Living at Your Own Natural Pace
When I read Sue Sullivan’s blog post on going at your own natural pace, I knew I had to share it with you. There is SO much in our contemporary lives that is encouraging us to hurry and do more, it can be really challenging to step outside that and discover for ourselves what our best rhythm is. That’s why listening to voices that are encouraging us to slow down and go at our own pace are so essential.
We are blessed live in a rich time with so many things to learn, opportunities, places to see, things to do and as artists, of course, an unlimited amount of works we can potentially make. It is up to us to sift through our priorities and to find the pace that works best for our bodies, our mental health and our spiritual connection.
There is never a need to rush.
Living At Your Own Natural Pace
by Sue Sullivan
I believe we each have our own natural pace. Some of us are fast, some slow, and some in between. My mom used to tell me I was slow, and I was. I loved to dig deep and savor things, so I hated rushing. As an adult, I thought you had to be fast in order to be successful, so I tried to increase my pace. I ended up getting sick over and over again from pushing myself too hard.
Since going faster didn’t work, I devised ways to become more effective in what I did. In fact, at one job, the boss told me I got more done than anyone else that had ever held that position. I wasn’t working faster. I actually worked less hours than a lot of my predecessors. Instead, I was focused on being most effective. Since then, I’ve chosen jobs that value effectiveness over how much you got done. I chose jobs that didn’t require me to work at a fast pace.
A few years ago. I hired a life coach who told me that when people go at their natural pace, they are most successful. I resonated with the idea. Even though I had changed my focus to being effective and not fast, there were still times I pushed myself to go faster. I’d been bombarded with society’s message that doing things faster and getting more done is the key to success. It was a hard belief to let go of.
But looking back on my life, I’ve noticed that when I stayed within my natural pace, I have actually been more successful and happier and healthier. At one time, I got involved with volunteer work as a citizen scientist. The real scientists taught us how to recognize frog calls in the area where I lived. We were to go out 3 nights and monitor how many of the different kinds frogs were in a certain area. When I volunteered, I didn’t realize that you couldn’t just go out any night. I had planned to do my volunteer work on weekends so I could sleep in the next day. It wasn’t until I finished the training that I found out I had to do my monitoring on a night when it had just rained. It turned out, that season there was only one weekend night that fit that criteria.
I wasn’t willing to stay out late on a work night, so I only monitored the frogs for that one weekend night. At the end of the season, the scientists asked for volunteers to input the data. I decided to do it. The data entry was done at a local Audubon Society office. As we entered the data, I talked about the project and my love of frogs. They got a kick out of my enthusiasm. I ended up being in a feature article in the National Audubon Magazine. The first half of the article was about me and my experience, and they did a two-thirds page photo of me in my rain gear. I was totally honest, letting them know I had only done a third of the monitoring.
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It takes a lot of courage to trust that living at your own natural pace will actually give you better results. I still find myself starting to rush. Then I remind myself to slow down and get into my groove. So for those of you fast people, don’t feel pressured to slow to an unnatural pace just because someone told you it’s healthier or more spiritual.
Go at your own natural pace. Look honestly at yourself and see what pace makes your feel most fulfilled. And don’t pick a pace rigidly. We’re dynamic people. We may have an overall pace, but we may want to slow down or speed up temporarily. I know there are times I dig zooming around, but if I tried to go at that pace all the time, I’d burn out.
Sue Sullivan has been actively involved in personal development for nearly 30 years. She used to go between the extremes with her goals, getting all psyched and working diligently on them, then burning out and crashing. She’d let go completely, gradually recovering to enjoy life again. Yet she’d be disappointed in not accomplishing those things she truly wanted. So she’d start back on the goal-oriented cycle again. She realized she needed to find a more sustainable way to achieve—a way she enjoyed and a way that felt natural. So she developed a system of working with goals that does just that. She teaches this system in her course “Surfing Your Enthusiasm.” You can read her blog at http://surfingyourenthusiasm.com/blog/.
