What have you been reading this summer?
/By Becky Riley Olin, LCPC
While I gravitate toward reading multiple books simultaneously, one book that I cannot put down this summer is Suleika Jaouad’s, The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life. The title alone drew me in immediately. Now more than ever, we need creativity and imagination in the world. These qualities are crucial for our personal growth and vital to making our world better.
This book explores the art of journaling and all it can contain. Jaouad shares what she has learned about how this practice can help us tap into creativity, a capacity that exists in every human. Jaouad presents one hundred essays and journal prompts that serve as ideas and inspiration for accessing creativity as a tool to navigate life’s challenges, heartbreaks, and uncertainties. The essays and prompts provide tools to engage with discomfort and fear and to promote the experiencing of the creative potential that we all are. Jaouad draws upon Michael Bierut’s 100-day project, developed for his graduate students at Yale. He assigns his students a brief on the first day of class, “Find a creative act that you can repeat for 100 days. You can do it on your own terms, in your own way.” Throughout this book, Jaouad demonstrates how she has made a daily practice of transmuting pain into art through writing, journaling, and painting.
Michael Meade captures the beauty of establishing an intentional, daily practice. He writes, “A practice is different from a skill because we can learn skills without meaningfully changing our character. Through a practice we become more genuinely established in ourselves, we gain an emotional seating, a place to dwell and return to again and again. A genuine practice means loving something enough to be with it again and again. A genuine practice will deepen and expand our inner life. It can ease our soul, but also affect the world around us.” Perhaps this is something you are open to exploring. And if so, I invite you to take a moment to imagine what you would write if you weren’t afraid, too busy, too tired, too stressed. What would you create? Take another moment to sense or feel into what creative practices call to you. What are you drawn toward in this moment? Follow it where it leads. And let it flow from there.
