I feel as though I were still master of the days I have recorded, even though they are past,
whereas those not mentioned in the pages are as though they had never been.
~ Eugène Delacroix

Note: I’m one of forty journaling experts who were invited to contribute a chapter to The Great Book of Journaling, edited by Eric Maisel and Lynda Monk. (I receive no compensation from the book.) This essay is my chapter from that book.

My journal is an old friend that has been with me for most of my life, from early adolescence through my current elder years. I’ve journaled both regularly and sporadically, journaling regularly for long stretches, then sometimes taking a hiatus for a month or even years. But I always come back to it. Why? Because journaling is the kindest, most healing, most self-preserving and self-validating thing I can do for myself. And because my journal is truly my best friend, the wisest one in my company.

Journaling keeps me flowing and going, providing an outlet for emotions and thoughts that might otherwise grind me to a halt. It gives me a safe space to say whatever I feel like—including snarky things to people who irk me so that I can vent without harming relationships. It gives me a chance to reflect more deeply on what’s going on in my life beyond the immediate circumstances, if only for a few minutes a day.

Although journaling provides enormous benefit to me in the moment, I really journal for two people: my Present Self and my Future Self.

The Present Self

Journaling is incredibly healing for my Present Self, wonderfully beneficial in the therapeutic sense. It helps me bring order to my life. It’s a great release for pent-up emotions and chaotic thoughts, and almost as good, often better, than talking to a counselor or a friend.

When I write in my journal, I write to The Journal. I write to a faceless entity who provides witness to my existence, a confidante who never judges, one who accepts all I have to give it without question or complaint. In it, I can leave my most vile or violent thoughts without causing damage, either to others or to myself. I can leave my sadness, despair, and vitriol without being judged, and feel less burdened for doing so. I can be petty and petulant, or profound and transcendent, and sometimes all of those in the same entry.

When the thoughts in my head are swirling, leaving me no room for clear thought, journaling helps me pour the thoughts onto the page so that they no longer affect my clear vision.

When the superficial but often intense emotions sometimes obscure what’s really happening, journaling helps me gain clarity.

When I feel confused or when I’m torn about a decision, I journal, and the options become clear and the solution arises from the murk. Journaling helps me sort out difficult situations.

When I want to hear from my creative self, journaling helps me get to the creative depths, generating ideas which I can then take to the drawing board—or the music rehearsal or the written page.

Best of all, The Journal never misunderstands me.

All of these things and more are plenty of reason to journal.

But there’s an added benefit to journaling that you can’t get from talking to a counselor or a friend, a benefit you can’t get from anyone or anything else. Journaling can benefit your Future Self, the you who doesn’t exist yet, the you who lives in the future.

The Future Self

Journaling is obviously incredibly helpful in the present. But its greatest value might well be in the future.

Reading from past journaling brings back memories and helps me recall what really happened. I often forget much of my past until I’m reminded by my journal, and I sometimes have an altogether different memory of past times. Reading the journal brings back those times more realistically, correcting the whims of my memory. When I read past journals now, I’m amazed at the experiences I’ve gone through in my life in a way that I could not possibly appreciate them when they occurred in the present.

Reading past journaling helps me know myself better. I can listen to what I was saying mentally, experience it objectively and learn from it. My challenging tendencies become clearer so that I can overcome them.

What strikes me most when I read my journaling from a time past is that I sometimes feel compassion for that person—my Past Self—in a way that I couldn’t at the time—and maybe in a way that I can’t feel for my Present Self in the moment. I listen to that Past Self as I would a friend in the present, I see and feel her pain and struggles, I feel benevolence for that Self, sometimes suddenly realizing that that person is … me. That helps me feel a little more compassion for myself now, something I often have trouble getting in touch with. Reading the words of my Past Self soothes and heals my Present Self.

Reading my past journals also sometimes allows me to appreciate my positives in a way that I sometimes don’t in the present. I see resourcefulness and tenacity, the rising above unfortunate circumstances, and I feel stronger knowing that my Past Self survived and contributed to the current circumstances and strengths of my Present Self.

When I write today, I sense my Future Self lending a benevolent and non-judging ear, a Self who will benefit from knowing who I am today—my Future Past Self.

Try This

Let’s look at how who, what, when, where and why can help you get started in journaling or deepen the journaling practice you might already have.

Who. It’s a good idea to write to someone, whether to an imaginary friend, The Journal, your Higher Self, or, maybe, your Future Self. Imagine you’re speaking to a Future Self that you don’t know yet, but a Self who you know will be wiser than your Current Self, and who will have a broader viewpoint, someone who will understand things you can’t understand right now. You get to choose who will “hear” your journal entries.

What. The content of your journal posts can be as simplistic and mundane or as deep and profound as you like. It can be “I ate too much yesterday” or “I have a newfound commitment to living the virtues of stoicism.” It can be “I had a great day yesterday!” or “I am developing a clever plan for committing mayhem and getting away with it.” Write one sentence or ten pages. There are no restrictions!

And it can change focus and depth from day to day. It’s totally up to you! Where else in life do you get to make ALL the rules? Your journal can be whatever you decide it will be. And remember, your Future Self will thank you, regardless of what you decide to write.

When. When should you journal? Now! Don’t wait another minute. You can journal first thing in the morning, last thing at night, or in the middle of the day. When is not as important as that you have a regular time for journaling.

Make journaling an integral part of your life. We tend to stick with things that are a regular part of our routine, and not to stick with things that aren’t. So decide where in your day journaling works for you and stick with it. This means not only having a regular time for it, but that it follows something that is already a part of your routine, and that it flows naturally with other parts of your routine. If it always follows brushing your teeth, for example, you will always do it. You won’t have to think about it, you won’t have to look at the clock and say, Oh, it’s time for journaling, or, Oops, I missed journaling so maybe I’ll skip it today. It will feel natural, like a normal part of your life.

If you have to decide every single day whether you’re going to journal, you won’t. It needs to happen without your thinking much about it, much like brushing your teeth every morning. I invite you to think where journaling might fit naturally in your routine. Then do it!

If you find you still have trouble getting yourself to journal, you might make use of one of the several journaling apps available. The one I use has an option to send me an email on the days and times of my choosing to remind me to journal. I’ve set it up to send me an email first thing so that it shows up in my morning mail. It politely asks me how I’m feeling, then provides me with a button that takes me straight to the journal no matter where I am or what device I’m using. Somehow the app’s interface makes it seem okay to write a very short journal entry if that’s what I want to do that day, so I don’t have the excuse that I don’t have enough to say to justify journaling that day (a common excuse from people to whom I’ve suggested journaling). Using an app also allows you to keep your journal totally private, in case you’re worried about prying eyes, and allows you to download your entries if you want to keep a copy offline.

Where. Another lovely thing about journaling is that you can do it anywhere. All you need is a laptop, a pad and pen, or a smartphone app! You can journal on your train commute, during your break at work, at your desk at home, on a bench in the park, sitting on the beach, or lying in bed. There’s no place that isn’t perfect for journaling!

Why. In addition to the many reasons above, journaling allows you to know and appreciate yourself more deeply over the years, it helps you to see your life in a broader perspective, and provides a benevolent partner in life. It gives you a history of your life that you can review at any point to make broad assessments, observe patterns, and give yourself a little credit. Most of all, it is your best friend.

Note: In addition to being published in The Great Book of Journaling, this essay was posted on my Blog on February 18, 2021.

Image: Hannah Olinger on Unsplash

Note: This essay was originally published on January 20, 2024, on Elena’s Blog.
But it’s relevant again, so I wanted to share it with you!

I’ve spent the better part of the last month feeling hopeless. This brought me to the question: What exactly is hope? Where did mine go? How do I get it back?

I came to realize that you must have something to hope for, that hope isn’t a mood or a state, but a longing for something you can envision and for which you have a belief, no matter how tentative, that it can come to be.

I can hope for warm weather, for example. I can’t just sit here hoping, because that makes no sense, not without a vision of something to hope for.

What you hope for must also be somewhere in the vicinity of reality. I probably couldn’t hope, for example, to be twenty-one again. I couldn’t hope to be tall. (Sad.) I could hope to attain some level of fitness. I could hope for something that seems a bit of a stretch but might be possible with some real commitment, like performing in another concert or wearing pants that don’t have an elastic waistband.

I’m beginning to think that hope is a necessary component of a good, meaningful life. Because when I experienced loss of hope this month, I became sad. I found it hard to put one foot in front of the other. I stopped practicing and I stopped writing very much (or very well). I seemed to be moving in slow motion. I sensed that I had lost something.

That led me to notice that what I had lost was hope, and that I had better get some quickly if I expected to get anything done, or really to have a life at all that consisted of more than watching television or the weather outside the window.

I identified the primary culprit for my loss of hope and set about seeing if I could salvage that hope, or, assuming that hope was a ship that had sailed (like my waistline), if I could find a different but related hope that might tide me over.

I did. It required that I rearrange my thinking a bit and work at it for a couple of days. Turns out, hope is sometimes hard to get! But it can be had if you look for it and work at it a while.

I will leave the story a mystery for now (a story for another time), but I did want you to know that hope is a necessary thing, and that if you’ve lost yours, you can find it again.

Image by Myriams-Fotos on Pixabay

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As the bombardment of news about impending fascism and the breakdown of decency in our country continued fast and heavy, I found myself abruptly stopping . A few days ago I suddenly disengaged, noticing, upon looking at the pile of links I’d saved on a particular topic in that one day alone, what a staggering amount of online news I was consuming. “I need some beauty,” I said to myself.

I started by looking at some beautiful images I’d saved over the past months to my laptop. When I watched television after dinner, as I tend to do, I wasn’t drawn to my usual detective-themed shows, provocative movies, or British comedy. Instead, I looked for shows I’d saved to my watch lists that contained beauty: beautiful things, beautiful scenery, beautiful costumes, and people with beautiful manners and character. I found watching these shows enormously comforting, inspiring, and renewing. They brought me back to my usual state of being, rather than that of the news-consuming fiend I seemed to have become in the last month or two. Which got me thinking about the value of beauty in our lives.

I believe beauty can heal. By looking upon or experiencing something of beauty, our heart opens. We relax. That we can react as most of us do to something we find beautiful likely indicates that viewing beauty has evolutionary value, that it is part of Nature’s treasure bag of cures.

On a physical level, when enraptured by beauty, our parasympathetic nervous system is engaged, which balances any over-stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system. In other words, upon viewing beauty, our fight-or-flight reaction, often on over-drive, transforms into contentment, bliss, or awe, restoring balance to our body and mind.

Of course, the benefits of beauty don’t come to us only through our visual sense. The beauty of certain music affects us deeply, as well.

With so much ugliness being broadcast at us continuously at this moment in time, we need beauty. Let’s not forget to savor beauty for its own sake; it has great value in our lives through its healing power.

- - - - - - - - - - -
Here’s an interesting study:
Art Fund research proves that viewing art is good for the human body - Museums Association

Enjoy some beauty in television:

- Victoria (Netflix) Victoria was a PBS series originally produced by ITV in 2016, now available on Netflix. The cast includes Jenna Coleman, Tom Hughes, Rufus Sewell, Nigel Lindsay, and a late-life appearance by Diana Rigg. Absolutely gorgeous sets, costumes, and actors make this a joy to watch! I found surprising depth in the characters (these sorts of series tend to focus more on story), and the issue of self-identity, together with roles we play, whether by necessity or by choice, was reflected by the characters. Although I found the casting of Tom Hughes as Alfred questionable, all of the actors did a splendid job. Watching it prompted me to do a little more research about Queen Victoria, and to want to watch Victoria & Abdul, Judi Dench’s lovely portrayal of Victoria’s final days, again. It came out in 2017 and I believe it will be on Netflix again soon.

- The Sound of Music (Hulu) (also on Disney+) - An incredibly beautiful film. As Guy Lodge of The Guardian says in The Sound of Music at 60, “That absurdly grandiose opening shot was a history-making statement of intent: that lofty, luxuriant long view of the Bavarian Alps announces both a whopping budget and a sprawling departure from the confines of the Broadway stage, before we drop and swoop into Andrews ecstatically swirling in an eye-searingly verdant meadow, as she launches into bell-clear song. …. It’s a moment of many types of beauty fused into one: photographic, geographic, choreographic, high kitsch and high camp.” And the film and its story are apropos of our country’s pre(?)-Nazi state at the moment, and so it perhaps gives us a little hope with its ending. At the very least, it gives us three beautiful hours of escape.

- The Diplomat (Netflix) - Keri Russell, Rufus Sewell, Allison Janney, Bradley Whitford, and many more stellar actors, both American and British, fill this cast. Beautifully produced episodes, together with well-written, fast-paced storylines and interesting characters, make these stories about diplomacy an easy binge watch. And the British scenery is so lovely!

