One of Picasso’s favourite assignments for a young artist was to have him or her try to draw a perfect circle. It can’t be done; everyone draws a circle with some particular distortion, and that distorted circle is your circle, an insight into your style. ‘Try to make the circle as best you can. And since nobody before you has made a perfect circle, you can be sure that your circle will be completely your own. Only then will you have a chance to be original.’ The deviations from the ideal give an insight into the style, and thus, Picasso says, ‘from errors one gets to know the personality.’”

From Trickster Makes This World: How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture, by Lewis Hyde.

Here are the latest books to be added to the Creative Focus Library.  

Need a book for a particular difficulty? – we can order it in for you. We lend books to our clients – be voracious, we like that!

•  Self Compassion: Stop Beating yourself up and Leave Insecurity Behind
• When Perfect Isn’t Good Enough: Strategies for Coping with Perfectionism
• Healing the Scars of Emotional Abuse
• Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men
• Healing the Scars of Emotional Abuse
• Freedom from Self-Harm: Overcoming Self-Injury with Skills from DBT and Other Treatments
• The Hero With a Thousand Faces
• No death, No fear: Comforting Wisdom for Life
• Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death
• Too Perfect; When Being In Control Gets out of Control
• The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognise It and How to Respond
• Radical Acceptace: Embracing your Life with the Heart of a Buddha
• The Miracle of Mindfulness

On not so good days, do you find you could eat anything that isn’t nailed down? Susan Albers book, 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food, might be just what you’re looking for.  Bare in mind that many people self-soothe by eating.

Often, however, there is a frenetic pace to this eating so it may not be pleasurable at all … it may be serving the purpose of dissociation: the experience of zoning or numbing out.  Soothing is lost and guilt and regret seep in. There is a contradictory nature to eating to self-soothe. It can calm you down but it can also make you feel out of control.

I often conceptualise binge eating or other disordered eating behaviours as like an addiction. Habits play a big part and the most effective way to change disordered eating behaviour is to find something helpful to put in its place.

Susan Albers book provides (1) Mindful Meditation Techniques, (2) Ways to Change your Thoughts around Eating, (3) Soothing Sensation Activities to Calm and Relax the Body, (4) Soothing by Distraction, and (5) Soothing via Social Relationships.

This is a down to earth book that helps people to understand why emotions play a part in eating. The book provides practical strategies to promote change and explains the core ideas behind these strategies. This book is very eclectic and is likely to cater for all types of eaters, personalities, and levels of readiness for change.  Five stars! *****

Find out more at Susan Albers website.

http://www.sootheyourselfwithoutfood.com

This year I have planted my feet

on this ground

and am practicing

growing out of my legs

like a tree.

— Linda Lancione Moyer, from ‘Listen’

 
Creative Focus is thrilled to stock a selection of Savi Organic Body Products to help demonstrate and encourage clients toward Mindfulness. Dr Simone Hughes will soon start adding Wellbeing-based products to the Creative Focus website, and you will soon see these products in her rooms. Guess what the name of the body cream we will source from Savi is called?

Wellbeing!

Dr Hughes will be demonstrating mindfulness by encouraging the senses with complimentary Savi Wellbeing Body Cream. It’s exciting to be taking the idea of Mindfulness a step further: to inspire our clients in simple ways!

SAVI is a family owned and operated business located in Margaret River. The family has been manufacturing a comprehensive range of exquisite organic body, hair, facial and medicinal products with an ethical approach since 2003.

You can find out more about SAVI at their webpage.

Excited! Much!

http://saviorganicsaustralia.com/

I’m adoring reading the book Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write by Gayle Brandeis. This is a beautiful, soulful, permissive book that encourages women to enjoy and make peace with their bodies and to know the physical through the engagement of the senses. I love it! I’m going to give here a sneak peak into some of the mindfulness based activities from Fruitflesh.

1. Establish a ritual to help you enter the creative process. At Creative Focus, I turn on a special and beautiful light, I refresh the flowers and I light a candle. What could you do to create an acknowledgement of your creative space.

