Inspiring: playful art & artful play

I am thrilled to announce that my life's work has taken me in an exciting new direction! The playful creative practice to which I have devoted myself for over three decades now has a new name: Inspiring. That will also be the name of a newsletter that launches in November, as well as a series of videos and podcast episodes.

Creative inspiration is an experience of wholeness as powerful as any other peak experience (mystical union, trance, being high, orgasm, etc). What makes inspiration unique is that it is conducive to creative expression, to the flow of ideas, movements, sensations, and energy. This flow is the essence of life! Here is where passion, sensuality, and transcendence meet.

Finding out how to live in this flow has been my lifelong focus and obsession. I went straight to the source, interviewing the people who knew the most about inspiration, as well as digging through historical archives, reading voraciously, and testing hypotheses in the lab. Most importantly, I delved into different practices, disciplines, and techniques first-hand. That is how I ended up apprenticing with a Mexican shaman, as described in The Chanter's Guide; traveling to India to unravel The Way of Play; developing and testing the simple and potent practice of Repose; and laying out the ten basic tenets of Deep Creativity. 

Now, it's time to get very practical. I am ready to share the playful art and artful play of Inspiring with those who are ready to embark on this wonderful, gratifying adventure with me. If you want to take your creativity to new heights, that is a good reason to explore this practice. And if you want to experience wholeness on a daily basis, tapping into the flow of essence from which all creative expression emerges, that is the best reason I can think of to master the art of Inspiring.

Living in a results-oriented society, we tend to focus on creative products as opposed to creative experiences. When you immerse yourself in the playful art of Inspiring, you will discover, as I have, that you just have to focus on the experience--on the here and now--and the outcomes will take care of themselves. This is a fundamental principle of creative inspiration. As the great art teacher Robert Henri would tell his students, "The object isn't to make art. It's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable."

Here is what you can do right now to get started. Join my Inspiring mailing list! I will be putting out a monthly online newsletter with some of my favorite tips and play activities. And stay tuned to this blog for some big announcements in the weeks ahead!