Showing titles in Creativity

The Creative Cure is a call for a revolution, fostering change where all change must begin: within. This internal change will allow you to express your own creative gifts, cultivate happiness, and experience the unique feeling of fulfillment that only a creative practice can offer. Packed with powerful, transformative exercises, this book is the medicine you need to find and reinvigorate your creative soul.

Based on a far-reaching study of thousands of individuals, Finding Flow contends that we often walk through our days unaware of and out of touch with our emotional lives. Our inattention makes us constantly bounce between two extremes: During much of the day, we live filled with the anxiety and pressures of our work and obligations, and during our leisure moments, we tend to live in passive boredom.

The Story Grid is a tool developed by editor Shawn Coyne to analyze stories and provide helpful editorial comments. It's like a CT Scan that takes a photo of the global story and tells the editor or writer what is working, what is not, and what must be done to make what works better and fix what's not. The Story Grid breaks down the component parts of stories to identify the problems. And finding the problems in a story is almost as difficult as the writing of the story itself (maybe even more difficult).

D.W. Winnicott's distinctive contribution to our understanding of human development, based on extensive clinical work with babies and young children, is known and valued the world over. In Playing and Reality, he is concerned with the springs of imaginative living and of cultural experience in every sense, with whatever determines an individual's capacity to live creatively and to find life worth living. The ideas expressed here extend the theme first put forward in his paper Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena, published in 1953.

Playing music should be as simple and natural as drawing a breath, yet most musicians are hindered by self-consciousness, apprehension, self-doubt, and stress. Before we can truly express our inner self, we must first learn to be at peace and overcome the distractions that can make performance difficult. Kenny's remarkable work deals directly with these hindrances, and presents ways to let our natural creative powers flow freely with minimal stress and effort.

For far too long we have relegated the erotic to the bedroom, when in reality it is a fundamental energy that helps us connect more deeply with ourselves, each other, the earth, and the creative potential within us. We also live in a world that equates our productivity with our worth, leaving us feeling overtaxed, exhausted, burned out, and completely disconnected from ourselves and others. In Turned On, artist and musician Brie Stoner redefines the erotic, stating that it is more than just human intimacy.

How art heals is a mystery as old as civilization itself. To the first shamans, no remedy was more important than the medicine of the imagination. Now you can learn to access this natural medicine and explore your own soul's capacity for self-healing with Shaun McNiff's Art Can Heal Your Life.

How to learn effectively when you have to be both the teacher and student. Work smarter and save yourself countless hours. Self-learning is not just about performing better in the classroom or the office. It’s about being able to aim your life in whatever direction you choose and conquering the obstacles in front of you.

If you are an artist, you need to make your art. That's not an overstatement - it's a fact; if you stop doing your creative work, your quality of life is diminished. But what do you do when life gets in the way? In this down-to-earth handbook, experienced artist coach Beth Pickens offers practical advice for developing a lasting and meaningful artistic practice in the face of life's inevitable obstacles and distractions. This thoughtful volume suggests creative ways to address the challenges all artists must overcome.

What if the smartest people in the world understand something that the rest of us don't? (They do.) What if they know that in order to achieve success, they will sometimes have to do things that others may initially perceive as stupid? The fact of the matter is that the smartest people in the world don't run from stupid, they lean into it (in a smart way). In The Power of Starting Something Stupid, Richie Norton redefines stupid as we know it, demonstrating that life-changing ideas are often tragically mislabeled stupid.

Artist of Love offers the modern-day woman a revolutionary approach to discovering, claiming and owning all of her inherently wild, expressive and artistic sides so that she can liberate her true self in all areas of her life-but especially her love life.

In The Soul of Desire, psychiatrist Curt Thompson suggests that underneath all our longings is the desire to be known - and what's more, that this fundamental yearning manifests itself in our deep need to make things of beauty, revealing who we are to others. Weaving together neuroscience and spiritual formation to open up new horizons for thinking not only about the nature of the mind but about what it means to be human, The Soul of Desire is a mature, creative work.

Free Play is directed toward people in any field who want to contact, honor, and strengthen their own creative powers. It integrates material from a wide variety of sources among the arts, sciences, and spiritual traditions of humanity. Filled with unusual quotes, amusing and illuminating anecdotes, and original metaphors, it reveals how inspiration arises within us; how that inspiration may be blocked, derailed, or obscured by certain unavoidable facts of life; and how it can finally be liberated - how we can be liberated - to speak or sing, write or paint, dance or play.

In The Book of Beautiful Questions, Berger shares illuminating stories and compelling research on the power of inquiry. Drawn from the insights and expertise of psychologists, innovators, effective leaders and some of the world's foremost creative thinkers, he presents the essential questions readers need to make the best choices when it truly counts, with a particular focus in four key areas: decision-making, creativity, leadership and relationships.

Are you good at dreaming about what you’re going to accomplish “someday” but not good at finding the time and getting started? How will you actually make that decision and do it? The answer is this book, which offers proven, practical, and simple ways to turn random minutes throughout your days into pockets of productivity, and dreams into accomplishments. In addition to presenting his own winning strategies for getting from dreaming to doing, Matthew Dicks offers insights from a wide range of creative people on how to augment inspiration with motivation.

Perfectionism is on the rise, and it has dire consequences for how we think and feel about ourselves and others as well as how we think, live, and work. Perfectionism has been seen to cause overthinking, overworking, burnout, sleeplessness, and mental health problems like depression and anxiety. We can’t keep going like this! But what’s the alternative if it’s not perfect? Lynne Cazaly uncovers how to think, work, and achieve in clever ways adapted from the productive and creative worlds of software development...and improvisation.

Whether you wish to create a work of art, a novel, a thriving business, nourishing relationships, or a deeply satisfying life, Robert Fritz, composer, artist, writer, and entrepreneur, reveals the guiding principles that can empower you to reach your goals.

Neurological research definitively and repeatedly concludes that there is a bottleneck in our cognitive function - when we do more than one thing at a time, we become less efficient and more error-prone. Our systems get overloaded and we crash. In fact, we are actually wired to monotask - to give dedicated focus to one task at a time.

Best-selling author and creativity expert Jeff Goins dismantles the myth that being creative is a hindrance to success by revealing how an artistic temperament is in fact a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Over a decade ago, when Writing Down the Bones first appeared, Natalie Goldberg started a revolution in the way we practice writing. Now, for the first time, Goldberg reads her classic work, while offering new commentary about the creative, spiritual, and practical dimensions of writing. This collector's edition also includes an exclusive interview with the author.