Here we are in the full swing of Summer 2022. I hope you are full of enthusiasm for how you will spend your time.
I just returned from facilitating an Intuitive Painting workshop at Esalen Institute (esalen.org) in Big Sur, CA. Esalen has a very long history for supporting holistic education. We had a group of 36 people who took time off to explore what Intuitive Painting has to offer. The people who participated walked into the workshop from around the globe! This included people from the Netherlands to Massachusetts, from all professions. As the workshop was ending, we loaded all of the pages of paintings (26”x30”) on 2 tables for sorting. There were over 400 sheets of paper where these wonderful people explored the limitless nature of creating and the limited nature of their mind-set. What I saw on their faces at the end of the workshop was a fresh brightness.
I credit their bright faces to the experience of having a richer connection to their true self and a spaciousness they are taking into their lives to live more authentically and freely. Thank you to everyone who came.
Share the spaciousness and freedom (a real friends with benefits moment of these participants) and embrace your summer. I have several fun events available for you this summer. I hope you will join in! They are listed below on this email and a complete list can be found on my website, Cherieray.com.
Who doesn’t need a good news story these days? Here’s one for you. Kids creating and being fearless or creating in spite of fear.
For many years, I have volunteered at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo (rodeohouston.com) serving on their Horticulture committee. I love working on this committee because I get to work closely with the kiddos as they compete for scholarship monies.
Participants register for both individual and partner events from floral design to landscape design and planting. Each competition has strict rules and guidelines that must be adhered to in order to be judged.
The competitions I enjoy the most are the floral design events. Why? Because each scholar is given the exact same materials to create with. While every scholar gets the same materials, no creation looks the same. I find this fascinating. Each creation is unique. Just like every human on the planet!
The scholars range from 10-18 years of age, both female and male. This year we had 113 participants. Each event is timed with a specific assignment. The scholars are brought into this huge ballroom, given an apron and a creating station, while they wait for the announcements. Some tower over their table, some barely reach the table. Some look cool as cucumbers, some look like it’s a high stakes game.
As soon as the rules are announced, the timer begins and off they go. Each participant’s process is unique to them. Some start by sorting their followers, getting organized. Others just grab stems and go for it. One of the more precious sites is watching a 10-year-old boy creating a bridal bouquet! He gives it his all. HI hands are barely large enough to hold the bouquet.
With lots of monitoring eyes and cameras capturing the action, they always beat the timer and submit a creation. What entertains me so, is the amount of focus and engagement they give these events. I admire each one for getting in the game to play with life.
Being in a room with 113 creatives creating is a fun energy to be in. I just soak it up. The energy is so intense as they sit in their anticipation and subsides when to buzzer goes off. I love the idea of kids creating with their hands, freely, with no one telling them what to do and with something alive. I believe it brings them an opportunity to get grounded and connected. When kids have the opportunity to draw from within, they GET that they have what it takes. Who doesn’t need to be reminded of that?
What have you been up to? I’d love to hear from you.
Hello! How have you been? I hope you’re doing well. How are you doing with all the change, unclear information, and the way life is unfolding for you?
Since March of 2020 does it feel like the world has been shifting under your feet? During this time, I’m sure you’ve had your fair share of loss, disappointment, and unmet expectations. What are you doing with it all? I hope you’re not looking for new places to stuff it.
With what feels like truckloads of LDE (loss, disappointment, expectation) lately in my world, I got really curious about how to NOT be permanently changed by these occurrences. It looks to me like life is going to do what it’s going to do, and people are going to do what they’re going to do. I decided I want to flow better with these changes’ vs creating a story and living inside my story about what’s happening around me? LDE certainly appears to be part of the nature of life and part of the human experience.
When I got curious, what sounds like seconds but felt like years, out of the blue, an insight dropped in, “I don’t want to be a pickle.” What? A pickle? I had to laugh. My intuition has a profound sense of humor!
