Author Archives: Paula Josa-Jones

Feb17

shadow dancing

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I have been shadow dancing this morning.  It is a strategy that I suggested to some of my students:   to overcome creative inertia, try dancing around it.  Or diving into it.  Or changing the station.

Dancing around it means that I am doing the opposite of honing in.  I am shifting focus, paying attention to whatever is flickering at the edge of consciousness and being lighter, more fluid and delicate in my physical self.

There is a tendency when writing or working here – in this digital place where we meet – to get stolid, turgic, thick-feeling in the body.  So finding ways to bring in lightness and less density is a good way to shadow dance.

How do you engage your playful body as you are working?

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Feb16

begin again

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This morning I entered the day with my camera.  Diving into the work from a different end of the pool.  Finding stillness  and a beginning through the lens.

Sometimes I think that beginning again is like climbing a summit.  Lots of sweaty, hard work to get to a new place.  I forget that it can be effortless.  A breath is a beginning.

I have been writing a lot about something that Abraham calls “segment intending.”  It is one of the processes from Money, and the Law of Attraction. What it means is that each time you shift an activity, you are conscious that you are leaving one segment – one chapter or scene – and entering another.  For example, if I am writing this blog, and the phone rings, then I am leaving the writing and starting a phone segment.

The next step is to bring a sense of intention to that next segment.  Just being aware is plenty.  If it is a phone call, then setting an intention to be present and patient is a good one for me (who tends to be impatient and wanting to be somewhere else).

So this morning, starting the day with a different point of entry – the camera- was a way to find a new perspective.  I also set an intention that I would dip into into seeing and feeling first thing.  Beginning with a different feeling in the body – striding across the field BEFORE sitting to write.

How do you begin?

 

 

 

 

 

Feb15

the wait

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Guinevere and Jules are waiting for us to finish tea and make their breakfast.  They are moderately patient.  They are confident that breakfast will arrive.

I am waiting for inspiration.  I am impatient.  I am not confident that inspiration will come. For the past couple days I have been feeling a lull, like a surfer out on a flat sea, no wave in sight.

But I am keeping in mind something that Stephen Nachmanovitch said:  Attempts to conquer inertia are by definition, futile.  Start instead from the inertia as a focal point, develop it into a meditation, an exaggerated stillness.  Let heat and momentum arise as a natural reverberation from the stillness.

I know that in dance, stillness is the canvas on which the movement appears.  With my writing have lost some sense of stillness being the place to begin.  I am filling the moment with too much effort, too many gestures, too little breath.  There is also this:

To the mind that is still
the whole universe surrenders.
                                       Buddha

Feb13

my heart, our hearts

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Painting by Pam White                                     This painting is FOR SALE (Contact the artist for details).

Today like every other day
We wake up empty and scared.
Don’t open the door of your study
And begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do
There are hundreds of way to kneel
And kiss the earth.

                                                     Rumi

I have been reading Jon Katz about Valentine’s Week.  This post touched me deeply, because I too live with an artist, and when I see the light shining from her studio windows, my heart leaps.

Lately she has been painting hearts.  They are ecstatic, wildly beautiful.  I have already picked out mine.  “That one,” I said,  “That one is mine.”

2012 marks 26 years together.  That seems an impossible number, and yet there it is.  The years, the days, the minutes are a complicated dance, a beautiful improvisation, a meditation on listening, on moving, on being moved.  Being a love warrior, which mostly means learning to love oneself deeply enough to love another.