"The Healing Power of Creativity"

Summer, 2007

This quarter's theme was suggested by Arielle Ford: Mystical Café Radio Host: Lime Radio - Healthy Living With a Twist, on Sirius Satellite Radio Channel 114. Thanks Arielle!

Welcoming Introduction

Ronda's Reflections

The Four Steps for Invoking the Healing Power of Creativity

Real Life Stories

Spotlight on Action

1. Welcoming Introduction Mission, your participation, and introducing this quarter's "Real Life Stories" contribution by Sharon Hawkins.
   
   
2. Ronda's Reflections The Healing Power of Creativity with a Personal Example by Ronda after the unexpected sudden loss of a loved one this month.
   
   
3. The Four Steps for Invoking the Healing Power of Creativity.
   
   
4. Real Life Stories Early Physical Abuse and the Healing Power of Creativity, by Sharon Hawkins.
   
   
5. Spotlight on Action Call to action and request for your sharing and empowering contributions to the next issue!

OK, it took a while, but here it is, the inaugural issue of SoulArts Reflections: Your Forum for Self-Discovery and Artistry of Being!

As the first issue, I thought it important to briefly share the overall mission and intended direction of this forum. I hope you'll take the few minutes to read the mission so that you can become readied to participate more directly in the next issue! Yes, I want YOU to participate and so discover how to reclaim the wisdom within YOU!

Mission:
This is your forum to explore and strengthen your own inner wisdom and spiritual knowing.

It is set up to help build your own "spiritual muscle" by offering you the tools of self-discovery that access your own inner wisdom, and by offering you a place to empower your personal growth through this shared and open-hearted (non-denominational) online spiritual community.

Here's how I envision it working...

For those who have not yet worked with me directly or attended a private retreat intensive at OjaiSoulArts, this quarterly publication is a good way for you to begin to discover and experiment with the tools of deep inner listening, sacred attention, and guided acts of transformation.

For those who have worked with me, this is a way for us to stay in touch and to continue our work together to deepen and strengthen your own unique genius of being.

In each issue under "Spot Light on Action", I will offer a suggested home process for putting your own reflections on these writings into direct personal experiences of transformation.

... AND I will ask for submittals for the next issue of SoulArts Reflections! 

You needn't write a full length article, but try and offer something. Even a short experience shared, sends a message to the Universe and to your soul that you are actively engaged and ready for transformational change.  I will do my best to accept as many subittals as I can.

This publication's direct usefulness to you will depend (like all things) on the level of attention you give to it. It's meant to be put to practical daily use rather than just read! If you'll put it into daily practice, and use this forum to strengthen your changes by way of sharing your experiences, I promise, you'll start to see amazing results.

So with this foundation set, let's begin with the first issue: The Healing Power of Creativity.

Special Real Life Stories Contribution this Issue:
Early Physical Abuse and the Healing Power of Creativity, by Sharon Hawkins

You will read in this issue's Real Life Stories, the beautifully tender, witty and vulnerable writing of kindred soul and client, Sharon Hawkins, who shares with us her own experience with the healing power of creativity during a recent retreat in which she unblocked a lifetime of suffering which resulted from early childhood abuse, and so reclaimed her freedom, power, and Self-authority.

I'm so grateful to Sharon for her open-hearted willingness to share this experience with you. Even if we've not experienced the horrific traumatic suffering of childhood abuse like so many in our culture have, we can each identify with her story through other areas of our lives that have caused much strife and a kind of wounding that, against our best efforts, seems to continually crop up in our lives and show themselves by way of withheld intimacy, fear, addictions, and less than positive self esteem.

Many of us suffer all our lives with deep scars and protective barriers that keep us from being fully able to love, forgive or trust ourselves or others.

It doesn't have to be this way!

We all have wounds or unconsciously-embedded fears. They don't have to be mined or dug up ad nauseum either. In fact, repetitive thoughts of strife rarely facilitate healing, and more often re-enforce the wound's negative hold.

