How could I not be drawn to Sarah Seidelmann and Suzi Vandersteen? As designers, they guide clients to find the sweet spot where self-acceptance meets great design. As unabashed emissaries of friendship and play, they teach self-exploration and design recovery through entertainment. They laugh, they whoop it up, and they invite whole people to join the party – all our bits are not only welcome, but necessary.

Suzi and Sarah’s design business is Kitchee Gammi Design Company. Joy Junket is their amusement park of a website.

In what way are you most successfully sensitive?

I think what we do really well is that when we have the initial meeting with the client we carefully gather information regarding what’s important to them in terms of the space we’re designing. Then we interpret all the information and collaborate with them on the design. With each update and new idea presented we watch carefully for reactions and feedback so we know when to make changes in the plan and when to reassure the client.

What or who has inspired you to embrace your sensitivity?

Probably responding to and working with many of our clients who had worked with other artists and designers who didn’t listen carefully to their needs and concerns. We feel design is intensely personal and intimate, and we’re privileged to be asked to work with people in their homes. The fact that we’re both always working towards spiritual progress (not perfection) leads us to listen carefully to everyone we work with, from clients to sub-contractors. We then, of course, take those data points and feed them into the design filter of Kitchee Gammi Design Company, resulting in a design that reflects the collaboration.

What are your eternal fascinations?

Beauty, function, the infinite possibilities inherent in how different people live in their homes, nature, good flea markets (treasure hunting), other businesses that bring their own points of view and have fun doing it, fashion, travel to exotic locales (Istanbul, India, Japan …), the makings of a good party, new food finds – essentially all the creative arts and the infinite offerings of new creations that we see every day.

What quest currently captivates you?

Finding a balance between work, play, and family, as all the variables are constantly changing.

We realize that many people don’t need a COUCH, they need a COACH to help them realign with their heart’s desires, so we’ve added coaching services to our menu. Sarah is currently doing additional coaching training with Oprah’s Martha Beck and is freaked out by how limitless personal transformation is.

What is your favourite kind of help to give?

We love to encourage others to live beautifully on their own terms: Don’t do what we do. Do what you do! And we love to encourage fun and laughter all along the way.

Related Reading: Successfully Sensitive | Dolly Hopkins, Book | A Pattern Language

What’s it like to wear a bespoke suit, a suit custom-made to fit me and only me? I want a life like that. I want a plan, a pattern, a path that takes into consideration all the weird, unruly, shocking, steadfast little and big things that combine to shape me. But how?

“The word bespoke itself is derived from the verb to bespeak, to ‘speak for something,’ in the specialized meaning ‘to give order for it to be made.’”
~ Wikipedia entry for Bespoke

What plan speaks for me? Cookie-cutter solutions need not apply. If I can’t make it fit me, if I can’t make it mine, all mine, then forget it. I’ve scoured office supply stores, art supply stores, read books and websites by goal gurus and earnest cheerleaders of every stripe and found only an elite few who make the cut, including these two…

For the past two weeks I’ve been pulling together a strategic planner for 2010, guided by what artist and business school graduate (a combination that thrills me) Lisa Sonora Beam does for herself every year. Although I’m still creating my plan, the power inherent in the thoroughly self-customized system has already taken me so far further along my way than I’d imagined possible that I’m almost scared to continue. The zoom is palpable. For more about this intensely customizable system, see Lisa Sonora Beam’s “Goal Setting for Creatives: My 2010 Strategic Planner.”

One of the zoomy surprises to burst forth from my 2010 Strategic Planner process is that a friend offered to sponsor my fees for an e-course that seems perfectly designed to help me further custom-make my life: Susannah Conway’s Unravelling: Ways of Seeing My Self, which combines photography, journaling, comrades, Susannah’s strong heart, and the promise of deep self-connection.

The primary goal of both systems is to put me in touch with myself in a way that encourages invention, supports forgiveness and acceptance, and fills the silence with my voice, even if I choose to be quiet. What could be more fittingly comfortable than that?