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What Is the Ideal Day for an Artist?
What would your ideal day look like? Have you ever stopped to think about it in all its juicy details? How would you move through your day? How much time would you spend making art? Who would you like to be around? How would you feel?
The artists in the Mindful Artist Mentorship Program were asked to do just that and one of the artists came up with such a deliciously vivid picture of her daily life, I wanted to share it with you.
You see, if any area of your life isn’t quite satisfactory to you, focusing on the dissatisfaction only mires you further in what you don’t want. You keep thinking about it talking about it and feeling it over and over.
I know! I do it, too. It actually can take a great amount of effort to shift our thoughts from their well-worn paths and I applaud anyone who makes even the slightest effort to shift their thinking patterns. Consider the benefits: better mood, lowered blood pressure, greater peace of mind, clearer thinking.
Just for a minute – recall any delightful moment with a loved one (human or animal). How do you feel just thinking about it? What happens to your mind, emotions and body as you savor the details?
Creating a clear picture of where you would like to be and allowing yourself to daydream a bit, straying from reality a little or a lot, points your boat (your conscious attention) in the direction you want to head.
Also, using your imagination in this way, even when you aren’t able to work on your creative projects, exercises those creative muscles and keeps them in shape.
Besides, it just feels good!
Here’s one artist’s “Ideal Scene.” I encourage you to take 15 minutes tonight before bed and write yours out, too.
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| By Simon Davison (originally posted to Flickr as IMG_6045) [CC-BY-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons |
I get up early and have coffee and a donut…(it’s MY perfect day, not my doctor’s). My daughter in LA calls. We have named her the Breakfast Fairy because she calls early before both of us start our day. She is a loving child/woman. She fills me with the same kind of happiness that painting does.
I do my crossword, knowing the paints are calling. Maybe I cruise through the garden to see what is either in bloom or ripe for picking.
After setting up a still life and roughing in the outline of a new painting, I call a girl friend and she picks up the lunch boxes I ordered at a local restaurant. When she arrives, we picnic out in the orchard and chat. Cold frittata stacked high with artichokes, yellow bell peppers, spinach and mushrooms is followed by fresh strawberry tarts, baklava and iced tea. We talk about the scenery, the day, our husbands and kids…just gently going over the details of our lives.
My friend leaves just before I go back to painting. I turn on music and time goes away.
The day is fading and I start to think about dinner as I clean my brushes. My husband, is nosing around the extra frittata I bought and we decide to heat it up and make a salad from the fresh tomatoes in the garden. While I am slicing them, I think how beautiful they would be in a painting, the translucent meat and juice flowing onto the cutting board…
The peaches are ripe and peel easily. A perfect dessert with ice cream from Cold Stone Creamery. We watch the Daily Show and laugh at Jon Stewart’s jokes.
Then my husband heads for bed and I go back into my studio. The painting is calling me.
“Come work with me,” it whispers, “Make me rise from the canvas. Give me life.”
There is my calling. It is literally calling to me. “Give me life, let me breathe, let me be seen.”
It’s midnight when I crawl into bed. The painting is sitting on a music stand I keep in my bedroom. It will be there in the morning when I wake up. It’s a newborn, and I am tired from giving birth. We both need to sleep now.
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How to Get Dried and Hardened Paint Out of Your Treasured Brushes
Assuming you take excellent care of your brushes – wiping them carefully, washing them in warm soapy water after each use, it’s still common for paint residue to build up around the ferrule* over time. I find many beginning acrylic painters rinse their brushes in water without using soap. The paint comes out but the clear acrylic polymer stays in the brush so they look clean but the bristles dry stiff and the brush is unusable.
I used to think when oil or acrylic paint dried in a brush and it became hardened that it was a lost cause. I tried lots of things – soaking them overnight in soap or solvent, depending on whether the paint was oil or acrylc. I experimented with all kinds of specialized brush cleaning products such as Kiss-Off, the Masters, EZ-Air cleaner with limited success. The bristles were still stiff and some of the paint would come out but not all of it. I also tried to get dried acrylic out with the soaps many artists recommended such as Fels-Naptha, Murphy’s Oil Soap without success. Once a brush became hardened, I had to throw it out.