Rather, when our unique struggles are given over to the healing power of creativity, these wounds are literally reclaimed in a new light - a light that reveals our power of spirit to bring them onboard as part of our unique gift in the world.

When we discover how to transmute our pains in this way, we learn how to step into our spiritual wholeness as one who lives, loves, suffers and carries the wisdom of what it is to be fully human.  It is character development through an inner reclamation of the totality of one's Self.

Sharon experienced just such healing grace by her willingness to invoke the healing power of creativity to its fullest.

When the theme for this first issue was suggested by Arielle Ford just after she invited me as her special guest on Satellite Radio Program Mystical Cafe, I immediately emailed Sharon to ask if I could share something of her powerful healing experience in retreat with me.

Sharon not only gave me immediate and full permission to share her vulnerable life story, but has written her own synopsis of her experience with the healing power of creativity as her contribution to this first issue of our SoulArts Reflections. What a gift!

So many people in our culture today continue to suffer the prolonged disempowering consequences of early childhood abuse!

This generous response from Sharon is the kind of honoring act that creates radical transformation! Sharon not only faced her early abuse from a new level of depth, she met it at the level that carries with it the power to transmute real horrific suffering into the healing gift of reclaiming her Self - and now too by her courageous sharing, she offers the healing gift of hope to others as well!

Sharon's story is a good example of making a sacred act in response to what is consciously seen from within the light of soul.

This is an act that carries tremendous healing power.

If anything is exemplary of the process that I teach and hope to inspire through the engaged use of this quarterly forum, Sharon's story is it! Thank you, Sharon, for sharing the healing power of creativity to shed new light and thus return you to your beauty and wholeness!

May these reflections evoke in you the burning desire to know and live according to your own true nature and highest aliveness!

In the Light of Recognition,

The theme of this first SoulArts Reflections quarterly forum,"The Healing Power of Creativity", was suggested to me by Arielle Ford, radio host of Mystical Café on Sirius Satellite Radio Channel 114... And what a perfect first theme!

Not only does this theme reflect the core transformational approaches and methods I use in private retreat intensives at Ojai Soul Arts and by phone and internet counsel, but it reflects what I have found after a lifetime of sacred inquiry and psychological study to be the amazing "seed power" for growing life crisis, searching confusion, and spiritual angst into true inner clarity, healing wisdom, and life transformation!

By use of the word creativity here, I am not speaking of doing art projects or some leisurely act of aesthetic expression. I'm talking about creation itself; how we create, change, transform, manifest, work with the materials of our lives in a way that is consciously alive and vibrantly empowered.

Creativity (when you really look into it) is actually who and what we are at our very core! We are constantly creating - either consciously (with awareness of what we are creating), or on autopilot (where we simply create from old repeated habits and pre-conditioning).

And herein is the secret key:

If we want to live fulfilled lives, ones that are blessed with an inner contentment, peace and authenticity -- well then, we have to learn how to become conscious of what we are creating by way of our beliefs, our thoughts, our words, and our actions.

When we become consciously creative of our beliefs, our thoughts and our actions, then we naturally become Self-Full-Filled (whole, healed) by reclaiming our power and birthright as master artists of our lives.

To heal, to reclaim our power, and to discover our wholeness, requires breaking free of our own areas of "darkness"; it requires breaking free of the unconscious blindspots that keep us repeating old patterns that no longer serve Life's bigger urge for freedom and authentcity.

Things change, they evolve. We're meant to too!

Look at life itself. Life itself is above all else, movement.

Movement requires the ability to change, grow, adapt. The ability to change, grow and adapt demands a breaking free of the bonds of static conditions.

In our own lives, this breaking free can occur through learning how to become consciously creative with the circumstances of our lives as they naturally evolve and shift... or, if we don't learn the skills of conscious creativity, this need to break free will (and must) eventually occur by crisis.

Either way, life must move -- and we as forms of life must move too.

When life needs to grow and change - when it is ready to become bigger and more whole - the old ways begin to cause discomfort and confusion. These are growing pains.

