Alysse Aallyn

Category: #PersonalChange

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

    The Field – Fate

    If This Archetype Chooses You – You are about to go through some things. Do you dream of costume drama? Historical characters? Ancient books? Do you consult tea leaves? Are you superstitious? We are all caught in the mesh of history. The field is too large for us to see it clearly. We can feel the pull of forces too vast to resist or even rise above and visualize. Those caught in wars, in genocides, in natural disasters, are brutally unlucky. But the techniques of the Creative can substantially save, improve, even alter their fates. Naturally we yearn for a trustworthy clue to extract us from this maze.

    Creatives Are Caught and Called – by History. Sometimes we are crushed by the gears of chaos. According to the philosopher Hegel, “Heroes are singular figures whose vocation it was to be the agents of the World-Spirit.” Such heroes interfere in and remake the world; their deeds produce “a complex of historical relations which appear to be only their interest, and their work.”

    Remember, the Creatives’ Code is “Never Surrender”. Never consent to the misuse of human dignity.

    Creatives’ Challenge – Always try to comprehend the bigger picture by comparing it to several other proven scenarios. Were those who fled Germany before Hitler shut it down, France before the Terror or Indonesia before the tsunami just “lucky” or had they learned to read the signs? Rulers by whim are even more dangerous than the weather, for their brains inevitably become echo chambers rotting from within. The larger the council of power the better – true democracy is best, but even then there are those self-destructive ones among us desiring to “shake things up”; loving chaos for its own sake. They may dream of riding a whirlwind but no one can ever truly tame a whirlwind. As the Chinese say, you can ride the tiger but you can’t get off. The challenge is to see the whirlwind – and the tiger – coming.

    Creatives Inhabit Danger – Is the danger learned helplessness, our old enemy? Or is it comfort – we’ve created a berth for ourselves that’s just too cushy to leave? Sometimes the danger is an inability to imagine evil: “it CAN’T get that bad” or “These people are my friends.” Famous last words. Or is panic the enemy? Don’t risk becoming too terrified to think.

    Creatives Seize Opportunity – Have you noticed, yet, that it’s always the same opportunity we must accept? To grow up. To embrace maturity. To become more like God, or as the Gnostic gospels call the Creator, “Good”. To regard each other with the wise generosity of compassion. Study all input intelligently. Learn to recognize and repudiate garbage. Don’t be lured by fantasy thinking of effortless achievements. In order to claim our opportunity we must seek out and create safe spaces to grow, think and learn.

    Models & Mentors – “We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone” – William James

    “No matter how dirty your past, your future is spotless” – Drake

    “Our destiny is not written for us, but by us” – Barack Obama

    “If you can influence, direct or control your environment , you can make your life what you want it to be” – Napoleon Hill

    “Life is choice, not chance,” – Jean Nidetch

    “Winners fail until they succeed” – Robert T. Kiyosaki

    #Haiku: Controlled Accidents

    All art’s
    “Controlled Accident”
    You plus God plus
    Fate:
    Steer into the skid

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

    Firefly – False Love

    If This Archetype Chooses You – Uh Oh! Do you dream of masked balls? Betrayals? Loved and known faces inexplicably turning demonic? People becoming animals? Mazes and puzzles that melt and change? The Firefly is not the only creature using illusion for the purposes of seduction, and seduction is not the only advantage offered by False Love. The Target is virtually disabled by relying on something that isn’t real. The False Lover lives in a shifting Potemkin Village of mirrors. Often, we feel in our gut that “something isn’t right.”

    Creatives Stay Alert – Face it, you’re human. You’ve been catfished. You’ve been gaslit. “All’s fair in love and war” means the creative must always be on game. Pretenders want to drag you into their web of deception by making it seem alluring. You’ll get so many benefits if you just step inside! But once inside it turns out they want you to feel complicit; you can’t escape, you can’t let anyone know, it’s too too too humiliating. You are fated, now, only to deceive others in your turn. Reject this. Remember: resistance is never futile.

