Ep #199: Waving the Wand that Brings Magic to Your Work

So, there are two really intriguing – I think they’re intriguing – themes coming up for me lately around the work that I do, the Art School, the coaching work. And one is around things being a secret, in a delicious sort of way.

The other is around magic wands. And I thought, as I went to organize my files in Dropbox for this episode, I’m like, “Oh my goodness, this is episode 199. How could I have made it to almost 200 episodes without sharing one of my secret tools with everyone?” The magic wand, how could I have not had an episode, 200 episodes in nearly, and not had an episode entitled The Magic Wand? Or something like that but better.

So, this is what you have today, everyone. I’m going to be sharing something secret, not so secret, and then also the tool of the magic wand. Not a literal magic wand, but you’ll see what I mean. Listen in and enjoy. I hope this feels like magic.

You are listening to The Art School Podcast; a show for artists and creatives who want to become the next greatest version of themselves. Learn how to cultivate an extraordinary way of being and take the mystery out of making money, and the struggle out of making art. Here is your host, master certified life coach, artist, and former lawyer, Leah Badertscher.

Hello and welcome, everyone, to another episode of The Art School Podcast. I hope this finds you so very well. I love thinking about where you might be in your corner of the world, in your own personal kingdom. I didn’t realize this was on my mind quite so much and then I saw the book on the shelf and I realize, actually, it has been there. It’s been there under the surface.

I love the book, the novel, All the Light We Cannot See, and one of the parts of that book I love is the broadcast that’s being sent out and the idea that you don’t know who’s listening, the mystery of that, yeah, I think that’s it. There’s something so beautiful, a beautiful mystery in that, almost like a secret waiting to be revealed. And again, there’s one of those themes. I’ll talk about those both today. And it’s a little tongue-in-cheek and I’m having fun and playing, talking about the magic wand as a metaphor for this tool.

This is really a continuation of our conversation from last week, talking about energy first when you are creating, creating anything, creating any aspect of your life, cultivating any aspect of your being. And, of course, because this is the Art School and we are about making things and creating things in the world, tapping into the energy of what wants to be made through you.

That could be tapping into your desire to make the thing. But it’s really steeping in that and letting your whole self be formed by that.

One way that my poetry mentor, Fran Quinn, teaches this. This is how he taught it to me, is when you are writing a poem, you feel it first, or you have this sense of what it is. You get a line, maybe an image, maybe words come together.

And then, let’s say in the workshop, I would read it. And as I read it aloud, those there, they’re not critiquing me. But it’s in that held space where people are there, yes, for the words, and then also there to witness you experiencing the energy.

And then, there would be times when he would say, “Okay, is that it?” and it’s not quite it. And he said, “Okay, this is what revision is…” Re, from the Latin to go back, right? And vision, like the visage, the feeling of it. It is about calling the vision back.

So, vision doesn’t mean only something – what’s the word I’m looking for – ocular, that you see with your eyes or with your mind’s eye. But it is a felt sense of the life of the thing, the flavor of it, the energetic flavor of it, the resonance of it, if you’ve tapped into the right frequency or not.

And so, oftentimes, we just try to trudge along and keep trying to quote unquote fix it. But it’s not a broken thing. You know, creating a work, creating your life is not a broken thing. It’s a living thing, a thing that wants to be fleshed out and in the world. So, when we fix it, we just look for the broken places and then we sort of hypnotize ourself, that either we’re broken, our lives are broken, or the thing is broken, when instead, what is available to us, like I was saying last week, is to go to the energy first.

Steep in the energy first. Stay in the energy first. Get really familiar with the energy first. Go there using what I call – I give this guidance and prompt to my clients, that I do myself, where you drop language and move into a direct experience of the thing and let the direct experience of the thing inform you. And then, from that place, you sculpt around it and you sculpt whether your craft is with words or color or paint or scenes, images.

