#5for5BrainDump – Creative Life Midwife

End Writer’s Block by Promising Myself Rewards? (Is it working well?)

September 15, 2017 by jjscreativelifemidwife Leave a Comment

Today I am earning a cup of coffee by writing about what I don’t want to write about.

Perhaps this is the little known secret for ending writer’s block: withhold coffee (or chocolate, or sex, or whatever a person likes best) until the first 750 words are written.

What do you think?

I could easily follow this tangent.and.I.won’t.because. I am supposed to be writing:

About walking down 19^th St with Josh last night about the early days before and after Samuel’s diagnosis.
About seeing an educrat last night who long ago insisted it was bad mothering causing Samuel’s behaviors (which were so obviously spectrum anyone with any ounce of knowledge should have known.)
Putting myself back in my 2007 shoes – finding the gap of July 31 to October 23 without a blog post. Unheard of in that era. Most eras of my life actually.

My last blog words on July 31, 2007 were “In order for the moonflower to completely open, it has to bathe in darkness. I am not a big fan of the dark. It scares me. Still. Yet I can not walk by this flower without bowing to it, without putting my face close to its opened-by-the-dark heart.”

I must have had the notion the darkness was behind me: my brother had died and I was doing ok with that – only light on the horizon, right?

Blog Silence for all of August. All of September. All of.

Darkness. I bow to it, putting my face closer to the flower that is poison and only opens in the dark.

(My timer goes off. My five minutes are up. I am angry. Now I get to drink my coffee. All will be ok.)

= = =

To review my history in words, visit:

My final blog post before Samuel’s diagnosis:

My nebulous return, including a country western tune for good measure.

Julie Jordan Scott inspires people to experience artistic rebirth via her programs, playshops, books, performances and simply being herself out in the world. She is a writer, creative life coach, speaker, performance poet, Mommy-extraordinaire and mixed-media artist whose Writing Camps and Writing Playgrounds permanently transform people’s creative lives.

Remember Yourself with Awe and Amazement: Let’s Write #5for5BrainDump Style Together

September 13, 2017 by jjscreativelifemidwife Leave a Comment

It took me a few days to warm up to this prompt. Seriously, I wanted/didn’t want to write to it and when I finally got down to business with it…. I… well, I’ll let the #5for5BrainDump process tell the story.

Here is a less-than-60 second video of the prompt – some photos are mine and some are from the Lumen5.com very smart process…

And now, written in 5 minutes is my first crack at this prompt. These are, for the most part, stories that are familiar to me. What is more valuable to me is the work beneath these fairly obvious answers.

I want to honor myself and YOU by sharing here. I’m considering this the “Bonus” you’ll see in the prompt itself.

It has taken me three days to even attempt to write on this prompt, not because… well, I am tired of excuses.

When I set my timer just now, salt licked my eyes. Tears – unspent and afraid yet begging me to release them.

So I procrastinate further by drinking coffee and I wonder what I possibly have to be amazed about so I step out of my head and into my heart and will ask myself to begin a list without worrying about how many times I may or may not have been amazed at myself.

I gave birth four times without pain medicine. One time, my first, in a car as it barreled down the freeway. My daughter didn’t survive that birth. She had probably died the day before.
I climbed a 44 foot rock climbing wall at the conclusion of my life coaching training primarily to prove to my trainer that anything was possible. He had told me I couldn’t possibly have 16 life coaching clients so quickly. “But I do,” I told him. His disbelief has messed with my head off and on since but I will always have the victorious climb no one – including myself – thought I could do.
I have couch surfed across the US.
I quit my comfy cushy job and have lived comfortably and uncomfortably ever since.
Somehow when I had melanoma I attracted a surgeon who would give me a heart shaped scar to wear on my face until I die. People have commented, “Only you would actually have a heart shaped scar… which fits you perfectly.”
I returned to acting after a 30 year hiatus. Hi-jinx from that episode include running through Oildale without a shirt on embarrassing my children to no end. What amazed me is…. How focused I was on what the director wanted from me. I love when my acting is so director-actor-collaboration that everything else disappears. I love that. I want more of that. I had a taste of that last Summer when I made a film with Inclusion and a butterfly appeared on set. See #1.
I have won every storytelling competition I’ve joined. I need to join more that I hope not to win so that I may continue to become better. Make that a goal – to be amazed at not winning.
(is yet to come)

To contact Julie to schedule a Writing or Creative Life Coaching Session, call or text her at 661.444.2735.

Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.

Writing Prompt inspired by Jack Kerouac: Your Memories + Awe = #5for5BrainDump Magic

September 7, 2017 by jjscreativelifemidwife Leave a Comment

Jack Kerouac said, “Write in recollection and amazement of yourself.” This is a territory ripe for self reflection.

Let’s do this.

First, make a list of 5 times in your life when your actions surprised you.

Scan your list to consider and ultimately choose the one time that is the most appealing for you to write about today. Set your timer for five minutes and write, starting with the prompt, “I remember….”

Note: if that first attempt falls flat and your words don’t flow, try a different memory.

Oftentimes there is something in the way of writing from the first memory and the simple act of completing your writing from another memory will ignite writing flow for both.

Bonus: Share your writing experience with at least one other person today.

NOTE: if you would like to participate in a Writing Community, I would love to invite you to be a part of the Word-Love Writing Community I facilitate on Facebook.

To contact Julie to schedule a Writing or Creative Life Coaching Session, call or text her at 661.444.2735.

Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.

Experiments in Brain Dumping: What I Learned May Help You, Too!

August 27, 2017 by jjscreativelifemidwife 1 Comment

I did an experiment last week with the process I created, the #5for5BrainDump.

I wrote using prompted brain dumps for five minutes a day for five consecutive days, allowing my thoughts to pour onto the page and then I published the unedited writing on my blog.

I wrote these reflections on Friday and I published last week six times on my blog. This will technically be my first post of the new week or my seventh post from last week.

What did I learn?

It is best to have a blog template ready to go – I made mine on Sunday – so that when it was time to do my five minute writing all I had to do was the five minute writing, copy paste and publish. I know for many the hardest part is pushing that publish button.

I think next week I will have the prompts ready ahead of time so all the images will be uploaded as well so it will be a simple copy, paste and done. I really ran with the Eleanor Roosevelt quote this week and I wasn’t expecting that, so I will allow myself to be open to whatever flows this week.

I want to keep a table of contents each week as I go with highlights of each post. I have found in my enormous body of work there is much that sits, forgotten, that is worth being re-published and shared with the world.

I want to explore how this practice may help with entrepreneurs as well. This will be a part of my focus next week – because I know once people begin to explore these methods, they may experience greater flow in their work world as well.

AND THE APPLAUSE SAYS – 5 minutes is up!

(Yes, this was written #5for5BrainDump style with several small edits on Sunday morning, just a different way of managing the content stream.)

Julie Jordan Scott inspires people to experience artistic rebirth via her programs, playshops, books, performances and simply being herself out in the world. She is a writer, creative life coach, speaker, performance poet, Mommy-extraordinaire and mixed media artist whose Writing Camps and Writing Playgrounds permanently transform people’s creative lives. Watch for the announcement of new programs coming in soon!

To contact Julie to schedule a Writing or Creative Life Coaching Session, call or text her at 661.444.2735.

Follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.

Discovering New Strength, Thoughts and Ooops, That Not-So-Surprising Surprise

August 23, 2017 by jjscreativelifemidwife Leave a Comment

Preface:

It took me far too long to begin to write to this prompt. Multi-fold procrastination which I might describe as block which reminds me: most everything that looks like block is actually fear.

One of the reasons people do not do a writing practice on an ongoing nature is “fear of stirring up more than one may want to stir up.”

Mine is like a book with many chapters: I am afraid of failing, falling short of not living up to… whatever it is I daily don’t live up to and I am afraid of making people angry and I am afraid of finding myself all alone because of everything I have noted up until now.

(It took me a full five minutes to explain my procrastination so please grant me another five to write about today’s prompt:

Starting… now.

My renewed thoughts are….

