Welcome to Mara Senese’s website! I am a leadership development coach, who helps individuals, partners and teams initiate “creative renewal” for themselves, their relationships and their work.
|
 It looks like I have again turned a corner in this process. From feeling driven to find out what I should write to waiting until the post wants to be written. When that happens it is very easy to put a piece together. But I have learned that between postings, I get the feeling that I will never post again – not an idea in my head. This was very difficult to deal with but I have come to trust that a new post will appear when the time is right. I am learning to rest in the off time when nothing seems to be brewing. It isn’t that I forget about everything, far from it. I still look at twitter and scan the horizon for what is happening. I post on Facebook when something strikes me. But writing on the blog requires something different and I must wait until it appears.
Another shift has been noticing how much my ego can get hooked on watching whether anyone is reading on the site, how many, what posts. Following that totally unpredictable and intelligible bit of information began to drain my energy. At first I thought it was all up to me to generate traffic all the the time. I have also let go of that. I have let go of competing with the people who get big followers and lots of re-tweets. I have had to face this aspect that is part of working on the web where so many people are seeking attention. To deal with this competitive part, it was important for me to re-examine my intention. Why am I doing this? Who am I doing it for?
My conclusion finally reached was to accept that I have no choice but to do this. It is a kind of inner drive that actually nourishes my creative spirit, enlightens me to far reaches of events, pulls me into contact with unheard of experiments and shoots of out-of-the-box thinking. It is fun when I relax and let go. It is exciting when I rest in-between. Just as in my whole consulting career, it is hard to really know if you are making a difference or not. You just have to let go of expectations, let go of wanting to know how individuals are touched. This was a good realization. I can live and work with it.
The last piece that I have had to face is that fact that perhaps there may come a time when no inspiration comes to write a piece. If that time comes, I have accepted that there are many others who are doing similar things. This is a joint project, even if we don’t see each other. Many of us are reaching out with good news. And many of them are done by very savvy media geeks, who know way more than I do. And so I trust that this is all OK. And then I can find a balance during this very fascinating time. And I am grateful for it all.
 Working with the HOPE project has intensely expanded my horizon and my understanding. I find myself connecting everything I see and read to the project. I ask myself, How could this piece of information fit in? Is this something that people should know? It is like my eyes and ears are fine-tuned into a particular frequency and I hear more than usual on that wave-length. Everything I read connects up with something else that I have read. I don’t have to think about it, it just happens. I intuit the underlying patterns and the larger picture – but this is not easy to put into words. I try to let things come of themselves otherwise I feel stressed and cramped in my thinking.
I feel led from one thing to the next. Messages appear magically at times and at other times I struggle to figure out what I want to say. Sometimes I discover information that feels overwhelmingly, disturbing, tragic, stupid or sad. I loose track. I can feel hopeless. And then I wonder if I am working on HOPE for myself, to force myself to look for what is working, what is good. And then suddenly a stunning video or something inspiring, engaging, hopeful pops-up. I see the power of the Good again. And I feel the passion and excitement of wanting to share it!
I know that I must allow both sides in, in order to keep HOPE real and honest. I am not after “positive thinking”, that is superficial. I am after changing beliefs – my own beliefs and those of others through seeing what is possible.
What about the future, I wonder. Can’t think about that now. I just have to take one step at a time, one day at a time. What a strange task I have taken on. But maybe it is my new spiritual practice.
 I haven’t written on Creative Renewal since April 2010. This morning I got the inspiration to come back to this site and use it to track my own process with my current project HOPE (human, organizational and planetary evolution).
I realized that in order to maintain a commitment to HOPE, I need to make space for my own creative work and to respect my own process of creative renewal. This brought to mind my love affair with ceramics that I have put on hold in order to do this new project. My Hidden Queen Vase came to me with its beauty as well as its imperfection as a sculpture. I choose to honor it here to remind myself that perfection is not the aim of my larger project. And that beauty is also present even with imperfection.
The Japanese regarded very highly, imperfection, my ceramic teacher told us. They actually looked for the cracks, roughness or mistakes in a ceramic piece. This is called Wabi-sabi and is based on an understanding of beauty as “imperfect, impermanent and incomplete”, also closely related to Buddhist teachings. How different from the demands I put on myself and the stress that I sometimes feel around the HOPE project.