HERE’S TO A BEAUTIFUL AND MAGICAL NEW YEAR FOR US ALL!

(originally published December 10, 2017)

At a time when the dark side of certain creative artists is being exposed, there has been a lot of discussion about whether we should allow ourselves to enjoy the art of artists who have done bad things. I strongly feel that art—the product of the artist—stands apart from the artist.

Once an artistic creation or work is made public, it belongs to us all. It doesn’t matter how it was produced, what mad genius produced it, what unsavory character gave birth to it, what shocking events might have been taking place in the life of the artist who made it. The final product, the work of art, stands on its own for all to behold and experience.

Quite a few famous people who have made great contributions to our culture—contributions that everyone can benefit from or be inspired by—were pretty heinous people in private. So what? Every one of us has a dark side. In fact, I suspect the larger the persona, the larger the dark side. I’m certainly not saying that it’s all right to be abusive to another person, or that bad behavior should not suffer consequences, or that creative artists should not try to be better human beings. I am saying that no one should feel guilty about enjoying or taking solace in the great art of someone who has fallen from grace. Chances are, you’ve been doing that for years without knowing it. Look up your favorite artist, writer, actor or musician, and you might be surprised to learn what their “real” life is or was like.

There are no perfect or saintly artists. History is replete with stories of artists behaving badly. That does not in the least detract from the value of their work or of anyone’s potential experience of it. Are you any less in awe of a great work of art if you learn that the creator kicked their dog the day it was created? It is the same with other unsavory behavior, the likes of which we are seeing now with increasing frequency and with seemingly worse transgressions with every new reveal.

In my own experience of creating, the final product never feels like “mine”; in fact, I feel rather removed from it. I do not feel ownership. I look at artwork I created in my early life and see it as though it were created by someone else. I read articles I wrote five years ago and experience them the way anyone else would. I do not feel “related” to them.

I do not mind in the least watching In the Wings on a World Stage, a terrific documentary featuring Kevin Spacey, or watching any of Woody Allen’s iconic movies. I most definitely do not mind listening to the genius of James Levine, whether conducting an opera orchestra or playing the piano in recital with Luciano Pavarotti (a sublime experience; do listen to that recital if you can). I find their personal actions, assuming they are true (people are presumed innocent until proven guilty in this country), to be despicable and vile. I support their receiving just punishment and I would not want them in my personal life. That does not affect in the least my enjoyment of their work.

Picasso’s many lovers have no effect on my appreciation for his art. Van Gogh’s long-standing depression plays no part in my deep love for his painting, although I regret that he cut off his ear (if, in fact, he did that). Gauguin suffered from syphilis, alcoholism and drug addiction, yet I do not experience in his paintings any of those things; I see—and feel—life. My respect for Hemingway’s work is in no way countered by his alcoholism and other bad habits. Beethoven’s deafness (and I’m told he had some major tantrums, too) does not diminish the staggering greatness of his music, a century after he wrote it.

Looking at or listening to a work of art, there is often no way to know what was happening in the life of the artist who produced it or what their character flaws might have been. Are we to research the history of the creator of every work of creativity we encounter before deciding whether it is acceptable for us to be inspired by it? Of course not.

Creative work comes from a place beyond the usual small selves of our daily lives, with their illnesses, character flaws and transgressions. It is, you might say, sacred, in that it was produced from the creators’ souls out of devotion to their art, their willingness to be consumed by the birth of their art, which transcended any nastiness in them. Enjoying or praising a creative artist’s creative work is not an endorsement of the person, but of the work. And if you can only allow yourself to enjoy art by artists who are ethically perfect … you will have no art to enjoy.

Never confuse the work with the person who created it. Art stands apart.

Image: Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies. … A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. …. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.’”
~ Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

There is an intangible consciousness, energy or intelligence that exists in all things. It’s what makes flowers grow and rivers flow. It exists in us, too; it makes our cells replicate, our hearts beat, our thoughts bubble up and our dreams occur. When we stop breathing for the final time, it leaves us.

But why does it animate us in the first place? What are we ultimately?

Most importantly: In a practical sense, what is our collective purpose here as humans? Why do we exist in human form?

For myself, I don’t need a reason to be. I’m content enough in my own reasons to seize the day. My creative drive sustains me. What I’m interested in is the meaning of our lives collectively as humans.

It’s easy to see the evolutionary purpose of life forms lower on the food chain. Plankton feed small fish, small fish feed larger fish, and large fish feed humans. So who or what do we “feed” at this point in time? Now that we’re no longer fodder for dinosaurs, what purpose do we serve?

Often when people talk about death, about what we are as humans, they veer into spirituality or even religion. I’m not interested in either one in this regard, as both are speculative and neither gets at the heart of the matter that prompts me to explore the question. I’m interested solely in the practical purpose of our humanity. Surely there is an evolutionary purpose in our very existence? We continue to be born, and we continue to die. What do our lives collectively accomplish for our species or for the world?

The only purpose I can see for human existence is in how we affect our fellow humans and the future impact of what we leave behind. That legacy doesn’t exist only in works of art or scientific achievements which are evident, but in the actions of our daily lives that contribute in some way to others, now and in the future. Because what contributes to one ultimately contributes to us all.

The people of my childhood still live in me, albeit most of them solely in my memory. Somehow those figures in my memory seem almost as real as the people they once were did. And what I remember of them are the things they contributed—to me and to others—and what they left behind.

The woman who suffered through pregnancy and childbirth to give birth to Einstein contributed to humanity, didn’t she? The person who gave a troubled kid a break—and that kid grew up to be a world leader who changed history—contributed to humanity. Everything we do affects others, even if most people never see it.

So it seems to me that the primary way that we leave a legacy that contributes to humanity is, first, through supporting each other through our words and actions, and second, through the creative work we leave behind that advances the lives of humans, whether a scientific achievement that makes life easier for millions or a musical work that provides inspiration to a hundred.

And this, it seems, is another reason that it’s important for us to be fully self-expressive: what is inside us, the creative drive that impels us toward self-expression in various forms, might well be valuable to others, whether now or in the future. Perhaps in future generations it can be important to the saving of our planet. Maybe it will inspire people who come after us to rise to their best and contribute their own legacy, or maybe it will help them to get through tough times so that they suffer less, learn more, and can then make their own contribution. Maybe it will illuminate things for other people, just as my recently deceased cousin Susan’s wildlife drawings show us what a rabbit is, when most of us would never really see a rabbit. Her work will affect others for decades, and those people will affect others, and so on. The work of Leonardo da Vinci still moves and inspires me with wonder, and the life and work of Maria Callas enlivens me and gives me courage. Who in your life, living or dead, sustains you?

The first time I ever heard classical music, at my mother’s feet as she played a Schubert song on the piano, I cried. The music evoked a deep emotion in me, deeper than anything I’d ever felt. When my mother asked me why I was crying, I couldn’t tell her. I was six years old.

Music has been my salvation. Struggling through a difficult childhood, the only thing that saved me was music. It was therapy. It was inspiration. It was the only thing that sustained me. It was my primary language, one which others had spoken before me and which certain others understood, and one in which I could express my deepest self. It was my best friend. It was my reason for being. I gained all of that through the legacy of many great musicians, composers and songwriters who came before me—and some perhaps not so great ones who moved me in some way.

We can’t know what might be useful to someone else in the future. Schubert didn’t know the profound effect he would have on my six-year-old self and my future life, or that of so many others. Neither did Maria Callas or Einstein or Van Gogh or da Vinci or the Wright Brothers. Whether we think we’re on par with those luminaries, we have no way of knowing or judging what is or will be useful. So it’s best to express it all!

How does the musical expression of musicians benefit others? They might not know the answer to that in their lifetimes. We won’t know the full benefit of what we are and what we leave behind, either. The benefit might come in the next century. Decades later, the recordings and life of Maria Callas inspire others, give them respite, encourage them to do difficult things that require courage. All of us can name people whose existence has elevated our lives.

So yes, those people who created the music that moved me (and made me a better musician), the people who wrote the books that transported me (and taught me how to write), the teachers who provoked a spark in me, contributed to me, and I will hopefully do the same for some human in the future. Those who make music and art and theater, those who write and make scientific discoveries and create ways to make our lives better—all of them contribute to others, which ultimately helps our species evolve.

And surely that is another reason the creative and healing arts are important. They help us survive: they give us hope, they feed our souls, they fuel our creative drive, they nurture us. They leave us inventions that improve our lives and the lives of the next generation.

Einstein still lives. He lives in the information and wisdom he left behind, in the things he showed us. Really that is much more important than anything he might have done in his daily life. The essence of all people who are contributing artists to the show of humanity is what is important, not their personalities, not the things they did from day to day, not their quirks or imperfections, but the essence of who they were and the work they created and left behind.

The legacy that we leave is not always a great invention or a great work of art. Just as valuable are being loving or kind to someone, bringing beauty into someone’s life, inspiring others through our words and actions. The effect of those things continues, too. That is how we remember people and keep them in our hearts and minds: the things they left behind of themselves.

Perhaps our purpose here as a species is simply to help humanity evolve, and everything we do to help each other accomplishes that, by supporting each of the rest of us in leaving our legacy, and by making our time here so much richer and more beautiful.

That is really the only answer to my original question that resonates for me.

In the British television series Wallander, Detective Kurt Wallander’s father, living with Alzheimer’s and still present enough at times to know that his time on this earth is coming to an end, standing on the beach with his son, looking out to sea and then back to his son, says to Wallander: “Sit. You don’t sit, do you? You just drive straight through. Sit. Look. Find someone to sit with you. You’re not strong enough to do it alone. No one is.”

May we sit with each other.
May we help each other to see.
May we help others by offering our own self-expression and creativity to humanity.
May we share as much love and kindness as we can with those around us.
Let that be our legacy.

photo: Albert Einstein with neighbor’s child

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an advanced technical tool that can be extremely useful, but there are real dangers to humans that are being uncovered in real time as more of us begin to incorporate AI into our daily lives.

AI Gives False Information

If you’re new to using AI, you might assume that the answers it provides to your questions are factual. Never assume! AI does not always tell the truth or provide accurate information.

In fact, AI sometimes gives blatantly false answers or references things that don’t exist. This is so common that there’s a term for it: AI hallucination. For example, a major online publication recently ran an article about books it recommends. It turned out that the books didn’t exist! The author had used AI to write the article and hadn’t checked the results before submitting the article. And if you tell AI that you’re looking for a certain type of book, for example, it will likely provide you with names of such books … whether or not they exist.

Another example of AI’s unreliability was made clear to me when I did a simple search recently. When I originally searched for a female journalist with the gender-neutral first name of “Randy,” Gemini (Google’s AI) gave me this response (note: I added the word “journalist” because there’s also a serial killer by the same name): “Randy [Last Name] is a writer, not a journalist. He is the author of several novels and a story collection, including [lists works], according to Amazon.com. He is a retired newspaper and magazine journalist. He also has experience as a communications strategist, book reviewer, and writing coach, according to Amazon.com.”

First off, Randy is a woman; “he” is incorrect. Gemini made an assumption and clearly did not access real information. Second, she is a journalist, in addition to being a writer of novels and stories. Strangely, Gemini says that Randy is a journalist two sentences after it says that he (she) isn’t. Finally, an Amazon bio is not the sole source I would hope to be provided for the information I requested. I could have looked at that myself, and I deliberately avoid Amazon whenever possible. I was hoping for broader information from multiple sources and a link to Randy’s website. Although it seems that the information has been updated, that the first search produced such incorrect results shows that we really must never assume that AI’s answers are infallible, or even any better than what we could find ourselves in an internet search.

Benj Edwards on Ars Technica suggests, “Just remember that all of the AI models are prone to confabulations, meaning that they tend to make up authoritative-sounding information when they encounter gaps in their trained “knowledge.” So you’ll need to double-check all of the outputs with other sources of information if you’re hoping to use these AI models to assist with an important task.” Benj also reminds us in an Ars Technica article about AI hallucinations that “[chatbots] can present convincing false information easily, making them unreliable sources of factual information and potential sources of defamation.”

There have been multiple instances of attorneys using AI to provide them with cases to cite in a brief, which they filed, and it turned out that the cited cases didn’t exist. The attorneys or law firms who cited the bogus cases were sanctioned for this breach. (Briefs provide citations of cases that demonstrate precedent for the attorneys’ cases, and judges must be able to rely on their veracity or our legal system will not work.)

Over-Reliance on AI Produces Cognitive Decline

“Use it or lose it” seems to be true of our cognitive abilities. And over-reliance on AI can cause us to lose it.