Related reading: Book | The Creative Entrepreneur, by Lisa Sonora Beam

Flickr photo: (untitled), by bird_flew

1. Make a new friend.
2. Spend time together.
3. Be your true self, especially when it’s difficult.
4. Disagree.
5. Let them go.
6. Figure out how to soothe yourself.
7. Welcome them back.
8. Willingly fall further into friendship’s gooey centre.
9. Copy what you envy.
10. Forget who’s who.
11. Draw a line.
12. Notice recurring border skirmishes.
13. Learn about yourself.
14. Draw a different line, one that includes all of you.
15. Do your best, even if it’s not enough.
16. Take a break.
17. Notice what changes.
18. Ruthlessly work to take back any unkindness.
19. Hold your friend’s hands until they’re warm again.
20. Decide to love yourself best by forgiving, even if you’re not sure how.
21. Remember all the good things. (There were lots.)
22. Accrue private jokes.
23. Count up the years.
24. Catalogue the stories and talk about them in code.
25. Accept the whole friend, including what bugs you about them.
26. Realize that you wouldn’t be you without your friend.
27. Praise the change you got from them.
28. Praise the change you resisted.
29. Get to know your friend’s friends.
30. Make a new friend.

Related reading: Pep Talk | Flip, Book | How to Live with an Idiot

Flickr photo: Old friends, by kevindooley

Now, I tend towards entitlement in a library. I consider a public library to be my library. This is not always to my benefit. I’ve been known to try the patience of a librarian now and then with my deep-seated territorialism. I get along very well with librarians who respect my hunger and genuinely help me feed my need. Those who don’t, those who persist in seeing my hunger as either arrogance or head-scratching lostness … well, I do try to get along. Really, I do.

My point is that I root through libraries, even our tiny, local island branch, like a wild boar rooting through a patch of delectable rutabagas. Dirt flies. Glee galvanizes my attention. The pile of books in my arms grows. I do draw the line at elbowing other patrons out of the way so I can get to the good stuff first, but (I have to be honest here) that sometimes requires superhuman strength. Greed is so uncivilized.

So. I have no qualms about checking out absurd quantities of library items at any given time and then paying my dues when I can’t get through them all before they’re due. What can I say? I need what I need when I need it. A glut of food for thought is worth every penny paid.

Here are a few recently unearthed rutabagas I quite enjoyed:

The Bounce Back Book: How to Thrive in the Face of Adversity, Setbacks, and Losses, by Karen Salmansohn

Idea Revolution: Guidelines and Prompts for Brainstorming Alone, in Groups or with Clients, by Clare Warmke and Lisa Buchanan

The Stress-Free Home: Beautiful Interiors for Serenity and Harmonious Living, by Jackie Craven

Instant Intuition: A Psychic’s Guide to Finding Answers to Life’s Important Questions, by Anne Jirsch

Related reading: Make the Most of Your Public Library, New Society Publishers

Dear Gracie,

I’m heading into triple digits in a few months and that’s got me thinking about you, back there at the halfway mark. Don’t worry. No need to roll your eyes in anticipation of receiving Precious Life Lessons from your aged future self. Rather the opposite, in fact.

I’d like to ask you a favour. Will you think about me every now and then, back there in 2010? I’m entering my second century still going strong – and I want you intact and with me. So just hang on. I can’t do this without you.

You create me as you rub your hand across your face, as you turn over in bed to get more comfortable. You accrue me as you fold each wish into yourself with your breath. I can’t be here unless you’re there.

The most basic life lesson, anyway, is so simple it’s silly. The only thing absolutely required for anything you want in this life is to keep living. Just hang on. Come hell or high water, fortunes won or lost, loves ditto … as the short view stretches further and further into the long view, please keep on dreaming of your future. Of me.

Meet me. Assume you’ll live another 50 years. Act accordingly.