    Creatives Know When to Cut Losses – Just as the deceptive catfish forces the lazy cod to keep moving (and improving!) when they would rather lie sluggishly on the bottom, the False Lover actually IMPROVES our game. Time to realize we are part of a complex universe where wings disguise themselves as eyes and flowers turn out to be chameleons. Conserve your energy. Others wish to capture your power and use it for their own fuel. Get smart. Don’t let them.

    Creatives Are Careful with Deception – You can’t tell the truth to everybody, all the time. Conserve your facts, reserve your strategy. You are entitled to privacy and security but be careful with deception. Deceivers restrict everyone’s options.

    Creatives Battle for the Universe Itself, Not Momentary Gain. Humans are more than energy. Love is more than fuel, it is living water as well as unquenchable fire. It is more than worth your while to hold out for the Real Thing. Real Love stands the test of Time. We are playing this game to get to the next level, and you can’t do that with such a narrow view of existence, where all of Creation is means to an end – the end being You, slick and fat, lying sluggish at the bottom of the Universe. Creatives are commanded to Rise, and so we will.

    Creatives Seek Ultimate Reality – Expand your inner and outer vision. We are multidimensional beings and our emotions – our very orgasms – can become multidimensional as well when we appreciate the historic, the inter-generational, the cosmic ramifications of everything we do and think and are. The marriage service talks about hanging in there through sickness and poverty, and it is a proven fact that people who have been through terrible experiences have a deeper connection. It becomes a secret language others just don’t “understand”. When you have children, you gain the ability to live through them – this is a multi-player, multi-avatar game! Life itself can be a terrible (as well as wonderful) experience. So buckle up! Those who are not alert will be eaten.

    Models & Mentors – “Remember sometimes not getting what you want can be a wonderful stroke of luck”
    – Dalai Lama

    “Let it hurt. Let it bleed. Let it heal. Let it go.” – Nikita Gill

    “Don’t waste your love on someone who doesn’t value it” – Wm Shakespeare

    “Temporary people teach permanent lessons” – Alysse Aallyn

    “Love dies of wounds, errors and betrayals” – Anais Nin

    “Attitude toward gratitude defines a person” – Eli Wiesel

    #Haiku: Explore vs Exploit

    How long should you stay
    At the casino?
    Until they cheat –
    Or you do

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

    The Ladyslipper – Singularity

    If This Archetype Chooses You – What kind of orchid are you? Are you the rarest kind, that hides in the woods and can never be transplanted? Maybe you have been running with the crowd too much – people who don’t appreciate you. Feeling depleted, even exhausted? Are you waiting for someone to celebrate You? Maybe it’s time to celebrate yourself.

    Creatives Are Always Alone in the Crowd – The wild orchid cannot be propagated. It is always found alone, in deepest woodland. Do you frequently find yourself walking in a different direction from everyone else? Do you often feel ganged up on, bullied? The Ladyslipper archetype represents all that Uniqueness out there, and because there are so many of us, that’s a lot of singularity! If you doubt that so much uniqueness could possibly exist, consider the humble snowflake.

    Each Creative is Unique – We may be civilized into groups, but society only advances because of its singletons. Becoming a creative means insisting on the right to make your own special contribution. Recognize how much the world needs you, and congratulate yourself for it.

    Creative Danger – The powerful are only powerful because they have an army. They want you fighting for them, not for yourself. Consider your best interests. Armies PLAN to “use you up.”

    Creatives Will Not Be “Used” – Creatives train themselves to out-think people and situations. Confronting Narcissism is a real danger in our society. People are encouraged to perform, push themselves forward and try to harvest “likes” from absolute strangers by sheer outrageousness, rather than by developing their real, immortal Selves. Honoring your uniqueness begins in absolute privacy as you face your soul, contemplate your real self and consider pathways to strengthening these assets.

    Creative Pride – Humility sharpens our edge and keeps us light on our feet. It’s never too late to change direction, especially when you find out you’ve been traveling the wrong way. Consult your maps and Training Journal. Time for a redesign?