As I considered this insight, a pickle lives inside a rigid container steeped in bitter vinegar. Well, there’s nothing about feeling confined or living with an internal environment of bitterness that interests me. So, I got curious about how to NOT be a pickle. At this moment in time, I’m seeing I have some free will in this game.
So, I exercised my free will and put my pin on the map about how I desire to feel in my day-to-day life with the unpredictable nature of life. With a curious desire to see something fresh, on NOT being a pickle, I’ve gotten some very helpful insights on how to live in more peace and joy while the world does what it’s going to do.
This same process can work for you.
I’d love to hear from you! Let’s have a conversation. The focus of my work is to teach you how to eliminate struggle from your life and to live in peace-filled joy with what you can’t change.
It’s September! What a surprise to be approaching a change of seasons. I hope you’re doing well and easily navigating what’s in front of you to do.
In my coaching practice, clients have been asking questions about the bombardment of news they’re presented with. The questions are similar to these:
What do you do with all the bad news coming at you every day?
The load of bad news feels overwhelming. What do you do?
Do you have any tips on this?
In response to these questions, I’ve decided to do a webinar on just this topic. Would you like to bring your lunch, coffee or tea and let’s talk about it? We’ll meet on Zoom this Friday, August 4th at noon Central, 10am Pacific, 11 Mountain, 6pm UK, 7pm Paris.
I’ll share information that will support you and answer any questions you have. Invite your friends, colleagues, or anyone you feel would benefit from this conversation.
How are you? I hope you’re doing well and finding fresh new ways to thrive where you are.
I’m very hopeful during these times that change is happening. I often say that evolution takes many strange faces. In the creative process, we call it ‘creative destruction.’ Creative destruction is when something is destroyed or taken away for new to appear. We see it in nature all the time, i.e. forest fires, hurricanes, natural disasters.
As a society, we are being faced with situations that are intolerable, horrific, and unprecedented. This year has been heavy handed with what it has dropped in our laps. A society is a vast collection of individuals. As individuals facing these times, many are experiencing overwhelm or at a loss of what to do with the size of the situations being handed. What can you do instead of sitting in overwhelm?
Enlist your creative process to bring forth ideas, solutions, and actions that you can take to make your world and the world around you more peace-filled and unified. If enough of us upgrade our standard operating procedures in our individual lives, change will be created in our society.
I love the idea of us, as a community, taking action on the inspirations and fresh ideas that come to us to create peace, connection, and unity. Let’s all do our part and take fresh actions to create change.
I’d love to hear what fresh ideas are coming to you. Please reach out and share them with me at Cherie@cherieray.com. I look forward to connecting with you.
I came across this and thought you might like it. Sometimes, it appears to me that people avoid creating and following inspirations because it’s often an individual exploration. But this essay, to me, states what’s on offer by saying YES. I believe creating takes you beyond your current ‘self’ and ‘Inspiration’ is an invitation from the Big Kahuna to grow and expand.
YOUR TRUE HOME
Each one of us is alone in the world. It takes great courage to meet the full force of your aloneness. Most of the activity in society is subconsciously designed to quell the voice crying in the wilderness within you. The mystic Thomas a Kempis said that when you go out into the world, you return having lost some of yourself. Until you learn to inhabit your aloneness, the lonely distraction and noise of society will seduce you into false belonging, with which you will only become empty and weary. When you face your aloneness, something begins to happen. Gradually, the sense of bleakness changes into a sense of true belonging. This is a slow and open-ended transition but it is utterly vital in order to come into rhythm with your own individuality. In a sense this is the endless task of finding your true home within your life. It is not narcissistic, for as soon as you rest in the house of your own heart, doors and windows begin to open outwards to the world. No longer on the run from your aloneness, your connections with others become real and creative. You no longer need to covertly scrape affirmation from others or from projects outside yourself. This is slow work; it takes years to bring your mind home.
Taos.This is one word that evokes movement inside anyone who has visited or has longed to visit this unique place. It’s a place filled with real-time postcard images that seem to have been enhanced by Photoshop, but they haven’t.
