Books by Category - Creativity

Browse by Category - Creativity

The Creative Family

When you learn to awaken your family’s creativity, wonderful things will happen: you’ll make meaningful connections with your children in large and small ways; your children will more often engage in their own creative discoveries; and your family will embrace new ways to relax, play, and grow together. With just the simple tools around you-your imagination, basic art supplies, household objects, and natural materials-you can transform your family life, and have so much more fun!

The Creative Family

Handmade Home

For many of us, our home is the center of our life. It is the place where our families meet and mingle, where we share our meals and share our dreams. So much more than just a space to live, our homes offer us a place of comfort, nourishment, and love for us and for our children.

In Handmade Home, Amanda Blake Soule, author of The Creative Family and the blog SouleMama.com, offers simple sewing and craft projects for the home that reflect the needs, activities, and personalities of today’s families. As Amanda writes in the introduction, “As a crafter, I’m always looking for the next thing I want to make. As a mama, I’m always looking for the next thing we need-to do, to have, to use-as a family. The coming together of these parts is where the heart of Handmade Home lies.”

Handmade Home

Art Is a Spiritual Path

Art is a spiritual path-not a religion, but a practice that helps us knit together the ideals and convictions that guide our lives. Creating art can be prayer, ritual, and remembrance of the Divine. And the sharing of this creativity with others in small groups can serve as sanctuary, asylum, ashram, therapy group, think tank, and village square. Pat Allen has developed a reliable guide for walking the path of art through a series of simple practices that combine drawing, painting, and sculpture with journal writing. Designed for readers at any level of artistic experience, the book shows how to:

• awaken the creative force and connect with the divine source of creativity
• access inner wisdom and intuition about life issues, including both personal and community concerns
• find a path to meaning that includes honoring, celebrating, and giving thanks
• explore the images and symbols of traditions such as Catholicism, Judaism, shamanism, and Goddess worship
• join in spiritual community with others who are following the path of art
• discover that artmaking can help us live our ideals and be of service in the world

Art Is a Spiritual Path

The Blank Canvas

The Blank Canvas offers solid advice for everyone who struggles with artist's block or other problems of creative expression, including: drawing subject matter from unexpected sources, mining one's daily visual responses for images, overcoming self-doubt and criticism, making choices when torn between several ideas, and getting started on assignments. 

The Blank Canvas

Creating Mandalas

The traditional designs known as mandalas were recognized by C. G. Jung as symbolic representations of the Self. This book is a practical guide to mandala drawing for personal growth, stress reduction, and creative expression. Fincher introduces the history and ritual use of mandalas in cultures all over the world; offers guidance in choosing art materials, techniques, and colors for the creation of personal mandalas; and discusses the symbolism of shapes, colors, numbers, and motifs, such as birds and flowers, that may appear in mandalas. She also presents several illustrated case histories of people who successfully use her techniques.

Creating Mandalas

Creative Recovery

For writers, artists, musicians, and creators in every field, this book offers a complete addiction recovery program specifically designed for the creative person. Full of explanations and exercises, this book presents ways to use your own innate creative abilities in service of your recovery and at each stage of the recovery process. Topics include: the biological and developmental risks unique to creative people; the special personality traits that can inform the recovery process; ways to approach your recovery much like your art; and exercises that promote your creativity and art that aid the recovery process. This book gives a clear picture of the relationship between creativity and addiction and lays out a complete program so that you can live a fully creative and addiction-free life.

Creative Recovery

The Listening Book

The Listening Book is about rediscovering the power of listening as an instrument of self-discovery and personal transformation. By exploring our capacity for listening to sounds and for making music, we can awaken and release our full creative powers. Mathieu offers suggestions and encouragement on many aspects of music-making, and provides playful exercises to help readers appreciate the connection between sound, music, and everyday life.

The Listening Book

No More Secondhand Art

This book is about using art as an instrument of personal transformation, enabling us to move from an inherited to a chosen state of being. Peter London offers inspiration and fresh ideas to artists, art students, and art teachers-as well as to people who think they can't draw a straight line but want to explore the joys of creative expression. Inside every person, he believes, there is an original, creative self that has been covered over by secondhand ideas, borrowed beliefs, and conditioned behavior. By freeing the capacity for visual expression-a natural human language possessed by everyone-we can awaken and release the full powers of that original self. 

No More Secondhand Art

The Way of the Actor

For thousands of years, in traditional societies around the world, actors were seen as the guardians of intuitive wisdom, and the way of the actor was a path to knowledge and power. Brian Bates believes that this is still the case today-that actors and actresses fulfill an important function in our culture as modern-day seers and shamans. He portrays the actor as a creator of visions who transports spectators out of their habitual ways of being and leads them on a journey of self-discovery. Personal magnetism and charisma, intense body awareness, and psychic sensitivity are among the special powers that contribute to the actor's mystique. 

The Way of the Actor

Writing Begins with the Breath

In this distinctive guide to the craft of writing, author Laraine Herring shows us how to tune into our bodies and connect with our emotions so that our writing becomes an expression of our full beings, rather than just an intellectual exercise. With warmth and wisdom, Herring offers a path to discovering "deep writing"-prose that is unique, expressive, and profoundly authentic. Lessons and imaginative exercises show you how to: stay with your writing when your mind or body starts to pull you away; explore the five senses in your writing; and approach your writing without judgment.

Writing Begins with the Breathwill open up a whole world of creativity for people who may not have considered themselves writers before, while also providing keen insights into the craft for seasoned writers. 

Writing Begins with the Breath

Writing Down the Bones

For more than twenty years Natalie Goldberg has been challenging and cheering on writers with her books and workshops. In her groundbreaking first book, she brings together Zen meditation and writing in a new way. Writing practice, as she calls it, is no different from other forms of Zen practice -"it is backed by two thousand years of studying the mind."

This new edition, which marks almost twenty years since the original book's publication, includes a new preface in which Goldberg expresses her trademark enthusiasm for writing practice, as well as a depth of appreciation for the process that has come with time and experience. Also included is an interview with the author in which she reflects on the relationship between Zen sitting practice and writing, the importance of place, and the power of memory. 

Writing Down the Bones

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