    Creative Opportunity – The creative path is independent of criticism from those not making your journey. Critics wrestling for control won’t like that. We all need to consult different perspectives & check our placement and effectiveness but much criticism is sharpened to spike & derail. Recognize that the following techniques are attempts to harvest YOU and feed off your power and are designed to re-direct your effort to the critic’s own ends: undermining your thoughts, bullying your actions, devaluing your worth as a person.

    Creative Freedom – Much human interaction is a subtle or unsubtle jockeying to divide people into camps and to enlist you to carry someone else’s banner. But creatives own their own souls and battle for abstract principles of fairness and goodness, health and growth.

    Models & Mentors – “What sets you apart can feel like a burden, but it’s what makes you great” – Emma Stone

    “If you are always trying to be normal you will never know how amazing you can be” – Maya Angelou

    “Always remember you are absolutely unique, just like everyone else”
    – Margaret Mead

    “Be yourself – everyone else is already taken” – Oscar Wilde

    #Haiku: Conceptual Art Project

    Your life’s
    Hard-fought how-to guide:
    Unique –
    Personal;
    Willed:
    Transformative

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

    Dawn – Relief

    If This Archetype Chooses You – All suffering comes to an end. Your depression will lift. The future awaits.

    Creatives Know “This too shall pass” – We serve the future. Every dream is followed by an awakening which is followed by another dream. In the moment of relief from the fear and the tension that preceded it we are still shaking from the experience we went through. We are in no condition to make decisions. We are just so grateful that it is over. What is required of us, however, is appreciation of the cycle. We are surfing, whether we like it or not. Another wave will come. Creatives learn how to ride it.

    Creative Challenge – To rise above the cycle, take an honest look at it. This is hard to do when we are quivering and feeling victimized but it is necessary. What pattern do you see? The surfing analogy is a good one because the tides are not rhythmic nor perfectly predictable, and they are CERTAINLY not “personal” plus we know another wave will be coming along soon.

    Creative Strategy – Sometimes there’s a way out; we can change jobs, switch professions, get a divorce. Figure out where the pressure is coming from. Assess your abilities. What parts are you good at? Where do you suck? Can you enjoy any of this? How can your performance be improved? Most of us take pleasure in things we are good at. Can your enjoyment be deepened?

    We’re Never Helpless – Learned helplessness is real. People give up, stop trying to game or even understand the system. They lie down under the shocks, no longer even trying to escape, waiting for death. Never believe “Resistance is futile.” Don’t succumb.

    Creatives Win –This game is bigger than our mortal understanding. Nevertheless, you can comprehend the majesty of what we are up against and appreciate it as a knife appreciates the whetstone. We learn through analogy, we remember through stories.

    Creatives Are Free – Creatives can always improve, becoming graceful, competent athletes of this mortal existence until we graduate into the next sphere.

    Creatives Roll with the Punches – You can change and affect your fate. But you must roll with the punches. When Jesus says, “Resist not evil” he means, allow evil to roll over you and smash itself against your non-resistance. Studying martial arts increases our knowledge of how to manage, subvert and overcome Superior Force.

    Buddy Power – Friends, allies, buddies, sensei, even dead or fictional characters can be summoned to your aid. People choose such different characters as St. Francis, Sherlock Holmes, Mother Theresa, Joan of Arc, Mulan, Buddha and Jesus to be their “Dream buddies.” Some are more comfortable with an animal – your personal power creature; the jaguar, wolf, eagle or wolverine.

    Change Dream Buddies based on the problem confronting you. Ask their help before you go to sleep, solicit them to come to you in dreams to shed light upon your difficulty. Then the next morning, start writing and remembering the moment you wake up. Some key dreams take a lifetime to decipher.