As long as we remain willingly or unknowingly stuck and attached to the old ways of seeing and responding that stand in the way of our next level of growth and the new wholeness seeking to show itself in our lives, we suffer.

To make our lives more conscious, brings us out of the darkness of these inner blindspots and the sufferings they cause. Creative living brings us into the light of being present for what is trying to emerge.  It brings us into the now...the only place where life is really happening and where we have any power whatsoever to creatively participate and effect positive change!

Art and healing only ever happen in the NOW.

Think about it: Whenever we believe, think or do something automatically, where is the aliveness? There isn't any because we aren't engaged directly and spontaneously (creatively) with the ever-newness of the moment! How can we heal anything if we're operating from someplace that is not actually alive itself? We cannot.

It takes real aliveness to heal. It takes conscious creative living.

The struggles and confusions in our lives come from not knowing how to be artists and instead trying to sort things out from a position of "un-alive". It's really that simple! And that's precisely why, when we're operating from unconscious pre-programmed habits, we feel so disenfranchised, confused and unable to find answers and life directions!

The very reason there are questions and struggles is because something new is trying to get through the old; something new is trying to be seen and creatively met as a new possibility of wholeness... your Self is trying to grow to a new level of wisdom, clarity and potential.  

Questions and struggles are a big "red flag" that says:

"hello, something's no longer working here...there's something new to see and enter into...there's a new way that holds the key to your peace and joy".

Struggles are the growing pains of an inner wisdom seeking to emerge!  Our life struggles carry potent transformation potential!  This is why I always say to my clients that there is a gift hidden within their wounds and their struggles. This is what we find and free in our work together.

To find this new possibility, the gift waiting within the struggle, one has to muster the willing courage to give up the old automatic thoughts and beliefs and ways, in order to discover a deeper more vibrant truth. The doorway for entering this deeper more vibrant and healing truth is learning how to access and live from one's inherent creative aliveness.

To end the search, to find clarity, to invoke self healing and transformation ...and to live in wholness and self-contentment, requires a fundamental shift in consciousness to one of creative aliveness. It requires stepping out of the conditioned mind-set, and into the moving current of the heart and soul of you.

The process that I have discovered and have come to help others find within themselves is simply this: I have found a way for stepping away from the circular confusions of the limited intelligence of the conditioned mind, and into the freely moving and vast intelligence of that in you which is truly alive: the creative essence of you!

When we talk about the healing power of creativity, we are really talking about accessing our original birthright: the creative spirit of aliveness itself! God.

When we learn how to access the wellspring of our innate creativity, we are reunited to our true Self, our Essence, our Divinity.

When we access this inner creative presence, we have learned the secret of how to step out of the quagmire of darkness and into the current of a living lightness of being...  

To fully participate in life by making our lives truly conscious ones, is the ultimate creative act. It is actually what we're here to do and be. The rest (our job, relationships, health etc.) is just the canvas on which we play out these acts of learning how to become more alive, present to our Soul's truth and evolving purpose.

Our lives are meant to be a great artistry - a continual expression of making art from the changing circumstances of our lives... and the ever-growing wisdom of being consciously involved in such a creative process. Our lives are meant to be a dynamic dance of aliveness - of spirit engaging form in ever-new reflections of artistry.

Here all things become possible according to natural law. Here too, our lives are freed to move and reflect their natural potential. This is called peace by some; self-realization or enlightenment by others. It is what I call "Re-membering who you really are"...an artist of Soul painting your unique masterpiece across the canvas of time and space...

The key steps for finding your true Self and entering into the healing power of creativity for reclaimed aliveness are these:

1) Find your heart's deepest longing, question, or desire.

What at the very very core of your being is most important to you? What do you most deeply long to experience within yourself?

2) Consciously let drop away the thinking mind, and learn to listen to that which arises from within stillness: "Be still and know..."

