God, I love the Process.
90 Day Magic Reflections + my Values Assignment for paid subscribers!
This is the start of a new series! As I continue to develop 90 Day Magic, I’m taking the summer to develop the planner and workbook and possibly a video course- more ansynchronistic offerings, if you will.
That being said, I will be hosting a live cohort again in September. You can sign up for it here.
If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll be getting worksheets and journal prompts every Monday for the next 8-10 weeks! If you’re a free subscriber, stay put for the Monday post which will give you lots of guidance if you want to get started on your own.
thank you for being here.
xoxo, sam
Part of my obsession with a “sustainable creative practice” is the need to allow myself to flow. I am in constant search of the balance between structure and creative flow. Iteration isn’t just part of my practice, it is the practice.
We just wrapped another 90 Day Magic session- 13 weeks of creative swirl, heartbreak, resistant and perseverance. All during an eclipse, Mercury and Venus Retrogrades… it’s been a doozy of a start to the year and I couldn’t be more grateful for the container we’ve been holding.
We were a small group of 4 who showed up for each other twice a week for 13 weeks. We held space with each other through the California fires, Inauguration Day, the fallout of Trump’s first few months of his second term. Personally, I went through the loss of our car totaled in an accident on New Years Day and more recently the loss of our sweet dog, Garner aka Gigi. Within our group we navigated the Grief- collective and personal, and we walked with each other for this tiny stretch of time in our lives.
Something fascinating happens in every cohort. Each 90-day session never goes entirely as planned, but they always teach me something. Life is messy. Life is circuitous, contracting and expanding in spirals of time, circling back to childhood and adolescence and early adulthood, forever learning the same lessons in deeper ways. When I find myself swirling like a marble on a loopy track, I look to my right and left to see who is with me- who’s feeling the swirl?
Who’s still trying to make their work within this dizzying onslaught of Life?
(I hope you raised your hand.)
It’s truly a treasure to find other people also in their swirl, making their work anyway. It’s not always about art, but about trying to live in an artful ways, with more agency, more integrity, more joy. So much of our sessions are about uncovering desire and navigating the equations of our lives to pull the levers for more pleasure, more presence. To be present, to be grounded, to be connected to your own magic that might allow you to create your unique, authentic offering back to the world.
Every week we touched on one of the core components of this framework that I like to call The Conduit. To become the Conduit, connector of Divine Source to practical, tangible art in your hands, you must first Know Yourself. Or, at least, know your Values.
What are the top 3-5 values you hold most dear to your heart and try to live your life by?
It’s not about morality. It’s about focusing on what’s within your control and creating the reality you yearn for right here, right now. You don’t owe your life to things you don’t believe in.
Reclaim your time. Reclaim your energy. Aim it toward your dreams.
Because to become The Conduit, you must also integrate Body, Mind and Soul. When you can each part of yourself to your creative practice, that’s when you will tap into the Gold. What does it look like to tend to the body? To feed the mind? To nurture the Soul? Think of a time when you felt most present, how often do you allow yourself to integrate and experience that presence?
Your community needs you, now more than ever, to step into your creative power. It’s going to take a whole lot of creativity to dream up a different future than the one we’re about to inherit. Your creative practice is not a selfish or self-serving act, but rather an act of resistance to a fascistic regime slowly swallowing our country. You’re building roads of connection to Yourself and the people around you.
Whatever your art is, it’s built in Connection. A meal, a garment, a painting. All marks of Humanity saying,
We’re here.
We matter.
We will be remembered.
…
So, who am I to teach this framework? What have I done? What are my credentials?
Life experience. Trying and failing over and over until I became so obsessed with Process that it became my art practice. When I started to write the book I’m writing, I didn’t know if I could simply show up to the page over and over enough times to get enough pages for a book. And then I did it. I’m working on making those pages mean something that I want them to mean, getting them closer to a Work of Art is another matter entirely, but I do know how to show up when no one is watching, when I don’t have anyone that I’m accountable to, no one is asking to see my pages. Just to get to the stage of Showing Up required me to unpack and understand so much about why it was a struggle to sit down and write every day even when I felt like it was the only thing I ever wanted to do.
If you get it, you get it.
Maybe you’ve started projects and abandoned them before they were finished. Maybe you never started because it would break your heart if it didn’t turn out exactly like it was in your head. If you want to find your way to a sustainable creative practice, you’re in the right place. I’ll be sharing my process for paid subscribers, linking to worksheets and journal prompts to get you started on your path to showing up for yourself and your projects.
Each Monday, we’ll explore one of the eight components of The Conduit: Values, Time, Energy, Money, Body, Mind, Soul, and Community.
Eventually, this will become a planner, a workbook, maybe even a video course. But for now, let’s walk together.
Big Love,
Sam
ONWARD! To Values!!!
Every 90 Day Magic session starts with a values assessment. It’s a fun process that allows us to get down to the top 3-5 values we want to focus on for the next 90 day season. I like to write these on a post-it and put it on my computer. For the next 90 days, these values will guide my decisions and where I direct my time, energy and money.
I like to say that your values are the tentpoles to your Integrity. If you’re living within your values, you’re within your Integrity! You’re sending your time, energy and money towards things that align with your values and move you toward your goals while staying WHOLE.
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