psychotherapy:

Creating can be an emotional process. But there’s good emotional—even when you’re sad or the work epitomizes sorrow—and there’s bad emotional. That’s when your inner critic attacks you, calls you mean names, and causes you not to feel like creating anymore.

One of the ways you may slip out of flow when you’re creating something is if you don’t feel that what you’re producing—your internal feedback—matches what you had in mind originally, that is, your internal ideal. Of course, apprehension due to such non-matching is helpful when it warns you to go back and revise the substandard work. In fact, that’s an essential part of the flow process. It’s only dysfunctional when it makes you feel too bad to continue working, then or later…

…INNER-CRITIC ANESTHETIZING TIPS

• Let it flow. Remind yourself regularly that, while you’re immersed in the creative process, there’s absolutely no sense in feeling embarrassed. Even if what comes out at first is crude, stiff, inappropriate, or simple-minded, tell your internal critic to take a hike, that he/she/it is simply getting in your way.

• Write without thinking. According to New Yorker-published poet Stephen Perry , “If you just put down words, whatever pops into your head, meandering here and there, free-associating, allowing whatever sputters out to sputter out, amazingly, after a short interval, something takes hold, some comet wraps its tail around you like a kinetic Cheshire Cat, and you’re off.” Don’t worry about punctuation, spelling, point-of-view, character, plot, any of the technical aspects of your particular art or craft. They can always be cleaned up later.

• Write from your emotions. If you get emotionally involved enough with your subject, if you really feel it as you’re writing or creating something about it, you’ll forget to be self-conscious. If you’re not in an emotional mood, try putting yourself into one. Many artists say they listen to a particular piece of music that’s emotionally stirring as they begin creating. Experiment.

mikehudack:

ericmortensen:

tanya77:

britticisms:

I’m still trying to wrap my head around how they got away with these things:

• Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”
• There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.
• To that end, they made dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution.

• Mavis B. Knight, a Democrat from Dallas, introduced an amendment requiring that students study the reasons “the founding fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring the government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion above all others.” It was defeated on a party-line vote.

• In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, among the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. They also replaced the word “capitalism” throughout their texts with the “free-enterprise system.” “Let’s face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation,” said one conservative member, Terri Leo. “You know, ‘capitalist pig!’ ”

• Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

If these people were less organized and more concerned with beard length, we’d call them Taliban. 

What is happening!? There is a violent regressive movement going on and it makes me uncomfortable. 

but that’s because we don’t see it as a way station on the path to success.

- In his 2005 book, “Born Losers: A History of Failure in America,” the historian Scott Sandage offers an account of 19th-century economic hardships and the pitiable archetype they gave birth to: the dismal “plodder,” the man who was a “failure.”  To make the loser feel even worse about himself, his glorious antithesis — the striver, the up-and-comer — was being defined at the same time. Writers promoting the secrets of success in the rough game of industrial capitalism rendered a verdict on economic failure that still endures: it’s never an accident. The success people have is determined by who they are — or rather, by who they aren’t — and not by circumstances.  More Than a Numbers Game, By Walter Kirn, NY Times Magazine, 10 May2009