This is the most difficult barrier and the hardest to learn to move beyond. It is accomplished first through a willing leap of faith to let go of thought as your "master problem-solver", and then to access a subtler language of knowing and wisdom that simply arises when the mind is stilled. (Easier said than done! This is the primary breakthrough I offer in our private retreats: a process for releasing the grips of thought through invoking something deeper, wiser, and more truly YOU...)

3) Engage in the symbolic language of Soul.

All of the arts, when done in the spirit of open-attentive play (rather than as a practice of technique) are good for developing this attunement. However, for an engagement of the arts to be effective as a way of transformation, it must be enetered into from a state of conscious intention and invocation.

You will see two specific examples of this type of engaging, first in the personal story I share of a process I invoked to heal (reclaim) a new wholeness after the sudden death of my ex-husband, and then in the Feature Story by Sharon, who used a process of the arts to reclaim her life from the devastation of early childhood abuse. Much more detail on this tranformational process can be found in my newest ebook: The Art of Living Your Destiny!

4) Give in-sights arising from the engagement of symbol an actual physical action of honoring recognition.

i.e. ritualize (reflect back) an acknowledgement of what you are seeing/sensing/realizing by giving it a creative action of some physical form. You will see two creative examples of doing this in this issue.

In Summary:

Following these four steps as a life style is how transformation occurs! It is through this process: shining the light of consciousness on your deep desire; dropping the mind to find your inner stillness; attuning to the language of soul and paying attention to what arises; and giving what is seen and sensed a conscious act of honoring recognition.  

NOTE: The final step, conscious action, is essential to healing transformation and positive life change. Seeing without action has little power to "make real" - it takes conscious creation; it takes the power of creativity.

Whatever conscious honoring act you create, becomes the next process of symbolic listening attention and creative engagement. So step 4 leads back to a deeper layer of steps 1, 2, and 3 - and so on, the process continues to unfold as you learn to ask from the heart; drop the mind; step into inner stillness; attune to the subtle language of soul; and create honoring actions based on what you sense, notice, realize along the way. It is an evolutionary emergence in which you creatively engage.

This cycle becomes your romantic adventure with becoming ever more alive and free and true throughout your days.  It is the pathway to self acceptance, self love, and peace. It is also the pathway to living your unique genius in the world!

When this tranformational process of spiritual alchemy becomes your lifestyle, then your life's circumstances and messages become an adventurous curiosity ...and you become increasingly empowered and whole through the act of giving yourself to Life.

When you learn to step consciously into an active engagement in these four steps as a conscious adventurer, then you have tapped into the radically transforming and awesome healing power of creativity...because that creative power is what you really are!

A Very Personal Example of the Healing Power of Creativity:
I awoke this morning with the feeling that I should share with you this very personal experience of the healing power of creativity.

Two weeks ago my ex-husband, with whom I remained deeply connected, unexpectedly died of a sudden heart attack at the age of 59.

For any of you who have suffered the inconceivableness and inner confusion and myriad conflicting emotions that accompany the sudden death of a loved one, you know how deeply painful is the suffering. There was the torrent of tears and the memory flashbacks, and the attempts (over and over) to understand from the mind what can only be accepted in the soul.

I hosted a public memorial for him, and scores of friends came and spoke and we shared together the sense of our loss and a celebration of his life. Still, I felt the need to offer my own private ceremony in honor of his amazing man, our many years together, and his most unusual life. And, perhaps as much to the point, I still needed to face and meet the many conflicting feelings that arose around the circumstances of our life together, our divorce, and now the finality of his unexpected death.

I share with you what I did in private, as an honoring act of conscious light put onto what the darkness of my mind couldn't fathom, because the process I invoked demonstrates a good example of the healing power of creativity.

When we talk of the healing power of creativity, we're not just talking about art-making! We're talking about a life orientation that co-creatively participates in life's constantly changing and surprising circumstances, by very actively meeting and using these circumstances to find and reclaim a deeper wholeness through co-creative expression and engaging participation with life's realities.

In fact "healing' isn't really the accurate word... "reclaimed wholeness" is.

We "heal" really by and through reclaiming our wholeness.