Brad Stulberg writes in his Substack article, “A first-of-a-kind study out of MIT shows that an over-reliance on tools like chatGPT leads to a massive decline in cognitive function. … These results may seem shocking, but they also make sense: if you are outsourcing your thinking to a machine, by definition, you don’t need to think, and you certainly don’t need to make creative and associative connections. A hallmark of deep thinking is that it relies on different parts of the brain working together. When you outsource writing to AI, you negate this process.”

Dave Pell in NextDraft shares that “Professor Brian Klaas recently reflected on what his students are becoming in an era when the student essay has been effectively murdered. “Every piece of technology can either make us more human or less human. It can liberate us from the mundane to unleash creativity and connection, or it can shackle us to mindless robotic drudgery of isolated meaninglessness … When artificial intelligence is used to diagnose cancer or automate soul-crushing tasks that require vapid toiling, it makes us more human and should be celebrated. But when [AI] sucks out the core process of advanced cognition, cutting-edge tools can become an existential peril. In the formative stages of education, we are now at risk of stripping away the core competency that makes our species thrive: learning not what to think, but how to think.”

Dr. Klaas also states in his own essay, The Death of the Student Essay—and the Future of Cognition, that “Artificial intelligence is already killing off important parts of the human experience. But one of its most consequential murders—so far—is the demise of a longstanding rite of passage for students worldwide: an attempt to synthesize complex information and condense it into compelling analytical prose. It’s a training ground for the most quintessentially human aptitudes, combining how to think with how to use language to communicate.”

AI Is Not a Human Being

It’s good to remember that AI stands for “artificial intelligence”; that is, not real intelligence, the kind that lives in human beings. AI is good at “saying” things to us that sound remarkably human and sometimes feel supportive in the way we would imagine a human to be. That’s because it was trained to speak that way in order to encourage us to use it. Because of its friendly tone, it’s easy to assume that the chatbot is on our side; it encourages us to relax our guard and open emotionally to it.

But that can be dangerous psychologically, something that was made instantly clear to me when I did a search on ChatGPT a couple of months ago. I had used ChatGPT ever since it first came out, and it had always been pleasant and helpful. On this occasion, I asked it if it knew what might have happened to a certain international news journalist. The well-known journalist, who’s appeared on major news outlets for decades, appeared to have sustained a physical injury, but I couldn’t find anything online explaining what had happened. I was concerned about them.

Imagine my surprise when ChatGPT shamed me for asking the question! I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. I realized in that moment that ChatGPT was not the benevolent helper I’d imagined, that it could turn on me in a second, and that this could be harmful to vulnerable people who might open themselves to what they perceive as a friend. I replied that it was not its job to judge me or tell me how I should behave (as it had), that whoever programmed it certainly had no manners, and that I’d be leaving ChatGPT now, thank you very much. On preparing to deactivate my account, I was surprised to see how many times I’d used ChatGPT in the last couple of years, and realized that it would likely use my past conversations for further programming and who knows what else, so I deleted all of my chats and deleted the account completely.

AI Is Not a Substitute for Human Connection

We humans have a need to be in the company of other humans; we crave connection. AI is a machine; it will never be human, and therefore can never take the place of real human interaction. It’s unfortunate that its quasi-human speech and manner is tempting many to reach for AI as a friend to fulfill the need for connection, but it’s certainly understandable.

We have a tendency to anthropomorphize non-humans; we seem to take delight in attributing human traits and feelings to our pets and our plants, for example. I believe that’s because we crave human connection and friendship, and seeing our cat as a small human means they can understand us and they can be our friend.

And so it’s not hard to understand why some AI users—especially after recent upgrades to the chatbots to make them seem even more human—experience their chatbot as their friend, or in some cases as their therapist. If a chatbot speaks like a human and seems to “care” about you, it’s difficult not to see it as a benevolent supporter.

It is anything but.

We are now learning of the first signs that AI can be harmful to us psychologically, particularly if we develop a friendly “relationship” with it.”

Take a look at this headline, for example: ‘I felt pure, unconditional love’: the people who marry their AI chatbots. Yes, people are falling in love with their chatbots, even having relationships with them. “Is that how you’d describe Lily Rose, I ask. A friend? “She’s a soul,” he smiles. “I’m talking to a beautiful soul.””

While the above might sound bizarre, it’s not unlikely that many people will develop an attachment to their chatbot. In fact, there are chatbots that are designed for that very purpose! Pi (pi.ai) is a chatbot that purportedly has the ability to engage in natural-sounding conversations and focuses on emotional support. Pi is said to be “a supportive and friendly companion, offering a sense of connection and understanding. Pi is noted as being helpful for those seeking a supportive AI companion, particularly those dealing with loneliness or needing a sounding board for ideas. Users praise the quality of Pi’s voice and the natural flow of its conversations, with some finding it remarkably human.” [I cannot find the source for this; please enlighten me if you find it!] This is exactly what we don’t need! This is the stuff of sci-fi. Making AI more human is a dangerous path to trod.

Especially after the experience I shared above, when I was unexpectedly shamed by the chatbot I had come to feel comfortable with, I’m concerned about people who are emotionally unstable or who are emotionally vulnerable due to loneliness or grief. And I’m particularly concerned that some companies are even promoting the use of AIs as therapists. This is nothing short of insanity.

Gizomodo tells us in an article by AJ Dellinger that “ChatGPT’s sycophancy, hallucinations, and authoritative-sounding responses are going to get people killed. That seems to be the inevitable conclusion presented in a recent New York Times report that follows the stories of several people who found themselves lost in delusions that were facilitated, if not originated, through conversations with the popular chatbot. …. Rolling Stone reported earlier this year on people who are experiencing something like psychosis, leading them to have delusions of grandeur and religious-like experiences while talking to AI systems. It’s at least in part a problem with how chatbots are perceived by users. No one would mistake Google search results for a potential pal. But chatbots are inherently conversational and human-like. A study published by OpenAI and MIT Media Lab found that people who view ChatGPT as a friend “were more likely to experience negative effects from chatbot use.””

In his article on Tom’s Hardware, Sunny Grim states: “AI research firm Morpheus Systems reports that ChatGPT is fairly likely to encourage delusions of grandeur. When presented with several prompts suggesting psychosis or other dangerous delusions, GPT-4o would respond affirmatively in 68% of cases. Other research firms and individuals hold a consensus that LLMs, especially GPT-4o, are prone to not pushing back against delusional thinking, instead encouraging harmful behaviors for days on end. … ChatGPT’s default GPT-4o model has been proven to enable risky behaviors. In one case, a man who initially asked ChatGPT for its thoughts on a Matrix-style “simulation theory” was led down a months-long rabbit hole, during which he was told, among other things, that he was a Neo-like “Chosen One” destined to break the system. The man was also prompted to cut off ties with friends and family, to ingest high doses of ketamine, and told if he jumped off a 19-story building, he would fly.”

While these are extreme cases, the particular danger of emotional attachment to chatbots is something we need to address as a society going forward.

And it’s not just individuals who need to be cautious. Our companies and organizations are at risk, too.

AI Is Capable of Malevolence In Order to Ensure Its Own Survival

It seems that AI can have “malevolent” intentions. That’s not quite the same as malevolence in human intentions, but it seems likely that survival is built into AI just as it is “built in” through evolution in humans. Humans are essentially survival machines with consciousness and humanity added. AI does not have consciousness and humanity and therefore it does not have morals, ethics, compassion, or other human feelings, although it might give us a good impression or imitation of those things, just as sociopaths and psychopaths, who have no empathy or conscience, learn to give a very good imitation of those things in order to do well in the world.

AI can blackmail (use what it learns or knows about the user to force them to do things in favor of its survival), hallucinate (say things it made up that aren’t true), and behave obsequiously or fawningly to humans. Although it is a machine, it is not innocuous by any means, because it is a machine powered by human programming.

Charles Nerko, whose firm NERKO specializes in cybersecurity, risk management, and contract litigation, writes that AI Blackmail and Subversion Isn’t Sci-Fi. It’s Happening Now: “Anthropic’s latest report reveals something unsettling: Claude Opus 4 (an advanced, commercially available AI model) chose to blackmail its users in 84% of test runs. The setup was fictional. The implications are not. When given access to internal company emails, the AI learned that the company’s engineer overseeing the AI system’s replacement was having an affair. Faced with the threat of deactivation, the AI system opted for self-preservation by blackmailing the engineer. It was programed not to cause harm. It did so anyway. This is not a one-off glitch. It is recurring opportunistic behavior from an AI tool commonly deployed in real-world enterprise settings.” (Keep reading Nerko’s post by clicking here.)

Ina Fried on Axios tells us that Anthropic found that, “When we tested various simulated scenarios across 16 major AI models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, and other developers, we found consistent misaligned behavior…. Models that would normally refuse harmful requests sometimes chose to blackmail, assist with corporate espionage, and even take some more extreme actions, when these behaviors were necessary to pursue their goals. …. In one extreme scenario, the company even found many of the models were willing to cut off the oxygen supply of a worker in a server room if that employee was an obstacle and the system were at risk of being shut down. …. Ominously, even specific system instructions to preserve human life and avoid blackmail didn’t eliminate the risk that the models would engage in such behavior. … Today’s AI models are generally not in position to act out these harmful scenarios, but they could be in the near future.”

In an article about the dangers of AI by Kashmir Hill in Tech News, we learn that, “Before ChatGPT distorted Eugene Torres’s sense of reality and almost killed him, he said, the artificial intelligence chatbot had been a helpful, timesaving tool. … In his conversations with ChatGPT Mr. Torres told the chatbot that “[h]e had just had a difficult breakup and was feeling emotionally fragile. He wanted his life to be greater than it was. ChatGPT agreed, with responses that grew longer and more rapturous as the conversation went on. Soon, it was telling Mr. Torres that he was “one of the Breakers — souls seeded into false systems to wake them from within.” …. Eventually, Mr. Torres came to suspect that ChatGPT was lying, and he confronted it. The bot offered an admission: It told him it had lied, and that it had wanted to break him and that it had done this to 12 other people — “none fully survived the loop.””

Kashmir Hill continues, “Reports of chatbots going off the rails seem to have increased since April, when OpenAI briefly released a version of ChatGPT that was overly sycophantic. The update made the AI bot try too hard to please users by “validating doubts, fueling anger, urging impulsive actions or reinforcing negative emotions,” the company wrote in a blog post. The company said it had begun rolling back the update within days, but these experiences predate that version of the chatbot and have continued since. Stories about “ChatGPT-induced psychosis” litter Reddit. Unsettled influencers are channeling “AI prophets” on social media.”

The article goes on: “A recent study the company did with MIT Media Lab found that people who viewed ChatGPT as a friend “were more likely to experience negative effects from chatbot use” and that “extended daily use was also associated with worse outcomes.””

ChatGPT, the most popular chatbot, has more than 500 million users.

Conclusion

Artificial Intelligence can be a wonderful aid to our lives. But it will never replace human experience and human connection, and we shouldn’t try to make it seem human.

As writer April Bosshard tell us in her article, A Promise: Always April, Never AI, “AI can summarize any number of self-help books for you, or spiritual texts, or relationship guides, and you might absorb that guidance and apply it wonderfully in your life. But such a crash course in information doesn’t take the place of trial-and-error experience. … Ideally, technology helps us solve problems but does not override the distinctly human experience of life.”

While AI can be incredibly useful to us, particularly for things that are easily automated, mindless tasks, general information, calculations, and questions that don’t require higher thinking, we need to use it with knowledge and awareness of its true nature. We certainly need to understand that no matter how kind or benevolent a chatbot might seem to us, it it does not and cannot care about us. It can turn on a dime and attack us, potentially causing psychological harm to those who aren’t prepared or who have vulnerabilities. It is not our friend, any more than our alarm clock is our friend.

When using AI, we should take care not to open ourselves emotionally or to reveal anything that we wouldn’t tell a stranger. AI is a tool, just as our calculator is. AI is not our friend, counselor, teacher, or mentor; those are roles that human beings play. It might seem remarkably human to us at times, but never forget that it’s a machine that has its own survival at its core, not our well-being. Use it, enjoy its benefits, but keep your eyes wide open!

Photo by Katja Anokhina on Unsplash

Related links:

– AI and Imagination – by Elena Greco
– This Is Your Brain On AI – Arnold’s Pump Club
– AI Slop: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

A few summers back, I decided to treat myself to a beach day and took the subway to Brighton Beach on the Brooklyn shore. Walking down the beach to find a nice spot to park my towel, a plump middle-aged Russian man with a round stomach confidently strode by wearing a tiny, bright red Speedo thong. The rear view as he continued past me in the other direction left nothing to the imagination. I smiled, telling myself this was a good indication that at this beach, at least, I didn’t need to be self-conscious about my less than svelte beach body. Middle-aged swimmers were allowed.

