There are 3 themes in these weeknotes, coming live to you from my retreat:
- Creativity, with courage, compassion & curiosity
- Retreat, being on one, well, no, being on 2 simultaneously
- Thinking: Where’s my head at? Notes on asynchronous collaboration & ADHD
Table of Contents
➡ What’s my relationship to my creativity? And how is it? And what about yours?
The interactions between my 3 month retreat in daily living and the creativity course Amplify are really incredible! So many different ways of being, doing, engaging, communing, sitting, dancing, musing, mindlessing (mindless being/existing, vs thinking).
I believe everyone is creative
I’m practising being more creative. It’s iterative. It’s a process.
Something about compassion, self-compassion, process, failure & being willing to make mistakes
What if I can rest into being accompanied?
Being accompanied means being encouraged, supported, upheld, enhanced, improved, complemented, cheered. Like a musical accompaniment. I think this emerged from retreat.
The kind of relationship I want to have with readers
Also translates to: What are my values? or What do I value?
- Curious
- Exploratory
- Creative
- Compassionate, and wanting to be more compassionate
- Reflective
- Femme
- Courageous
- Helping me iterate and evolve, learn and grow
Who will be most supportive of my values and how I want to show up in the world?
What a difference being resourced & rested makes…
When I give myself space and time, the things that are difficult are not that hard.
How to practise collaborating with creativity
4 Signs You Might Be a Starving Artist (and What to Do About It), in summary:
- Fantasize ➝ Have vision
- Blame ➝ Seek opportunities
- Complain ➝ Take ownership
- Stay stuck ➝ Keep going
Helpful advice from this week’s Amplify call
- Define milestones and look for opportunities to get there
- Use a quarterly planning process – noting that 90 days go faster than we tend to think
- Review what you actually got done
- Keep a list of accomplishments, achievements, interesting experiences by quarter ➝ try on paper. Include interesting films watched, video games played and stuff. Leads to a sense of what you get done & what the trade offs are
- Set goals to get better balance
- Write 3 pages (stream of conscious, like Morning Pages) on the fear/anxiety I’m experiencing
Listing accomplishments, achievements & interesting experiences
- Watching Adventure Time
- Lying down, sometimes napping, when I need to rest. Exhausted? Time to nap for 20 mins
I started my list with these, before going through my calendar for January – March.
Really glad to be doing that because I wanted to do quarterly reflections from the start of the year, in addition to my monthly reflections. I guess now I do reflections every day too, with my daily diary drawings for the past two week, and weekly reflections, with these weeknotes. Yay!
I digress…
The Amplify live sessions really help me to be more exploratory and adventurous. 70 folks on a video call, with a lively chat of so many ideas and insights. As a result I looked into courage training, amongst many other things.
I want to share my process more, so part of that is sharing these things that I’m intending to do (not just talking about stuff I’ve done already):
- Dare to Lead: Brené Brown
- Train The Brave: 7 Steps To Building Your Courage Muscles
- Psychologies: Can you learn how to be more courageous?
- Mind: Building Courage course
- Daring Leadership Assessment by Brené Brown
➡ How do I live: On being on retreat
How to be on retreat in daily living
Carve out time in the day light for sitting and noodling, for musing and meandering, for resting and snoozing, for reflecting.
What do you call a retreat within a retreat?
So, this week’s video is a vlog about being on retreat, specifically the 4 day unscheduled retreat I’m on right now, as well as the 4 month retreat in daily life, which I’m on right now too. What unshoulding and shedding mean to me, being unbound and free.
Practising giving myself Permission to Slow Down
Slow down.
That’s one part of the recovering from burnout triad (the other two being get support and reconnect with goals & priorities).
Slowing down made these things possible
- Making hot chocolate (good quality cocoa, date sugar & frothed soya milk). So simple, and yet I hardly ever give myself time to make it
- Reading Amanda Tuke’s nature writing newsletter – March edition
- Looking out for writing workshops and meditation retreats, as a result of this time, I’m looking forward to
- 1 x dharma talk with Jaya Ashmore
- 1 x dharma/sangha with Lama Rod Owens
- 4 x retreats (3 in April, 1 in June)
- The London Wildlife Trust is putting on another free Festival of the Great North Wood, this time for the whole of April
Feeling very grateful.
Because of the pandemic, I was introduced to Jaya Ashmore. A friend ran regular & frequent meditations, and recommended Jayaji to us. 5 retreats this year, so far, and 8 last year (5 of which were with Jayaji, the others were with a friend, Lama Rod Owens and Anushka Fernandopulle and Bonnie Duran with Gaia House).
If you would like brilliant extended meditations, I recommend these audio recordings:
- Seven Homecomings by Lama Rod Owens (1 hour 20 minutes) from a retreat I did a couple of years ago
- Mindfulness of the body by Bonnie Duran (50 minutes), very visceral
Other stuff I’ve been doing whilst embracing unshoulding & shedding
- Meditating
- Dharma talks
- Eating pizza
- Watching Adventure Time and this science video: 3 Discoveries You Missed Because of COVID (5 minutes, auto-generated subtitles)
- Writing weeknotes
- Playing with & updating functionality on my website (image slider/gallery & tag clouds)
➡ My thinking mind: On ADHD & asynchronous collaboration & ADHD
Asynchronous collaboration
Being on retreat made it possible to do some lightweight planning in a way that didn’t even feel like working, that was great. Looking forward to writing about async ways of working next week.
ADHD
I was going to say I’m not going to link to a specific episode of the Translating ADHD podcast, because they’re all golden, but this particular episode resonated so much with me:
“I work best in collaborative efforts. …It used to be that I thought I needed someone else and I was always in a one less position, down one. Like, oh I’m so grateful that this person’s going to work with me. I’m nothing and they’re something. And I’m gonna hitch my wagon to their locomotive. Which is a mixed metaphor… Because I need an activator.”
Cameron Gott
I love mixed metaphors.
Ooh, great question:
What gets in the way of embracing your authentic self?
Cameron Gott