Affirmation: “My collage opens my heart to endless joy.
I am an artist!”
Creative endeavors are an amazing way to express your emotions. Creating something—anything, really—can help you process a difficult emotion or integrate past experiences for your highest good. Every time you process or integrate something that was left emotionally unfinished, you make more room in your heart for bliss. You create space for goodness by letting go of what no longer serves you.
Certain things in your life inspire attachment. Some of those things are great. It is human and healthy to feel attached to those that we love. Love is part of the beautiful human experience of having a heart and being present in a body for a period of time.
Feeling attached to the types of experiences you want to have is also natural. As humans, we are propelled by an intricate system of chemicals to seek what feels good. And we are rewarded when we do that with powerful feel-good chemicals. This is the reality of how our bodies are built.
You can harness these realities of love, attachment, and pleasure seeking and use them to your advantage to create a life that you enjoy. You can choose to appreciate the experience of being a human with a delightful array of senses and an opportunity to share love and emotion in this temporary world of duality. You can create bliss in your life. It is actually your job to create your own paradise on earth. It is your personal responsibility to craft your best life. You can experience peak moments and peak living by cultivating bliss, love, and soaring joy.
Creating art also helps you let go of the old to make room for the new. Without even having to consciously think about old wounds or traumas, you can let them go by harnessing your own creativity. This might happen through a painting with pieces of fabric pasted into it, symbolizing the patches that have covered someone’s wounds for so long. Sometimes simply by creating that art, the artist is able to let those patches go and let those wounds permanently heal. Healing is alchemical. It’s energetic, emotional, and complex. And creativity can sometimes bypass the mind and get into the deep subconscious to cause powerful healing and dramatically increase well-being.
Exercise: Heart Harmony Collage
Today, you are going to create a heart collage on your choice of medium. You might want to do it on a canvas and use decoupage glue to adhere the pictures to your collage. You might also want to do it on construction paper or create a poster board in the shape of a heart. What would be fun? What would you like to put your collage on?
Get that surface ready. Gather your glue, tape, or whatever you want to use to adhere things to your collage. Keep some markers or colored pencils handy. And don’t forget the scissors!
Next get some magazines, old picture books, newspapers, brochures, and anything you’d like to cut up and use in your collage. You might cut one word out of an entire magazine; that is okay. You can also print out photographs and use those. Anything goes. You could put a favorite picture of yourself smack dab in the middle!
Take some time and think about your heart. Feel your heart and then begin to flip through all of your collage materials. Cut out anything that stands out for you, be it pictures, words, or anything else. Think about your heart and how you want it to feel. Think about all the good feelings you want to feel. You can also think about your life goals and desires. You can include anything that evokes any of these things. Collages are poetic. They don’t always have to be literal and make total sense. You are simply creating beauty.
After you’ve gathered a bunch of beautiful things to affix to your surface, go for it! Arrange everything in a pleasing manner and glue it on.
Look at your collage and use your colored pencils or markers to write any words or draw any pictures that you want to include. Of course, because this book is all about enhancing your bliss, I suggest you add “bliss” in big, bold, delightful letters—because who doesn’t want to have a blissful heart?
When you’re finished, gaze at your collage. Appreciate the beauty you created. Enjoy this visual representation of your inner self. It is powerful to see what is within you beautifully expressed in art. Let yourself feel empowered and blissful that you created such a gorgeous piece of art. You are awesome!
Life is like a collage. Its individual pieces are arranged to create harmony. Appreciate the artwork of your life.
#joyfulliving101