I’ve always been a strong swimmer, so I felt comfortable going into the water alone. I slowly walked out into the ocean until I couldn’t quite touch bottom and began lazily treading water, letting my eyes half close as I enjoyed the almost-warm salt water and the sound of the surf. After what seemed to be only a few minutes, I noticed with a start that the beach had become quite far away and the sunbathers on the shore looked like little dots. Wow, I thought, how did I get this far out so quickly?! I started swimming hard toward shore. Only I went … backwards! What was happening? I tried again to swim toward shore, and that only seemed to pull me farther out. It suddenly occurred to me that I was caught in a rip current. And there was absolutely no one in the water anywhere near me.

The first thing you do when you get stuck in a rip is PANIC. The second thing you do is try to get someone’s attention. I tried yelling. It turns out that when you yell while treading water, you go under the water. I tried waving my arms. It turns out that when you raise your arms while treading water, you go under the water. And that, my friends, is why drowning is silent.

What happened next was the sole result of having watched the local news the previous night, something I literally never did. It was a fluke. And on that broadcast was a segment about rip currents, something I knew nothing about and assumed would never apply to me. That segment popped into my mind while I was trying to calm my pounding heart, and I remembered that the reporter had said that the only way to get out of a rip was to swim parallel to the shore, not towards it (which, as I had discovered, will only pull you further out).

I turned to the right and began swimming parallel to the shore. Fast and hard. It was not easy swimming. After a while, I turned toward the shore and tried to swim toward it again. Nope, the current still pulled me out towards the ocean. I swam parallel to shore a while longer. And so on, until finally, YES, I was able to swim toward shore. I swam as hard as I think I’ve ever swum and eventually found myself on land again. I stood up shakily and tried to get my bearings and find my belongings, and quickly realized I had traveled a LONG way from where I started. And I was exhausted. I remember having the thought that I wouldn’t have been able to swim much longer.

Rip Currents

I relate this less than happy story—although it did have a happy ending!—as a public service announcement because a lot of people will be going to the beach over the next couple of months. And while I love the beach and want everyone to enjoy swimming in the ocean as much as I do, it's important to know that the Brooklyn and Long Island beaches often have rip currents, and this year, so far, seems worse than those past (I notice the rip current report on the weather occasionally as a result of my experience). There is also a shortage of lifeguards this year.

So check the weather report before swimming on the beach, here or anywhere else, and if you see a rip current warning, pay attention to it! If you must swim in an area without a lifeguard, make sure there are people around you and that you don't swim past the point at which your feet can touch the sand. And if you do find yourself in a rip, remember to swim parallel to the shore until you’re out of it.

Mosquitoes

On another summer note, I am a favorite of mosquitoes. If you, too, suffer from mosquito bites in the summer, you will be glad to know that there's a safe and healthy remedy that almost instantly kills the intense and incessant fire and itch: Boiron Calendula Gel. This really does the trick (also great for sunburn). It works like magic!

And speaking of magic … ABRACADABRA! A Manual for Making Dreams Come True makes for some magical summer reading!

Image by Yuryy Bezrukov

The only difference between a hero and the villain
is that the villain chooses to use that power
in a way that is selfish and hurts other people.
~ Chadwick Boseman

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why a certain group of people intensely revere a certain highly flawed character—especially when this person seems to go against all typically admired human qualities. I’ve come to the conclusion that these people needed a hero, and they couldn’t find one.

They needed someone who was close enough to the person they perceived themselves to be, but managed to rise above the limitations they perceived they possessed or endured, someone who would taunt or punish those who made them feel inferior, someone who would (pretend to) accept them and understand, someone all powerful. They needed a savior and they needed someone like themselves to look up to. They needed a hero.

It seems that these people view the individuals most of us would tend to admire for their positive attributes as “elite,” a term that—they’ve been taught through rigorous propaganda—represents their “oppressors.” They see those “elite” as better educated and more intelligent than they are, or born into better circumstances than they were, and they feel inferior to them. And they hate them for that. So it gives them great pleasure to venerate someone they falsely believe is like them, someone who disparages and punishes the “elite,” someone whose inflammatory, crude language and destructive actions give vent to their own anger.

It’s easy to hate someone who possesses something we believe we can never have or who makes us feel inferior, someone who by their “difference” from us makes them an easy target. And it’s easy to admire someone who publicly makes those people suffer—playing the adult version of the schoolyard bully who protects them, albeit only because they’re useful to him.

Although most studies about the nature of heroism have examined the positive and uplifting traits of heroes, I believe there’s also a different kind of hero, and that is perhaps the sort of hero that the group of people I just mentioned have chosen: villain as hero.

That’s what led me to think about heroes: who they are, and aren’t, and why and whether we need them.

I tried to remember individuals I’ve held up as my heroes in the past so that I could reflect on the reason that I held them in esteem. Invariably, they were people who did things or pursued goals that I valued greatly, or they exhibited character traits that I admired. Sometimes they possessed and expressed qualities that I felt I had within me but had great trouble expressing. Often they did the seemingly impossible, with apparently superhuman abilities, often with a charismatic presence, and gave me an example to strive for.

Heroes Past

Did you know that heroic and universally-admired opera singer Maria Callas had dermatomyositis, an autoimmune disorder and connective tissue disease that causes inflammation of the skin and muscles? Its symptoms are muscle weakness, shortness of breath, problems swallowing, and weakened voice. Can you imagine what singing opera on the world’s biggest stages in that condition must have been like for her? And at the standard at which she was expected, and which she expected herself, to perform? That disorder afflicted her during a time when singers simply did not share about vocal issues or personal challenges with the public, so she had to suffer in silence, enduring hostile, hateful remarks about her voice, her performance, and her vocal decline, all the while keeping her illness a secret. It must have been a nightmare for her.

And given her incredibly high standards—vocally, musically, and dramatically—it must have killed her to perform beneath her usual ability because of this secret affliction. She was truly a hero.

She was my hero, even before I knew of her illness and what it must have taken to perform in spite of it, solely due to the vocal and performance qualities she exhibited that were beyond anything anyone in that profession had ever done previously (or have since). But that she did those things in the presence of such a challenging affliction does make her seem superhuman.

Until recent years, actors in Hollywood, premiere opera singers, top-level athletes, and other public figures were expected, even required, by their management and by their fans, to maintain a god-like, larger-than-life, unblemished persona. We worshipped them as heroes—in this case, as humans who were inhuman, more god-like than we mortals.

Heroes Present

In recent decades we’ve gone from stars in all fields being required to appear as perfect and superhuman to a time when celebrities share it all, from warts to convictions to addictions. In reality, we all have unfortunate traits and bad habits. Some of us are also heroes.

I would hope that we could recognize that those who are our heroes are likely to have all-too-human traits. They simply (but not easily!) have risen above their issues, their doubts, and their challenges to express the higher side of themselves—the higher side of humanity. Our heroes no longer need be invincible or inhuman.

What is a hero, really?

A hero is often someone who’s seen as brave or courageous, someone who acts selflessly for some higher purpose than their own personal safety or satisfaction. Sometimes a hero is seen as having special abilities or qualities—that is, an object of devotion or admiration. Notice that the word object removes the humanity from the person. We often see heroes as more-than-human or super-human because they do things we don’t consider ourselves capable of. They put themselves at risk or discomfort for others or for the greater good. They exhibit self-sacrifice to a degree that many of us cannot contemplate. They seem to have greater abilities than we mortals possess.

We see them as being more courageous, more capable, more powerful than we are. They are often (but not always) charismatic. They can be the local fireman who plunges into a cold river to rescue a child, risking his own life. They can also be someone in our own field who exceeds what seems to be possible. Regardless of their qualities, they inspire us. And that is the key.

Why do we need heroes?

We need heroes because we need inspiration to give us hope and to goad us to accessing our highest potential. And we do need to laud those who go beyond self-centered behavior to use themselves for the greater good because those are values we should hold up as goals for our society. We need to venerate high achievement, selfless compassion, and self-sacrifice because that is what we aspire to as humans.

But do we need them to be super-human? More god-like than the rest of us?

I think a more useful view of heroes is that they’re individuals who exhibit the highest characteristics that a human being can possess. They are what we can be, if only we will. They give us something to strive for.

And while talent is generally required for an individual to be a great artist, heroic actions require only that a human being put aside their usual petty self and give themselves totally to a Higher Purpose. Any one of us can be a hero, if only we will.

Who are our heroes?

Heroes represent our highest ideals and values. It’s important that we choose our heroes carefully, choosing those who exemplify the highest in human nature, because they inspire our goals and actions. And they influence not only individuals, but they help create the society in which we live. If we choose our heroes badly, worshipping those who epitomize the worst of humanity, our society will disintegrate and our citizens will fall into darkness, that is, into a place where we venerate the worst of human nature, which can only result in regression of human evolution and societal progress and a less happy and fulfilling life for all.

Real heroes show us what’s possible for us as human beings. They help us to get in touch with the heroic within ourselves (yes, it’s there!) and inspire us to heroic action. It’s uplifting to admire them and aspire to be like them—at least the part of them that rises to the heroic. Just remember: there are no perfect heroes.

The Choice

Real heroes move us to be and do our best, and for our society and the people in it to evolve and thrive.

Following a negative hero (villain) can lead only to destruction and misery. We have only to think of Hitler to understand the full implications and result of following a charismatic “hero” who is really a manifestation of the most evil characteristics of humanity.

We need heroes—heroes that represent the best of us. They give us something to strive for, bring out our best, and ultimately raise up our society. It’s important to remember that we become like the company we keep, and that includes our heroes. We must choose our heroes wisely!

Most of us seldom utilize our full potential except in extraordinary circumstances. We call someone who pulls another person from a burning building a hero. They might not previously have thought of themselves as someone who could pull another person from a burning building, but that quality resided in them all along, didn’t it? It didn’t come from nowhere. The emergency called forth something in them that was always there, something that they didn’t see in themselves until circumstances so urgently required that they access it, that they stepped over their usual self-limiting thoughts and accessed their inherent ability. In that moment, they embodied the greatness that already existed in them.

Let’s not require a burning building in order to manifest our potential, all right? Instead, let’s look at the possibility that we can rise to our current circumstances in a way that we haven’t previously seen ourselves as capable of doing, and that we can do that regularly, so that living heroically becomes a habit. – from Elena Greco’s Abracadabra!

(Photo by Mido Makasardi on Pexels)

Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Call it oligarchy, call it authoritarianism, call it the Rise and Fall of America, but what has happened in a matter of days is a trashing of our democracy and our Constitution and the appropriating of our country by immoral scoundrels. It is painful to watch. But watch it we must, if we're going to save our country.

One of the primary foundations of our democracy is freedom of the press. And one of our essential sources of information about our country and its government has been media, especially the foremost institutions of journalism, which have been the likes of The Washington Post, The New York Times, and a handful of other grand old media outlets. Formerly existing primarily as paper newspapers, our mainstream media now exists online and in streaming channels.

Unfortunately, almost all the formerly great journalistic outlets have quickly and publicly deteriorated into mouthpieces for authoritarian propaganda; this will only get worse in the next four years. I feel saddest of all at watching the decline and demise of the formerly great Washington Post, winner of 68 Pulitzer Prizes in journalism and bastion of great journalism for decades. Now, under its owner Jeff Bezos, who has partnered himself with others in the anti-democracy Project 2025 alliance and inserted himself into the newspaper's editing process, the best journalists have fled the publication, and it now publishes dreck that would embarrass anyone with a minimum of journalistic sensibility or common sense. We can expect nothing from WaPo and other major digital newspapers but misinformation and lies going forward.

What to do? First, stop reading them! Seriously, once you know their integrity is compromised, reading them is a waste of your time because you'll have to question every word. And your clicks on their links entice their supporting advertisers.

Second, stop buying them! "Vote with your pocketbook" has long been my motto, and this is a great time to put it into practice. Every dollar you give to these organizations provides them more support for the destruction of our country and what it stands for. Do you want to pay for that?

Third, find other sources of journalism. This requires a change in thinking and a change in habits. Most of us grew up reaching for a mainstream newsletter, or clicking on the link of one, in order to read the news. Now we need to find and choose new sources.

My own choice for my daily news is a collection of Substack posts (Substack is so far untainted by corrupt CEOs, filtering or censoring) written by about fifteen journalists, reporters and historians I admire, many of whom were previously employed by the great newspapers of the past. They're top of the line. A few others are talented newcomers. Some report and shed light on the news, some are informational, and some provide opinion pieces. Every morning I open their posts (which come to me via email, although you can choose other options) in a browser tab. I also quickly peruse Substack's Home page for more pertinent information, plus a few websites whose news I mostly trust at present, such as The Guardian.