Then, you apply and you begin to form the stuff, the physical stuff of the thing around it by first though being informed by the energy of the thing. Energy first. This tool is like a magic wand and also, meta, at the same time, one of the ways that I can help guide a client from being in the left hemisphere too much, you know, being in a state of survival, in a state of fear.

Because when we are afraid of being critiqued, when we’re afraid that we’re getting it wrong, or that we are doing something wrong, as I’ve said before, we are under threat. And then, our body does not know, our brain does not know that we’re not.

And when we are under threat, we cannot access the places we need to access within ourselves in order to create. When we’re under threat, we can produce and we can produce from adrenaline. We can – and let me just say if this is not obvious – that’s not sustainable.

Adrenaline is good for short bursts, but this is what results in burnout, when over and over again, we are creating scenarios in our life, like, “That’s how I get things done.”

Yes, and then there is another way, a way that is sustainable and will help unleash levels within you, rooms and worlds and creativity within you that we can’t get to, neurobiologically speaking, when we are in a state of fear.

So, it’s using this magic wand that helps us move into a state of safety, of imagination, of play. Those are places that we cannot access, play and imagination, when we are threatened. Because if we’re being chased by a lion, that’s not the time to sit down and build a tower with building blocks or write a sonnet, you know, or sing, or paint.

No, that’s a time to get the hell out of Dodge and save your skin. And I want to make sure you hear, if you have formed so much in your life and in yourself from this place of survival, from a place of pressure, overwhelm, or you procrastinate until the pressure builds up and then you make yourself do it from states of, again, survival, fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, it’s not your fault.

So, this is not the place to shame or judge. There’s no place, actually, in the Art School, to shame or judge. And there is another way. That’s the survival mode way and that is the way most of the culture runs, the adrenaline, the cortisol, that’s the fuel on which much of our productivity consumer culture rests. And there is another way.

I’ve said so many times, this is about building a paradigm of thriving creatives. And thriving creatives have ways of being creative that aren’t fueled by these burnout methods and burning out their adrenals. But it does require breaking a habit of using those things and identifying as someone who, “Well that’s just how I get things done. I don’t know any other way to be.”

And what I want to offer is that you consider it’s not actually who you are, and that there is a genius within you that I keep talking about, unleashing this innate genius, nurturing the innate genius within you. And you will be stunned by what flows from you by how prolific, by how playful you can be, you are.

It’s just that you haven’t been taught and haven’t been trained in methods, practices, ways of living that cultivate this way of being. Again and again, I’ve said this Art School philosophy is cultivating an extraordinary way of being that makes your extraordinary dreams, goals, results inevitable.

And so many people, because they’re accustomed to the way mainstream culture works, hear, “Extraordinary way of being,” and they think, “Oh, I’m just going to have to be hopped up and go harder and push harder.” No, it’s extraordinary because it’s out of the ordinary, out of the ordinary to have a regulated nervous system, to feel safe within yourself in order to create, and then to trust yourself and to play and to revolutionize your relationship with what you create and your creative process.

And it is out of the ordinary for that to be thought of as a way to express your fullest potential. But that is precisely what happens. The reason I wanted to do another podcast episode on this and the reason that I also want to teach a class on this, a workshop – so stay tuned for those things and be sure to be watching your inbox and signed up for newsletters because I’m going to be creating a lot of episodes in advance, so oftentimes a podcast won’t have the most up-to-date information about offers.

And I have some really juicy – talk about magic wand – I have some really juicy, juicy offers coming up. And so, again, make sure you’re signed up for the newsletter. As always, you can find that, www.leahcb.com and find a link to do that, to sign up, in the show notes.

Again, the reason that I want to emphasize this energy first and return to it again is because when you are listening to a podcast, it’s really easy to be like, “I get the idea,” but not actually integrate it, not actually embody it, not actually get it.

And these are one of the things that, when you get it, it is like a magic wand. It changes everything. And so, as I was thinking about creating this particular episode today – and actually magic wands came up a lot in my mastermind call today – and I knew I would be talking with all of you. And I can hear, like, the “Yeah, but…”

“Yeah, that sounds great, but come on, be real. Be real, Leah, magic wands, maybe she doesn’t live in the real world.” And I so don’t want you to miss out on this life-changing work. Because again, I say magic wands and what I really am talking about, it’s a blend of neuroscience, neurobiology, central nervous system.

