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Listen With Your Heart

March 20, 2015 By Dave Leave a Comment

"Listen With Heart" by Len Matthews

“Listen With Heart” by Len Matthews

“The things which hurt, instruct.” – Benjamin Franklin

As a boy, my one true love . . . was basketball.

That’s right. Like Juliet to Romeo, basketball was the sun, only . . . okay, well, that may be stretching it a bit. But the idea of playing, the feeling I got from being on the hardwood or the blacktop found its way into every corner of my brain, it climbed beneath my skin, so all I thought about was shooting hoops.

Now, I was a skinny kid with asthma who couldn’t run fast, couldn’t jump high. So, you know, me and basketball were the perfect match.

I loved playing basketball so much, I spent every day, rain or shine, shooting, dribbling, running, jumping rope, trying to get better. I sought out coaches I respected and asked them for drills. And they shared them with me, even though I didn’t play for them. That struck me as quite generous.

It was that way all through high school, too.

The summer between my junior and senior year, I averaged 10+ hours of basketball every day. I played in a park about six miles from my home. It took me an hour to walk there every day after driver’s education, dribbling my ball, stopping at two other courts along the way for some practice shots, maybe a few games of one-on-one.

I won’t go into the whole story, not here, but suffice it to say, my dream was to play Division I basketball at UNC. Syracuse would have been my second choice and Virgina third (James Worthy, Louie Orr, Ralph Sampson were all playing back in those days). I spent all my energy chasing that dream and, even in retrospect, those were the best days in my young life.

I spent every minute I could doing the thing I loved. I lived the thing I loved. I was the thing I loved. Life doesn’t get much better than that.

Just after the season started during my senior year, I blocked a shot in practice and came down on a teammate’s foot, snapping my ankle. My season was over. I worked hard to rehab, hoped that if I gave myself time during my first year in college to fully recover, I could try out for the team as a sophomore.

But as Robert Frost put it, way leads on to way.

Over the years, my dreams have changed. I wouldn’t say they’ve been abandoned, as much as that they morphed. Other interests rose up. Of course, for much of my life I didn’t listen to those interests, not beyond having some deep down feeling in my gut.

I think that’s true of many of us. We get swept up in the whole way leading on to way and, for some of us, we forget to listen. We stop listening for any number of reasons. But it’s important to listen. I think that’s where happiness lives, in the listening, and in the doing . . . in both.

It took me decades before I heard that voice inside letting me know that I had a new love, a new passion. There was this completely different thing I never expected that filled me with the same kind of feelings I got from playing ball (and i did it most days without getting sweat in my eyes).

You’re here because you’re a creative – a writer, or a painter, or a singer, or a photographer, or a gardener, or a mixed media artist, or . . . You’ve already done some listening. On Fridays we tend to look back on the week, or further, and reflect on the action steps we took related not just to our goals, but to our intentions. What things did we do to honor that voice deep down inside us?

Some weeks we may do more than others. Some weeks we may find ourselves on a different path entirely. That’s the importance of listening. Of paying attention. Sometimes our dreams change. And that’s not necessarily bad or good. You have to decide – by listening . . .

Sometimes an obstacle arises that is painful, that keeps us from our goals, from our dreams for a time. But those are the times we learn about ourselves . . . if we listen. We learn different paths to those dreams, or we learn those dreams may have only been part of our story. That is why understanding our intentions is so important. Why listening . . . to our hearts, to our souls is so important.

The photo at the top is titled “Listen With Heart” and it claims that a true friend listens with the heart. Sometimes we forget to be a true friend to ourselves. That’s all we’re suggesting now.

Take a few moments today and be still. Take a few deep breaths and listen. What is your heart telling you? Your soul? What is your dream? And what steps have you taken toward it?

If you haven’t taken any, well, that happens. But let’s not except that as the only outcome. After all, you just listened and that’s a step.

Now answer this – what is the first step or the next step you will take?


Photo Credit: “Listen With Heart” by Len Matthews photo above is used as per Creative Commons License on Flickr.

Filed Under: creative living, Obstacles, personal story, Uncategorized, Writing Tagged With: creativity, distractions, emotions, follow your bliss, happiness, listen, obstacles, who we are, your passion, your true self

What If?

April 19, 2014 By Terry Price Leave a Comment

Cabo sunset 001“It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.” ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Whenever I work with writers, especially those who feel as if they’ve hit a dead end in their work, I encourage them to play the game of “what if.”

“What if” is exactly what it sounds like. And it is unrestricted. The focus of the game is to be playful and to get out of your left brain, rational, logical thinking, at least for the moment. It’s designed to return to that playful mode we experienced as children; when we made up stories and never, ever had “writer’s block.” Nothing was impossible.

What about life?

Sometimes we work so hard to live our own life story, we reach dead ends and don’t know where to turn. We reach a “life block.” We work so hard to do rational, logical, “grown-up” things and yet we move through life as if we’re not getting anywhere. People look around and ask, “is this all there is?”

The answer lies in your imagination.

If you only believe that the world of your senses, the world of your intellect, is all there is…you will be right. But, conversely, if you believe there is more, much more, maybe even life greater than your imagination, you will be right, too.

We live our lives and tell our stories, one often a metaphor for the other. Ultimately, when we write, we decide what possibilities exist for our characters. Ultimately, as we live, we decide what possibilities await for us. We build our own prisons and hold the keys to our release, but only some have the imagination to unlock the doors and venture outside. It is our logic that tells us the safety of the prison is better than the danger of the dragons that await outside.

