All articles, tagged with “creative”

We are frequently asked how to make a practice routine more habitual.

What about you? Are you ever baffled about how to reach goals without getting thrown off course?

Do you sometimes wonder how you could make each day more meaningful?

Are you seeking ways to effectively install creative activities into daily life?

If these questions interest you, keep reading . . .

Three Powerful Steps to Effortless Achievement

1. Write it down
When you commit any of your intentions to paper, your chances of following through are far greater than if you just think about them and hope to remember them later. By putting plans in writing, you crystallize the details. You also use your creative imagination to further energize the idea.

Write down the things that are important to you and plan ways to include these items in your life. This concept can be a life-changing exercise because you learn how to install the things that matter to you into your daily routine.

2. Visualize your goal and plan backward
You read that correctly! See your goal already attained in your mind’s eye, then write it down on top of a piece of paper. Just below the goal, write down the last step that needs to happen just before you reach the goal. Below that step, write down the second to last thing that needs to happen en route to your goal.

Continue this backward planning process until you reach the step that you will complete just after the moment of planning. This magical exercise clearly illuminates the path to your goal because your creative imagination is fully engaged throughout the process.

Many of us have been taught to plan from where we are to where we want to be. Try this process backward and watch the results come to you with effortless ease!

3. Quiet your mind at least two times daily
We could be talking about meditation, visualization, focus on the breath or any technique that allows you to “press pause.”

If you’ve never taken time out of a busy day to experience stillness, you will be amazed at how taking just a few minutes twice daily can center you, calm you, release stress and create deep peace.

Try this exercise:

a) Close your eyes
b) Visualize yourself in a darkened movie theater
c) Look up at the imaginary blank movie screen and just watch
d) Whenever a distracting thought enters your mind, just gently put your attention back on the blank screen
e) After about two minutes (feel free to use a timer), open your eyes and smile
f) Begin your next activity with a new sense of peace, creativity and clarity

These three steps work for us every day. We hope you find these tips helpful!

In the video sample below, you can watch the scenes that inspired the new CD, “Waterflow II.” Take in images of British Columbia, the Canadian Rockies, Sanibel Island, and Holden Arboretum in Kirtland, Ohio.

The soundtrack for the video is comprised of the music from “Waterflow II.”

Press play and enjoy!

Here is another Water Film that comes from one of our favorite places on earth, Lake Louise. This awesome glacial lake is located in the heart of Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada.

As with all of our Water Films, our intention is to create relaxation and stillness so that you may become creatively inspired. By sitting and watching these videos, you get in touch with the pace of nature and become inspired as the mind becomes quiet.

The quote at the beginning of this Water Film comes from Lao Tzu:

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”

The soundtrack for this video is Clear Stream from our new CD, “Waterflow II”.

Press play, sit back and enjoy images of gentle water, glaciers, streams, Icelandic Poppies and canoes.

You can also watch it in HD on YouTube

The soundtrack to the video can be downloaded here.

Thanks for watching!

Here is “Calm Rain,” the track that serves as the introduction to a brand new CD that we’ll release soon, “Waterflow II.” As with the original Waterflow, this CD will provide you with ambience for calm focus, meditation, a massage or yoga routine. Fantastic new recordings of water from the beach, rivers and a high glacial lake are blended with soothing sounds to put you in a relaxed and creative state.

Just press play and relax while you read about our latest news . . .

We’re excited to announce that the first Waterflow CD is now available on Omstream.com, a fantastic online music websie that features ambient, meditation and world music. Check out our new artist page on Omstream.com.

Coming soon…we’re gearing up for another CD release — Waterflow II. Like the first Waterflow album released last year, this CD features water sounds blended with original music.

This music is perfect for relaxation, meditation, body work or yoga. I’m excited about this CD because I was able to capture a wide variety of high quality water sounds around the country. This collection includes intro and outro tracks.

Take a listen to the outro, called “Clear Stream,” which features strings fused with a stream and birds. Studio Blog readers and our Facebook Fans get the first taste of this brand new music.

Just press play and enjoy . . .

All of us can use ways to find calm, right? Well here are just a few ideas that can help you experience peace and relaxation.