As I try to understand this stress, I realize it is part of the creative process and the creative renewal that I am actually birthing by taking on this project. Like any artistic endeavor there are phases where “Flow” happens and you get lost in the process, know just what to do, forget the outcome and focus in the “now”, taking each step as it is presented to you. This is when you are most connected – both to your deepest wisdom and to the piece you are working with. There seems to be no separation between the two aspects. But there is another phases where you become separated from yourself and the piece. Can’t stay in the “now” but start worrying about the results, the outcome, how it will be received, is it good enough. This state creates stress and tension. It is hard to know what to do next because the “inner guidance” seems to have disappeared.
Both aspects must be accepted and recognized. I work with that acceptance and try to understand what can help me to connect again. The obvious answer is to re-connect! But that is not always easy and needs a kind of clarity about what is pulling me away in the first place! If I notice that I am getting caught in the fears about outcomes, I can slow down and recognize this. I can also find out what keeps me close to myself.
This question led me to this blog! That is why I am writing about my process here because I believe it will keep me close enough to myself to help me connect back into myself and the project as I go along.
But why not just write for myself. I am actually doing that by writing in my journal daily and that has been a big help. But it occurred to me that there might be something to learn for all of us interested in the HOPE project, so I am thinking of trying to transmit some aspects of my process here rather than on the HOPE site because I believe it would interrupt the main purpose of that site.
And I am rather amazed by this first post. I hadn’t thought about Imperfection or Wabi-sabi when decided to write here. I just started with the Hidden Queen and then realized that she was imperfect and then remembered what my teacher said and suddenly I was connected to this post and revealing stuff to myself as I wrote.
So a double sharing of my process! And now I call forth my courage and will post this first attempt at sharing my personal process with the world!
 Shadow Energy August 19, 2009
This small sketch was made after a warm-up of creative writing.
Exercise: Weave these three elements into a one page piece
1) what do you see, hear, smell – right now
2) what memories pop up
3) ask a question
My example:
My mouth tingles with Tom Ka soup that I had for lunch, it’s tangy smell still lingering in the air. Bach’s “Gamba Sonatas” fill the space with repetitive themes. A calmness settles over me. I lift my head and catch the distinctive shapes of the pale yellow orchid with its promising buds on the windowsill across the room.
Our Thailand visit of some years ago jumps into my memory. Lush palm trees and pink lotus blossoms in the waterways, a backdrop for the vivid blue, oval swimming pool where we spent the mornings lounging in luxury. Friendly kindness and spicy food comforting us. Life serene and free from responsibilities in the bubble of our hotel.
The first time we took the open-air makeshift taxi, spewing fumes and noise, to town we were gay and bubbling in our vacation high. When we passed through the heavily guarded gate, the scene changed. We had forgotten the crowded shacks and dirty children playing in the dusty road that led to the small center.
We became silent and wide-eyed. Some of the people starred at back at us. Most focused intently on their daily tasks ; hanging colored cloth over poles, lugging buckets of tiny shrimp and fish back from the near-by town, preparing meals on open fires.
Toward the end of our stay, we talked about avoiding Thailand because of the constant exposure to poverty so close to the tourist hotels. Did our stay make any difference in the life of the majority of Thai people? Or would they be even less fortunate if we stopped coming to Thailand because we can’t tolerate the shadow side of life in our face.
Can I tolerate my own shadow side? Do I hide from it in the brightness of comfort and routine?
Can I believe that the “shadow” ( the denied sides of my personality) when fully accepted becomes a source of dynamism and power? Will it give me the courage to go out the gate of comfort and face the wildness of the unknown?
“You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover is wonderful. What you discover is yourself.” Alan Alda
 Dialogue of Opposites M Senese This drawing was made after a warm-up with a creative writing exercise.
The exercise is to establish a dialogue with a “secret” part of yourself. Give the part an identity and characteristics. Get to know that part. Let the writing flow without stopping or correcting as you go along.
This kind of exercise may surprise you with a deepening of your self-identity.
My example:
Dialogue with My Soul
Who are you, my Soul? First I must understand who or what you are! How can I know you when my personality is caught up in daily living and survival? You don’t seem to care much for that, not in your vocabulary. You are so “present” that for you there is no “time” or “death”.
Yet I am stuck in a body that I actually love, with eyes that adore beauty, feel the flow of the curve of hills, taste the play of purple and yellow on fields of autumn grain. The “me”, that I am most familiar with, worries about paying bills, keeping my weight steady, surviving the family dramas and mastering my own emotional weather as volatile as a Norwegian sky.