    Models & Mentors – “Worry is like a rocking chair – it gives you something to do but you never get anywhere”
    – Erma Bombeck

    “For fast acting relief, try slowing down” – Lily Tomlin

    “Happiness is the relief after extreme tension”
    – F. Scott Fitzgerald

    “Laughter is the tonic, the release, the surcease of pain” – Charlie Chaplin

    #Haiku: Blameless

    What could you accomplish
    If you blamed no one
    Ever – Self included

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

    Night – Balance

    If This Archetype Chooses You – Something in you is out of whack. Balance is a key law of nature to help us avoid the dreaded stagnancy that we experience as a kind of living death. Once our conscious is in harmony with our subconscious, our dreams begin to balance our waking life. Even the worst nightmare can be looked at objectively in the light of day, as a warning story with curative potency and significance.

    Creatives Seek Balance – Unfortunately our contemporary life has become a competitive pursuit of “highs”. A good life well-lived provides natural highs – learning a skill, reveling in physical and sensual gifts, falling in love, listening to music, sharing with children, enjoying the grandeurs of nature. Our intellect teaches us that every “high” is dramatically enriched by thinking about it! That’s why we are called “homo sapiens.”

    Balance is a Law of Nature – The pursuit of competitive highs without the thinking and enshrining stages always leads to excess and grief. Highs for their own sake inevitably disappoint, leading to a pursuit of more and more dangerous highs, which, if we are not thinking about them, sharing them with others and incorporating them into our personal history and philosophy, damages our ability to experience joy. Understanding and managing our “emotional highs” is the key to future joys.

    Creatives Live on All Levels At Once – Creatives learn to give thanks for and pay tribute to the Past, to enjoy and understand the Present, to anticipate and strategize for the Future and to revel in and be comforted by the promise of Eternity.

    Balancing the Levels – Joy that is held in the mind is joy endlessly re-experienced. It will be yours forever, and you will be able to share it with all the people you love for the rest of your life. Each of us briefly experiences heaven during our lifetimes; prolonged, immortalized and enriched by experiencing and re-experiencing with each other.

    Creative Challenge – We need to personally set up our brain’s “reward system” to handle pleasure and suffering or we will be prescribed drugs in an attempt to achieve the same effect chemically. Drugs can be useful as training wheels; ideally we want to teach our systems to achieve the same effect naturally. Calm is the first step to balance, so we must learn to calm ourselves. Meditation, sleep and yoga offer the best methods for reliable self-soothing. First, we assert calm over our breath, then our bodies, lastly our thoughts. It’s not that difficult! Reminder: this occurred naturally every night of our lives before we started stressing about it!

    Night Is the Leveler – Our species needs sleep to connect to the Universal Mind, and to the minds of all Dreamers, human and animal. Conscious dreaming (often called lucid dreaming) provides a trusted avenue to filter daily discoveries down to your subconscious level. Always have a joy to think about just as you are going to sleep, and another for when you are waking up. This will sharpen your connection with emotional ecstasy and deepen your life. Once our conscious is in harmony with our subconscious, our dreams will balance our waking life. Even the worst nightmare can be looked at objectively, as a story with potential significance.

    Models & Mentors – “The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule but to schedule your priorities” – Stephen Covey

    “Don’t get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life” – Dolly Parton

    1.“For everything there is a season,
    a time for every activity under heaven.
2 A time to be born and a time to die.
    A time to plant and a time to harvest.
3 A time to kill and a time to heal.
    A time to tear down and a time to build up.
4 A time to cry and a time to laugh.
    A time to grieve and a time to dance.
5 A time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones.
    A time to embrace and a time to turn away.
6 A time to search and a time to quit searching.
    A time to keep and a time to throw away.
7 A time to tear and a time to mend.
    A time to be quiet and a time to speak.
8 A time to love and a time to hate.
    9.A time for war and a time for peace. – Ecclesiastes 3

    “Moderation in All Things” – Hesiod

    #Haiku: Stability

    Assert balance;
    Employ wealth of eternity
    Universal mind

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

    Day – Focus

    If This Archetype Chooses You – Time to make up your mind – will this be a good morning – or bad? Do you wake up fearful, fretful and exhausted? You’re too much of a worrier. Worry borrows trouble and erases pleasure. It’s OK to plan but it’s destructive to worry. “Rumination” is endlessly thinking over a problem in a circular way – it isn’t going anywhere. If you dream only about your problems, you are at risk of wasting your valuable dreaming time.