This morning I looked outside and my heart literally felt like it enlarged in my chest: the garbage collectors had come by my home and taken my trash away. The trash can was no longer overflowing! It was ready to be rolled back to its place beside my house! I didn’t have to worry about it getting knocked over or making a bigger mess. It was gone, gone, gone and although I had a full day ahead with some not-so-pleasant tasks on the list, my heart was happy and in turn, my happiness has continued to expand.

And perhaps be a foundation for the more challenging prompt –

One risk my heart is longing to take….

I want to start over again after Samuel graduates from high school. I see myself being a vagabond, leading tours for people who are either writers or literary junkies or a combination of both. I want to take people on explorations of self and literature while having a ridiculously good time. I want to help people find their guiding inner writers, their favorite quotes and deeply textured writing fairy god-mothers (and fathers, I would suppose)

I want to risk building bridges with people from “I can’t” to “I will” to productive, heartfelt creativity while adventuring, while exploring new and familiar spaces.

And then… applause is here. We have been heard.

Julie Jordan Scott inspires people to experience artistic rebirth via her programs, playshops, books, performances and simply being herself out in the world. She is a writer, creative life coach, speaker, performance poet, Mommy-extraordinaire and mixed-media artist whose Writing Camps and Writing Playgrounds permanently transform people’s creative lives. Watch for the announcement of new programs coming in soon!

To contact Julie to schedule a Writing or Creative Life Coaching Session, call or text her at 661.444.2735.

Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.

Reawakening Love for The Writing Process Itself

July 28, 2017 by jjscreativelifemidwife Leave a Comment

It is one of the most powerful questions you may ask yourself: “What do I really, truly want in this wild and wonderful life I’ve been given?”

As writers, we may ask specifically about our writing, “What do I really, truly want to create with my writing? How do I want my writing process to feel?”

We may ask, “How may I awaken my love for the writing process?”

I wish I could tell you the answer naturally rushes out in a beautifully crafted message right from my subconscious to my keyboard.

It doesn’t usually happen like that. Instead, a process we come to know as even more delicious than instantly having an answer takes place and instead of just “getting an answer” I give myself room to fall back in love with writing.

Stay with me so you may deepen or fall in love all over again with both your creative process AND your life. I will share with you what I wrote in five minutes. I am taking that risk, I am allowing you into my own writing perfect imperfections. It is scary for me AND I am willing to go there because it is so important for each of us.

“When love awakens in your life, it is like a rebirth, a new beginning.”

John O’Donohue

I started to write:

Think outside of the realm of romantic love now.

If I reawakened to the love in my writing life, I would discover… my words have more merit and meaning than I had originally believed. In fact, I haven’t believed deeply enough in eons. Or at least a long time. Eons, that’s a bit of hyperbole.

Isn’t it funny how a moment in time may feel like eons? It may feel like hyperbole too. Maybe we should write about love AS hyperbole. Maybe we should write about love being someone else drinking the yummilicous coffee I made for myself. Or stealing the chocolate bar (for myself) or… enter your weird quirk here.

“My sun sets to rise again.”

Robert Browning

Settling in, I think about Nutella sandwiches. I think about my slouchery as a mother. I think “What will my babies eat if I don’t map it out?”

= = =

There are so many distractions as I sit here and attempt to write for five minutes about awakening love for my writing process. I see a broom and want to sweep, I look at the clock and I want to assemble lunch for my children and get out into the money making flow “hurry it up hurry it up hurry it up!” I hear in my inner ear. Oh, Lord I can’t do it all – my anxiety reaches for my throat to shut my voice – my writing voice – down.

Five minutes. That’s all.

My fingers continue to move, on the keyboard focused.

Reawaken love for the process.

Let go of end result. Welcome bad or mediocre or lukewarm results. (Youch!) Yes, even lukewarm.

Awaken to the process being enough. This is so un-pilgrim-esqu: we are trained to insist upon results that are only in our favor. “There must be a something in order to continue I can’t just continue for a nothing that makes no sense.”

Writing this is not a nothing. Writing these words is definitely a something.