Here is the ceremonial act of engaging in life's reality that I created, without forethought, but rather by listening to my inner questions and angst and then following what arose from an inner stillness (see the four steps of co-creative transformation earlier in this article).

Within the stillness that lay beneath my immediate grief and deep disturbance, it came to me to drive up the coast and hike along the beach to Point Conception and there to offer my wedding ring to the sea as a symbolic act of honoring the natural rhythm and cycles of birth, death, release and rebirth.

At the last minute I packed in with me a few other items with no idea what I might do with them - if anything. (Again, this is part of the inner listening and spontaneous creative play of our vast intelligence when we learn to access it.)

I packed in a photo taken at the sea's edge of Kauai, where my husband and I were married so many years ago. The photo was one of the kiss that sealed our marriage.

I had no real notion of what I might do with the photo of the two of us as I picked it up; it just felt right to bring it along. I might just carry it out and then back home with me where I would place it in a memory album. Or I might decide when I got there that it felt right to burn it, or bury it, or tie it around the wedding ring and release it into the sea. I've learned not to listen to the mind in making these determinations, but rather to listen to something far more true and awake that resides in the inner stillness of the moment.

I also took a small ceramic vessel I'd made with a male and female figure on the rim into which I put some sage; a booklet of matches; a favorite rock he had picked up on one of our hikes in Big Sur and that was still on a wall outside my backdoor; and a tea candle.

At the water's edge at Point Conception after a 6 mile hike through the early mist, I spoke aloud to Steve, my ex-husband. I shared my feelings of love, anger, frustration, hurt, and hope. He hadn't told me of the cancer or of the lengthy surgery he had scheduled. And now he was gone and nothing could be spoken or cleared between us. I had some difficult and angry and confused feelings to speak and let have voice after our many years together.

Through this creative process of spontaneous ceremony I just followed an empty-minded kind of consciousness. I found a small hallow in the rock where the tide would eventually come that night. There I placed and lighted the tea candle, burned the sage, and decided to leave the photograph of our marriage kiss, allowing it to move, be picked up by a bird, washed into the sea... and eventually disintegrate back into the earth.

After this, I felt ready to consciously release the marriage and all the things spoken as well as those that were left un-resolved between us, and I walked into the ocean a few steps where I shared my prayer for his life pain to now be released into freedom, and I threw my wedding ring (diamond and all) out to the sea in a symbolic act of acceptance, release and new birth.

As I turned to begin the long hike down the shore back to civilization and to the living, there was a very marked feeling of inner peace, acceptance, and new readiness for living that had alluded me ever since our divorce 2 years ago! It was palpable and surprising and very real.

There was a feeling of new freedom and lightness. This overriding sense of acceptance and lightness of being has remained ever since.

Yes there is of course still sadness and the mental inconceivability of the permanence of his being gone from my life, but it is not any longer my primary ground. The primary ground has been changed from the darkness of mind-thoughts to the lightness of a reclaimed wholeness.

In my experience, a conscious and attuned act of co-creative relationship with life's circumstance, like this one personal example, has phenomenal life-transforming power! I've seen it over and over again with the beautiful spontaneous processes and honoring acts created by clients when they come to work with me.

There is a healing power in creativity because that is what we are:

We are creative beings set up and meant to continually gather from the raw materials of our life's changing circumstances , and from them, to recreate a new wholeness.

What does the artist do? She gathers and draws from the parts and elements and insights available to her and reclaims them as something that reveals a new wholeness, be it a sculpture, a painting, a dance or a table setting.

This is what we are each called to do:

We are called to gather up the bits and pieces of our lives and offer them new possibility through the sacred act of creating our own unique master work of art. 

When we step into the conscious light of our creativity, we discover our innate essence and freedom as master artisans ...and our wounds and life circumstances become gathered and reclaimed as expressions of our unique genius and the brilliance of spirit made flesh.

