Colleen Leonardi

Yoga for the Creative Class: It's Your Job to Be Inspired

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Inspiration is often likened to lightening - it only strikes once, maybe more, if you're lucky. It's often talked about as something that happens to you as opposed to you happening to it. And everyone gets inspired, artists or not. It's part of the curiosity - the sacred passion - that comes with being human.

In a leadership retreat years ago, we were discussing core traits of our work and what we aspire to. A women, who I deeply admire, said "It's my job to be inspired." And I remember thinking - Wow, thank you.

She is an artist, teacher and lovely soul. She spoke to how essential it is when teaching and creating art to have that constant flow of inspiration in one's life. And she spoke of how she finds it for herself, how she takes it upon herself to look for what inspires her. She doesn't wait.

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{Photo of the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in Helena, one of the coolest, most inspirational spots in the world, I think!}

I went home from the retreat with a new dedication to myself and my work. It IS my job to be inspired. It's not a

| luxury

| hedonistic desire

| escapist tendency

| apathetic quality

| wasting of my time

It is my responsibility. There is real value in gathering close to me what inspires me, who inspires me and maintaining a dedication to my job to be inspired, everyday. Inspiration becomes the supple bedrock of my meeting my goals and making things happen with my business or artwork. Inspiration serves as a wellspring and friend. It bolster you up when you're working when nothing else can.

And I often think that for artists and business folks, inspiration is a type of creative/innovative research that serves as the bones of a project or business idea. It's the original, resonate qualities of an idea that make your idea, your desire, like no one else's, and therefore (some might say) more likely to succeed.

I offer this to artists and non-artists alike. I meet so many people who are craving inspiration in their life out of an innate creativity they have within them. I see it.

And while it can be hard to take the small steps to create the idea you want to create (oh my gosh, for perfectionists and procrastinators, it can take a long time - and that's ok!), I think it's a little easier and more joyful to look for what inspires you. To spend time finding the things that bring you joy and spark your thinking, rather than having to do something and hold yourself accountable to creating something.

| What inspires you?

| Can you find time in your day - 5 minutes - to gather the stories, pictures, objects from nature, quotes, books, friends, videos...whatever it is...close to you to create your bank of inspiration?

| Experiment: Once you have a bank of inspiration going, put stuff in a shoe box or container of some sort and leave it under your bed. See how having your inspiration this close to you influences your dreams.

Don't let anyone tell you this isn't serious or important work. Inspiration is real. Go out and claim yours.

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Making Dances About Something

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Do you make dances about something? Or do your dances make something about you?

As I work on a new project, I’m aware of the balance of reading and writing about ideas and people I like, to getting into the belly of movement and making a dance. I really believe the dance lives in the movement—in the looks, weight shifts, gestures and internal shifts of the movement and environment in which it moves—and not in the story of it or idea of it {as often detailed in program notes}. I work with the belief that you have to work with movement a lot to get the dance to a place where it’s an unknown to you, where it’s a mystery and you’re following it, where it’s generating knowledge and information on its own without you having to inject it with knowledge and information.

Some choreographers make dances about something. We all have our way of making and valuing what we make. {I wish we could find ways to talk about those differences.} I’m finding that even I {a hardcore emergent theory kinda person} have had to have some thing to fuel my inquiry as I start in the studio on this project. My stack of books, pictured above, are some of those things.

And as I’m working with these things in mind, I think—Oh, I’m making a dance about something! For right now, at least. And that is interesting to me as I work to turn that something on its head so the dance is in charge and I am not. And what is also interesting to me is that part of this attraction to ideas and story in making a dance right now is because I haven’t made any dances in a while but I’ve been writing a lot more.

It all makes me wonder if part of the jump start back into making a dance is in making a dance about something so you can shed it and move onto the actual mystery.

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| Do you make dances about something? What?

| Do your dances often end up not being about that something but about something else? Why?

| What do you not want to make a dance about? Go make a dance about that.

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"What interests me is the part of you that you are stuck with, that you can’t control, and it comes out whatever. That’s infinitely more profound; you are who you are, even when you don’t wish to be—you can’t not do it. As a teacher, you help people locate that, have confidence in that self—not as invention, and maybe including aspects you don’t like. That’s the you which you are using when you make art." ~ Michael Craig-Martin 

Yoga for the Creative Class: Intention vs. Action

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What intentions do you have for yourself as a creative artist? How do your actions reflect those intentions? And when I say actions I mean the littlest steps, movements, real-time commitments to making something happen.

In my last Yoga for the Creative Class, we talked about what it means to have intention versus action. How the two modes are distinctly different, and they don't always line up. You can have loads of intention but your actions reveal a totally different desire. You can have the intention of writing down your goals but then your action of reading a book and eating cookies, and then going for a walk reveal a different intention. It's a curious conundrum. Because I would say that even though you didn't do the thing you had an intention to do, you did do something that helps carve out a pathway for that intention. {I might think differently if you went to a baseball game or something. But maybe not...}

One of my yoga teachers talks a lot about how certain patterns, habits, modes of behavior are familiar to us because they're our way of surviving in this world. So your habit of reading a book and eating cookies and going for a walk---that's a strategy for you that serves a purpose. You're taking care of yourself. So being gentle with your range of intention and desire is important. But it's important to then know your habit {to have intentions but not act on them, perhaps} and consciously work to ask yourself: Is this strategy really serving me and my intentions as a creative artist? And you might find it's not. And then you might find that your intentions are very different from your actions.

I do think, too, that thinking about intention too much distills the healing action inherent in the question. I think we have to do a lot to know ourselves, and reflect a lot. If you sit around thinking about your intentions too much {What is my intention? What makes it an intention?} you loose sight of the very reason you've started to ask the question---to get things done and change something in yourself or your life!

| What is your intention for action right now?

| Did you do it?

| If so, what do you want to do next? Do it.

| If not, what did you do instead? Do more of it.

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