My complaints

Not enough time for friends, R&R, and art; not enough money to be reasonably care free; health problems (which also take time); and too many on-the-job and other stressors, so that even when I do have time for art, it's not always "quality" time.

My miracle

I wake up without an alarm and in a calm and unhurried state of mind. I take my morning walk first thing, out to Independence Park, and photograph the sunrise, even before I eat breakfast, as it starts my day off with a peaceful feeling and is also the best time to take the pulse of the harbor sky.

I'm in town today, but I have a "Cultivating Your Creative Self" workshop in Minneapolis this weekend. I'm happy about that because I enjoy these full-day or two-day marathons, and I enjoy the freeing up of time that the extra income provides me with. I have time for art and I have income to allow me to see my clinic clients and low-fee clients and still meet my expenses.

I either have an agent/representative for my art and writing or I enjoy the process of marketing myself. I make regular sales and I have a contract for a book on mandalas and another on using creative means to work with addiction. I'm also talking with people about training therapists on how to use writing to work with their substance abuse and trauma clients.

I block out the morning to work on photography and to do writing on these projects and I see my psychotherapy clients in the afternoons and evenings. Once a month, I also work with a group of artists who are taking their work to the next level, and once a week I do a workshop on cultivating creativity.

I have a busy art/work life, but there is time in the week to see friends, exercise, and take care of my medical issues.

I am excited but not anxious, and I am more confident in my abilities as an artist. I am learning new techniques and refining my skills all the time, in part on my own, and in part because I am solidly in an artistic community that is both supportive and edifying. My friends notice that I am calmer and more confident in my work, and that my inner light shines through most of the time. The ups and downs of my life are less extreme, and I ride them out more easily. I notice that my friends, too, seem to be gliding through their lives with more ease and excitement. Our deeper selves are more present more of the time, and they guide us in our mutual paths.

I accept that my creative and professional work will have ups and downs, dry spells, and dead ends. I recognize that this is just part of the process of living creatively, and I look forward to learning from the "mistakes" I will inevitably make. They don't rattle me. They are just part of it.

At the end of the day, I have a sense of satisfaction and of living it well. I look forward with openness, but without attachment to any particular outcome, to tomorrow.

Turnabout is fair play. Okay. On Saturdays, and sometimes on Mondays, I can wake up without an alarm, as I don't have to go off to see clients at the crack of dawn. A few days a week, I do take the photographs of Independence Park, though I wait until after breakfast. I ran a Cultivating Your Creative Self workshop for the first time, and it seemed to be a hit. (It was amazing, actually!) and I e-mailed a contact who may, eventually, be able to get me doing it in larger and potentially lucrative venues. I also talked to a young woman who may be able to market my work, though I have to wait a few weeks to find out. I am reading books about being a photographer, more from a ways-of-seeing point of view than from a technical point of view, and I'm experimenting a little with seeing differently with different lenses. And I approached a local Buddhist sangha about joining their community on a trial basis and am waiting to hear from them. I also started transferring my agency clients in Gloucester to other clinicians and posted an ad in the Psychology Today "find a therapist" database -- and may already have gotten at least one referral from it.

In general, I feel as if I'm moving forward on the art, therapy, and spirituality levels, though not in a linear fashion.

I'd rate myself a 6.

So... photography has been on the back burner as I have been overwhelmed by taking on a couple of new clients and transferring 22 existing clients, as well as by trying to figure out how to manage the paperwork of a private practice -- am seeking advice from others, but everyone seems to have their own system, so I guess I'll find mine, too. I'm working with a couple of young boys, and that feels good. The marketing person seems to have vanished, which is not so good. My office has become too noisy to work in, so that's a bit of a problem. I did manage to squeak out a new blog entry, so something creative happened, but my life this past couple of weeks has been somewhat lopsidedly devoted to transitioning, without much energy left for anything else. However, it all seems necessary, so I'm holding at a 6. Once the beginning of May rolls around and I have a little more time to catch up on the business end of my business and to get back to making and finding someone to market art, I think that number will jump to a 7.

Thanks for the nudge!

- David

So David ...

How's your miracle going?  Been a month or so now since you posted, what's been happening?   Where do you think you are now, did you make the 7? 

Chrysalis 

I've become relatively inactive in Beliefnet this past few months, absorbed in the other aspects of my life, but I'd like to start the New Year with a report on my personal progress on working toward the "miracle question" and its way of envisioning change.

I'm probably a 7 on the progress in my inner life (where 1 is as far as I ever was from my personal miracle, and 10 is I am there every day). Progress this past year is largely due to taking another Focusing training and finding a Focusing partner, with whom I'm starting to explore, and hopefully to release, a part of myself that has been hidden since early childhood. This is the "little boy" side, the side with much of my creativity and joy, who 20 years ago I imagined to be contained in a titanium capsule six inches thick, but who now is a very real, if still timid, presense in my life.

On the counseling business side, I'm probably also a 7. I have finished up working at the community mental health clinic I'd been working at for 3 1/2 years and am now fully in private practice in Danvers, MA. Until September, the financial side of this was going surprisingly well -- I was getting perhaps a call a week from various sources, and most of them resulted in clients coming to work with me -- but this has dropped off since the financial crash, and I need to figure out ways to generate more referrals. I'm working on it.

On the art-making and art-marketing side, I'm probably a 6. I'm still working on finding a market for the flower mandalas (and am happy to hear suggestions / make connections through this forum), but I haven't created any new mandala work in a long time, nor have I made a lot of headway in finding someone to represent me. I'm continuing work on my Independence Park project (a study of the sea, the sky, and time) and am beginning to broaden the concept in ways I find myself thinking about when I'm doing other things -- always a good sign. And I'm starting to appreciate my growing skills as a photographer. I feel that a move to a new level is afoot, though where that will take me I don't know.

On the spiritual side, I have found a group of people and a teacher who, as I've written earlier here, is combining his study of the major world's religions into a practice that draws on several traditions in an integrated way. It seems well-adapted to our times and the migration of practices from west to east and east to west. I'm not 100% sure this is the way I want to go, so I'm also planning to reconnect with the Thich Nhat Hanh sanga of which I was briefly a member several years ago. Here, too, moving to a new level is afoot.

On the personal plain, where I've been a about a 3 most of the past year, I'm now about a 7, having found a partner quite different from prior partners. I feel seen and connected in a new way, and I find I'm also able to process both within myself and with her old baggage I am now able, at last, to let go. In part, this process is due to who each of us is, but it is also helped by my work as a counselor. I seem consistently to be taking insights from my personal work into my practice and vice-versa, so that each enriches the other.

Overall, I'd say I'm still a 7, but a 7 on the threshhold of a major move up, as the various threads of myself and my life that I've been working on integrating since my near-death experience seem, finally, to be coming together. If I were a pot of water on the stove, I'd be at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, ready to boil.

As Tom Petty said in "Learning to Fly," the future is wide open....

More anon,
- David