    Creatives Build Routines – Then Explode Them
    We construct lists and calendars in our Training Journals that are very much Works In Progress. Every effort’s an experiment. If you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems, so we have to build good systems. As Zig Ziglar reminds us, there’s no elevator to success. We have to take the stairs, one step at a time. We will build ourselves so strong that ultimately we can trust our subconscious, even our unconscious, to do the work for us. Creatives create independent selves to transcend their selves.

    Taming Wild Mind to Focus Productively – Buddhists are fabulous at training the brain to calmness. This is a physical discipline and it does take practice. But as in any practice, we start out needing both effort and commitment. You will have to “forgive” yourself over and over – “I suck at this.” Learning to enjoy the process is key. Meditation teaches us how to live in the present moment. You are your own toddler, so mother yourself. Be delighted by the effort and moved by the commitment. You don’t yell at a toddler for falling down. Study the work of Pema Chodron (libraries everywhere) for assistance.

    Your Toddler Self is Frightened by Everything. As we meditate and the fears boil up, we talk to ourselves calmingly. Focus on small, pleasurable things, the green grass, the blue sky. Give thanks for the green grass and the blue sky. Focus on the breath – out with the worry, in with the fresh day of joy and discovery. Now close your eyes. Are you still seeing the green grass and the blue sky? Isn’t that wonderful? Now they are yours forever. Tonight you will dream about them. Cherish them in your heart.

    How Strong is Your Negative Voice? This is the first enemy we must defeat. We all have at least one – some of us have many. Banish them firmly. Your negative voice is belittling, angry and demeaning. It doesn’t think you can accomplish anything. It is not a helper, in fact it is toxic and we are going to tell it goodbye. Read Viktor Frankl’s wonderful Man’s Search for Meaning and Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run With the Wolves for advice on how to pluck the lotus of joy from the mud of despair.

    Creative Opportunity – Learning to focus at our advanced age is nothing to be ashamed of. It is a daily practice of mindfulness and joy in the classroom of creation. Be proud of your effort, your commitment and the confidence you are modeling for all future generations that life itself is a dazzling gift. You are alive at this perfect moment for some perfect reason. Let us find it.

    Models & Mentors – “Your habits will determine your future” – Jack Canfield

    “You’ll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of success is found in your daily routine.” – John Maxwell

    ‘Practice isn’t something you do when you’re good. It’s what makes you good.” – Malcolm Gladwell

    “It’s easier to prevent bad habits than to break them.” – Benjamin Franklin

    #Haiku: Focus

    Energy
    Resurgent
    Depowers dread
    Repowers health-
    Dare –
    Aim –
    Fire

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

    Mourning – Detachment

    If This Archetype Chooses You – You are depressed or facing depression. In your dreams you hurt. You feel such shuddering emptiness and loss it’s a physical relief to wake up and find your dream wasn’t real. Lots of people fear such sadness is some kind of prophecy. It’s enough to make a person fear going to sleep.

    The Detachment Archetype – warns you are too “involved.” Check out life’s professional creatives – such as cops, firemen, paramedics – all will tell you to “forget’ the personal just to get the job done. Focus on the “healable” crisis– even though all that suffering reminds you of your Special People and the dangers they face unwittingly, every day.

    People Die. Worse – People Can Lose Their Personalities BEFORE They Die – Think your worldview through BEFORE the crisis happens. If death ends everything, surely you will fear it. But remember, what a caterpillar calls “the end”, Nature calls ”a butterfly.”

    We All Need to Mourn – Creatives mourn, too. Creatives’ powerful forward drive sometimes fools them into thinking that moving backward in the dance is a sign of weakness, when ebb and flow are laws of life.

