creativity – Sarah Collin

Making ‘Connection’ a self-care theme

As I sit in the café at the Dolphin Discovery Centre, I am surrounded by the happy sounds of people enjoying the café: the open space, families enjoying time together, and in some cases the celebration of a birthday with generations of the family together. Happy gatherings of people wait for the next cruise to take them out to see dolphins in their natural environment. As I observe all this it reinforces my focus word for 2019 and that is “Connection”.

As many of you know, over the past few years I have taken a word and intention to journey the year with. Last year was my year of Extreme Self Care and upon reflection, I find it is an ongoing journey as I realise how challenging it is to put oneself first in the area of self-care! I used the word extreme because I personally felt I needed to take extreme action due to a long absence of any meaningful self-care. When reflecting with a wise friend we discussed the use of the word extreme. My friend felt it was a bit harsh and that we don’t need any extreme of anything, rather balance being more the order of things. I pondered this and came to the conclusion that at the time I needed to take extreme action in the area of self-care to make it meaningful after so long neglecting myself. Now that I have had a year of exploring that and what that means I have found a balance in what I need and how that might look as I embark on bringing that self-care into my daily life in 2019.

My self care begins this year with a renewed connection to silence. This means that I spend Monday mornings in silence so my morning walk or bike ride will be in silence by myself, followed by some study of sacred teachings. I had this practice well established a couple of years ago but it got eroded away until it vanished completely.

My self care will also be:

Regular connections with my family
Regular connections with nature
Regular connections with creative activity

Connection came up for me during last year and I had a feeling it would be my focus for 2019. If I needed any signs to confirm that feeling I got them many times with the most recent being at Christmas when my son gave me a book with the title “Connect”. That was it! The final confirmation that I was on track.

Connection, for me, is part of this self-care process as I realise how much I benefit from connection to nature, connection to my family, connection I feel when exploring spirituality. I felt the deepest connection recently to my exploration of the Patanjali Yoga Sutras as I studied for my final yoga therapy assignment, a sense of wonder and joy in profound learning that will carry on past my graduation this month.

I look forward to sharing with you the many aspects of connection in our lives as we continue the journey of exploring our deeper selves in our ongoing yoga practice.

Namaste

Sarah

It’s FINALLY HERE! New Creativity Forum

Hello! Kel here, with a cool new thing: the Creativity Forum!

We promised this at the end of last year’s Spring Retreat and it’s taken a while to sort out the tech end of things, and then to sort out a time to release it, and then I lost my password and had to reset it all and, well, you get the idea. It just kept falling off the list. But it’s here! And it’s ready!

The basic idea is this: during the last retreat, I joined Sarah to run a session on creative writing. People enjoyed the process and wanted a way to commit to doing it regularly, so they’d have a space to contribute and other like-minded people to play with in this creative writing space. We decided that an online forum might be the way to go.

How to do it:

Go to sarahcollin.com (you’re already here, if you’re on the main blog page, but not if you’re reading this as an email)
In the top right corner, you’ll see “Members”, “About Me” and “Contact”
Hover over “Members” and select “Register”
Fill in your thing
Then you can hover over “Members” and select “Log In”
Do that
Now where before it said “Members” (top right), it says “Creativity”. Hover over it
“View posts”: Click on the image to read what people have written about it. Write your own contribution in the comments
“Create a post” to upload another image and words

If you got in but are not sure how to contribute or what to say, read the one that says “Please Read” with a photo of a blue coffee cup and a notepad. If you have creative writing questions, ask them in the comments to the blue coffee cup post. I’ll check there on a roughly-weekly basis.

If you can’t get in and the instructions above didn’t work, comment under this blog and I’ll help you out.

For now, just contribute to the images there, and add one of your own if you want to (please make sure you have the rights to use the image – you can’t use most images from Google). Once we have a group going, we’ll set up a roster so someone puts a new image up each week 🙂

I hope all that makes sense. This weekend, sit down with a cup of tea or glass of wine and see what happens!

Happy creating,
Kel

Cultivating Creativity

This week I thought I would mention an idea that has come about from this year’s Spring Retreat.

We were blessed to have Kelly Fox on retreat this year who very kindly agreed to come along and not only nourish us with beautiful food but also share a session on creative writing. I like to include a creative session on my retreats as we are all born with creativity within us but often as we get older it isn’t expressed or we lose the ability to express ourselves creatively in the belief that we are not able or that it wouldn’t be good enough. “I can’t draw” or “I can’t write” are common excuses for not engaging.

Kelly’s session was on”Ekphrasis”, which is about harnessing the power of images put into words. We had a selection of the free postcards that you often find in local cafes and Kelly demonstrated how to look at an image and start to express what you see using all your senses. So you look at the card and jot down how it makes you feel, what you see, what you might hear, smell, taste and so on. Put these words onto a piece of paper and let your pen start writing with no expectations at all. It is a great way to start expressing that suits any level of writing experience you may or may not have. It is also a great practice to lead into journal writing, letting anything at all roll out onto the page.

As a result of that session we are about to start a project that you may like to join us for. We are challenging ourselves to write once a week about the photo of the week and the photo will be taken by one of the participants of the group. We will all take a turn at sharing a photo via our mobile phones then have a week to pen our response. We will all be writing about the same photo each week and I am excited to see the individual expressions that will emerge as we share via an email group.

If this is something you might like to join us in please email me with your intention and I will include you in the challenge which we are hoping to start within the next ten days.

We all have an innate artist within us that is really just waiting for the opportunity to express so come on, give this a go and join us for some fun and free expression as we create a space to share that is safe, non-judgemental, caring and compassionate.

Namaste from my inner artist who is excited about this creative project. I leave you with this quote to contemplate your participation.

“Creativity comes from looking for the unexpected and stepping outside your own experience.” Masaru Ibuka

Sarah