Rose Rising

     Lately, my life has just felt like there has been one thing after another, and coupled with constant migraines it is sort of just a recipe for disaster. I have gotten insanely behind in all of my courses and have had no motivation to solve any of my issues, just sort of on autopilot. Creative mindfulness has helped breathe some life back into me, which allowed me to help myself. To display and understand how to use creative mindfulness, we did some meditations to help us be with ourselves and focus on our sensory feelings. Mindfulness itself is an awareness, a sense of paying attention with purpose. to help you both open yourself up and ground yourself.    The first focused on our inner self and the thoughts racing through our brain and letting them go, by imagining we were looking at a sky and each of our thoughts was one of the clouds just passing by. Instead of just being with my thoughts I drew the clouds in the sky of my safe space- per the recommendat...

 Week Four's class was largely focused on collaboration and community. collaborating made my ideas and brain flow like crazy, though it was frustrating in some ways because I am not the best at articulating my ideas properly so I really struggled with that but I think in that sense it is great practice for all of the times I will need to be able to collaborate with others on various projects and research. However, the true lesson of the class was about creative innovation and how the community can help in the innovation process. The activity was a group assignment where we were instructed to find ways of improving the creative flow for college students. Each group was to come up with a solution and then present it to the class. My group ended up focusing on the curriculum/class options to be more student-led and a bit more flexible for what students may be interested in taking. My drawing I think was depicting the idea of breaking free from the rigid expectations into something mor...

“The happiest people spend much time in a state of flow--the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it…for the sheer sake of doing it… The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills at their utmost.”  -Mihaly Csikzentmihayi      For this week's reading, we are learning about creative flow and how one knows they are in it. Those characteristics range from complete concentration on the task at hand to a transformed sense of time whether it is speeding up or slowing down or maybe even standing still. As someone who was a musician for the majority of their life, this is an experience I know quite well. I used to play the flute and the piano. And on the rare occasion when nobody is around I sing as well.  It is an amaz...