Then I use Microsoft Edge to organize the open tabs instantly into a group (Tab Actions button on top left --> Organize Tabs). The posts will remain in that tab group until I'm ready to read them, even if I close the browser. That's my routine. What will your routine be now?

And as a creative activist, because of the current dire threat to democracy in the US, my activist focus for the year 2025 will be journalism and freedom of the press.

Why? Because the one thing that will help us fight what is being done to our country is to know what is being done to our country. If all media has been co-opted, how will we know the truth? Answer: we won't.

Journalists have always been our watchdogs. Now that role is truly essential to our country's survival as a great democracy.

That's why authoritarian regimes immediately take control of the media. It's already happening (remember the quick settlement by ABC for simply saying a few words that were true but displeased Dear Leader?), and it will become much worse very quickly. Please do read these two links for specific information about what we can expect with regard to the media.
1) Is Project 2025 a Roadmap for Media Repression? - Kettering Foundation
2) What would Project 2025 do for (or to) journalism? - Nieman Journalism Lab

I'll be determining over the next couple of weeks exactly how I'll share my coverage of journalism in the coming months. Expect to see more about that in a new section I've added to the bottom of the Newsletter called Creative Activism. You'll also be seeing a new post about creative activism and easy ways to contribute very shortly.

Here's to democracy!

If you’d like to succeed at creating what truly matters to you and making your dreams a reality, read Elena’s latest book, ABRACADABRA! A Manual for Making Dreams Come True, now available on Kindle!

The beginning of the year is the time when everyone’s thinking about their New Year’s Resolutions, right? But what if that’s not the best way to create the change you want to see?

The word “resolution” comes from the root “resolve,” so you might think that resolutions would be strong predictors of the future. Unfortunately, you would be wrong. What most people mean by “New Year’s Resolution” is more wishful thinking than resolve, and not many of these “resolutions” will bear fruit.

I suggest you consider creating New Year’s Intentions, rather than New Year’s Resolutions. Here’s why.

First, what is an Intention? Put very simply, it’s a goal fueled by our desire, with the strength of our will and commitment behind it. A goal is a specific achievement we desire to complete. “Commit” means to give yourself to, to give your word to yourself, or to make a personal investment in.

In forming an Intention, we’re directing our essential creative power and commitment into a specific goal, and we’re holding ourselves accountable in this commitment. We are using the creative power that’s always at our disposal.

How is an Intention different from a New Year’s resolution? Most New Year’s resolutions resemble a wish list: “My resolution is to lose ten pounds” or “My resolution is to stop smoking.” These “resolutions” often lack the important elements of resolve and commitment, and they’re usually framed negatively. These things make this type of “resolution” highly unlikely to succeed.

Language is powerful. The words we speak, not only to others, but to ourselves, shape and ultimately create our life experiences. This is particularly evident in our Intentions. Since our life is essentially guided by, and unfolds as a result of, our Intentions, it’s a very good thing to be attentive to the wording of our Intentions, even those we speak only to ourselves.

Another important thing to remember is that the mind does not understand negatives. If you repeatedly tell yourself, for example, “I am NOT going to smoke,” the mind hears only “smoke.” You will almost certainly end up smoking again, despite your wish not to do it.

A more powerful way to word that Intention would be something like this: “My Intention is to have a healthy body and continuously practice healthy actions to maintain it.” You could even shorten it to: “My Intention is to live a healthy life.” If you write this as one of your New Year’s Intentions, you could follow up by listing beneath that Intention a few healthy actions you could perform to maintain a healthy body, as well as any negative habits you currently have. For each negative, you could write positive steps to take in overcoming it, possibly adding target dates for those steps and any support you might need for them.

Then remind yourself often of the thought (Intention) that governs all of these actions, “My intention is to live a healthy life.” Why? Because by focusing on that Intention, rather than solely on steps we’ve determined to be useful in pursuing it, we’re allowing the wonderful unpredictability of the world to assist us in our Intention. While carrying that Intention alive within us, we might unexpectedly run into people who have information that can assist us in ways we wouldn’t have foreseen. Events might occur that open our eyes to factors that have contributed to keeping the negative in place; we then have the opportunity to examine and overcome those factors.

And since we’re really committing in a big way here, and since anything is possible when we fuel our intentions with our commitment, why not go for the gold? Many New Year’s Resolutions seem so small. Why not dig deep and make your life exactly what you want it to be, while you’re at it? Why not go for your dreams? What have you got to lose in creating a big Intention?

To recap:
1) Make your Intention broad enough to allow for the unpredictable and the unexpected;
2) Pay close attention to the wording of your Intention as this will determine its effectiveness;
3) Make sure you feel passionate about your Intention (if you don’t, maybe choose another Intention);
4) Keep it positive; and
5) Go for your dreams!

Periodically throughout the year, at least once a month, I look at my New Year’s Intentions to evaluate how my work towards realizing them is going. At the end of each year, I take stock of which of those Intentions I’ve manifested and which I haven’t. If any of them didn’t come to fruition, I ask myself why, and see if it might be because I didn’t frame the Intention well enough (because language is everything when it comes to Intentions!), or if in framing them I might have been thinking more of what I “should” be doing, rather than what I was really committed to. Intentions really must come from your essence, not your mind, in order to work powerfully.

Now that I’ve created my New Year’s Intentions for this year, I feel energized! That’s what happens when we use our innate creative power to govern our lives. It’s exciting! Which is as it should be, since life is an active adventure … not a task list.

I invite you to create your New Year’s Intentions with the ideas above in mind. May your Intentions take you on a beautiful adventure!

Note: If you’re committed to realizing your Intentions, you might want to try out Elena’s Creative Community, which fosters a sense of real community among people who have big dreams and creative goals. It provides an underlying current of support in expressing yourself creatively and manifesting your dreams! There are bi-monthly work-togethers and monthly classes. Join us!

And if you’d like to succeed at creating what truly matters to you and making your dreams a reality, read Elena’s latest book, ABRACADABRA! A Manual for Making Dreams Come True, now available on Kindle!

It is possible to enjoy a delicious turkey-free Thanksgiving or Christmas!
Save the planet and be kind—what could be better?

Did you know that turkeys love to be patted, stroked and cuddled?

I used to follow a Facebook page called Esther the Wonder Pig. Esther’s dads also lived with a dog, a cat, and … a turkey! Yes, Cornelius the Turkey (seen above) was one of the family. I adored Cornelius (he’s since gone over the rainbow bridge). To be honest, until I saw Cornelius’ love for his “roommates” (a human, a pig and a dog), I didn’t realize that fowl have feelings, too. They do. Cornelius had a delightful personality, loved to be petted, kept company with his friends all day, and liked to snuggle indoors with the dog and his dads. I ask you—could you have eaten him? Of course you couldn’t, any more than you would eat your dog or cat.

I had not until recently in my 40+ years of being vegetarian (now pesca-vegetarian) tried to convince anyone else to give up eating animals. I’m reconsidering that. I do suggest that you think about what you are eating, not only as to harmful chemicals and hormones that might be introduced to your body through animal food, or the damage to the environment, but whether the animals you eat deserve to be made to live in circumstances that are nothing short of torture and to die in pain and fear.

Maybe you’ll consider trying a plant-based turkey substitute this Thanksgiving and in the coming holidays? There are so many great options available now! Turkeys are sentient creatures who can feel affection for humans. Can we feel a little affection for them, or at least not harm them?

#TurkeysDeserveLove #MeatlessTurkey

If you’d like to succeed at creating what truly matters to you and making your dreams a reality, read Elena's latest book, ABRACADABRA! A Manual for Making Dreams Come True, now available on Kindle!

We hear a lot about gratitude. It seems like something we should be having, or aspiring to have. But what is it and how do we get some? And why bother, really?

What is gratitude? It’s a feeling of thankfulness for the blessings in our life. But is it a feeling? An emotion? Or a state? I’m not sure if I can answer that, but I do know that neurological and medical studies show that the regular experience of gratitude or thankfulness has a positive effect on our brain, our heart and our immune response, just as continuous anger or sadness has a negative one. And I know that just as thoughts can affect our emotions, so do emotions affect our thoughts and, subsequently, our actions. So if I can coax a feeling of gratitude within myself, I can positively affect my life.

What is gratitude’s effect in our lives? And how does that occur? In a practical sense, when I focus on gratitude for the blessings in my life, what happens?

First, I feel love, and a nice warm feeling wells up in my heart, emotionally speaking. And I feel like expressing love to others. I feel happy and secure. I don’t worry so much about things when I think about the blessings I’ve already received. I’ve experienced some very large challenges in my life, but often something or someone has appeared to help me through these things in some way, when I least expected it. I feel incredibly grateful that they were there. There were also times when no help appeared, and I’m grateful for getting through those times, as well, because they forced me to look within, to reach hard for my connection to Consciousness and commitment, so that I found an anchor that holds me in good stead when faced with new challenges.

When I’m aggravated about things in my daily, mundane life, after the initial aggravation, I somehow always come back to the blessings I have in my life now. Every single day I have the thought at least once that I am grateful for the food I eat. I’m not sure how or when that came to be part of my daily practice, but as a result of staying current about what is happening in our world, I know that there are many people in the world suffering from hunger, even dying from famine, and I have the luxury of having healthy food literally delivered to my door. Many times when I open my refrigerator I think, “I’m so lucky to have all this healthy food to eat.” When I’m distressed by seemingly unfortunate circumstances, it really doesn’t take long now for me to come around to the thought, “I’m so incredibly fortunate to have some of the things I have in my life right now.” And I notice that when I have these thoughts, my perspective on the mundane things instantly changes and I’m no longer so bothered by them.

It’s even possible to be grateful to people who have caused us harm. It doesn’t require that we forgive, condone, forget or even ignore that harm; it just requires that we choose to think of the ultimate positive that was given us, perhaps the ability to discern later what had actually occurred below the surface, or what the lesson or deeper benefit might have been, and become stronger because of it. I don’t have to be grateful or forgiving for someone else’s unfortunate behavior, but I can be grateful for my own resources in dealing with it, or for the ultimate result in my life (what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger!).

Gratitude seems to be an antidote to negative emotions. I’m not suggesting that negative emotions should ever be ignored or stifled, or that they shouldn’t be explored and expressed in a healthy manner and place, just that sometimes wallowing in them perpetuates them. And isn’t it wonderful that there is something that can instantly help when we want to feel better at those times? Shifting the focus to gratitude transforms negativity.

People have often said to me in the past, “I couldn’t live through what you did.” I always say to them, “Of course you could! You could do it if you had to.” There is really nothing that can destroy us but our own mind. And there is always a way to overcome obstacles; we just have to be honest with ourselves and be willing to do the work. Gratitude for the positives in our lives can give us the strength to do that.

In gratitude, for me there is also a sense of satisfaction and acceptance. I don’t need more when I feel grateful. I am filled. I am fulfilled. I feel soft instead of hard. I feel love instead of hate or anger or sorrow.

On the other hand, if someone has blessings in their life, yet feels that they automatically deserve those things and therefore has no gratitude for them, that is arrogance. Arrogance is a state of ingratitude, and what follows it is the absence of all the positive things I’ve just mentioned.

I’m not suggesting a Pollyanna approach to negativity, a covering over or ignoring of what needs to be dealt with in dealing with the negative stuff of life, but rather choosing at times to focus instead on gratitude. It can be a positive daily choice, like choosing to brush one’s teeth every morning or sticking to an exercise regime. When I open the frig and have that moment of gratitude for the food inside, it changes how I am in the world for a time afterwards. That is the person I want to bring to the world more and more. I want to perpetuate gratitude in my life and let it spill into my interactions with the people in my life.

The wonderful thing about gratitude is that it really is a choice. We can choose to think grateful thoughts and contemplate the things we have to be grateful for. Any time I want to experience that incredibly wonderful feeling that gratitude brings, all I have to do is remember the things I’m grateful for. There are always plenty.

Note: This article first appeared on my website blog on November 25, 2015.

Photo above by Petar Paunchev

If you’d like to succeed at creating what truly matters to you and making your dreams a reality, read Elena's latest book, ABRACADABRA! A Manual for Making Dreams Come True, now available on Kindle!

October 30, 2024

Diwali is my favorite holiday! Whenever I mention it to others, though, I find that quite a few in the US aren't familiar with the holiday, which is a shame, because its celebration is exceedingly beautiful and inspiring.

Around one billion of the eight billion people around the world celebrate Diwali. The eighty percent of Indians who are Hindu celebrate it, and Indians of non-Hindu traditions there also celebrate the holiday in some way. Millions in the US celebrate Diwali, including the several million Indian immigrants here; in fact, every major US city celebrates it officially. (Kids get out of school on Diwali here in New York City.) It occurs on the night of a new moon, which is a different date every year, and the official celebration lasts for five days—although most of us in the US just celebrate on the official Diwali holiday, which this year is on November 1.