It’s a blend of then, as a practitioner, me having worked with so many clients and then also myself and so many mentors, not only on the intellectual concept, but on watching someone very closely, watching for years people very closely, listening very deeply, and then also doing this work myself, and then learning how to shift my energy so that it creates a situation that helps other people shift theirs.

And it’s a combination of – you can do that with tone, with your words, with eye contact, with body language. It’s also getting to know the other clients and their particular language, what speaks to them, and what doesn’t, and speaking to them in their language. There are so many things that go on.

And it can feel like magic. And it’s also available to all of us. And then, there is also this shorthand way, like a mini supercharged magic wand, when I will ask someone this question that I have always loved and always returned to.

And I also want to say, underpinning all of this, if you’re listening and you’re a coach and you’re interested, I will say be in a place where you are not bullshitting, where you know you’re standing on sacred ground and you are in integrity with yourself and you are speaking truth to your client and you are holding a space of reverent, deep dignity, for you, for the client, for anyone else there.

Because magic doesn’t work if you’re not on a foundation of this deep integrity and love, being with someone else and being present in full awe of their dignity is being in love. You can’t be in a different state, I don’t think, at the same time. It doesn’t mean you agree with their actions or everything they do, or even like it. But it’s this sacred ground that you stand on.

So, anyway, maybe that sounds very heavy. It’s also so damn fun. Did I say? Magic wand. And here’s the magic wand question. If I could wave a magic wand, what would be different for you? If you could wave a magic wand for yourself, how would this be different?

And clients, I don’t care how many degrees they have, I don’t care how incredibly freaking smart they are – and they all are. What they’ve been through, there is something in us that is waiting to be asked that question because we are waiting to give ourselves permission to return to our source, to return to a place of fresh and new desire, to return to a belief that yes, maybe yet life can still be what I have thought it could be.

Yes, maybe still yet for me, I can still be who I think I really am. We all yearn for this kind of question. And waving a magic wand is shorthand for that, for that part of our soul, our psyche that is like, “Damn, thank you, somebody is going to finally let me speak.”

When you say, “When you wave a magic wand what could happen?” also what’s happening in your brain is that you are moving out of the analytical center, the one that wants to perceive threats because it knows we’re speaking magically and it jettisons you off into a right-hemisphere adventure where things are possible.

Because whether you say – when you wave a magic wand, you are suspending disbelief. That’s what happens any time you sit down to watch Netflix.

In essence, you are being hypnotized. When we sit down to watch a movie, we have this sort of unspoken implicit contract that we are going to suspend disbelief. We know we are just looking at a television screen and those are actors and that this is made up. And we agree to that. That moves us out of our left hemisphere. We are suspending disbelief and playing in the imaginal.

And then, that’s what allows those scenes, the dialogue to move us. That’s what allows the story to become real for us. It’s how we lose ourselves in the story, whether that’s a movie or a great novel, or even a three-minute song.

Oh, and I got a little sidetracked, but here was this backstory I wanted to tell you about answering the yeah buts, like maybe Leah just doesn’t live in the real world.

And I thought, no, this is really a life-changing tool, and this practice of energy first is so powerful and profound, and what I see as a missing piece and a really fun missing piece.

And it’s a piece that makes people frustrated and disenchanted with inner work and their creative work. Because they keep just thinking the same thoughts, which are self-referential thoughts, meaning you stay in your same hamster wheel of, “This is who I am and therefore this is how I feel and this is how I think,” and you try to change them, but it’s basically just variations on the old self and nothing changes, versus having a leap into a different level of consciousness.

And from that consciousness, which is also what I’m talking about when I’m saying tap into the energy, I’m talking about tapping into a different consciousness, from that different consciousness, from that different energy flow new ideas, new thinking, new feeling, therefore new person, new personality, new personal reality, as my guy Joe D. likes to say.