2. What landscape has informed and constructed you? What corner of the Earth have you felt a deep union with?  Are you of a mind to bring this place – and your body’s response to it – into view, onto the page, in writing, or visually? Remember and name each little detail – trace the course of your walks or play. These places form a deep part of who you are today. When you make a mental pilgrimage to this homeland you make a mental pilgrimage to your self.

3. “It’s important to remember that one of the most important words in any writer’s, and any woman’s, vocabulary is ‘no’. When we learn to say no, without guilt, to those things that keep us from our desire, it creates more space for the things that make us say yes.

4. A fruitflesh meditation: “A kiwifruit is like a fuzzy brown egg, rather dull and unassuming on the outside. When you cut one open, though, a bold and glistening emerald fruit greets you. Take a tentative bite of the kiwi skin. It takes like cardboard and may even make your tongue itch. Bit further, past the skin, into the heart of the fruit. Let its sweet deep colour fill your mouth.”

5. “We are fruit with breath inside, as Maria Teresa Horta writes. Breath is life. Breath invigorates us, fills our blood with oxygen, fills our bodies with vitality, fills our language with possibility. Breath, literally, ‘inspires’ us.

Too often, as women, we walk around sucking our stomachs in, holding our breath. This is a sad commentary on how our society expects us to look, but the consequences run even deeper. Withholding breath withholds circulation, not to mention sensation. When we try to look like our stomachs are flatter than they are, we also flatten the sensation we could be experiencing in the lower half of our bodies. We disconnect ourselves from our creative centre.

Suck in your tummy as tight as you can. Try writing about how this feels without exhaling or letting go of your muscles. It’s not so easy, is it?

Now let your stomach be soft, whole, relaxed to its natural self. Let your breath be full, natural. Take the world and all its inspiration deep into your lungs. Exhale; give yourself back full to your environment. Feel yourself as fruit filled with breath, filled with vital, vibrant, aliveness. Now write about your belly, how it feels when you don’t constrict its movement. Let your breath imbue your words with its supple, subtle flow.”

I love the idea of sharing relaxation techniques sourced form my travels and readings. To begin this series, I’m posting two techniques from Payne’s Handbook of Relaxation Techniques – a wonderful investment for therapists and clients alike. 

1.  A shoulder relaxation technique: Pull your shoulders towards your feet. Do this gently, but go on until you can’t pull them down any more. Feel the space between your shoulders and your ears getting greater. Stop pulling. Notice the feel of the new position. Take plenty of time to register the sensations you are getting from this exercise.

2. CANDLE MEDITATION: Light a candle. Let the lighted candle hold your attention… settle your eyes on the upper part of the wax rather than the flame itself…sit without moving while you gaze at it … focus on it in a relaxed but constant way, letting the image fill your mind … continue for at least a minute. Now close your eyes. Notice that the image of the candle prints itself in the darkness…hold the shape in your mind’s eye, accepting any change of colour … it if slips to one side, gently bring it back … continue to focus on it until it fades … then open your eyes and resume your gaze on the candle … continue, repeating the sequence in silence for several minutes.

Enjoy.

via de-stress and be happy.

THE BRIGHT FIELD

I have seen the sun break through

to illuminate a small field

for a while, and gone my way

and forgotten it. But that was the pearl

of great price, the one field that had

the treasure in it. I realise now

that I must give all that I have

to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after

an imagined past. It is the turning

to the miracle

of the lit bush, to a brightness

that seemed as transitory as youth

once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

RS THOMAS, COLLECTED POEMS.

Creative Focus provides Stress Buster Workshops for Workplaces. The workshop can be taken over just 2.5 hours with up to 20 attendees and includes a lecture, self-reflection activities, a survey that captures the stressors particular to the workplace, and lots of fun, stress busting, communication facilitation and creating!!

Our latest workshop was conducted with a bunch of awesome teachers at a Montessori School. The teachers produced the most exquisite mandalas.

Want to know more? Shoot Simone an email at simone@creativefocus.net.au or use the webpage’s contact form.

You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf … 

When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as ‘rootless and stemless.’ We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don’t condemn it as immature and underdeveloped, not do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains it’s whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is [whole] as it is. (Gallwey, 1974)