It wasn’t until Winsor and Newton came out with their Brush Cleaner and Restorer that I found the perfect solution for reviving old brushes. What I really love about it is that it is environmentally friendly as it is both non-toxic and biodegradable. (But remember the paint and pigments you remove from the brush might not be, so once it is used, please dispose of it in your local Household Hazardous Waste facility.) I reuse the brush cleaner over and over by allowing it to stand in a clear glass jar. The pigment particles settle to the bottom of the jar and the liquid at the top can be poured off and reused for the next cleaning.
Here is the MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet) for Winsor & Newton’s Brush Cleaner and Restorer.
* Watch the video to find out what a ferrule is!
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Keeping an Open Heart in the Face of Disappointments
Part of being an artist is riding the natural ups and the down cycles. There will be high times (we are getting published, in shows, having sales, or accolades and inevitable lower times (we didn’t accepted into a show or get the grant, or residency or what have you).
A while back, I watched a documentary called “How To Cook Your Life”, a film about Edward Espe Brown, a zen priest who was the head tenzo, or cook, at the Zen Buddhist retreat, Tassahara.
There were many pearls in this film, but one that struck me was when he spoke of life’s disappointments. I will paraphrase, but basically he said, that we hold in our hearts our dearest, most precious wishes for ourselves – for our happiness.
And then in life, we encounter inevitable heartbreaks and pain. When things don’t turn out the way we want we try to control or defend ourselves from the disappointment we feel.
So we begin to separate ourselves from our heart’s desires. And in doing so, we actually separate ourselves from our heart.
And while we may succeed in insulating ourselves from future disappointments, we create a much deeper chasm. We begin to feel an ache inside; a longing. And no matter how many material trophies we acquire it doesn’t go away. Because we have separated from our heart.
We all guard our hearts so zealously. We are so careful about whom we open them to. We are so afraid of breaking them.
This is an exercise in futility. In this life, the heart will break.
It will break open and grow bigger.
It will break like the sunrise. It will break like a wave. It will not be destroyed.
What destroys us is keeping our hearts locked up in armor of fear. This fear of being open and vulnerable doesn’t allow our hearts to grow.
The irony is this. We are not meant to protect out hearts. Our hearts are meant to protect us. When the heart is open and loving it is free of fear.
There is no stronger “protection” than a fearless heart.
- Yearn (detail) © 2004 watercolor, acrylic, gouache on panel
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How to Pack Art Supplies for Summer Travel
| Many artists want to get away for a vacation but rarely do they want to leave their art practice behind. In fact, if you are going away for more than a week you will probably sorely miss creating if you don’t pack some art supplies.
When I get relaxed and I have oodles of free time one of the first things I want to do it seems is draw. So, how to make your painting studio portable? If you are driving, you can often find room for canvases, a French easel (portable paint box with easel legs) and all your paints and brushes. Here is our man Cézanne modeling the portability of the French easel:
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However, if you are flying, biking or backpacking, you’ll need to pare things down to what you can fit easily in suitcase, panniers or pack. Drawing supplies are pretty easy to pack – pastels, pencils, charcoal and paper can all tuck neatly into a suitcase. But what if you long to paint large on your trip to Italy or the Ozarks? One option is to bring smaller pieces of paper and put them together to form one larger piece. Such as this piece by David Hockney, made up of 4 smaller sheets. |
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| If you work in acrylic or oil on paper, you can gesso some heavy sheets of paper such as Coventry rag which is 100% cotton. When you get home you can mount any paper onto canvas, linen or wood panel so it has more presence and durability.
