Trusting What Is Fascinating
Developing freedom within our creative process and confidence in what inspires us.
Time: Thursdays from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm California time, 6:00pm to 8:00pm UK Time.
Dates: Five meetings, October 23 – November 20, 2023
Additional 1-hour creative process sessions will be made available to participants outside of the scheduled class time, 1-2 a week for the four weeks between meetings.
Cost: Offered on a dana/donation basis
Sign Up: Sign up using this Google form
Note: Due to difference in when Daylight Savings time ends for Europe/North America, the class on October 30th will be one hour earlier for those in Europe (i.e. 5pm UK).
This course will touch into possibilities to enliven and open one’s creative process with a two-sided exploration. On one hand, we’ll explore ideas rooted in Buddhist wisdom teachings as a means to support the releasing of unhelpful habits and fixated ideas about our art, creative process and creative identity. The second angle of exploration will be meditations and exercises that evoke connection to that which enlivens and inspires us. These two directions of exploration (both connected by the shared purpose of opening ease and freedom in one’s creative path) will be explored in tandem through discussion and in-class creative process work (see below).
This course will contain many of the elements of previous creativity courses I’ve offered (opening the creative process, from my perspective, best comes from working both the angle of disbanding unhelpful ideas and finding skillful ways to reveal and trust what fascinates us). However, this course will lean a little more towards exploring ways to evoke and re-connect us to what moves and inspires us than previous offerings.
Weaving both of these approaches together (freeing ourselves of limiting ideas, finding skillful ways to meet what inspires freshly) can support the opening of trust in our own process, and a confidence that the source of our inspiration is neither fragile or finite.
About the elements of this course:
Element 1: Unburdening ourselves of limiting habits and views around art making
Each week there will be a short talk related to releasing fixated habits and limiting beliefs around art-making and creative process. I’ll be drawing from Buddhist wisdom teachings as well as the habits and structures relied upon by meditators (of any tradition) for this element of the course. A key theme within Buddhist teachings is how to engender ways of meeting experience that don’t rely on evaluating what one encounters in terms of what it can do for you , or how your relationship to things defines your self sense. So much of what closes down the creative process for many is the pressure of evaluating what we make in terms of “success” or “failure”. Questioning the reasons why our own creative exploration is burdened by judgement and self-criticism can open a fertile sense of authentic exploration. While these talks will include a framing the exploration of creative process in terms of dharma concepts, previous experience with Buddhist teachings is not required.
Element 2: Connecting to what inspires us
Each week there will be a guided meditation, contemplation or exercise intended to put us in contact with what touches, inspires, and fascinates us. Meeting our inspiration through an avenue that is different than our medium of choice allows for new connections to be made that can be hidden by the habits we’ve developed working in specific mediums. Developing a relationship to what inspires us outside of our regular mediums and forms can open a sense of trust and ease that what we touch through art making is much larger than the ways we make it concrete within a specific form or medium. These explorations will precede the creative process session in most cases.
Key Practice: Creative Process Sessions
The primary practice modality for this course will be the “creative process session”. Within this kind of work the dynamism between dismantling limiting beliefs and the revelation of inspiration can be well explored and experienced. You can learn more about creative process sessions here. Within these we will work independently in our medium of choice while others are doing the same (in a shared zoom room). I will offer simple guidelines to set the context, but mainly its a time to engage creatively while being held by collectively shared intentions to explore beyond our habits and into the wilds of creative possibility. There is time to check in about how it went after each period of working.
Each main meeting will include time for creative process work, and additional creative process sessions will be scheduled during the week (1-2 weekly, scheduled based on participant availability).
Supporting practice: Cultivating sensitivity to how we are feeling in the moment (as we open to inspiration, as we do creative work) is a thread that weaves through this course in different ways. In class we will have a short guided meditation to support developing this sensitivity, and recorded guided practices that support this sensitivity will be made available to participants.
Meetings will include these elements (order may vary by session)
- Teaching/talk
- Time for discussion/questions
- Guided contemplation/ exercise evoking inspiration
- 45 minute creative process session
- Short guided meditation or exercise
Who is this course for
This course will offer a grounds for exploring the creative process for anyone engaged in making art or craft (painters, dancers, musicians, writers, textile artists, poets, crafters, digital artists, filmmakers, ceramicists and more). In this context, labels like professional vs. hobbyist don’t apply – if you are called to make any kind of art, then you have a creative process that can be explored and freed-up . This course may be of particular interest to dharma practitioners, but the wisdom approaches will be presented in the context of creative exploration, and so previous meditation/dharma experience is not necessary.
Unlike some previous creativity/meditation courses I’ve offered, the creative process session will be part of the main meeting vs. optional. The course size will be limited . As is most often the case, the best part of this course will most likely be the chance to explore this way with a group of kindred spirits.
About Me: Susy has practiced Buddhist meditation since 2001, and began practicing insight meditation five years later. In 2015 she began studying and training with Rob Burbea, and completed her teacher-training with him in 2020. She teaches meditation in Los Angeles, California, and is an artist and a parent.
Some particular biographical details related to this offering: I consider my first spiritual root to be art-making, and painted throughout my teens and early twenties. I studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, and Film Directing at UCLA. The one thing I did not learn at school (or maybe more accurate to say, I learned to forget) was how to keep my creative process alive and vibrant and fascinating. In time, through years of meditation practice and spiritually-oriented art making practice, I found my way to keeping those doors open – at times working as an artist and at times making art for no good reason at all…