    Sadness is Stigmatized in a society where perfect strangers feel comfortable demanding that you “smile.” Look at all these Instagram feeds with everybody grinning away because they’re having so much FUN and their lives are so PERFECT they never wake up shuddering with sadness. Except they are human too, so we know that they risk their very humanity by trying to pretend ”everything’s fine” when all red lights are flashing.

    They’re Just Better at Covering It Up than we seem to be. And some people, admittedly are just plain shallower. They’ve worked hard to feel less deeply! And narcissists convince themselves that they can transfer their pain to others and “free” themselves by enjoying the suffering they’ve created. This inevitably means we all have lots of work to do.

    First, We Sort Out “Real” from “Transferred” Suffering. Whose misery has been foisted upon you? If you’re in that position you are literally a “scapegoat” and will need all your creative skills to get out of it.

    DO NOT ACCEPT TRANSFERRED SUFFERING! – Pain is inevitable but suffering is voluntary. We feel compassion for some, we pity others their willful darkness but we do not accept their world scheme of punishment and torment.

    We’ve All Got Plenty of Legitimate, Necessary Mourning to catch up on. If you skate over “bargaining” and “acceptance” all that’s left to you is denial and depression. Sometimes, the “causes” of your lost mourning seem inconsequential to our “adult” selves. “So your pet died when you were five,” everybody says. “Your parents got a divorce. You moved five times. Get over it, already!” But we say, Now is always the perfect time to accept the power and significance of your own feelings.

    Creatives Feel Compassion for Everyone – Themselves Included. Begin with yourself. Why feel these things now, right before you set off on your next great, consequential adventure? Sometimes it is joy that brings to the surface those past unhealed hurts. That’s necessary, part of the ebb and flow. Because we are strong enough to feel it now.

    Creatives Are the Heroes of the Collective Unconscious – Creatives do battle for and honor centuries of collective suffering. (Inter-generational trauma.) It’s OK to think about that sadness, especially if it makes us feel closer to other people. Everyone has these lost, wrecked treasures submerged in their lives.

    Creatives Feel Deeply – Your power frees the greatness of your emotion even as it protects your feelings and other people’s. Celebrate the fact that you are able to feel so deeply in a world where others feel forced to abuse themselves, taking risks and drugs in order to “feel something.”

    The Art of Detachment allows creatives to rise above the fray, strategize, plan. Even on the eve of battle they enjoy their lives. Let go – finally – of the toxic elements in your life. Time to go “no-contact” on the toxic vampires who waste and suck your energy. Read up on sadism, the better to understand the people out there who are revel in your suffering. Buddhists recommend surveying your thoughts and feelings from a distance, as in hypnotherapy, then setting them free.

    Detachment is Not Dissociation – Dissociation is more like floating through life with all our systems repressed, feeling numb. Dissociation is not good. You can use that quivering pool of tears to respond more intensely to life, to art, to music, and to each other.

    Resilience is the Creative’s Most Powerful Survival Trait. This means that even after blight, we can flourish more strongly, just the way pruned plants will. It’s not necessary to explore all the caverns of your being, but it will make you stronger. Once again, choose a buddy and a guide. Think about the “hero’s journey” story you respond to most deeply. How would you explain your hero’s journey to someone else? Feel free to use metaphors, after all, when we were children we did feel our world to be populated by monsters and the supernatural.

    Models & Mentors – “Detachment is power. Release all things that no longer work for you” – Shane Steele

    “To be detached means to dive so fully into the experience you dropout the other side… with full understanding you can say, “Now that I know, I can let go”
    – Teal Swan

    “In detachment lies the wisdom of uncertainty…freedom from our prison of past conditioning…willingness to step into the unknown surrenders us to the creative mind that orchestrates the dance of the universe…” – Deepak Chopra

    “I release the subjective thoughts, energy and emotions I am holding about people, places and things that kept me trapped in dis-ease…I can step back and allow the feelings & thoughts & energy to dissipate…I am then free to act with compassion, love & acceptance” – Angela James

    “Attachment is the fabricator of illusions – reality can be attained only by one who is detached” – Simone Weil

    “Detachment is having your life be about you, not about other people”
    – Karen Casey

    #Haiku: Detachment

    last phase of grief
    blesses wrestling angel –
    flourishes scar tissue wings

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

    Breakthrough – Epiphany

    If This Archetype Chooses You – Let the Knowledge Pour In! – You didn’t even know there was a wall there! And suddenly, you’re through it and the world looks completely different on the other side.

