1.  Recognize you aren’t alone or the only one.

Tama Kieves offers us a look you may recognize – and since you recognize it, you know that at least she, if no one else (do you really believe it’s just you and her?) understands the crazy cycle of creativity called life.

Tama’s Diary of a Creative Mind:

Week one:  Get a creative idea and the slightest bit of encouragement and feel on top of the world, burning, singing, dancing and feeling as though it all makes sense now and everything will come together.  You are magnificent.  You will be rich.  Life is so beautiful.  You will never be stopped.  How could you have ever dobted?

Week Two:  Get a cancellation from a client or a form letter back from your proposal, query, or inquiry and feel the world is harsh, cruel, sick and scary.  “Reality” sinks in.  This will be hard.  This is not easy.  This will take a lot of work, time and adjustments to your personality.  Your therapist might not be that good.  You may just be too old.  You may just be too tired.  You may just be too sensitivie, like your family said.

Week Three:  Turn on television and have a love affair with chocolate, Cheetos, cookies and guilt.  Notice how thin the leading women are.  Notice how the celebrities are getting even more famous and fabulous.  They are thin.  Many of them look like they are fourteen.  Many of them are fourteen.  Notice how you haven’t moved from the couch in about six hours.

Week Four:  Begin to be clear that your life will never work, you don’t have what it takes, and you should just give up.  Journal morbid, angry things you hope no one ever finds.  Get paranoid about the possibility of them finding these things.  Write illegibly.

Week Five:  Slip into depression, like slipping into a cozy, unmade bed.

Week Six: Eventually pick up a self-help book and read it cynically.  “Yeah right,” muttered after every page.  Keep reading anyway with hunger and buried hope.  Have one idea slip in that makes you wonder:  “Maybe.” Attempt to be positive.  Affirm to be positive.  Read more self-help books and buy the tapes and programs. [or, you could just work through the ones you have that you didn’t quite make it through before.]

Week Seven:  Get a creative idea and a flash of excitement and possibility and begin the process again.

2. Practice imperfection

Read a little of Anne Lamott.  Wait.  Read a lot.  Often, stuck = fear of imperfection.  Here is a woman who is out there in all her radiant (and successful) imperfection.  Do you think people love reading her because she’s different than the rest of us?  No – we read her because we recognize – and get permission to be only and just – ourselves.  Here’s a bit of Anne:

Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up.  But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.  clutter is wonderfully fertile ground – you can still discover new treasures under all those piles, clean things up, edit things out, fix things, get a grip.  Tidiness suggests that something is as good as it’s going to get.  Tidiness makes me think of held breath, or suspended animation.  (from Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

Here are the two best prayers I know:  “help me, help me, help me,” and “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”  A woman I know says, for her morning prayer, “Whatever,” and then for the eveing, “Oh, well,” but has conceded that these prayers are more palatable for people without children.  (from Traveling Mercies:  Some Thoughts on Faith)

3.  Realize that there are no rules.  You can make this up as you go along.

This would be me speaking to you.  Long experience studying communities and the art of change has taught me that they who make the rules win.  Take back your power.  If you need rules, make your own.  Base them in your experienced life, and in the integrity of your best self.  Don’t worry about everyone else and what they’re doing.  Your doing what you came here to do, instead of stewing in a job you hate or a relationship that does not support your being your best and truest self, will make the world a better place.  Simply by following your own rules – which of course means following your own heart.  Which of course means living life at your most courageous.  At least it won’t be boring!

4. Forgive yourself (bonus 1)

(me again).  Forgive yourself whatever you need to forgive yourself for, most likely not being perfect (see Ann Lamott above). 

5. Celebrate (bonus 2)

Henry Thoreau wrote:  The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.  By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal.  It is a fools life, as they find when they get to the end of it, if not before.”

Celebrate that you do not have to be stuck or live a life of “quiet desperation.” Celebrate that you have amazing choices in front of you that generations before would have gladly given their all just to taste, never mind live.  Celebrate that small step towards your Real Self and ignore all the clamoring desperate voices that would have you instead focus on what you don’t yet have.  Celebrate what is right in front of you right now, this moment.  It doesn’t take long.  Light a candle.  Breathe in and be present.  Blow out the candle, breathing out in gratitude.  Notice that joy is knocking on your door – let it in.  (Me, yet again.  I have a lot of practice learning this stuff!).

One small step.  That’s all it takes to get unstuck.  And if you fall down taking that step, it’s okay.  It’s just fine.  Because you can get up and have another go at your heart’s desire anytime you so choose.  And it’s the getting up that makes the difference.  I know you can.  Do you?

6.  Give yourself to a cause for an hour or a day (bonus 3 – and this is the biggie)

Get over yourself.  Get outside yourself.  Find your passion again by finding something you can be passionate about.  Raise money or awareness that Haiti hasn’t healed yet.   Volunteer at an animal shelter that is taking in homeless animals from the Gulf.  Teach someone something you know inside out that they don’t know.  For free.  Start a book club. Smile at everyone you see for a full day.  Create a no-complaint zone around you:  only positive things shall pass your lips.  Ever again.  You get the idea.

Better yet?

Wylde Women’s Wisdom

(two bits of wisdom on my twice weekly blogs not enough?  Click through and have some Wylde Wisdom mailed to your desktop daily!)

At its root, discouragement is a decision in favor of stinginess.  We are voting that the universe has done its last nice thing for us and that we have come to the bottom of Santa’s bag of toys.  No one will ever be spontaneously nice to us again – and we certianly aren’t going to point the way by mustering any authentic and healing compassion for ourselves either.  We are bingeing emotionally on not doing what we want to do.  As a rule of thumb, repeat this mantra:  Sudden problems in my life usually indicate a need to take a step.  Julia Cameron (slightly rephrased by me)