bullying other children the way I was bullied. I didn’t care for it. The only relief was in thinking about, researching and understanding what was going on. My earliest researches, as for many children, were in astronomy and dinosaurs. The cold magnificence of the planets and the complete wipeout of the dinosaurs gave me a way to stand back from the immediate suffering of the schoolyard. I then moved on to the early Egyptians who tried to solve their problems through magic and art. The art was visually appealing and the magic was emotionally soothing.

                  Pick Your Battles: I saw that most schoolyard fights were a reaction to the immediate suffering of pain or confusion, and that they magnified, rather than solved, those problems. There was a manifest holiness about this discovery. It rescued me from the torture of everyday life and elevated me to a plane where every other contributing thinker had already become immortalized.

                  Study & Strategy: I read everything I could get my hands on in history and biography (research) and in fairy tales (magic). When I fell in love with the novels of C.S. Lewis and Rumer Godden, the world judged my taste good – when I discovered Agatha Christie, it did not – but it turned out everyone else was reading her too. Agatha is a short course on human nature (original sin) and a proponent of both the scientific and Socratic methods. She’s great training for a Creative. I wrote it all down in my Training Journal.

                  Claiming Your Power: By the time you’re a teenager you can see you have some power – some mental, some physical. The question is developing it and finding appropriate gurus. Avoid the dominance/submission game.

                  Keep Going – Recognize that you have been touched by the goddess and honor her by being grateful for the glorious gifts of life.

                  Models & Mentors: “I did not deceive you. I permitted you to deceive yourself.” Agatha Christie

                  “An Indian proverb says everyone is a house with four rooms – physical, mental, spiritual and emotional. Most of us live in one room or the other but if you don’t visit each room each day you are not a complete person.” – Rumer Godden

                  “You are never too old to dream a new dream or set a new goal”
                  – C. S. Lewis

                  “You have to believe in yourself” – Sun Tzu

                  Haiku: Wyvern

                  My power
                  Beast bristles
                  Fire;
                  Eats critics
                  Guards path
                  Sleeps in my
                  Mirror

                1. Butterfly Language for Caterpillars – Soulmate Seeking with Alysse Aallyn

                  The Calla Lilly = FORGIVENESS “My Grandmother’s Ghost”

                  “Is forgiveness possible?”

                  In the language of flowers, the Calla Lily is forgiveness. Forgiveness is like coming home. It hypothesizes a place where the past doesn’t matter, mistakes are healed, and love conquers all. Sounds like heaven, doesn’t it?

                  Soulmates create heaven for each other, but we can taste and enjoy it, now. Nothing is held back.

                  Love requires that each desire the other’s “good.” There is no tiny part of us hoping for the other’s denigration so that we can rise. This means forswearing the Scarcity Mentality. We must believe there is enough love for us both.

                  Love without status, without competition. Just closeness, forgiveness and togetherness. If a Soulmate keeps pushing his Beloved into position of Enforcer, Critic, Teacher or Detective, the relationship is under such threat its future is imperiled. One can hardly be forgiven until one stops being a danger to the soul of the Beloved and the soul of the relationship. We must commit to desiring the other’s good, and to demanding health and life for ourselves.

                  When the Calla lily arrives at your door, not just forgiveness but absolution is in the offing. We know there can be no forgiveness for us unless we have learned to forgive others, but perhaps the hardest thing is to learn to forgive ourselves.

                  We must even forgive God for the pulse of history and the electricity of circumstance, for the physical web in which we are all caught. Give up trying to assess who did what to who and why; letting it all go as your eyes turn to the future.

                  There is no resolution in simply showing wounds or admitting wrongdoing; but there is healing available when we hold each other up in the light. But we have to want it. We must want to come home.

                  How many times do we have to forgive ourselves? When asked how many times we need to forgive others Jesus made the quick calculation of “seventy times seven” meaning, “a lot.” If you think about it, you’ll realize we are going to have to forgive each other and ourselves a lot more times than that! Possibly multiple times per day for the rest of our lives. Don’t we have to forgive ourselves for constantly underestimating ourselves, for saying “I can’t do this” without even trying, for insulting ourselves and verbally (and for all I know physically!) Be a loving partner to yourself so that your Beloved knows how to love you.

                  Meditation: We’re branches of the same tree – W.B. Yeats

                  My Grandmother’s Ghost

                  My grandmother never cried
                  Emmie you’re a stoic
                  Everyone admired her. That’s why
                  She haunts us; pressing her face accusingly
                  Against the glass beneath the stairs.
                  On windy nights she
                  Threatens God, maligns
                  His angels; for the little boy who died
                  Of scarlet fever; without once
                  Calling her name; and the collie dog run over
                  And the storm that forever uprooted
                  Her wedding tulips.
                  Mother shakes her head, says, “Poor Gran
                  Will never be done; she’s got
                  Too much grief to catch up on.”