    Are You Battering Against Barriers in your dreams? Are you breasting tape, cresting mountaintops, shedding light on darkness? You are seeking, or experiencing an epiphany. Let’s consider those pieces of your psyche/life that don’t add up.

    Eureka! – Creatives Learn From Epiphanies – It’s possible to have a sudden enlightenment and NOT FULLY REALIZE it. Could it be that it is too threatening? Could be that you lack the language to explain the new connection you have made. Could be that your “discovery” started down so deep in your consciousness that it’s taking its time to percolate through to the surface. YOU ARE “MOLTING”! Shed what no longer serves you. In the meantime, pay attention to your dreams and track them in your Training Journal. Dreams have the power to heal the jagged edges of our fear, our incomprehension and our daring.

    Creative Danger – We almost always quit too early. Status quo is SO attractive. Let somebody else be the adventurer, let somebody else put into words what nobody else can say, let some other poor sucker stick their neck out and mention that the emperor has no clothes. Study your fears rationally. It’s OK to protect yourself – in fact, it’s mandatory – remember making sure that oxygen mask works on YOU, first? But that doesn’t stop us from evaluating the full “reality”, which also, I remind you, contains suspicions, insights, ideas and yes, dreams. Whispers of the multiverse.

    Grow New Skin – Creatives are highly accomplished, well-trained professionals who sometimes find themselves at the bottom of a pecking order. Are you in a group whose leader is making decreasing sense and ever more self-serving decisions? If you’ve been struggling with a knotty historical, mathematic or scientific problem nobody else can solve, why not try seeking the edges of light?

    Transform Your Thinking – how often have you had that experience of waking up from a dream whose conclusions were so real they were right in front of you, only to see them melt in the sand like the escaping tide until no longer perceptible. That’s OK. They’re still on the tip of your psychic tongue, just waiting for a little more encouragement.

    Learn New Things -We are all familiar with the “sleep on it” suggestion, but anything that takes your mind off the problem can be helpful. Sports, prayer, meditation, reading, a massage, a night out, but please – not too much liquor. Hold it at two if you can, if you can’t, don’t start. Liquor affects the brain, killing brain cells. That might keep overlords seeking compliance happy but it’s not good for creatives’ growth and development. Develop a gratitude practice. Keep dreaming. Keep seeking those epiphanies. Keep using your fears as stepping stones to climb higher. Never give up. Remember; clever – like the fox, wily as the snake, gentle as the dove.

    Models & Mentors – “Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.” – John Milton

    “Record these epiphanies with care as the most delicate and evanescent of moments” – James Joyce

    “Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising”
    – Isaiah 60: 1-3

    “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing” – Henry Miller

    #Haiku: Epiphany

    Dominos crash:
    Picture resolves:
    Insight –
    Upside down is
    Right side up

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

    Loss – Suffering

    If This Archetype Chooses You – You are hurting. If you can no longer feel pain, you are numb. Every religion and philosophical system must account for the misery we see around us – storms, flood, volcanos, disease, human frustration and animal predation.

    Creatives Get Used to Loss – Do your dream explore inner and outer pain? How much is fear, how much is anxiety, how much is collective unconscious and shared human history? We fear there is no possible paradise where everyone can be happy all at once. How do we educate ourselves to surf this intolerable dilemma?

    Pain is Joy’s Shadow – Joy is an excess of feeling and so is suffering. When we long to “numb out”, we numb everything. If we live our lives in fear, we avoid the potential excitement of holding our breath on the edge of discovery.