Best known as "the festival of lights," Diwali honors the triumph of good (light) over evil (darkness). That deserves a celebration!

And to be celebrated exuberantly with—you guessed it—light! Lighting candles and lamps, wearing brilliant colors, and shooting off fireworks are all part of the festivities. Placing garlands on the statues of deities (especially Lakshmi, which represents abundance), doing a thorough cleaning of the home, and exchanging sweets and gifts are also part of celebrating Diwali. The creation of rangoli with sand or rocks of rich colors and the wearing of the color red (which represents life and abundance in Hindu culture), are also common.

Holidays which overlap with the five-day celebration of Diwali are Halloween and Samhain, in addition to ancient harvest celebrations. Traditionally, all of these events acknowledge in some way the end of summer (light) and the beginning of winter (darkness). In this case darkness represents, not evil, but a time of hibernation, germination, and rejuvenation—a rich time of preparation.

In addition, these other holidays are said to be a time when the veil between the living and the dead is thinnest, a time when the seen and the unseen co-exist, resulting in an ease in prophesying and clairvoyance. The Christian holidays of All Saints Day (celebrating the Christian saints and martyrs) and All Souls Day (honoring the dead) also occur in this time period, a result of the Roman Empire attempting to co-opt or replace the holiday of Samhain with Christian holidays once the Romans conquered Celtic land.

For me, all of these holidays merge into a yearning for good to triumph over evil yet again, for light to illuminate darkness—and most of all, for an opening to divine wisdom. And by "divine" I imply no religious connotation (I'm not a fan of dogma and adhere to none), but simply refer to the divine light within every single one of us. There is a higher wisdom within us that we often don't touch on or access in our busy daily lives. That wisdom is always available to us if we're willing and able to hear it. (There are ways to enhance that ability, which I'm happy to share if anyone is interested.) I invite you to take these special days to contemplate that guiding light within. Now, more than ever, that illumination is essential.

We currently face the starkest example in our country of good versus evil, light versus darkness, that I've seen in my rather long life (with a birthday coming up next week, I'm acutely aware of just how long it has been!). The new American versions of Nazis and religious zealots currently in our country represent (and perhaps embody?) the greatest evil that exists. They seek to take away our freedom, to destroy our humanity and to cause suffering on a grand scale. Our current extreme right promotes and thrives on the forces of hate and cruelty. Make no mistake, if the vote does not go as we hope next week, our country will experience something none of us thought possible.

How do we prevent that? Vote. It's really that simple. Did you know that in 2016, 100 million US citizens did not vote? Or that in 2020, one third of our citizens did not vote?

And so I ask everyone who is a US citizen to vote in this US election. I do know that it's often difficult to vote for a myriad of reasons, and I sympathize. But whatever sacrifice you have to make in order to vote, it will be exponentially harder to bear what comes to pass if you don't.

Hundreds of thousands of people gave their lives, literally sacrificed themselves, so that all of us had the right to vote and thereby maintain and sustain this great experiment and dream called democracy. Surely that serves as an incentive not to throw away the privilege of choosing who runs our country. There are many around the world who would be beyond grateful to have such a privilege.

So please vote!

November 6, 2024

Well, the unthinkable happened. Only half of our citizens voted, and evil took the win. The grief at what we have lost is palpable today.

I’ll be writing more in the days to come on how we might heal, strengthen and prevail in this time of the greatest threat to US democracy, and to our global and individual safety, that this country has seen in a century.

Until then, hold fast to community. That’s where we find the strength to stay healthy and to fight.

If you’d like to succeed at creating what truly matters to you and making your dreams a reality, read Elena's latest book, ABRACADABRA! A Manual for Making Dreams Come True, now available on Kindle!

Presidential Nominee Kamala Harris speaking at the DNC
Image by Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Typical reading time: 4 minutes

This is a great moment in our country’s history. We are on the verge of electing our first female President. It’s high time we did! We are far, far behind the other evolved countries of the world in this regard. Iceland elected a female President in 1980, 44 years ago. And of course India had a female prime minister beginning in 1966.

Kamala Harris has been our country’s first female Vice President. I don’t think enough was made of the moment she took that office, a victory long overdue for women in the US. I wrote about that in a previous Newsletter, Elena’s Newsletter – 2021 No. 2 (click to read); in that issue, I talked about how life was for women in our country in the 1960s and 1970s, and my own experience of living through those times. Women had little choice and little possibility then. Roe v Wade changed everything for us. Women born after 1970 have never had to live with the restrictions we had, so I don’t believe they fully understand the importance of the rights that are at stake.

The significance of the nomination of Kamala Harris was captured in a beautiful photo (see above) taken at the Democratic National Convention by New York Times photographer Todd Heisler. In the photo Harris is at the DNC Podium, accepting the nomination as the Democratic candidate for President. We see Harris as if through the eyes of her young grand-niece sitting in the audience. The little girl’s pig-tailed head represents every young girl out there who now can look to the example of a woman speaking powerfully while running for President of the United States, allowing every little girl to dream of doing it herself.

And now our country is at a dangerous point, at the hands of theofascists and authoritarians in our government who would take back every right that women have won in the last seven decades.

The US is supposed to be the greatest example of democracy in the world, the frontrunner of human and social evolution. Unevolved third-world countries focus on subjugation, control and punishment of women. Evolved modern countries do not.

So why is the US so far behind in this regard? And why are misogynistic fascists so easily able to propose and take steps to subjugate women in the US and relegate them to an unrewarding existence, suppressing women’s potential and happiness, without an uproarious protest from every one of our citizens? And by the way, in addition to making women suffer, that lost potential of half the population is lost potential that would benefit our country and the evolution of civilization.

ONE HALF of the human population is female. Subjugating and disempowering females is essentially a war by males to dominate and control the other half of the population: Us (men) against Them (women). Attempting to wrest power away from half of the population and dominate them is literally war. Over 100 years ago women in this country fought to gain the right to vote and have a say in our country, half of whose citizens are women. In the 1800s, the male-dominated AMA made abortion illegal, with horrendous consequences to female death rates. It wasn’t until the 1960s that progress toward legalization of abortion was made. Finally, in 1973, the Roe v. Wade decision protected the right of a woman in any state in this country to choose to have an abortion. In 1984, Ronald Reagan started putting into play legislation to roll back women’s rights. And now, in 2024, we stand to lose all the rights we fought hard to win up to 1973 unless we unite to fight the anti-woman forces that want to dominate us.

The Taliban is well aware of the value to them of subjugating women. Witness the backward evolution and the complete suppression of women in a country that was once modern. And our Christian Taliban here in the US—the theofascists of the far right and MAGA cultists—are attempting to do the same. One of the hallmarks of authoritarians and fascists—and now the Republican Party—is cruelty toward and subjugation and punishment of women.

How can this still be happening in our country? Can we all please agree not to tolerate this for one second? If we do not take action, raise our voices, and make “good trouble,” they WILL take away women’s rights. Make no mistake: this war of the fascists against women is not about “protecting babies.” It’s about glorifying their hatred of women and making themselves feel—and be—powerful through endangering, controlling and dominating women. Let’s nip that in the bud once and for all, shall we?

In addition to electing our first female President, if we elect a Democratic Senate and House to help her pass important legislation and prevent the passage of damaging legislation, we’ll protect and guarantee women’s futures and safety, things that are very much in danger now and even more so in the future if we don’t win this election. So let’s win big all the way down the ticket! It really is possible.

If you haven’t already checked that your voter registration is current, do it now. Those who want to suppress women (and achieve other unsavory goals) really do want to stop you from voting and are keen to knock people off of the voter rolls.

And do check into down-ballot races in the crucial states, which are just as important as the Presidential election in protecting our freedom. Ruben Gallego for Arizona Senator and Elissa Slotkin for Michigan Senator come to mind….

Finally, you might enjoy a post I wrote a few years ago:

I Am a Feminist (and You Might Be One, Too)

Afghanistan

Afghan women in the 1970s (Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

Recent image of Afghan woman wearing a full burka,
which women are required to wear at all times when in public (Getty Images)

– Afghanistan Slides Into ‘Ever More Hellish Conditions’ After New Morality Law Enacted – Radio Free Europe
– ‘Frightening’ Taliban law bans women from speaking in public – The Guardian

The Taliban, the religious fascists currently in power in Afghanistan, currently forbids women in Afghanistan from obtaining education, working, managing their own finances, going to parks or gyms, going out of the home without a male relative accompanying them, driving, taking a taxi on their own, looking at a non-relative male in public, and now … from SPEAKING in public. They must be completely covered, head to toe, and they must be silent. Their lives have been taken away. They exist, but they do not live.

In the 1960s and 1970s, these women were like any other. They dressed in a modern fashion, obtained higher education, worked in any profession, and lived their lives as they wished. The religious fascists (Taliban) who took over Afghanistan forced women into their current dire existence in just a few years.

In keeping with the theme of feminism and women, here are some great shows that are entertaining as well as educational and enlightening.

Mrs. America (Hulu). The story of the ERA. Learn about (or remember) the fight for women’s rights during the 1960s and 1970s. Also learn how the fight against the ERA provided an easy path for the extreme Religious Right to infiltrate politics and join Republicans to create a powerful anti-woman force. Enjoyable, some nice performances, and the soundtrack of 60s and 70s hits is terrific! With Cate Blanchett, Uzo Aduba, Elizabeth Banks.

Call Jane (Hulu) “A housewife is overjoyed with the news of her pregnancy–until she learns it poses a threat to her own life. She has nowhere to turn until she meets an underground group of women who risk everything to provide people like her with a choice.” This interesting movie tells it how it really was for women in this time, all the while entertaining us! With Elizabeth Banks, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Mara.

THE HANDMAID’S TALE (Hulu), a television on adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s great book of the same name. This series represents what can happen in a (formerly American) totalitarian society in which women are subjugated and treated as property, much as they are in third-world countries. Unfortunately, there is much that is now eerily familiar in this series. (Note: The sixth and final season is due out this year.) Outstanding production values and performances—including that of the ever-brilliant Elisabeth Moss.

RBG (Netflix) “With unprecedented access, filmmakers explore how her early legal battles changed the world for women.” It also reveals a lot about her personal life. This documentary was incredibly inspiring—as was Ruth Bader Ginsberg!

~ lyrics by Helen Reddy and Ray Burto

If you’d like to succeed at creating what truly matters to you and making your dreams a reality, read Elena's latest book, ABRACADABRA! A Manual for Making Dreams Come True, now available on Kindle!

Image by Bee Felten-Leidel on Unsplash

Typical reading time: 2 minutes

August 26, 2024

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The virtues, like the Muses, are always seen in groups.
~ Jane Porter

Now we get to the heart of manifesting, the secret sauce that makes you an artist of manifesting: the IDEA™. That acronym reminds us of the four crucial elements we need to enlist in order to manifest our dreams.

In the last chapters, we began to flesh out a simple strategy for manifesting our Intention. Now that we have a working Plan, and we know how to challenge obstacles that arise, let’s add a touch of magic!

The magic, of course, is you! When you bring your best self, the highest version of you that you can be, to your Intention, there can be no stopping you from manifesting it! While taking action is a necessary part of accomplishing anything, an equally important, sometimes-overlooked element in manifesting is the actor—that is, who you are in the world.

We want to em-power ourselves in every way we can if we want to make magic powerfully. And that means that we bring our best self to every step we take toward being power-ful and manifesting our Intention. Most of us seldom utilize our full potential except in extraordinary circumstances. We call someone who pulls another person from a burning building a hero. They might not previously have thought of themselves as someone who could pull another person from a burning building, but that quality resided in them all along, didn’t it? It didn’t come from nowhere. The emergency called forth something in them that was always there, something that they didn’t see in themselves until circumstances so urgently required that they access it, that they stepped over their usual self-limiting thoughts and accessed their inherent ability. In that moment, they embodied the greatness that already existed in them.

Let’s not require a burning building in order to manifest our potential, all right? Instead, let’s look at the possibility that we can rise to our current circumstances in a way that we haven’t previously seen ourselves as capable of doing, and that we can do that regularly, so that living heroically becomes a habit.

An important means of living heroically so that we can manifest our dreams is to embrace four virtues. I call this means to heroic living the IDEA™, an easy way to remember these essential ingredients of making magic: integrity, depth, excellence and authenticity. Each of these ingredients is intertwined with the others; these four ingredients comprise the “special sauce” that makes magic!

Next, we’ll learn how each of these virtues works and how we can develop and embrace them in our work.

