Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles

Therapy, as I’ve said, is like taking a class about yourself, but gentler, and there is neither a grade nor an exam.

Do a quick online search for “feelings list” and you’ll find a variety of them.

We have a story about who we are and what we are like. We not only believe it, but we also may operate as if it’s an unmovable truth, the stuff of the universe. It’s unchangeable.

No feeling you have is bad, it just is.

We, the individual users of money, can make our own meaning of money and decide how we want to use it.

Sharon Louden, editor. Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists. Intellect Ltd. 2013.

If you’ve got a spouse, or plan to share your life with someone, it’s important that you’re honest with this person about the role of your creative practice in your life—which means you need to know this for yourself.

Many of us who have deep misgivings about capitalism also love money or at least want more of it, and this can feel incongruent. It helps to understand money as a resource, an energy. It does not have to be intrinsically good or bad. We project meaning on it.

There is an intimacy, a sense of destiny, that we could be changed so much by something we found by chance.