If you are traveling domestically, you might consider shipping your art supplies via ground transport to your destination so you don’t have to worry about packing them or flying with liquids. If you are traveling abroad, shipping art supplies to or from a foreign country can be a slow and costly option, and I don’t recommend it if you can avoid it. Instead, try paring down your materials to the bare minimum that you can easily fit into your suitcase. Drawing media and watercolors are the most portable. You can also make your own set by packing a few tubes of paint in zip-lock bag and wrapping your brushes in a sheet of thin cardboard to protect the bristles from bending. Sometimes I will improvise a palette on the spot. A plastic lid from a food container or those waxed paper caps they put on the water glasses in some hotel rooms work beautifully in a pinch. Not packing a palette means I can travel lighter. I like the Arches watercolor blocks. Because the paper |
I also like the Rotring Art Pens in Fine and Extra Fine for pen and ink sketching. They eliminate the need for a messy bottle of ink by packaging the ink in neat cartridges.  The ink is a rich, archival black. I’ve been known to dip the nip in water to create shades of grey or to use my finger or a brush to pull ink off of the tip and make washes. |
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Brush pens are also fun and easy to pack. Faber-Castell makes 48 gorgeous colors that are all lightfast. The brush nib makes wide strokes and also very fine lines. No palette, no brushes needed! |
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Charcoals and chalk pastels travel nicely but you will need to use a fixative to protect your drawings from smudging. Fixative comes is in an aerosol and takes up a lot of suitcase space. (You are also not allowed to fly with aerosols according to TSA regulations.) If you like colored pencils, Caran d’ache watercolor pencils or pastels or graphite pencils they may be easier option to travel with because they smear less they don’t require fixative. |
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| If you are going abroad, I recommend packing what you need. I love to shop for art supplies in other countries. Just looking at the different brands, the ways items are arranged and displayed fascinates me. But I would rather travel with my own supplies because then I know I have what I need and I can get started right away and don’t have to spend an afternoon hunting down a shop on some obscure little street.
Later, I can go on a shopping trip to supplement what I brought or just for the pure enjoyment of browsing. Remember, though, that you may not carry any oil paints, solvents or mediums on an airplane as they are flammable and considered hazardous. If you are an oil painter, you may carry oil bars on an airplane instead of tubes of paint. They look more like giant oil pastels and build up color easily. Pack some gessoed paper, or primed canvas or masonite panels and a few brushes and you can accomplish quite a bit. If you need to, you can purchase some solvents or mediums at your destination to clean your brushes, help manipulate the color further and to create glazes and details. (You can also clean oil brushes with non-toxic vegetable oil followed by washing in warm, soapy water.) |
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| For the acrylic painter, another solution for travel is to carry a palette of two-ounce. jars of soft body paint or fluid acrylic colors. Be sure to tape the lids closed and to seal them in Ziploc bags as the pressure on an airplane may cause them explode and spill a little paint.
Or stack them in a cylindrical mailing tube into which you can tuck a few paintbrushes to protect the bristles. You don’t have to bring a lot of colors. I suggest a primary palette of phthalocyanine blue, quinacridone crimson and yellow medium azo plus titanium white. From these I can mix beautiful rich browns, greens, oranges, and even a rich deep black! I made a youtube video here on mixing browns from those three primaries: |
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Painter Derek Leka glues seven small screwtop jars to his palette and fills them with acrylic paint for traveling. The key is to make whatever you do fun, easy to carry and easily portable. And don’t berate yourself if you don’t end up making a bunch of work but instead are distracted by the gentle summer breezes, the night sky, And besides, there is no better way to fill your artistic well than to truly relax and be in the present moment.
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3 Simple Practices that Unlock the Life of Your Dreams
Our guest writer this week is Stacey Curnow who has a talent for coaching people who want to transition into the life of their dreams. Here she shares how that can be a remarkably practical and do-able process.
I love this quote from W. Somerset Maugham: “It’s a funny thing about life. If you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.”
Let’s just imagine for a moment that’s true.