Early Physical Abuse and the Healing Power of Creativity:
My Ojai Soul Arts Retreat Experience
by Sharon Hawkins

The fact that I booked a retreat based on an Internet site in a moment of I'm going to blow a gasket if I don't get away for some introspection, still amazes me. I'm usually more reserved about decision-making.

On the trip to Ojai Soul Arts I was full of anticipation with a dose of wary mixed in.

I had packed a suitcase that was too heavy with my uncertainty about what to wear to a "spiritual" retreat. Far heavier than my suitcase was the heartache of sexual abuse I carried for the past 40 years and more recently, the suicide four years ago of my sister, Debbie. I am no stranger to therapy, various religious doctrine and old fashioned "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" methods but my grief and self-blame felt like I was treading life in quicksand.

As far as the retreat agenda, I envision long days of intense conversation with Ronda, maybe some incense burning and hopefully, no drumming. (That's just my uncomfortable judgment for reasons that probably require another retreat.) Ronda's emails to me tell me that she "intuits" each individual's retreat program. I am soon to learn that what she hears in her heart for the retreat guest is the real magic ingredient in this process.

I arrive on a sunny afternoon to a property that feels as though I should have a U.S. Forestry pass to walk around it. Big majestic trees, boulders, and magic-like charm. I like Ronda right away in my own cautious "I've got my eye on you lady" way, "and I will leave here in a nano-second if I think that you are weird."

My first session is in the late afternoon. I am nervous but ready to begin the work. The first assignment feels a little strange but also appealing. Ronda feels that I should spend the rest of the afternoon and night by myself, to include dining alone in my retreat cabin. No problem for me, I think. This is why I am here. I can lie on the lounge chair and read or write in my journal. Sounds like heaven. I am not prepared for the rest of the suggestion. "I feel it best that you attempt not to read or write, rather that you just be with yourself," she says.

"Uh, really? This is what you see would be helpful for me?" I can feel my eyeballs spinning wildly in their sockets at this suggestion and I am a little concerned that she is not intuiting me very well at all. Mental panic sets in. I love to read, it is how I relax. I am here to add joy to my life not have it taken away from me.

Apparently, Ronda either can't see my spinning eyeballs or is familiar with the look from prior retreat guests and just ignores it. She continues, "Yes, as best as you can, just be quiet with yourself and see what comes up for you. It will open the door to your soul work that we will explore tomorrow morning."

This is very uncomfortable and I am half joking with her when I blurt out, "Don't leave me alone with her, she's a crazy person, ya know!" But off I go to be with "me, myself and I" and I soon discover that these three characters barely know each other and don't get along very well which is an uneasy revelation to me through this night of aloneness.

Thankfully, the next day arrives. By the middle of the day, we are into the meat of why I am at Ojai Soul Arts Retreat. Ronda hears things that I don't know I am saying because it is not just my words that she listens to when I speak or cry about my abuse and the red raw pain of suicide.

She suggests that I create collages that represent my feelings about these issues, these feelings that are sucking me down. I am nervous about creating things. I am not an artistic person, I can't sing, I can't paint, I can't even draw stick people. But I figure I can rip pictures out of magazines and glue them on cardboard. I'm not sure it will help anything but I will try.

Ronda's art studio was a great place in which to work. She makes her beautiful masks in this room and I am in awe of how artistic everything feels. She puts before me boxes of do-dads and baubles to use with the magazine images. Hours start to pass and slowly each dab of glue to the back of an image or a shiny bauble is cementing the truth, the pain, the fury and more strangely, a goose-bumpy feeling of forgiveness creeping onto the collage that I have not been able to claw my way to before now.

This time it is my choice to dine alone, to be with myself in this process. I work late into the evening on my first collage about abuse and it is a labor of love to myself. Initially, I thought it would just be a collage of rage but just when I think that I am finished, the collage seems to tell me that I have only told half of the story that way. I go with my instincts and add a tender message through images next to the abuse side. Images that tell me that God has been and always is with me, taking rocky times in my life and creating smooth stepping-stones on a pathway to a journey that is uniquely and lovingly mine to take.

