breakTHROUGHArts
a free newsletter for visual artists

Thanks to all who have passed breakTHROUGHArts on to other artists! To share this newsletter with friends who want more creativity in their lives, use your e-mail Forward button. To subscribe or schedule your complimentary coaching hour click: connect@dianereardon.com .

February 2007 Contents
I.  Welcoming the Unthinkable
II. Energy Management: Translations from the Psych Research Lab, the Board Room, and the Shrink’s Couch
III. Friends in Print: When you feel like reading
IV. Creative Links
V. Newsletter and Info: Share this newsletter, subscribe, or unsubscribe

I.  Welcoming the Unthinkable
I remember the feeling when I was writing out the answers to one of the exercises in Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way. I wrote the answer and then there was a shock of recognition, a shiver of meeting what I longed for. I, In my mid-50’s I  had written “go to art school”.

It’s that special ka-ching. That feeling somewhere behind your jawbones, your heart, or your belly, that says,”Yes – bingo – this is right on target for me”. When that happens, when you know what you’ve expressed fulfills a previously unspoken longing, then you have been beckoned from a future self, beyond your everyday present world. And, as Joseph Campbell* says, you’ve been called to the first step of the hero(ine)’s journey.

It’s tempting to dismiss these odd, surprising moments because they seem to be way beyond us and have little context in our current reality. We literally may not know what to do with them. In the organization of our creative work we may have omitted a folder for “odd possibilities,” we may have no page in our daytimer for “exciting, barely thinkable callings.” Even if we do find a place to capture them or post them for inspiration, they seem beyond us. They came as a surprise because up to now there were unseen barriers, usually of current logical limitations and realities that kept us from seeing any further. In the grooves of our habitual thinking, it was literally unthinkable.

Once we at least acknowledge this unthinkable idea, here come all those logistics, reality checks, and self-protective warnings from our psychological immune system, which may treat the idea as a foreign body whose invasion needs to be repelled. In a sense, it is foreign, since it’s beyond your known territory and therefore activates all your inner early responders whose job is to protect you from risk of the unknown.

If you can stay with this unthinkable idea and all the instinctive defenses and adrenaline it elicits, just for a moment, you might find a way to hold it and your reactions in your heart and mind and honor both. Honoring the unthinkable as a message from beyond your everyday identity as an artist is the seed of your next breakthrough. You will need to negotiate many risks to bring it into actual being, but at the moment of discovery and acceptance, you are holding what, for you, has been unthinkable, and it weighs in the palm like pure gold.
*Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1972.
(Return to Top)

II. Energy Management: Translations from the Psych Research Lab, the Board Room and the Shrink’s Couch

Gilbert, Daniel. Stumbling on Happiness. 2006.
Following my riff above on how important glints from the future can be, here’s some cautionary information on why we have a difficult time predicting now what will make us happy in the future.