For many years, I’ve had the good fortune to facilitate Intuitive Painting workshops at Mabel Dodge Luhan House (www.mabeldodgeluhan.com) in Taos, New Mexico. This puts me in Taos twice a year for almost two weeks in the spring and two weeks in the fall. With every visit, I learn more about this unique town and the people who were attracted to it. Two immensely creative people who’ve been attracted to Taos were Mabel Dodge Luhan and Dennis Hopper. Why would this pair be on my mind? Mabel created the retreat center 80 plus years ago and Dennis Hopper owned it at one time. The energy of supporting creatives is imbued in the walls.
I find an individual’s creative process fascinating and I wanted to learn more about Dennis Hopper’s, so I started listening to every interview I could find. One of the most interesting comments I remember him saying was, he felt his most creative once he was clear of his addictions. This rang the Truth Bell for me. Why? Because we are naturally immensely creative. We can be awed by this fact once we align with what’s creating vs what we’re creating or the common thought-theme, ‘I’m not creative.’
When I was in Taos this September, on my way back to Mabel’s from the post office, I got an inspiration to visit Dennis Hopper’s resting place. Since I’m here in Taos to support spontaneity, freedom, and following inspiration, with a clear conscience, I couldn’t say no. But you should have heard the sh..t-show of thoughts that flooded my mind about following this inspiration. OMG! The thoughts ranged from reverence to heresy.
As will happen with inspiration, the next step showed up. I went to YouTube and there it was, a driving video to where I was inspired to go. When I arrived, I circled the location a couple of times because I didn’t want to impose on a person who was having a chat with another resident of the cemetery. When the other visitor left, I drove in. What I found was a homage to Mr. Hopper.
It was evident by the adornments to his resting place that he had been impactful to the lives of many. My ‘shame on you thoughts’ for visiting the grave of someone I’d never met changed. A rich feeling of gratitude replaced the spaces in my mind where shame had lived. There was now an abiding respect for all who have followed their inspirations and colored outside the box. I said a prayer of appreciation for all his earthly contributions and how he continues to inspire from where he lives right now.
I would also like to thank all of the creatives who followed their inspiration to come to the Taos September workshop. From the first gathering in the garden to the very last day, this group was filled with fun, collaboration, bursts of creative insights, and truly wonderful people.
Saying YES to Life. Little did I know that I have been doing this, in a big way, for the past 6 years. It wasn’t as conscious to me then as it is now. Now I see that something larger than my mind has been slamming my hand on the YES button to some extreme invitations that I just couldn’t wrap my head. As a result, my world has expanded beyond my wildest imagination. In more ways than I could list in this message.
Some of the invitations I mentioned were so extreme that they pushed every ‘NO WAY’ button, belief, and understanding I held to be true about how life works. I shake my head and laugh today because I really believed the answer was NO to these opportunities. These things really did NOT look or feel possible for me. They weren’t even part of what I could see for myself in the biggest vision on the biggest vision board. I couldn’t have been more off the mark.
That is why I’m so excited about the new program that has been birthed from this exploration, Level-Up: Saying YES to Life. This is a 4 month group coaching program that will give you an opportunity to gain understanding, to see opportunities, to get real support in saying YES to living a bigger life, and having a richer experience of life. The group will be small with a maximum of 8 participants. This program offers you both individual and community support.
Seeing something fresh and new is not special. Human beings are designed to receive insights, fresh thinking, aha moments, whatever you want to call them. It’s built into each of us and you don’t have to do anything special for it to happen. With that said, it’s possible to see life’s truths, simply by living. By doing what’s in front of you to do, in this moment. Recently, two insights about being human occurred to me and I wanted to share them with you.
It was my turn to have a colonoscopy. I’m a huge proponent of this procedure because it helped several people very near and dear to my heart catch diseases that would have otherwise gone undetected.
You hear lots of stories about the prep for this procedure. To prepare, I began reading all the instructions over and over because I didn’t want to miss any details. I knew for certain that I only wanted to do this dance once, so following the directions to the letter was imperative.
