So if you have walked into a bookstore lately, you probably have seen the **awesome!! happy clap!** display of adult colouring books. Yes, that is right! Permission to colour!!
I spent many hours this summer swooning over the pages of the mandala colouring book I have. Besides being super fun, it struck me that there is so much more going on when we put pen to paper. It is the essence of creation.
Creativity can be a nervy thing. We get scared away from our creative lives when we try to do it perfectly; when we try to meet unseen and unmentioned expectations; when we get distracted by approval and lose touch with the flow of our own voice. Creativity is ultimately an act of vulnerability and truth.
**oh sh!t!**
Yeah, that is a lot to manage sometimes.
That is why colouring books are so wonderful. They are a perfectly free place to be creative and have fun without the need to be a wild genius. The designs are already pretty and we can’t really mess it up, and if we do – no big deal. This is not our main gig. We have nothing riding on the outcome. It doesn’t have to be dazzling or profound or perfect. Our only goal is to have fun.
But what happens when we just cut loose and have fun?
The ideas – our ideas – they start happening.
Spend enough time colouring and you will get the creative process going again.
It is inevitable. The motion of putting colour to something. The act of making something, even if it is not your thing, that releases an energy that draws the ideas to you.
I absolutely love the talk Elizabeth Gilbert gave on the elusive human genius. **which made me cry… again** In it she says:
…the Romans did not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual. They believed that a genius was this, sort of magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist’s studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work.
It is not us.
This crazy, juicy, creative stuff.
It is not us. It just zips through us when we are in the right space, in the right attitude, in the vulnerable, yin, receptive moment.
This is why colouring works.
We let go and surrender and just have some fun – some fun that makes something physical and tangible. We forget to worry. We forget to compare. We forget to judge.
Only then, our elusive genie will greet us, and deliver the ideas we are ready for. They will sneeze their magic fairy snot on us! Just think about this… being sneezed on is a passive process! 😛
My idea – the one that pounced on me when I was colouring – was that I could make these pages. I could make colouring pages of my affirmations from my Reiki Ideals Affirmation Ladders.
So, I did.
Here you go:
Just click the picture to download a pdf that you can print out and colour. I would love to see where you take this! Please send me a picture of your colouring and doodles and paper airplanes that you create from this nice, cozy launching pad.
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