And if you have been an Art Schooler and you’re thinking of my infamous image now the drawing I always do of the two circles and making the leap from the hamster wheel into this big sun image, yes, that’s precisely what I’m talking about here and it’s something I’m going to take further and go deeper into with some new material in an upcoming workshop.

But for now, again, don’t miss out on this thinking it’s magical thinking. And I was thinking, in my own life today, as I was preparing for this, I had a number of calls today, a mastermind coaching call, a few one-on-one calls, I had back-to-back doctor’s appointments, myself which I wasn’t looking forward to, but taking care of business. Nothing life-threatening, just taking care of things.

I took my daughter to the orthopedics office to get her cast off. Oh yeah, and I spent two hours cleaning – sorry, this is a gross alert – dog diarrhea up off my carpet in my beautiful basement because my poor pup has a virus. And, again, Luna, she seems to be doing better, but not before she clearly felt worse and felt it all over the basement.

And so, it was a full day. I also paid bills, did all the things I was supposed to do, and yes, I’m talking to you about magic wands, that is really again this poetic metaphor and image and shorthand tool for a lot of neuroscience, a lot of practitioner-based experience and also because I know this audience loves nuance and metaphor and going for it and being out there, especially when it works like magic.

So, this brings me to the part of the podcast where I want you to do more than just listen. I want you to lean in and really work with me, coach with me.

Think of something in your life right now that currently is an irritant or it just puts you in that survival state, it puts the squeeze on you. Likely, it’s some variation of not enough, not enough time, not enough money, not good enough, not enough love. It could be something else. You’ll know it. Like, what is it that just puts the squeeze on you? You just feel like, from this state, paralyzed. You feel that fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, one of those things, and you know that you’re not able to access your potential. You know you’re not able to show up and move your energy, move your potential into the world in a way that moves your life and your work forward.

You know that this is not the way of being that is going to unleash your creative genius. This is not the way of being that is a match for the artist that you are meant to be. Which, by the way, is the workshop I held this last week and it was amazing. Thank you so much if you were there because you’re a part of the reason that it was so magical.

So, think about this. Think about what it is that puts you in this state that is not the state of being that’s going to make your goals and dreams inevitable.

And now, consider this. Imagine you have a magic wand, or I have a magic wand, whatever works better. And then, with a wave of that magic wand, everything changes. What if everything could change for you. Suddenly, what’s gone? What’s no longer a weight? What clarity is there? What do you feel rising within you? What rises effortlessly from you? What flows from you? What are you reconnected to again? What do you create, it’s not effortlessly, but you’re engaged? And the challenge is satisfying and the work is satisfying and you crave it.

You feel your own ability as a match and growing for the challenge. You rise to meet it. You’re confident that you can. You feel your spirit flowing out into the world and increasing, ever increasing in strength and efficacy and you’re thinking, “This is what I am made for. This is who I’m meant to be. This is what I’m meant to do. This is how I’m meant to feel.”

And again, I don’t think this happens in a state of no effort. I think it is – and the research shows Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow shows we need some degree of – it needs to be hard enough.

If it’s too easy, we’re not interested. Think of kids playing videogames. Like, the kids have been playing for a while, they’re not interested in the quote unquote baby games anymore, the Mario Kart that my generation kind of grew up on. And they’re so much more advanced. They need the next challenge. And we do that. We need an adequate level of challenge in order to access that state of flow.

And in that state of flow, we are in this place of self-forgetting, no longer self-referential. We’re liberated and the, again, neuroscience shows, on brains scans, for instance, of jazz musicians in this state, the analytical part is silent, but this other part that improvises, this part that’s associated with self-expression is all lit up.

This is the area too that’s lit up when people describe having an experience of God or the universe or love or nirvana or being connected to something larger than themselves.

