I’m taking a long weekend for an Art Retreat with a girlfriend. This is a good example of how I live my life differently now, post-’big’-reinvention. When I was a Vice President at The First National Bank of Chicago, I didn’t do retreats, let alone art retreats.

Art helps me find my way in reinvention.

Especially in reinventions, we need all of our inner resources ‘firing on all cylinders’. Both the intuitive and analytical are essential.

For you reinventers who rely on your analytical side but have always had a ‘hankering’ to try some art or craft, I would encourage you to make learning and playing with art a part of your reinvention process.

Awakening art will do several things for you:
1. It will give you some play time. More than ever, when you are reinventing, it’s important not to take things too seriously. It can feel like you are in the midst of some weighty decisions, and you need downtime.
2. It will provide ‘incubation’ time. It helps to give decisions and questions some time to ‘work on you’ indirectly. Often, the answers from your heart will then come spontaneously to you, sometimes when you least expect it. When you are distracted by an engaging, creative process, it’s like you’ve put your analytical brain on pause and there is room for your heart and intuition to speak to you. Sometimes you will get surprising answers.
3. The answers you seek may show up in the art itself. The language of the heart and spirit is image and metaphor. I was once doing some collage art, and found that the image that resonated most for me was one of an open gate, with a bright, detailed landscape on the other side of the gate. It totally changed my perspective of where I was in my reinvention when I saw that bright, detailed scene. I had been thinking that I was stuck in a very dark, unknown and indistinct place. The image was telling me that I was on the threshold of a bright, new landscape in my life. My questions totally changed. If I was standing on such a threshold, what was on the other side? Suddenly I was focused on my future, a bright one, and I was able to see new possibilities that I had not seen before.

When you awaken art in you, just for the fun and adventure in it, you can let go of the expectations for the art to be good. it becomes about what the process of art awakens in your spirit and heart, not about results.

Take up a form of art that you have always wanted to try. Let go of doing it perfectly (or even well) and give yourself the gift of playing freely with it. Find a form of art or craft that will be easy for you to get into without having to develop a high level of skill.

Then listen to how it may be guiding you. Your heart speaks in many ways, through many channels. Sometimes accessing our heart’s wisdom is just a matter of tuning our listening in different ways.

Filed under: Being a Reinventer, Tools, Adventures of a Reinventer on October 10th, 2007