Now imagine what that “best” means for you and imagine what you really want. What do you really, really, really want? (I think there’s magic in that third really.) Once you’ve determined what you really want, ask yourself why you really want it.
Chances are good that you want a feeling more than a thing. (And, really, I think that what we all really want at heart is a sense of being valued or loved – or of more security, more satisfaction, or more meaning. But that’s my take.)
And so if we’ve determined that our dreams are elusive and unachievable, we should hold our vision – the details of what we want – lightly and focus on our intentions – on the way we want to feel and our desire to feel that way.
When I want to make sure I understand my intention, asking “why” helps me identify the underlying desire or feeling. I start with the perceived goal and ask myself why I want it; when I have an answer, I ask why I want that, and I keep asking why and why and why until I get to the crux of the matter. Identifying the desire or feeling is important because very often we get hung up on the means to the end rather than the end in itself.
What’s worse, often those means have to do with money. And we can get so hung up on them that we don’t see that there are many, many ways to fulfill any intention and satisfy the underlying need.
That’s why I tell my clients to ask themselves, “If I didn’t have to worry about money what would I do with my life?” (In case the question ever gets turned around on me, I already know my answer: “My intention is to live a life that is filled with delight, service to others, satisfaction in life’s simple pleasures and appreciation for the gift of being on this beautiful planet.” It helps that I know that life is providing this for me right now.)
One of my clients recently answered that question with, “I’d buy a house in the country in an arty community and have a large studio on the property. I would have dogs and cats and a horse and maybe a few chickens for eggs. I would get up every morning and work on songs and then go to my studio and make art. I would hire an assistant to help with the business side of my art and music.”
My client is an amazing artist, so I pointed out that her desire did not have to be some lofty goal that could be achieved only after she worked for many more years and saved up many more dollars, but could be fulfilled right now – or at least very soon.
There are artist communities where she could live and teach – for example she could become a resident artist at a place like Penland School of Crafts in the Blue Ridge Mountains – and tend to animals.
More importantly, I helped her see that what she really wanted – the feeling she was after – was more freedom to live a creative life.
Please note that when I encourage folks to look deeper into their lofty goals to find the kernel of their desire, I’m not knocking the goals per se. I myself wouldn’t mind receiving loads of cash, for example.
I see that money will allow me to have more of the things I desire. It’s just that it’s important to acknowledge the extent I already possess what I want in large measure. The only way that money would really change my life, I’m guessing, is that if I had tons of it I would share it with more people.
So, here’s what I’ve found: if your bank balance has not caught up with your intentions to live a “big” or “more secure” or “creative” life, here are some suggestions for what you can do to feel more abundant and satisfied right now:
- List 5 things you appreciate about your life. It can be as simple as your breath, your child’s laugh, or a cup of hot tea. As Melody Beattie wrote, “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more.” And as you list things to be grateful for, look for the ways in which your life has already fulfilled some of your longstanding desires.
- Be of service. It doesn’t have to be anything grand – it can be small things, like relinquishing a good parking spot to someone at the grocery store, or offering child care to a neighbor who is a single parent. Emerson once said, “It is one of the most beautiful compensations in life… we can never help another without helping ourselves.”Each time you do help someone, savor the satisfaction and think about your desires. Because chances are what you want for yourself you want because it will be of service to others in your life – your children, your parents, your spouse.
- Tithe. Tithing is an ancient spiritual practice of giving 10% of everything you receive back to God. You don’t have to give it to “God” per se – my husband and I give to a variety of organizations and people who feed us spiritually. But whether it’s the giving – or the focus on totaling up all the money we’ve received – it has helped us be more conscious of and grateful for what we have.
I think your dreams are closer than you know. If you can identify what the “best” means to you, you have the ability to feel what it would be like to get it. Once you can do that, you’re solidly on the path to fully achieving it. And you know what? It feels pretty amazing every step of the way.
Stacey is a nurse-midwife and a mentor who helps you give birth to your BIG dreams. You can find out more about Stacey here.
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