And with a wave of the magic wand, imagine what that feels like. And if you can’t feel anything, that’s okay. Just by imagining what it might feel like, also studies have shown that the brain changes in response to that. New neural networks are growing and when those new neural networks are growing, when you are imagining what it would be like to be free, to be free of concern about not enough.

If you imagine what it would be like to be a creative genius, you’re a creative genius. You don’t have to worry that it’s not enough, even if this is your 18^th painting and you’re like, “It’s not it yet.”

If you know you’re a creative genius and you love color and you love art, you just keep going. And not from a state fueled by adrenaline and pressure and the need to meet societal expectations and prove that you’re good enough. Because you know, if you’re a creative genius, you’re not thinking about that. You’ve got nothing to prove. You’ve moved back into a state where you’re there for something greater. You’re tapping into something for the love of it, for the play of it, for the challenge of it, for the growth of it, for the aliveness that you feel.

So, here’s a second step. You want to be aware of the difference in your energy in your body, in your mind. Be a scientist of yourself. Know thyself without shaming or judging thyself. Study both aspects. What is my experience of me when I’m doing the problem, the distressing situation? How am I when I do this problem, as a problem in the world?

How am I when I think of myself as a problem in the world. Study that, not just what you’re thinking, but how you feel, how the energy feels. And then notice, wave that magic wand. What if I could change everything? Look for the smallest opening and notice that you are able to shift your attention. Because what you put your attention on is what grows.

So, when you create these scenarios in your imagination and you go there, you have to build an imagination fitness level on the caliber of an Olympic athlete because the brain’s negative bias, negative bias default will pull you back, most likely, toward the catastrophe, towards fear, towards what’s going to keep you safe, but you’re actually then in danger of never doing what you love, and then how safe is that?

And I want to say I’m saying safe in quotation marks because that kind of safety is also an illusion. But that is a different podcast. And if you can’t imagine, when you wave your wand, it being different for you, imagine someone you admire, someone you’re like, “Oh her. Oh him. If I could only…” what? If you could only what? What do you imagine they feel like? Go there. Really try to feel it in your body.

It’s this practice of then noticing that you do toggle your attention and that you can shift your state, you’re shifting your state by shifting your mental state. And, as Dr. Rick Hanson says, mental states become neural traits.

So, when you build this mental state of you fully expressed and free, this mental state of the affluent artist, which is also an embodied state, you want to feel it in your body, you want the energy to shift, you go to that place where you feel the energy first and you saturate in it. Then, stay there and practice going there and then waving that magic wand will be like a sign to your brain, to your central nervous system, “Ah, she, he wants to shift me to this new way of being. That’s what we’re practicing here.”

And from that place then, then you begin to ask the questions. We don’t want to ask questions about make decisions from our old patterns, I’m not even going to say old self, I’m going to say old patterns, which were probably dictated by other people or other people’s expectations.

If you want to make decisions, choices for your life, creative choices – because that’s what choices are, creative – you want to make it from your truth. So, what is your truth? What does it feel like? If you could wave a magic wand and change things, what would that feel like? That gives you such great – it’s like training wheels for feeling into your truth.

Stay there, and in that embodied, in that energy of truth of you embodying truth, stay there, hold that, from that place what choices do you make? What choices don’t you make? What’s no longer even relevant? What now is a priority?

And this is such fun, fun work and it also – like I want to say the word work – it can feel like effort. It does take effort. And yet, it can also be play and it can also be light and it can also be playful.

And because I don’t think I can hammer this home enough, next week’s episode, I’m going to include just a couple short clips of me waving my magic wand for clients in a private coaching session. I’m not going to include their names or any identifying information whatsoever or their voices or things that they said. I’m just going to share the audio clips, just short ones. Because again, who knows which magic wand will work for you, which wave of language will meet you where your private language is, where that secret door in your psyche is.

And so, I want to offer as many opportunities as possible, including some very juicy upcoming offerings, including a secret one. I’m not going to say much more than that. I did talk about it on Instagram, if you happen to find it there. But that’s going to be pretty amazing, so stay tuned.