1. Calm your mind with meditation or breath awareness. When you wake up or just before you go to sleep for the night try one of these techniques:

a) Follow the movement of your abdomen as you breathe calmly. Just observe without feeling the need to control your breath. Whenever your mind drifts and you become aware that you’re no longer observing your breath, just gently come back to focusing on your breathing and the rise and fall of the abdomen. Start with 5 minutes and increase by one minute each successive day. Use a timer if you desire or just do it for as long as you want. With practice, you can get to 20 minutes each day. You will find that this practice will become a part of your active, waking day as well, bringing you tremendous calming benefits.

b) Practice visualization for five minutes a day. Create pictures in your imagination that reflect your life as you desire it to be. Feel the feelings of already having the life you desire as you imagine your mental movie in great detail. You can build details into your imaginary film every day. Try this for 21 days in a row and observe any changes you experience in your ability to think about things in your life as you desire them to be (even when you’re moving through your day). Also, remember Einstein’s great quote:

“Your imagination is your preview of life’s coming attractions.”

c) Observe your thoughts without judgment. Pretend that your mind is the sky and that thoughts are like passing clouds. There’s no need to label thoughts as good or bad, just allow the thoughts to come into your awareness and pass through without you getting attached to them. When you resist the thoughts you don’t want, you give them power to stay around and become stuck in your field of consciousness. When an unwanted thought comes about, just observe it with a “there it is,” unattached approach. This practice is really great for helping you to develop greater clarity of focus. Try it for 5 minutes a day.

2. Fully engage yourself in a creative activity. Whether it’s practicing piano, learning a language, developing a business plan or playing with your kids, engage in these activities on a regular basis with your full attention. Turn off your cellphone and put away your electronic devices (unless your creativity is taking place on the computer) to help put you in a dedicated mental space. Plan time for this activity every day for 21 days so that it becomes an effortless habit.

3. Take a walk outside in nature. Few activities calm the mind more effectively than the act of communing with nature. You become connected to something larger than yourself when you open your focus to the variety and connectedness of the outdoors.

4. Listen to relaxing music or watch videos that make you feel tranquil. If you’re in the middle of a hectic day, music can be that “take it anywhere” elixir to help soothe your stress. As readers of the Studio Blog already know, we make videos specifically for that purpose called, “Water Films.” “GCMusic” is also a good resource for relaxing music.

We hope you find these techniques helpful as you journey toward greater peace in your everyday life. All of these ideas give you greater benefit with regular practice because you’ll find what works best for you. I find that something as simple as looking at a picture of a flower (like the one below) can immediately raise my vibration. Enjoy!

For more hibiscus photos, check out our Hawai’i Hibiscus album on our Facebook page. Click here.

Here’s another new MP3 from GCMusic called “Dusk.” The Studio Blog is the only place to hear the complete track.

Just press play and enjoy this new, mysterious and cinematic track . . .

If you want to own your own copy for your iPod, click here to purchase it.

Also, for those of you who wish to hear my radio interview on Cleveland’s WHK 1420 AM on December 5, here’s the recording of the full interview with Nick Phillips, “The Advocate.” We discussed my musical background and the launch of our new GC Creative Studio product called the Creative Mentor. This exciting 21-day video program was developed for those who wish to find more time for creativity in their busy lives. Enjoy!

A very nice quote appeared in my e-mail box this morning. Perfect timing, because I was just about to blog about this very topic. Check it out . . .

“Don’t let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of your doing it. The time will pass anyway; we might just as well put that passing time to the best possible use.”

This quote comes from Earl Nightingale, a well-known motivational author and speaker who started the Nightingale-Conant Corporation of personal improvement products.

Last night, a student came into his lesson and admitted that he lost motivation to learn his new piece for one reason: he looked at all the pages he had to learn.

Have you had this happen? It’s not uncommon.

If you’ve ever made a “to-do” list with great excitement (or with good intentions), you’ve probably noticed that the excitement wears off quickly when that list becomes overwhelming. Suddenly procrastination, excuses and stress replace your well-meaning intention to get things done.

The reason the list can overwhelm you is because you couldn’t completely foresee the details of your day as you made the list. If you write down 5 things to do, it seems quite manageable. But, the day begins to unfold with unexpected phone calls, work events that demand your attention, childcare, meals, etc.

You get the point.

What can you do?