But is the imagination that whispers “what if…”

What if you were made for slaying dragons?

What if the dragons aren’t what you thought?

What if dragons were actually quite tasty, served with an apple cranberry chutney and a decanted 1999 Brunello?

What if there are no dragons?

There are times in our life when logic and reason are necessary. But there is a season and a time for every things…times when we must escape the structured, limited, confining boundaries of our intelligence. Great works of art are not fashioned from the mind, they are created through the passion of the heart, the soul, and the imagination, all of which have some basis in reality. Life is ultimately not about what you know. It’s about what you don’t know, about what you are willing to learn, about what you are willing to dream…about what you’re willing to be.

Therein lies the fertile playground of the “what-ifs.”

And today is a perfect day to go out and play.

Filed Under: Creative Writing, Creativity, New Harmony, personal story, Retreat, Writers, Writing, Writing Retreat, Yoga Tagged With: art, conscious, creativity, distractions, expression, feelings, flow, follow your bliss, getting in yor own way, happiness, Joseph Campbell, Mediation, obstacles, our essence, painting, photography, Time, unconscious, who we are, writing, your passion, your true self

Yoga And Writing

March 20, 2014 By Dave Leave a Comment

Yoga Into Writing

Using Yoga As A Way Into Your Writing

“. . . the intellect is a great danger to creativity . . . because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things, instead of staying with your own basic truth — who you are, what you are, what you want to be. I’ve had a sign over my typewriter for over 25 years now, which reads ‘Don’t think!‘ You must never think at the typewriter — you must feel. Your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway.” – Ray Bradbury

In addition to the vast disconnect many people have with the world around them, there is also a disconnect from the self which is perpetuated by the multitude of distractions man has created for the purpose of keeping the conscious self from delving into the unconscious, into the subtle body, into one’s feelings.

Back in 1923, Aldous Huxley alluded to those distractions when he wrote, “There are quiet places in the mind, but we build bandstands and factories on them. . . . to put a stop to the quietness . . . All the thoughts, all the preoccupations in my head–round and round, continually . . . To put an end to the quiet.”

Huxley suggests that it’s not just part of the human condition to have obstacles to overcome, but that we also create them so as to divert our focus. So as to keep ourselves out of the quiet, out of stillness, which is, of course, exactly where the writer must go.

Those defense mechanisms are often set up to keep you away from your emotions, which, as Bradbury states, is a problem if you want to be creative. Yoga offers you a way out of your head, so to speak, a way to pull back from those preoccupations that go round and round, and a way back in – through the body – to your unconscious mind, to your feelings, to the very place where art is created.

Yoga is trendy these days. You can find at least one class of some sort in most communities: often in an assortment of styles and flavors, not to mention a variety of settings from strip malls to churches to dance studios, from fitness facilities to board rooms to classrooms. To some, yoga may possess a “new age” quality – perhaps due to it’s ability to help one reconnect with oneself – mind, body, and emotion – yet it is an art and a philosophy that has been practiced and espoused for thousands of years. So, you could say, it’s a rather ancient trend.

Believe it or not, even if you can’t quite reach your toes, even if you haven’t seen them in decades, a little time on the mat can help you get to the page. And it can also potentially help you transform the white space into something more, to imbue all the possibility you find there with some essential part of yourself.

Writing is an extremely rewarding endeavor, not because it isn’t work, but because it is the sort of work that brings the writer closer to her true self. She turns inward, away from the ubiquitous distractions of the world, but also away from those in her own mind.

She dives down to the darkest depths where imagination and memory spark, where her conscious focus blends with her unconscious subtle body, and she explores that part of herself she could not otherwise see except in the special light of those sparks.

This is, at times, daunting, yet also quite wonderful, especially if she is able to dive when and how she chooses.

If you develop a separate yoga practice, you’re likely to experience the positive physical, mental, and emotional effects of your yoga sessions as they carry over into your writing sessions. But if you intimately and intentionally join the two, if you unite them into one practice, the results can be remarkable.

And that’s one of the things about the retreat that I enjoy most. Showing writers how to do specific yoga sequences as part of their daily writing practice, as a prelude to the writing – whenever they might lack inspiration, or as a way back into that part of the self from which the stories are to be mined.

Depending on your specific writing intention, you can customize the sequence of poses to quiet your mind, to tap into your emotions, to slip out of the conscious mind and into the unconscious, into a creative flow.

“If there is no feeling, there cannot be great art.” – Bradbury


Huxley, Aldous, Antic Hay, London: Chatto & Windus, 1923, 123. 

Filed Under: Creative Writing, Creativity, Flow, Obstacles, Uncategorized, Writing, Yoga Tagged With: Aldous Huxley, body, conscious, distractions, don't think, emotions, feelings, flow, mind, obstacles, Ray Bradbury, sequences, subtle body, unconscious, writing, yoga

West of the Moon Blog

"Listen With Heart" by Len Matthews

Listen With Your Heart

March 20, 2015 By Dave Leave a Comment

“The things which hurt, instruct.” - Benjamin Franklin As a boy, my one true love . . . was basketball. That’s right. Like Juliet to Romeo, basketball was the sun, only . . . okay, well, that may be stretching it a bit. But the idea of playing, the … [Read More...]

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