Thank you everyone for listening to another episode of The Art School Podcast. I have a big thank you to send out this week. Thank you to everyone who emailed me that they are participating in my tribe of 10 invitation.

If you remember, a few podcasts back, I said things just seem more real and like they get traction if I can feel a human connection. It’s so important for me in this work. As I’ve said, you are not an audience to me. This is a community of individuals.

And feeling that connection makes the work more real and, I believe, also makes it more powerful. And so, if I can connect with more and more of you, I just thought that would be so enriching and wonderful, and it is, and powerful.

So, thank you to everyone who told me, “Yes, I sent the podcast.” Because what I was looking for were 10 people, just 10 people to send the podcast to one other person.

And thank you. I heard from so many of you who were like, “Yeah, I’m playing along with this.” I love that and I wanted to give a special shoutout – because I’ve said thank you to all of you. I’ve contacted you personally by now. And I also want to give a special shoutout to somebody who just took it to the next level.

So, Many V. who is the creator and host of a charming, beautiful new podcast called A Box in the Attic. I mean, check out the artwork for this podcast. You’ll love it. I love it. Mandy V. sent me a message and said she’s been listening to the podcast. She’s also connected with one of my beloved Art School alum who is now her coach. I love this. And she shared the podcast not only with one person but with seven people. And she also tagged me in not one but three or four posts last week with beautiful, meaningful shares.

And so, thank you Mandy V. And I am also going to surprise Mandy V. right here – I haven’t told her yet – with a coaching session. So, this is a $1400 value and because I am so grateful, again, I just want to say thank you for your enthusiasm and for your support and for paying it forward. And also for the beautiful work that you are sharing through the world with your creativity.

I also want to thank A.M Likes, who left a wonderful review on iTunes. And she said that she’s been listening since 2020 and even though she hasn’t been in the Art School yet, that her creativity and also her life as a mother have been deeply supported by this work.

That means the world to me. That is the embodiment and epitome of one of my greatest intentions for this. And it came up in the mastermind a lot this week too, that yes, people are there for their creative breakthroughs and for their big creative dreams. And once you step into this work of regeniusing yourself, you fall in love with yourself. You change everything. It is a creative revolution that is so benevolent.

And I say creative revolution, and I know that can sound scary, but what is revolutionized is you move away from a state of being in fear, from fearing you can’t trust yourself. You move away from states of survival, of not enough, and you move into a place of deep and radical safety and love.

And I say radical because it is so outside the norm of what we are conditioned to think as the way to nurture your genius, fully express yourself, and bring your dreams to life. Actualize, realize those dreams.

I think you really have to understand the place from which I’m coming, a place of deep love and compassion and pouring love into people and truly seeing them, feeling that they are heard and seen in a way they’ve been waiting for all of their lives, and then what flows from there? What then is allowed to flow from there and gets to be nurtured from there?

It’s from this place that then I say, “Yes, you can push the limits of what you think is possible for you. There is more possible for you than you’re even letting yourself dream right now. It is so hard for us to dream and touch the energy of what’s really possible for us when we’re stuck in old patterns and cycles of fear and survival.

And being in a container like the Art School can help you shift that energy, can help you move your central nervous system into a place where it is safe to trust yourself, where your creativity is safe, where it is safe to be powerful, to be successful, to be seen, to make money, to make failures along the way to creating your success.

And again, when I’m saying magic wands, I’m not creating some sort of artificial environment in which they’re not actually out in the world. In this environment, they learn what it is like to create safety within themselves.

I’m not creating it for them. They learn to create safety within themselves. And then once you can do that, you are hungry to go out and do what is yours to do. You are ready. You are so ready. It is fun again. There is joy again. You feel resilience not as a bad word that means you’re burnt out and rock bottom and just hanging on by the skin of your teeth. You feel your inner strength.

You feel your ability to access peace and transform situations you didn’t think you’d ever transform. I’ve heard this so often with relationships and where it seemed like it was the other person or people, it was the outside scenario or outside job, where people come to realize, no, everything shifted, not because anything needed to change at all, but because I grew. I became free and I became safe.