Process is worth all of the wonder and exhilaration of being on a best seller list or having twenty five people pay a thousand dollars to hear me speak.

My community is rising up to greet me and say “Bring your work forward with and for us” it is almost surreal, beloveds, almost surreal.”

Is it still less than five minutes?

I heard the coffee pot call me, the coffee pot that has been creating really tasty coffee lately.

I think of the squirrel and planning and play. And me. And love. And movement.

And applause. (My timer applauds when my time is up.) All that in five minutes.

= = =

Now it is your turn to take today’s prompt and write from it. You may write once or you may write several times.

“How may I awaken my love for the writing process?”

Remember to set your timer for five minutes and after your time is up, spend fifteen to thirty seconds writing what you are grateful for either from the writing experience or from your life in general.

The world is waiting for your words: let’s get them on the page now.

Be sure to follow me so you may continue to stay close to this sort of writing inspiration to keep your writing flowing and your life moving in the direction your heart seeks.

Julie Jordan Scott inspires people to experience artistic rebirth via her programs, playshops, books, performances and simply being herself out in the world. She is a writer, creative life coach, speaker, performance poet, Mommy-extraordinaire and mixed media artist whose Writing Camps and Writing Playgrounds permanently transform people’s creative lives. Watch for the announcement of new programs coming in soon!

To contact Julie to schedule a Writing or Creative Life Coaching Session, call or text her at 661.444.2735.

Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.

Writers & Creatives: Passionate Detachment MAY be Your Best Friend –

July 6, 2017 by jjscreativelifemidwife Leave a Comment

I started writing this as a five minute brain dump (#5for5BrainDump) and then discovered… I hadn’t started my timer. Nonetheless, I loved the content so here it is – unedited and raw but about ten minutes worth.

I wrote from the quote you see below –

“Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached. ”
― Simone Weil

Passionate Detachment is a theory/term I made up roughly fifteen years ago from a conversation with a painting contractor while we talked about small running backs one hot day in Bakersfield.

I’m sure there are similar concepts but I enjoy the paradox and how it sounds, the variety of vowels and consonants.

Passionate detachment: going for your goal with all you’ve got and not being attached to the results of your efforts. Be entranced, delighted and full throttle, like the five-foot-six-inch high school running back who puts his head down and runs right through the huge defensive linemen and heads toward the end zone without worrying about the two-hundred-pound tackle launched in his direction.

Sports analogies work in the US.

It is the painter who splashes paint for hours on end on her masterpiece, not concerned with commercial endeavors yet knowing if this painting resonates with the right audience and her art dealer gets this painting in front of the right people it will change EVERYTHING and yet she just goes for it – she may have visualized and strategized and held countless meetings but the bottom line is she loves how the paint smells and how it feels to move it on the canvas, how the expression on that face she just created reminds her of her first grade teacher, Miss Foley, when she told her “Happy Mother’s Day” with the sweet purity of a seven-year-old who loves her single-not-a-parent-yet-teacher-who-obviously –loves-children.

Passionate detachment says “I will go after success AND I will do what I love, regardless of how wacky some people may think I am in doing so.”

Passionate detachment says, “Make that slightly offbeat declaration about your plans on Facebook in front of everyone you know (and a few people you met once in passing who friended you) and then, by gosh and by golly, take action in the direction of that wild dream no one thinks you will ever really do.

Passionate detachment says, “I don’t know how I’m going to do this, but I am going to start because I know Plato once said something like ‘The beginning is the most important part of the work’ and if I just talk about beginning but don’t actually start, it is worth nothing. And my vision and I are both worth a whole lot of something so here… I…. “ and then, the passionately detached person takes that leap.

She moves her pencil on the blank page. He makes that phone call to that investor he met while riding pool on Uber in Los Angeles. They sign that contract to rent that space for the event they have wanted to hold and place the ad and talk to five more people than they’re comfortable speaking to because they are passionate and they are detached. They know they are worth every action and their vision is worth every small and not-so-small risk.

They are passionately detached.

(Sometimes brain dumps are interrupted by phones ringing and sometimes they end with applause.)

How do you create with passionate detachment?