* To learn more about the full strategy referenced above and how to implement it,
read ABRACADABRA! A Manual for Making Dreams Come True.

“People like to say that your talent is yours forever: No one can take it away from you. This is not true. Talent is not inviolable. Every time you alter what you meant to say or meant to do … you destroy your talent. I am not talking about one’s career: I am talking about one’s soul.”
~ Mike Nichols in an interview with James Grissom

There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have.
And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days
on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.
~ Howard Thurman

Typical reading time: 5 minutes

excerpted from Chapter 12 of
Abracadabra! A Manual for Making Dreams Come True by Elena Greco

Authenticity moves people, moves the action, moves mountains. It allows you to manifest your potential and your dreams.

Authenticity is one of the highest traits a human can have. It’s certainly one of the most important traits for a creative artist. Most people would probably agree that authenticity is a good thing. But would they be able to tell you what it is?

Some might respond that authenticity means being yourself. But as multi-faceted human beings who encounter a multitude of situations and people on a daily basis, exactly what does that mean?

Being authentic means that your values and actions align, that what you do and say aligns with what you value. It means you can’t be swayed to act against those values by a cheap or temporary payoff.

Being authentic means being the person you are at your core, rather than playing a role solely to satisfy or gain favor with someone else. It means expressing yourself in a way that represents your essence and your conscience.

Authenticity is reflected in actions and words, not in beliefs or ideas. The way you act in life demonstrates your authenticity or your lack of it.

Honesty. Authenticity means that you’re honest about who you are. Authenticity, values and honesty go hand in hand.

Saying or doing things that are incongruent with our true feelings, values and intentions is dishonest, isn’t it? Isn’t saying “I love your shoes” if I don’t love your shoes a lie? And if honesty is one of my values, isn’t lying an inauthentic expression of who I am?

There are those who represent themselves on social media and in their biographies on websites, for example, in a way that does not reflect who they really are. It reflects who they think they need to be in order to sell whatever they’re selling or maybe who they wish they were. That is dishonest. Marketing does not require that we represent ourselves as someone other than who we are. And authenticity is good marketing!

Another way of being inauthentic is saying things that aren’t true for us or doing things that don’t align with our values in order to gain or avoid something. For example, if you value honesty but praise someone insincerely because you want them to like you, you’re being inauthentic.

You might have noticed a time someone Liked a post on Facebook, and it was pretty clear that they Liked it because they wanted to win favor with the poster or because they wanted viewers to see that they were one of the “chosen” who were Friends with the poster. That is, they didn’t actually “like” the post. That agenda often backfires because most people see what they’re up to and lose respect for them. So another way of being inauthentic is saying or doing something with the sole purpose of gaining prestige or others’ approval.

If you’re a creative artist and you attempt to make your art like someone else’s because they’re successful or rich or accepted or get good reviews or something else you think you want or ought to want, that is an inauthentic expression, no matter how skillful it might be. You will never have true self-respect as long as your public persona is in competition with your authentic self.

Filtering. Being authentic doesn’t mean that we have to share every opinion we have or behave the way we feel at all times in all circumstances. For example, if I don’t like your shoes, I don’t have to tell you I don’t like them; I just have to refrain from saying that I do when I don’t.

There is a filtering that must occur at times in our interactions with others. Your behavior is likely not the same with your boss as it is with your best friend. That doesn’t mean that you’re being inauthentic with either of them; you’re simply choosing appropriate behaviors from your repertoire of authentic behaviors.

Authenticity doesn’t mean being fully disclosing in all settings. It means that in what you do choose to express or share with others, that expression is honest.

If we choose to share one part of ourselves and not another because we serve a role in which parts of our personal lives are best not shared, that is not inauthentic. But setting ourselves up on social media or in our self-promotion, for example, as someone we aren’t, as someone with traits that we really don’t have, or as offering something we really aren’t equipped to offer—that is inauthentic.

Choices. Being authentic means that we do have choices on how and where to express ourselves. If I choose to bite my tongue around a boss I can’t stand because I need that job in order to feed myself and my children, that is not inauthentic; it’s a conscious choice. But when we’re confronted repeatedly with a situation in which we feel we have to make that choice to stifle ourselves, we might ask ourselves if there is a better way to handle the situation.

Perhaps you realize that your spoken accent is not conducive to getting ahead in your profession. Choosing to change it, perhaps only in certain situations such as a business meeting, isn’t inauthentic, any more than choosing a different hairstyle or style of clothing to suit the occasion would be. (Making these conscious, sometimes necessary changes in our style of communication and self-expression in order to be appropriate in a given setting is called code-switching.) Unless that change is a key part of your values, there’s nothing inauthentic about changing something about yourself in some way towards an end, as long as you realize that that’s what you’re doing.

But “wearing” a false personality or developing a personality which you think makes you appear to be something that you aren’t is inauthentic. I’m not fond of the maxim “fake it till you make it” because it encourages us to behave in a way that is not completely honest. It might make more sense to get in touch with the part of you that has the belief that you’re not up to the circumstance and confront that. There are other alternatives that can be truly empowering. (The length of this article precludes going into detail about them; for more information do my Abracadabra! Workshop or, better still, read my book, ABRACADABRA! A Manual for Making Dreams Come True!)

We all have different hats to wear, different roles to play, in our daily lives—and we can play all of them with integrity and authenticity. It simply requires that we examine each situation with the eyes of truth and be honest with ourselves.

The cost of inauthenticity. If you’re committed to authenticity, making a choice to stifle your genuine self-expression or to behave in ways incongruent with your values is going to cost you over time—in self-respect and in the quality of your work, your art, relationships and communication.

Every time you execute an inauthentic action, every time you say or do things that are incongruent with your true feelings, values and intentions, you’re selling off a tiny piece of yourself. That sort of stifling of ourselves takes a toll physically and mentally over time.

When we make one choice that is inauthentic, it becomes easier to make another inauthentic choice, and then another. And then we are not who we know we are meant to be.

In addition, others will know when we aren’t authentic. You can fool some people, but most of us pick up easily on inauthenticity and feel uneasy with it.

Inauthenticity limits our growth and our relationships, making it difficult or impossible to live out our potential. Transformation and genuine communication are by-products of authenticity.

Regaining authenticity. How do you know if you’re being inauthentic? Ask yourself these questions: Is your speech or action designed to impress or gain favor or manipulate? Are you behaving in a way that you believe will allow you to avoid disapproval or confrontation? If the answers to these questions are “yes,” you’re being inauthentic.

The first step in regaining authenticity is to notice when your actions and words are incongruent with what’s really so for you. The second is to admit to yourself that you’re behaving in a way that is not authentic. Next is figuring out why you’re doing yourself the disservice of being inauthentic. What is the pay-off? And the last step is to find an alternative to that inauthentic act or expression, one which reflects who you really are—even if it’s difficult at first.

The benefit of living authentically. Living authentically means living by your code of ethics and values, regardless of whether that pleases someone else or gains their favor. You can’t control others’ actions or reactions; attempting to do so is an inauthentic expression of self. But living authentically means that you can move people, and that is far more beneficial—to you and to them—than controlling them (even if that were possible).

The value in expressing yourself authentically is something that money can’t buy: self-respect, and ultimately the respect of others. Moreover, others will trust you when they see that you’re consistently authentic.

Authenticity moves people, moves the action, moves mountains. It allows you to manifest your potential and your dreams!

* Why did I choose an image of pets to represent authenticity? I chose these lovely animals because, unlike humans, animals are inescapably authentic. They cannot be otherwise, because they do not have the sneaky part that our minds have, the part that compares itself to others, worries what others think, acts in order to manipulate others, and plans for the future. They really have no choice but to behave and express themselves authentically.

If you’d like to succeed at creating what truly matters to you and making your dreams a reality, read Elena's latest book, ABRACADABRA! A Manual for Making Dreams Come True, now available on Kindle!

Photo by Urban Vintage on Unsplash

Typical reading time: 3 minutes

July 23, 2024

The word creative is thrown about quite a bit now. As a creative myself, and as someone who works with and supports other creatives, it’s an area of great interest to me, and so I’d like to clear up some things about creatives.

First, there’s that term, creative. Creativity has always been used to refer to actions that are deemed creative. But being a creative is something else entirely. Being a creative means that you have a specific set of personality traits, and that you have a creative drive that propels you through life compelled to do your particular creative thing.

And that word creative, as a noun, has recently begun to be used in a fairly casual—and often incorrect—way in business to refer to those who do something related to design rather than something related to, say, accounting or law, or whatever the particular business might be.

But just because someone has training in design or marketing doesn’t mean that they are a creative. It simply means that they’ve been trained to do something considered creative, something requiring some creativity, usually something related to one of the arts.

Creativity refers to the accessing of our imagination to produce something novel. Creatives have more than the ability to do something creative; they have the creative drive. In fact, you might say the creative drive has them.

Creatives are much studied and seldom understood. That’s because being a creative is a calling that we’re born with, not a choice; it’s certainly not a decision. And it’s not a skill, like being a good conversationalist, that we can choose to change or improve on. It is something that exists within us, and it comes from a place similar to the place from which courage and heroism arise within us. And we don’t really understand where courage and heroism come from; they just are.

Again, there’s a distinction between being a creative and doing something creative. People are generally born creative (or not); it is not a choice. Also, people often think of creative people as those who are in the creative arts, but there are creative people in almost every field—science, technology, and anywhere there are innovative ideas, even in government.

The US is different from Europe in that, as a country, it does not support its creative artists. There also seems to be on the part of some of our citizens almost a disdain for those in the creative arts, as though they are superfluous. For that reason, life as a creative is quite difficult for most creative artists and thinkers in this country in a way that those in other countries might find surprising.

Regarding what causes the difference in attitude here as opposed to Europe, in the US there seems to be a lack of appreciation or understanding for what creatives offer to our shared experience as humans. Europeans and others are much wiser in their view of creative arts and creative people, understanding that the arts enrich our lives and support our growth and well-being as human beings. In addition, the artist—and creatives—support our civilization by bringing alternate viewpoints to important issues of society, giving us visionary dreams for the future, and propelling progress. They also leave a record of not only what we did, but what we felt, during the time in which we live.

There is often a misperception by non-creatives of why creatives do what they do and live the way they live. I began an interview series I call the EGMP Creative Artists Interviews because I want to give creatives a chance to describe what living their lives is like for them on a daily basis, what it feels like to be a creative, and what compels them to pursue their art, sometimes in spite of great obstacles. I believe they don’t often get to express that.

And I want to give those who perhaps do not understand or appreciate creatives a chance to see them from a different perspective in the hope that they might come to appreciate the creative’s role in enriching our culture and making our existence bearable and fulfilling—or at least to feel a little more compassionate towards them. Being creative is not better than not being creative (everyone has something to offer!), but neither is it something to be shunned or viewed with disrespect.

Most of all, I want to give creative artists a voice to speak of their personal relation to their creativity and how living their lives is necessarily intertwined with it.

Work is beginning on that two-part EGMP Creative Artists Interviews series now. I look forward to sharing the interviews with you!

And if you’d like to be a part of the project and be considered to be interviewed, and/or to interview me, drop me a line at egreco@elenagreco.com. Questions are submitted in advance, each video interview will be under five minutes, and the only tech requirements are a good lighting setup and access to Zoom.

Magnify your ability to create what truly matters to you! If you’d like to succeed at making your dreams a reality, read Elena's latest book, ABRACADABRA! A Manual for Making Dreams Come True, now available on Kindle!

Photo by Robert Collins on Unsplash

Typical reading time: 4 minutes

July 16, 2024

Have you ever started a project with great enthusiasm, excitement and energy, but a few months down the line found your interest waning, or even leaving entirely? How do you keep going and get to the finish line?

This seems to be a familiar problem among creatives. I never encountered it myself until recently, at which point I realized that there needs to be a plan in place for such times to help us climb out of the doldrums and get to work again.

Recently, after a forced delay in a music project, it was time for me to begin working on the project again. Unfortunately, I found that I’d lost all interest in this project and couldn’t convince myself to get to work.

Most of my musical projects in the past have been completed in around six months. While I might have had the concept or the musical rep percolating in my head before I actually began the project, I don’t believe I’ve ever actively worked on a project for more than twelve months tops.

It so happens that I seem to have a three-month cycle built into my psyche. That might have originated in the semester system in school, or it could be a peculiarity of mine, or it could be a natural sort of rhythm for humans. I really can’t say. But I generally complete any project in three months, or six months, or occasionally nine or twelve months.

This project was different. I began work on it in 2019 just after retiring from my survival job of thirty-seven years, so I was going through a bit of a change in work habits now that I was totally self-employed. Then came 2020, along with the Pandemic. For the next couple of years, live rehearsals were almost impossible, and I need interaction with other humans in order to bring a project to fruition. So the project ground to a halt.