So, this really is the work of a life, your life as a living work of art. You know, I was speaking recently on the RevelEleven platform and I had written for them and said, “We all have these magnificent, shimmering destinies available for us.” And I also want to say we all have these magnificent shimmering lives, lights that we are, that we innately are, that just want to be safe to be in the world, that want to be able to be visible and shared and to be free.

So, it is the Art School which again is really about a way of life. Not only a way of creating, but away of being, a way of living. And if you want to do this work up close and personal with me in this beautiful, profoundly loving dynamic, brilliant, gifted group, I highly encourage you to apply to the Art School Mastermind.

And if you are on the fence and you would love some free sound-boarding on this – and no pressure at all because we don’t do that. That would put you in a state of fear again and survival and out of creative mode, that would be counterproductive to the work, that is not what we’re about at all, but you just want to move closer to your freedom, send us an email, support@leahcb.com and we can possibly share with you how many other ways there are to work with this work and be in community and receive guidance and just the exact help that you need and what you can’t access at this moment in a safe, comfortable way for you, that helps you really change.

Not just a minor change, but a deep radically loving revolutionary change from the inside out. I know who you are meant to be. She’s waiting for you. And I know your next level of work, your next level of art, your fullest expression, your dream is possible for you. And I know I can help you get there. You are not alone and it’s not just for other people. You are not beyond help. This is so possible for you. This is all within your reach.

To close today, I want to riff on a few other prompts based on the prompt, the invitation, what would happen if you waved a magic wand? And for those of you who are like, “Prompts don’t work. That’s not really powerful. Is that coaching?”

It is self-inquiry. And I was telling the workshop participants this week, self-inquiry goes back millennia and further. Know thyself. Know thyself. And I pointed out that no sage, philosopher, mystic, anybody who has ever said no to their self, and then said, beat thyself up, know thyself and then judge thyself.

No, because all of those things obscure true knowing. You can’t be in judgment and also be able to see truth. You can’t be in judgment and also be curious. So, embrace a playful curiosity towards knowing yourself. What if you could wave a magic wand? What would you change? What would you change about your creative process? What would you change about maybe your income level, maybe where you live, maybe your colleagues, your community, lack thereof, or you want more of your lifestyle, your ability to follow through on the energy that you sense is the vision and then create that outside of you.

Start to play a movie in your mind and come back to it again and again. Do the revisioning process, as my poetry mentor Fran says, call the vision back. Call that movie screen back. Play it again and again. Tweak it. See yourself smiling on that movie screen, happily moving through challenges, happily coming up against something that, oh gosh, that’s a delicious challenge for you and you might struggle a little bit, but minus the angst and minus the self-doubt, and then see yourself again and again completing your work and moving it successfully into the world.

See other people greeting it with open arms. See yourself smiling. Feel yourself smiling. See yourself in the back of your mind and on that movie screen smiling as your work moves through you into the world and out onto its stage where it’s meant to be, amongst the living, amongst other people, your dream realized.

See and feel the happiness. Watch yourself from outside the movie and then move yourself into that frame, move yourself around at different angles and then move yourself into your own body as the star in that movie.

And what you are doing here – this has turned into a mini episode – what you are doing here is showing your brain who is the authority. You are directing your attention. And this – just a little sneak peek into some of the things – this is a little bit of hypnotherapy. Not the strange hypnotherapy work, but hypnotherapy which I will be sharing more about in some of the secret things that I’ve talked about.

So, play with this. Play, curiosity, an open, relaxed state, a curious state, these states of being will all be your friends for accessing that imaginal, for allowing yourself to tap into your innate creative genius, for feeling that it is safe and fun and good to be who you really are in the world, the artist, the creative genius that you are meant to be, that you already are.

See yourself getting wickedly good at using this magic wand. Play with it, everyone. Have a beautiful, creative week and I can’t wait to talk with you next time.