On the day before the procedure, I wasn’t allowed to have any solid foods, only clear liquids. For me this consisted of chicken broth and popsicles (no red or purple flavors allowed). What I found so interesting was, when I took food off my mind, such as, what I’m going to eat, getting the right food, and when to eat, I realized there was a huge open gap of space in my mind. It really surprised me how much ‘food thought’ fills my head daily! When that topic was taken off the table, WOW, my mind felt so spacious. Less on my mind felt great! Change is interesting.
The second part of the story, which I found so clever, was how my mind was trying to tempt me to break the fast! I bought a fruit bar as one of my popsicle options and when I went to eat it, I noticed it had chunks of pineapple. My mind is saying you’re hungry, eat it, it won’t matter, it’s not that chunky, etc.
The clarity in me said, no way! I’m not about to blow this process by eating something solid. With the vigilance of a D.C. lobbyist my mind wasn’t letting up. I was amazed how my mind was operating on its own agenda while the clarity in me didn’t budge. It saw the cost and said no way!
This mental tug-a-war brought a simple but significant insight. It showed me that as human beings, if we REALLY understood the cost to our experience or sense of wellbeing, we would not indulge our thinking. The clarity in us would stop us from languishing in events that have passed or made-up future events. If we found ourselves in the weeds of those two topics, we’d come back to the present moment.
What I know for sure is, I’m going to feel whatever I’m thinking about. If it scares me, I’m feeling scared. If I have thoughts of regret, I feel rotten.
Engaging with life brings insights. Since I’m a girl who likes bullets, I’m going to make it simple.
To me, this looks universally true for human beings:
1. If our minds are freed up from habits of thinking or anything else that consumes space in our heads, we have an invitation to see what else is on offer from life. When minds are less burdened, life feels lighter, more hopeful, more promising.
2. Understanding the TRUE cost of indulging our thinking, supports us in exercising free will. If we want to feel better more of the time, we can’t afford the mental indulgence. By indulging our thinking, we leave the present moment and live life through the story being created in the mind. If we’re playing it out in our heads, we’re not present to life. We’re not in touch with what’s alive, life, we’re in touch with our story.
This timeless video clip continues to bring me smiles every time I catch myself in my humanness!
I want to share my deep appreciation to all of you who commented on my last blog. It was wonderful to hear from you. Thank you for taking the time to say hello!
I love the fact that all human beings have the ability to receive new information via insight. Insight is the effortless, natural ability to see something fresh. Insight seems to pop into our minds from out-of-the-blue. Something that was once invisible to us becomes obvious… that’s insight.
This happened to me recently when I caught myself dreading and dragging to get something done that I needed to do. I spun around my house doing everything except what needed to be done the most. It was similar to being in college and thinking cleaning my dorm room was a better idea than studying for my exams. Crazy!
As I was spinning around avoiding the obvious, an insight in the form of a question popped into my mind, “What would you do if you could just get over yourself?” Almost immediately, I hear a response to this question, “Oh, I’d just do it.” Just do it? That’s an option? Who knew that was possible or even existed? And surprisingly, I did just that. I got over myself and completed the task with incredible efficiency, spaciousness, and enjoyment. This was a brand new experience for me.
As I continue with this inquiry of ‘getting over myself’ I’m finding that life gets simpler and simpler with more opportunities than I could imagine for practicing this fresh insight. LOL! I find this inquiry especially helpful when I’ve taken something personally. Yes, even when I take something personally, the sooner I ‘get over myself’ the more I find myself enjoying what life has to offer and the people that surround me.
With the holidays upon us, I felt like sharing this insight with you to support you in having a better overall experience in the coming weeks. With the many expectations we put on ourselves, others, and the holidays, if we could get in the habit of ‘getting over ourselves’ we could get on with the things we want the most, connection with the aliveness of life and connecting with the ones we love.
I hope you’ll give yourself this gift. It’s been a real eye opener for living with greater peace and possibilities.
“I began to see it wasn’t my external circumstances that created my reality; it was the way I viewed and thought about my situation that formed my experience.” -Elsie Spittle
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