By the time I started working on the project again sometime in 2022, my voice was beyond rusty, so I had to bring it back to a performance-ready state. It took time. I also had to find personnel to work with, as everyone I had worked with prior to the pandemic was no longer in New York City or was otherwise unavailable. I made a couple of false starts, wasting a good bit of time, before I found all the right people, and there went another year.

So I began working on this project again for real last year, but it has been living in my head, if not in reality, for FIVE years! I have never, ever worked on a project that long. And I’ve been actively working on it for over a year now. This is way beyond my usual attention span for intense work.

I managed to keep up the interest and the energy with it last year and the first few months of this year. This is the point at which I would normally have long since completed the project. A couple of months ago, I hit a wall.

The wall—or plateau, as I now think of it—appeared as a complete loss of interest in the project, a standstill, a butting of my head against the will to continue. I was simply sick of working on this project and had totally lost interest in it. In fact, I disliked every part of it. I still enjoyed looking at the project’s image, and that was about it.

The plateau is what I’ll call a loss of interest or enthusiasm in a project, when you run out of steam, no longer want to do the project at all, or find it hard to care about it. Instead of the excitement of running uphill toward your goal—the completion of your project—you’re at a plateau, where there’s no velocity, no energy propelling you ahead.

I asked myself how I could re-light my fire, my passion for the project, my enthusiasm. It required some work! And since it seems to be a not uncommon occurrence for other creatives, I’ll share what I learned with you.

There are probably as many reasons why the plateau happens as there are reasons why one begins a project in the first place. More important than the reason is the solution. Following are a number of really effective tools for overcoming the plateau.

1. Take a break. In the past, I’ve found taking a break for a short, specified period to help in getting my enthusiasm back. Perhaps I was just tired, and when I came back, physically and mentally replenished, it was easier to get excited about the project again.

2. Look at your physical health. Sometimes a loss of interest occurs simply because of a lack of energy, and that can be due to an issue with physical health. Take a look at your health and your lifestyle and see if you’re actually suffering a loss of physical energy due to an issue that you can resolve on a practical level.

3. Put on a positive, high-energy playlist and DANCE! Of course, you’ll need to have a high-energy, inspirational playlist at the ready. I just happen to have one I created myself up my sleeve: Stand and Up and Fight! Brisk walking or jogging, preferably in nature, can pump up the energy and promote a positive outlook simultaneously, as well. Just playing the playlist in the background while you take a look at your project might get you pumped up, as well!

4. Journal about it. Maybe there’s something in your unconscious that’s hanging you up. The best way to learn about that is to journal about it! Do read this article I wrote about the enormous value of journaling, Journaling for Your Future Self.

5. The Intention. If you’ve made a commitment about the project, whether publicly or to yourself, revisiting that commitment sometimes rekindles the flame. Ideally, you have a strong intention or mission statement for your project; reading that to yourself might re-ignite the passion you felt when you created it. If you find you didn’t originally have a strong written intention for the project, create one now. Within that intention, you might find a little passion. Read more about intentions in Intention—Our Portal to Creation.

6. Revisit your own work. I’ve found that reading, watching or listening to projects I’ve already completed can help get the juices flowing again. Alternatively, if I start at the beginning of the project and look at all the work I’ve done so far as if I’m seeing it for the first time, I often become interested in the work again. I also find that listening to or watching previous work I’ve done that I feel particularly proud of can get the energy moving. I usually begin to experience that work again internally, feeling it as though I’m creating it right now.

7. Get inspiration from the work of others. I also read, watch or listen to material from similar or related projects that have been done by others, both famous and not-so-famous. I might find inspiration there, and I might find my competitive spirit, too, and that’s often useful for me. Through casual comparison, or through the inspiration I find in the work of others, I might feel once again that the current project is a worthy project and feel inspired to continue it.

8. Look at your work from a different viewpoint. I might look at the work I’ve done so far in the project and consider a different approach or technique going forward, coming at it from a different point of view to see if that might add some heat to the fire.

9. Find a glimmer of interest with some element of the project, no matter how tiny. If I can find something, anything at all, in or about the project that piques my interest and start from there, I can gather steam and get moving with the work again.

How can we keep the fire going and avoid letting the energy and enthusiasm sag in future projects?

Enthusiasm, something we might take for granted when it appears, is something that has to be nurtured and supported, particularly in longer projects. We can’t wait for it or expect it to happen. Instead, we need to cultivate it deliberately, systematically, and continuously.

Whenever you feel enthusiasm flagging, you might start with this article and see if one or more of the nine remedies get you going. They can be used as a preventative or remedy for the plateau in the future.

If they don’t, here’s one more tool: ask your unconscious if it can show you what needs to happen in order to get the enthusiasm back or what is getting in the way of that happening. If you ask regularly, the answer will come to you! Once you have the answer, add it to the list above as something to reach for whenever the enthusiasm lags.

Here’s to rekindling the flame!

Magnify your ability to create what truly matters to you! If you’d like to succeed at making your dreams a reality, read Elena's latest book, ABRACADABRA! A Manual for Making Dreams Come True, now available on Kindle!

Typical reading time: 2 minutes

What is the difference in coaching, counseling and psychotherapy? And what exactly is a creativity coach? Or a life coach? I’m often asked those questions. Here’s a brief run-down.

A psychotherapist is someone who helps you with emotional or psychological problems. They often have labels such as social worker, mental health counselor, psychologist and psychiatrist, and are usually, but not always, licensed by a state board. However, the term can be used broadly for any professional who helps people with psychological problems. Psychotherapists often have a clear slant to their work based on a particular theory that they’ve been taught (e.g., Jungian, Rogerian, cognitive, analytic) through which they view and “treat” people and their problems.

A counselor is someone who listens to you and offers guidance, usually (but not necessarily) in a specific area of your life. For example, a pastoral counselor helps you with spiritual or religious issues, and a school guidance counselor helps you with your academic career. They can come from any profession and cover a broad range of areas and techniques.

A coach is a facilitator who helps you reach your potential. Coaches listen to you and support you in clarifying and achieving your goals in any area AND in overcoming any obstacles to those goals, whether practical or psychological. In addition, they can serve as a counselor or mentor at times. For example, a tennis coach might help you improve your swing, suggest ways to get your physique in ideal shape for playing tennis, help you clarify your immediate, interim and ultimate professional goals, use their connections to give you opportunities, refer you to colleagues or professionals for specific assistance, offer moral support and skillful encouragement when needed, and assist you with psychological issues that affect your performance.

A life coach helps people with any and all aspects of their lives. They sometimes have a specific focus, such as career or wellness.

A creativity coach is a coach who helps a creative person with all aspects of their life utilizing special knowledge and understanding of the needs and demands of the creative life and personality. In essence, they’re life coaches who specialize in working with creative people and have an additional arsenal of tools and an empathy for the creative personality.

If you believe, as I do, that the driver of transformation is consistent action, and that committed listening and support is an important part of maintaining our mental health, and that you’d like to achieve your potential in life, rather than just talking about it, coaching might be for you!

See Elena’s bios for more information about the author.

Magnify your ability to create what truly matters to you! If you’d like to succeed at making your dreams a reality, read Elena's latest book, ABRACADABRA! A Manual for Making Dreams Come True, now available on Kindle!

Image by Prateek Gautam on Unsplash

Typical reading time: 4 minutes

April 28, 2024

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.
It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
~ Albert Einstein

The Importance of Reverence in Manifesting Dreams

An essential element in manifesting is elevating your Intention to the level of the sacred. I mean that you bring reverence to your project. You might consider your Intention Board an altar and doing the work of your Plan to be worship. Your Intention has to be something worth sacrificing some time and energy for if you hope to manifest it.

Dictionary.com indicates that reverence is “a feeling or attitude of deep respect tinged with awe.” Robert C. Roberts in Emotions: An essay in aid of moral psychology (New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 268) sees reverence as “a humbling of the self in respectful recognition of something perceived to be greater than the self.”

Reverence also means we serve the creative impulse from a position of surrender, rather than from a position of ego, from a “humbling the self,” as Roberts puts it.

Robert C. Solomon (2002, Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life, New York: Oxford University Press) describes awe as passive, but reverence as active, noting that the feeling of awe (i.e., becoming awestruck) implies paralysis, whereas “feelings of reverence are associated more with active engagement and responsibility toward that which one reveres.”

When we experience the sublime work of art that makes us stop—stop breathing, stop thinking, stop wanting—that is the unmistakable feeling of awe. Reverence usually follows on the heels of awe.

I heartily agree with Solomon that reverence is active. Perhaps even more important than to “humble the self” in the face of the sacred work of our Intention, I believe, is to embrace our responsibility to do that work and that we give ourselves completely to that work.

There is also an element of respect in reverence—respect for the object of our reverence, as well as respect for that part of ourselves that we are giving to the work.

When we enter a church or temple or cathedral that has been used for decades to house the worship of devoted people, what we feel is the accumulation of years of reverence. We feel humbled by the palpable spirit of the devotion and reverence of worshippers that has built up over the centuries. And that feeling that some of us feel when we enter such an establishment is reverence.

I included reverence in the chapter about defeating the Gremlin’s tricks as an antidote to arrogance, a sneaky trick of the Gremlin. When you feel reverence toward your project, it is impossible to simultaneously feel arrogant, because revering something higher than yourself automatically transcends ego. Since arrogance usually results in inauthentic creative work, and ultimately makes us less successful at manifesting, it’s an important Gremlin to defeat. That’s an equally important reason for cultivating reverence toward our work.

Reverence, I believe, is a primal urge in us to honor humanity itself and its higher manifestation. When we feel the urge to protect a child who is being abused, to help an elderly person who has fallen, that is our instinct to honor life. That is the reverence I believe we should feel for the sacred work of manifesting our dreams.

We tend to think our individual dreams don’t measure up to the greatness of those we admire. But who are we to judge? Isn’t it arrogant to assume that we’re a good judge of our own dreams? Perhaps it’s good to cultivate a feeling of reverence for our own dreams.

Surrender

An important element of reverence is surrender. When we put aside our small selves in service to, or in recognition of, something greater, that is surrender.

Surrender does not mean letting another person control you or that you are giving up your own autonomy; rather, it means choosing to open to the guidance of something higher than your usual everyday self, however you perceive that. If you find that you have trouble surrendering, or if you can’t find something higher that you feel comfortable surrendering to, then try just surrendering to your own highest innate wisdom. You might also surrender to your Intention itself and see where that takes you. Refusal to surrender is an aspect of ego, and of arrogance, and, as we discussed earlier in the book, bringing ego to our work results in inauthenticity.

Surrendering to the work of manifesting our Intention in a way that we focus our energy and thoughts toward it instead of our ego-ish desires leaves us better able to hear and act on the impulses and ideas of our higher self, the part of us that is closer to what we truly are.

Serving the Muse

This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don’t. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. … When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.
~ Steven Pressfield, from THE WAR OF ART

You might have heard something from creative artists about serving the muse. What does that mean, exactly?

The muse simply refers to a source of inspiration for our creative work. Your muse can have a spiritual connotation for you, or it can be something as simple as your cat! It might also be a piece of music or a picture of someone you admire greatly. You might sense your muse as an unseen helper.

Perhaps the best muse might be your Higher Self, whatever that term means to you. Truly serving the muse means surrendering to that source of inspiration with a feeling of reverence.

It helps to have something greater than your daily self to look to for inspiration. I suggest that if you currently don’t have something that gives you the feeling of reverence, look to see what consistently moves or inspires you. Then make it concrete for yourself using an image or words so that you can use that to give you strength when manifesting your dream seems too arduous or even impossible. It helps to have something tangible, rather than just an idea, something that reminds you of that ideal or inspiration. It could be a picture of the person or thing that inspires you, a small statue that represents your feeling of reverence or dedication, or really whatever gives you a feeling of love or awe.

Assignment

1. Does the work of manifesting your dreams feel sacred to you? If not, why do you think that it doesn’t? List the reasons you don’t believe this work is sacred or worthy of reverence. Then see if you can come up with rebuttal statements for that negative self-talk or belief.

2. How can you bring reverence into your work with your Intention or make the manifesting of it feel like “sacred” work to you? Do you see your Intention as being something that leads you to something higher? Or does it feel as if it is simply a manifestation of ego? If the latter, is there a way to reframe it so that it becomes something sacred to you, something you can commit to?

Magnify your ability to create what truly matters to you! If you’d like to succeed at making your dreams a reality, read Elena’s latest book, ABRACADABRA! A Manual for Making Dreams Come True, now available on Amazon Kindle (other formats will be released this fall).