I go to bed exhausted but proud and tell myself that due to lack of time and energy, I am not able to make a collage on my sister's suicide. Yet the next morning I feel pulled to say good-bye to Debbie through another collage.

Ronda brings breakfast to my retreat cabin early in the morning. She lovingly encourages my efforts as I attempt to tell this story with ripped and broken things representing the sadness of losing a sister to suicide. These pieces are a metaphor in my mind of how ripped up my own heart feels in my chest. Without thinking, just feeling and being in the moment of creation, I pour my soul and love into this goodbye collage. I stand back to look at the finished piece and am touched to see that I show Debbie breaking through a barrier and shooting into the heavens with her arms stretched up in triumph and freedom. And I feel a peace within myself for her.

In the meditation room Ronda creates an altar on which to place my collages and we contemplate them and discuss my meaning of them. In front of each collage is a sacred candle for me to light when I am ready to honor and release these burdens. I love my collages and how I, the "un-artistic one", was able to express myself in a new creative way that feels healing. A calm settles over me and I feel an opening in my lower abdomen that feels like a rippling brook flowing gently over smooth stepping stones. It is a comforting feeling. I am ready to light the candle in front of the abuse collage and free myself from a burden that keeps me mired in the quicksand of my past.

Ronda and I stare at the remaining collage of my sister breaking free. The more I stare at it the more I see things that I did not see earlier that morning. I am astonished by the realization that this collage showing the movement and triumph of Debbie breaking through a barrier also represents me doing the same. I thought the collage was all about my sister but it is, in a very profound way, about myself!

I too am the woman in that collage breaking through my own hemisphere of pain and regret into the freedom space of forgiveness and understanding for myself. As I lean forward to light the sacred candle before this collage, a tiny square of mirror glued onto the collage reflects back my own blue eye. It gives me chills to realize that I am recognizing my true self through the collage that looks back at me.

I ask Ronda if other retreat guests have found the making of a collage to be such a breakthrough experience? Ronda laughs. "Sharon, this was not arts and crafts time at the retreat, this is what my inner listening into you revealed would be helpful. No retreat guest has ever done a collage here before." Me, myself and I, who have finally befriended each other at this retreat, are pretty amazed by this.

Did my retreat experience alleviate sadness from my life? No, I still have sadness about the reality of the sexual abuse and my sister's suicide. But the gut-wrenching grief and self-blaming pain went to live on the collages and now when sadness comes up, it feels pure and framed in grace.

At home I look at my collages and feel a sense of completeness and peace. I still sense gentle waters washing smooth the stepping-stones on my path [see collage images], guiding me to freedom. And I whisper thank you.

Home Study Books:
What Happy People Know by Dan Baker
Excuse Me Your Life is Waiting! by Lynn Grabhorn
The Biology of Belief by Bruce H. Lipton
A Bibliography: Overcoming Negative Thought Habits
The Art of Living Your Destiny! by Ronda LaRue
Power Freedom and Grace: Living fromthe Source of Lasting Happiness by Deepak Chopra
Feeling is the Secret by Neville

Home Exercise:
As you read and reflect on these books, simultaneously build your self-development "happiness muscle" (and this is KEY!) by putting into daily practice the 4 steps to transformation that is highlighted in this issue (you can get more detail in my 48-page ebook: The Art of Living Your Destiny available on either of my web sites).

And then...

Become an active part of the SoulArts Tribe by SUBMITTING your experiences!

Submittals to SoulArts Reflections:
I'm looking for real examples and real life stories of your use and experience with creative ceremony (conscious honoring acts) given to your quest, reflections and discoveries as you make happiness your inner study over the next couple of months.

Submitting and sharing your real life experience is a great way for you to strengthen and quicken your own depth of insight as well as to help inspire others!

Please submit your insights or reflections on The Art of Happiness to ronda@rondalarue.com by September 1, 2007 .  I will contact you if your material is selected to be included in this next issue.

Until next time: "don't worry, Be...Here, Now!"