for thirty minutes while thinking, daydreaming, looking, and seeing. Make sure you have a notebook and pen with you, or a smartphone where you can write down whatever comes into your head.
Before: Set an intention for what you want to write, or think about an issue or topic that you’d like to ruminate on. Alternatively, you can think about what’s bothering you today—those (good or bad) thoughts you just can’t shake.
During: Well, there are no real rules. Just do anything that gets you walking and into a good rhythm. You could go to the park, or go window shopping, or explore a part of town you’ve never been to before. Once ideas pop into your head, stop and write them down as fast as you can, and then continue walking.
After: Once you’re back from your walk, reread what you’ve written, and, if you feel inspired, use your favorite bits in a finished piece of “work.” By work, I mean a Facebook or Instagram post, a little note that you put on your fridge door, or a verse you decide to save on your phone. If you like what you have written, honor it by saving it somewhere special.
I love this exercise, because it allows creativity to percolate and brew. When I run retreats, we do this together. We begin in a pack—talking and laughing—before wandering off our separate ways to walk our way to writing. I recommend doing this walking and writing exercise regularly (as often as you can). If nothing happens the first time, try again. Wait patiently for creativity to happen, and trust that it will. If nothing more, you’ll have gone for a head-clearing walk.
Yours Too, Can Be the Truest Voice
If your energy is flagging, I hope this story will perk you up. You may have heard it before—it’s the story of Florence Foster Jenkins, which was made into a film of the same name in 2016. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend that you get yourself to a movie download site, pronto! The film is a heartwarming display of passion. Florence is a woman who has had syphilis for fifty years. She’s always known she could die at any moment, so she always felt she had nothing to lose by following her passions. She had wanted to be a concert pianist but couldn’t due to problems with her hands. So, she ran a successful music club with her boyfriend for more than two decades.
Then, in her twilight years, she decided that she wanted to sing. The trouble was she didn’t have a “good” voice. It was either flat or completely out of tune. Plus, she had poor phrasing and terrible breathing. But she sang with such gusto and passion, and with so much of her heart and soul, that despite her concert audiences laughing at her, they also fell in love with her.
Toward the end of the film, she reads a terrible review of her performance in The New York Times. She looks to her boyfriend for reassurance: “I was never laughing at you. Yours is the truest voice I have ever heard,” he says. But the shock of the review sends her health into a downward spiral. And finally, on her deathbed, she says, “People may say I couldn’t sing, but they can never say I didn’t sing.”
Make sure they can never say that you didn’t write.
Don’t allow anguish, fear, and blocked creativity to stagnate. Get moving and get writing. There is true magic in movement. You just have to put one foot in front of the other.
Chapter 2
Forging a New Creative Identity
In 2003, I went to see a destiny reader. Yes, that was her official job title! I had met her a year earlier while researching and writing a feature called “Married for Seven Years But Are We Compatible?” The idea was to use lots of different tests to see if on paper and anecdotally, a happily married couple were actually suited to one another. A Feng Shui expert whom I’d worked with on several other features recommended her. And she was amazing! She used Indian astrology, which is very different from the Chinese method. By simply taking their dates and times of birth, she used her scientific system to pretty much tell them everything about their past, present, and future. She was so spookily accurate, that a year later I found myself in her kitchen, eating delicious homemade curry while she talked me through my own destiny.
As we talked, she told me things she couldn’t possibly have known. Then she told me my future lay in writing and speaking. I guffawed. Writing—YES. Back then I was a journalist, and writing was a big part of my life. But speaking—I told her NO WAY. Ahem, I am now a professional speaker, and leading workshops, talks, and retreats is a huge part of my life. But back then, it seemed unbelievable. And it just goes to show that we often don’t know what future we’re stepping into.
Her main point, however, was that I needed to
stop forcing and pushing at life.
She went on to explain that life is made up of time periods (for me, it was ages 0–9, 9–29, 30–34, 35–54, and I forget the rest). In these periods, only certain things can be achieved, she explained. It doesn’t matter how much you want something or how hard you try. You can only achieve the success, the lessons, the blessings, and the fortune that these time periods are able to bestow on you. It was the first time I had heard about the concept of divine timing. That key things in life unfold when they are ready to unfold—not when we want them to.
When you view your own life through this lens, there is no one set-in-stone schedule for when you should complete society’s milestones. Instead, if you learn the lessons and work through the thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors of that period—then you can move into the next cycle without your old baggage. And in that new cycle, new things are possible. The aim is to use creativity to navigate the space between the time periods, when an old way is dying and a new one hasn’t yet begun—and to remember that we’re all on different schedules.
Harnessing Your Inner Power
In the early days of my career, money was short, and my freelance writing lifestyle meant that I didn’t always know when my next paycheck was coming. So I read the classic Napoleon Hill self-help book, Think and Grow Rich. I didn’t grow rich (in money), but I did learn a thing or two about inner power. Hill introduced the idea of sex transmutation—something I still find fascinating. Sex transmutation is when you turn the energy of sexual desire into creative fuel and use that to drive ahead and forge a new path. It’s when you turn on your emotions and feel positively charged. For our purposes, it’s about falling in love with writing and creativity.
In her book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, Elizabeth Gilbert asks her readers to imagine that their creativity is like a hot relationship they’re in. If it was, they would steal time for it, stay up all night to be with it, and think about it all day. Fusing your life with that kind of desire and intensity is extremely powerful.
To achieve this kind of desire, you need to get firmly into your physical body first (layer two of the communication pyramid from Chapter 1). Whether consciously or not, we’re taught from a young age to be out of tune with ourselves. We sit at desks for most of our school days and are told to think and solve intellectual puzzles. If we later work in an office-based job, we’re told to do the same, with a few workouts thrown in before or after work, or perhaps at lunchtime. Moving and being firmly IN our bodies is often discouraged. And yet, this is where much of our power is.
