Crafting The Soul

Examines what great thinkers of the past have had to say about the meaning of life. Offers ways to shape your life into something beautiful and unique.

How do you harness creativity and bring it into your every day life? Crafter and blogger, Pip Lincolne shares her lifetime of wisdom on: x PRIORITISING YOUR OWN CREATIVITY x DOING NEW THINGS x FINDING THINGS THAT SPARK EXCITEMENT AND PASSION x BEING POSITIVE x CREATING ROUTINES x LOVING YOUR WORK x AND MUCH MUCH MORE ... Divided into ten chapters, this is a step-by-step program that talks the reader through the challenges of tapping into your creativity and making it work for you. Pip applies rules and routines to her own creativity and suggests that having a formal structure allows creativity to flourish. This clever, cute step-by-step guide will show you practical ways to get the most out of your creativity and live the life you want.

In The Artisan Soul, Erwin Raphael McManus, author, thought leader, and founder of MOSAIC in Los Angeles, pens a manifesto for human creativity and the beginning of a new renaissance. McManus not only calls us to reclaim our creative essence but reveals how we can craft our lives into a work of art. There are no shortcuts to quality, and McManus celebrates the spiritual process that can help us discover our true selves. McManus demonstrates that we all carry within us the essence of an artist. We all need to create, to be a part of a process that brings to the world something beautiful, good, and true, in order to allow our souls to come to life. It's not only the quality of the ingredients we use to build our lives that matter, but the care we bring to the process itself. Just like baking artisan bread, it's a process that's crafted over time. And God has something to say about how we craft our lives. With poignant, inspirational stories and insights from art, life, history, and scripture interspersed throughout, McManus walks readers through the process of crafting a life of beauty and wonder.

Since 1980, depth psychologist Bill Plotkin has been guiding women and men into the wilderness — the redrock canyons and snow-crested mountains of the American West — but also into the wilds of the soul. He calls this work soulcraft. There’s a great longing in all people to uncover the secrets and mysteries of our individual lives, to find the unique gift we were born to bring to our communities, and to experience our full membership in the more-than-human world. This journey to soul is a descent into layers of the self much deeper than personality, a journey meant for each one of us, not just for the heroes and heroines of mythology. A modern handbook for the journey, Soulcraft is not an imitation of indigenous ways, but a contemporary nature-based approach born from wilderness experience, the traditions of Western culture, and the cross-cultural heritage of all humanity. Filled with stories, poems, and guidelines, Soulcraft introduces over 40 practices that facilitate the descent to soul, including dreamwork, wilderness vision fasts, talking across the species boundaries, council, self-designed ceremony, nature-based shadow work, and the arts of romance, being lost, and storytelling.

Learn how to focus your creative energy to make things—and make things happen. In this blend of memoir and hardworking handbook, creativity and craft maven Amy Tangerine shows how to find your flow, maintain a positive mindset, and cultivate a rich and fulfilling life by focusing on what truly matters and implementing small yet powerful changes. Chapters explore how to craft the soul, craft the right mindset, craft the right environment, craft good habits, rediscover your creative mojo, and maintain momentum, with each section offering exercises for taking your creative practice to the next level. For anyone who has felt disconnected from their creativity or has had trouble saving a space for their passions, Craft a Life You Love will teach you how to make time for creativity each and every day.

Just what is poetry, and who writes it, and why do they write it, and did they always write it or is it something that develops gradually, and how do they go about it, and what are some of the frustrations, and if the frustrations are great what even greater rewards are sufficient to keep spurring them on, and who are they writing for, and where do their ideas come from, and what influence do other poets and writers have on them, and, after repeated rejections from publishers, what keeps them from chucking it all in favor of less unpredictable not to mention more remunerative undertakings? The poems that follow, addressing in some manner all of these questions, are simply one individual's attempt to discern and then to follow what feels to him a calling or, using Joseph Campbell's word, his bliss. A "Dialogue with Events" section in Ira Progoff's Intensive Journal Program provided me a fruitful place back in the late 1970's to explore the significance in my life of becoming a psychotherapist. In Crafting Soul into Words I am in effect dialoguing with the evolving event in my life of becoming a poet. This collection will likely speak most to other writers, actual or aspiring, who will be able to identify with writing's steep and winding but exhilarating way. It may also appeal to those curious to know something of poetry's allure, as well as something of what makes this particular poet tick. Who knows, it may even have the felicitous effect of giving to one seldom lifting a pen an extravagant notion. Each experiences the universe uniquely, each has a singular story to tell-the joy is in finding the words!

Over three-quarters of American households contain someone who loves to craft . . . and for good reason. Hobbies like painting, sewing, scrapbooking, woodworking, and photography provide crafters with more than just a way to have fun or make gifts. Even at their most basic, they're potent art forms that can distract the mind, soothe the soul, and de-stress the body. "Craft to Heal" describes how creative pursuits can be transformed into healing arts, which, in turn, can transform you. Mind-body research now shows that crafts are good for our mental, physical, and spiritual health, so we no longer need to make excuses for doing what we love. The truth is, crafts aren't just enjoyable, they're downright therapeutic!

Craftfulness is the idea that making things with your hands makes you feel better, and can offer the same benefits as mindfulness and meditation, yoga, running, playing an instrument or singing. Integrating mindfulness, neuroscience, positive psychology, and creativity research, Craftfulness offers a thought-provoking and surprising reconsideration of craft, and how making things with our hands can connect us to our deepest selves and improve our well-being and overall happiness. We should get this out of the way: Craftfulness is not a "crafting book." Rather, it is an investigation of the wisdom generations of men and women know to be true: that making things is a vital means of self-expression, self-realization, and self-help that sparks the mind, touches the soul, and rejuvenates the spirit. Integrating mindfulness, neuroscience, positive psychology, and creativity research, Rosemary Davidson and Arzu Tahsin explore how the simple act of making something from scratch affects mental well-being, and offer a brilliantly reasoned argument in favor of craft. Process, not product, is the soul of a craft practice. Whether you knit, crochet, sculpt, weave, quilt, tat, draw, or bind books--working toward small, attainable goals provides a sense of purpose, accomplishment, and control that is proven to positively impact our mental health and happiness. Davidson and Tahsin illuminate how craft practice re-introduces balance into our lives and our habits by cultivating creativity, carving space for ourselves, promoting focus, creating a safe space for failure, and ultimately, how to make peace with imperfection. Like Matthew B. Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft, Ken Robinson's Out of Our Minds, or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow, Craftfulness helps us to see our world in a new way, offering opportunities to disconnect from the world, and pay attention to ourselves.