    Creatives Dare to Feel it All. Bravely we take on the feelings of the entire planet to show that we can’t be destroyed by them. Creatives explore and expand the edges of perception and assessment. Philosophical coping mechanisms can be Buddhist – “It’s all illusion”;“ Practice taming the wild mind”; or religious – “Suffering brings us closer to God in developing compassion for all creation” and “Birth pangs are necessary to bring new life.” Any way we can keep our mind and soul responsive and deepening benefits the whole planet.

    Don’t Surrender to Learned Helplessness – Too much suffering breeds inertia. We stop even trying to better our human situation while attracting predators to such easy prey. Even worse, we become predators ourselves, bragging to the godless that we are the new potentates. Cruelty breeds endless cruelty. There must be a way to step off this treadmill – there’s enough suffering going around without manufacturing more.

    Creative Daring Frees the Universe – Imagination itself comes from discomfort, even misery. We see a need to expand our mental repertoire, to magically increase the very dimensions of thought that seem to imprison us. As a species we have broken through this many times. Further epiphanies await.

    Models & Mentors – “You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered”
    – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

    “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard”
    – A.A. Milne

    “Only people who are capable of loving strongly can suffer such deep sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heal them”
    – Leo Tolstoy

    “What we once loved we can never lose for it becomes a part of us” – Helen Keller

    “Death is not the greatest loss in life, the greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live” – Norman Cousins

    #Haiku: Profit/Loss Analysis

    Does autumn lose summer
    Warmth or
    Gain snow-blanket?
    Peonies decide.

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

    Transformation – Metamorphosis

    If This Archetype Chooses You – You are about to undergo a major transition. Are you a SciFi fan? Do you dream of bionic humans? Robots? Cryogenics? How about caterpillars becoming moths and butterflies? Acorns don’t look like oak trees, pollywogs don’t resemble frogs. It is quite common in nature to evolve into some unexpected form. What a metaphor for us, as Ovid’s Metamorphoses postulated centuries ago. We speculate about humans becoming invisible, disguising themselves as bats or wolves; Greek gods “became” swans and bulls to further their purposes. Our imagination is rich with all these possibilities, as is our literature, theatre and film. At a funeral, we look at a bird invading the church is a whole new light. Is it a message? An incarnation?

    Your Possibilities are Infinite – Every time you buy a bottle with an animal on the label you are calling on the powers of that creature just as your ancestors did. We suspect consuming even the “idea” of a creature might confer their powers. We also heard the legend that when a human husk breathes its last, the soul escapes and may reincarnate in heaven or even in another life as something entirely different, perhaps without blemish, wholly beautiful for once and for all.

    Creative Power – Who’s your power animal? What supernatural gifts do you desire? Give yourself the freedom to think about the talents you yearn for and the purposes you’d put them to. You can define yourself this way, experiment and play. You might not wish to be a dragon every day of the week, but once in a while it could be fun. How can you cultivate these gifts, desires and yearnings in your present-day life? Don’t these dreams make you a bigger, more important creative, even if nobody knows? What if they did know? How might you tell them and who would you tell?

    Creative Danger – We don’t want to jump off buildings pretending we can fly. We’re expanding our psychic repertoire, not trying to escape into fantasy. The most commonly yearned for gift is omnipotence. But think how terrible life would be – not just for others but for YOU if your whims and fantasies were never checked? Often our wish is that we be spared the pain of growing up. But who wants to remain a toddler forever? As we get older we are REALLY coming into our own and knowing and sharing our true self. A joy not to be missed. Pity the toddler who prays to fly through the air so he doesn’t have to learn to walk and risk falling down.

    Models & Mentors – “Nothing gets transformed in your life until your mind is transformed” – Ifeanyl Enoch Onuoha

    “Every success story is a tale or adaptation, constant revision, and change”
    – Richard Branson

    “Perfection is constant transformation” – Nia Peeples

    “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not fighting the old but building the new” – Socrates

    #Haiku: Being Is Relationship

    Electric seeks
    Charge;
    Transformer –
    You’re my lock on
    Immortality