Focus on the first item on the list and completely engage in it! That’s right, forget about the remaining items on the list until you complete the one right in front of you. Maybe it’s the task that is most important, maybe it’s the one to do first in the day because it needs to be done before you can do anything else. Whatever the reason, you can certainly decide which activity is worthy of your full attention at any moment.

The problem comes along when you start to look over your list and imagine how you won’t be able to do it all. Then you get fearful and stressed. In fact, you spend more time worrying about the ways in which you can’t complete the tasks then actually getting something accomplished.

With our students, we have them practice just 1 or 2 measures at a time with full care and attention, even if it’s a 75 page piece with 800 measures of music.

Why?

Because if you do a good job on those 2 measures the first time, you won’t need to keep coming back to them to repair unfinished business. In fact, if you gloss over those first two measures and miss details, you will later have to unlearn the details that don’t even belong in the music.

I don’t think I need to spell out the life metaphor here.

Just focus on what is in front of you with full care and attention because the success in this moment will lead to success in each subsequent moment. You may even finish all the items on the list because your focus level is high. You’re unencumbered by fear and procrastination when you adopt this principle.

I’m thankful to Earl and my student from last night because I need this reminder on a regular basis!

So, my hard drive on my 2 year-old MacBook was acting up. Since July, there were signs that it wasn’t functioning properly.

I took about 2,500 photos this summer and thought to myself, “I really need to back these up soon.” For some reason I kept putting it off.

The laptop was starting to function slowly when we were making audio recordings, so we decided to buy a new computer with more capacity and speed. In addition, we could finally do that much heralded backup.

Now you’re caught up.

Last weekend, we bought the new MacBook Pro with a 17” screen. Sweet specimen indeed. The first order of business when I returned home was to transfer the data from the old computer to the new laptop. Sounds good, right?

Well, I was eagerly anticipating the use of my new toy. So, I went through the process of migrating data from one computer to the other and all seemed to go well. But, when I began searching for documents, I found none on my new computer.

In my concern, I attempted to turn on my old computer. No luck. I tried every troubleshooting trick in the book. That hard drive was not going to mount for me.

Do you know that feeling? It’s not fun.

But, here’s the key.

I took a deep breath and left the room to collect my thoughts as I gently pondered the thought of not having the data from my old computer…all 80GB of data! I actually managed to stay detached.

I went back to the new computer to search for my pictures and music and found them on the new hard drive. What a relief! But I couldn’t access them at the moment because of permission details.

Went to the Apple Store the next day and the Genius Bar dude shook my hand like we were at a funeral as he pronounced our hard drive to be deceased. I remained calm in my response and pictured that another solution was possible.

To make a long week short, we have not yet recovered our documents. Yet, because all of our photos and music are with us, we feel tremendously grateful!

We are currently going through the process of having Disc Savers recover our information. The prognosis is pretty good. We are optimistic but not attached to the outcome as we have already begun the process of retrieving hard copies of many important documents through our students.

But, here’s the deal…

If you ever wish to find out what’s important in life, this kind of experience can take you there quickly. My experience is that loss of data is more of an inconvenience than a disaster. It’s not fun and an organized way of life quickly turns into chaos when you realize that you have no schedule, no business telephone numbers, no current financial records, etc.

At earlier times in my life, I would have totally freaked out about this and it would have ruined much more than one week. My new approach is more about getting still and letting solutions come to me. Letting go of the need to control made this experience much more pleasant as I connected with a lot of great people who helped us in the process. This experience taught me many valuable lessons.

Did you know that hard drives normally work well for about three years? I wasn’t aware of that until this experience.

If anything, I shared this story for all of you who have valuable info stored on your computer that you don’t back up. There is definitely peace of mind to be experienced with regular data backup.

The new Macs have something called Time Machine which automatically backs up all info on your computer — I hooked it up to my big and burly external hard drive.

We’ll be back next week with new music and a new Water film. Enjoy one of the rescued photos below. I was pleased when I captured this split second opportunity which presented a lizard hanging out next to a colorful flower.

Here’s a brand new track, hot off the presses, that fuses wordless vocals, world instruments and contemporary beats with acoustic jazz. Our blog is the only place for you to preview the complete song called, “The Iris,” named after one of my favorite spring blooming flowers. You can download the song for your i-Pod or car by going to the GCCreativeMusic site. Just press play to sample the entire song!

An iris bloom from early May, 2009