You by contrast seem to be all light and love, filled with dynamism, joyous to the point of ecstasy, content with things just as they are. I have touched you, felt you rise up in me, explode into a million particles, disappear in your orb of energy, stable yet vibrating like a galaxy of stars.
You recede and my old perspective returns, filling the narrow confines of my ordinary consciousness. I call you, invite you back but secretly wonder if you ever were really with me. It must be a parallel reality that touches me when I manage to get the coordinates right and meet you in the zone like a lover’s rendezvous.
Will you speak to me in a secret language that only we know? Will you teach me to hear your voice amid the jarring clamor of daily life? There is a field where we can meet. It is the place where I can most be myself, feeling delight and joy in what I do.
 Garden of Possibilities M Senese This small sketch was made after a warm-up of creative writing.
The exercise is to use 6-8 of these “asides” in a dramatic monologue about something that really matters to you. Write only one page, without stopping or thinking about what you are writing. Creative writing exercises often reveal fascinating insights into early conflicts or beliefs that you can use further in your self-inquiry.
Choose 3-6 from this list:
- laugh if you like
- if you say so
- know what I mean
- this isn’t the first time
- I have problems of my own
- You don’t need a PhD to…
- In other words
- And so forth
- For Christ sake
- For better or worse
- And another thing
- Know what I’m saying
- Like I always say
- Dig
- You tell me
My example:
Laugh if you like, but I’m still trying to figure out what I want to “be” when I grow up! Seems like at 67 I’m again in what I call a “new phase”. How many new phases can on have in one lifetime! For Christ sake, I’ve been “trying” to be something, someone, known, published, respected, seen or important as long as I can remember. And another thing, when I search through old drawers I find remnants of great beginnings. Piles of sketchbooks, small scraps of writing, poems, practice pieces, stories and loads of plans for projects with high expectations from myself and others.
You can’t tell me I haven’t “tried”. But does trying really count? You know what I mean! Can you try to get up from a chair? It only gets you caught in the suspension between standing and sitting – or you could pop up and down over and over, like your butt and the chair are magnets with opposite poles!
In other words, I’m fed up. It’s about time that I move from “trying” to “being”. Taking each step forward, keeping momentum, blast expectations and fear of rejection to the skies!
Like I always say, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way!” Actually that was my mother who said that. What did she know about it. She gave up when the going got rough. She never did “get me” anyway, know what I mean!
She found her soul-friend in my sister – they could chat for hours about food and kids. I sense that I was out of her league. Too big to handle! You don’t need a PhD in psychology to see that I was the wild strange one – hard to control or manipulate. For better or worse she never stopped trying!
So enough of this stuff! Get off your butt and start working!
I recently decided that it is time for me to move into semi-retirement! With the decision came an inspiration to resurrect this website that I set up in 2004 but consequently stopped using.
I love the name Creative Renewal. All innovation, personal growth and generally life is about the ability to renew and regenerate. This is the primary creative power of human beings – to find creative ways to meet current challenges and adapt to changing times.
I see this site as both a place where I can expand my development through daring to post my ideas and my own art work. And a place to encourage and inspire people who may long for deeper contact with themselves and others.
The emphasis here will be on nourishing the soul and the heart. Our hectic lives, filled to bursting with daily tasks, can feel dry and dusty, thirsty for the quieter elements beneath the surface of things.
With ideas for practicing creative writing, resources, inspirational poems, creative art work, plus the potential for coaching that reaches out to the creative and resourceful essence of self, I hope to contribute joy, wisdom and love in everyday life.
 La promenade sur la falaise - Monet I’ve been reading Shaun McNiff’s newest book called “Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul”.
It came into my life just when my soul needed healing! After our vacation was extended by two months because my husband ended up with a quadruple bypass while we were in the States, I returned to Norway rather exhausted.
Funny enough I had begun sketching again after many years – just a few minutes or so when I got a chance. My energy began to return and I found my mind clearing. More than that I felt a sense of nourishment and self-contact that I hadn’t felt for a long time.
Healing is a new word to use in connection with art making and I am curious about it. I begin to wonder if healing happens when a group of people make a drawing together as they often do in the workshops that I run. A lot of energy is certainly released and often laughter with it.
There is a lot of talk in Norway about how to reduce all the sick leave that seems to have taken over business. Could making art have an effect in this area? I have often wondered if the tough business environment we live in today leaves the soul thirsty and tired along with the body. Perhaps art making engages the imagination and brings some right brain bring into a left brain world.
I continue to watch my own process and read more in Art Heals.
originally written in 2004
|
|
Recent comments