I’m working on a new program. It’s called YOUR CREATIVE DREAMER and it starts on Dec 21, on the solstice. A part of it includes strategic planning for how you’re going to show up for your dreams, and as I create those guides, I want to work with people who want more help with their dreams, so I will be sharing some parts of it in the membership this fall as I work on it.
I've been trying to write a post that explains what this new program is, and explains the support I want to offer this fall…
But every time I try to explain, in a way that you would be able to understand what I mean… I freeze.
I cannot pull the words out of me.
I can’t make these ideas make sense to anyone but me.
This is normal! As the person giving birth to a new idea, you are the only one who can see and understand it the way you do.
Finding the language to talk about it in such a way that the people your thing is for can understand it… that’s a different process from the process of creating the thing.
Putting it out there is a whole new creative process, a whole new growth process, a whole new alchemical process.
The work of putting it out there may actually be harder and take more time and effort than the work of creating the thing.
This can be a surprise! After the herculean hero’s journey of DOING THE THING, it can be surprising and disheartening to find out that there is a whole other hero’s journey ahead of you if you want anyone to actually engage with the thing you made. A whole other mountain to climb, when you just finished climbing one!!
I still remember reading marketing and business books in 2008-2009 and crying, it felt so painful to figure out how to even talk about my work. I had an office job, and on the side I had been doing spiritual counseling, healing and circles at a spiritual center on a volunteer basis, and I was was starting to create my own creativity workshops and starting to figure out - how can I put this out there in a bigger way?
I started Marking as a Creative + Spiritual Practice Calls as an experiment in the fall of 2024 - after 14 years of doing the Creative Dream Incubator as my full time work.
The experiment was to stop thinking of marketing and sales as being so "outer work focused" and go deeper into he spiritual practice of offering your gifts, and the creative practice of creating ways to do this that feel aligned and alive.
After that first call, I fell in love and have been doing them regularly in the membership ever since.
And it’s not an experiment anymore, it’s my whole way of doing things now.
I’ve learned so much from this practice, from going deeper into the work of shining the light of my gifts in such a way that the people that my work is for can receive it.
Our next Marketing as a Creative + Spiritual Practice call is tomorrow, Sept 2.
This is a 45 minute meditation + journaling deep dive into how you are sharing your gifts with the people they are for and all of the relationships there… your relationship to your gifts and your relationship to the act of offering them more widely or more effectively… your relationship with the people your work is for, and their relationship with your work.
There is so much going on there in the inner relationships.
After these years of practicing marketing as a creative and spiritual practice, now I think it’s really unhelpful to focus on outer tactics instead of explore the inner relationships. Especially these days when algorithms change so fast and AI is everywhere…
It’s like what someone said on one of our first calls - “it’s just so exhausting to put my precious work out into such a toxic world”.
Indeed!
And, of course, sharing our heart/soul work with the world is one thing that helps to heal it.
Which can feel like a catch-22. Like you need to do the standard “business things” in order to succeed even if some of them insult your soul…
I don’t think it needs to be.
I mean yes we need to learn some business skills if we want to support ourselves sharing our gifts. But I also think we need to give a LOT more time and attention to exploring the inner relationships to help us find new seeds to plant and new ways to plant them.
So many strange and wonderful ideas have been shared on these calls as people explore how their unique gifts want to go out into the world in their unique way.
I think your precious heart/soul/creative work deserves better than “business as usual” especially in late stage capitalism!
I think the way you market and sell your work can be a force for healing.
And I think YOU are the only one who can create that path.
Yes we all have things to learn but in the end… THESE ARE YOUR GIFTS! YOU ARE HERE TO SHARE THEM IN YOUR WAY.
If you want to practice this with me, I’d love to see you there! It’s a 45 minute meditation then we usually talk about what came up for us in the meditation for another 45 minutes. The replay will be available later in the day.
This is deep work, it’s not always easy to look at all of this, hard stuff can come up. But this work can create real shifts that help you see your options in a new light.
(Members: get the call details here. If you're not a member, it's worth joining for this!)