With love and gratitude,
Gracie

Related reading: Love’s Slope, A Forgiving Tale

Flickr photo: Beautiful old lady from Darap (Sikkim) village, by Sukanto Debnath

What do you stand for? Is it Love or Beauty or Home or Peace … or, perhaps, The Acoustic Guitar. What it is matters less than that you know it.

It’s the thing you’re a broken record about, the thing that stands the test of time. The thing your bones and cells know. It’s the thing you’d walk the plank for.

It’s the worthy devotion you carry with you, giving you confidence and buoyancy, even when you’re poked in the back by people who don’t agree or see, forced out toward the tip of the plank.

Make the plank just another way to enjoy a swim.

Run toward the end of the plank with a flippant bum-swish. Fling yourself off into the gathering dark with a wild “Yeeeee HAH!” Before you even hit the water you’ll out-grin the sharks to the point of freaking them out.

When you dare to stand for the song your very cells sing to you, the plank is only a springboard. And you sail from it into the air as the embodiment of a dream.

As the ship and its cheering, jeering mayhem sails off into the black distance, you float, at ease. That’s when the sea plane and the luxury yacht and the friendly sea serpent arrive, drawn by the lighthouse of you.

The story – the sharp sticks, the salt spray, the shark fins (the layoff, the weight gain, the creditors) – is not important. What’s important is that you tell yourself what you already know you stand for.

Everything else is merely darkness waiting for your shine.

{ PEP TALKS deliver a bracing blast of Grace }

Related reading: Pep Talk | Count Your Limbs, The Power of the Hero Alone

Flickr photo: Schiermonnikoog, by Bert K (revised by Grace)

~

“But the normal filtering mechanism on his mind had been stripped away. The tiniest of sights, sounds, smells competed with the big ones for his attention. It felt like looking at ten million blades of grass and being unable to see a lawn.”

~

From Laurie R. King’s Touchstone,
a novel about a highly sensitive man

~

Flickr photo: You can almost see the grass grow, by aussiegall

The Original Deck

Years ago, I made a deck of creativity prompt cards for myself – 75 prompts that propelled me into a more expansive space for finding solutions. I formatted them in Excel, printed them on card stock, and cut them out by hand.

Months later, I put them to the test. I wanted to write an e-book to help empower highly sensitive people. But what about? I’d recently read Jump Start Your Brain, by Doug Hall, and agreed with his insistence that great ideas come easier when we’re having fun, so I decided to play.

I told my husband not to interrupt me for a few hours. I took teacup hooks, twine, India-print bedspreads, a CD player, pillows, a dictionary, a clipboard, paper, pen, and my prompt cards into the bedroom and closed the door. In half an hour, I’d raised a colourful tent over the bed by running the twine between hooks screwed into the walls and draping the bedspreads over it all. Everything else went inside, including a little lamp. I entered the bewitching world, settled in against the pillows, and started the music. I couldn’t stop grinning.

One by one, I went through each of the prompt cards, writing ideas down as they came – not judging or assessing, just collecting. Card after card sparked more ideas and as they piled up I started sensing patterns and nudges toward specific directions. It all came together when I drew the card that said, “Use the dictionary as a Ouija Board. Ask first, then close your eyes and point to an answer.” I did, and everything I pointed to in the dictionary was nautical in some way or another. It was spooky.

By the time I emerged from that glorious tent, I knew I wanted to write a light-hearted e-book about healthy boundaries, using a nautical theme. The result was Stay Afloat When They’re Rocking Your Boat: How to Feel Steady and Calm with Healthy Boundaries.

Daily Posts

After that, I was really hooked on using the creativity prompts. My friend Danielle persuaded me to post one prompt a day on my website, which I did. That was fun, too, and gave me great feedback as people commented on them. I did that for 202 days in a row, creating more than 100 new prompts in the process. A surprising number of people wrote to me and said they continually got just the prompt they needed on just the day they needed it.

But by the time I posted number 202, I was ready to try something different. New readers of the site had to ferret the old prompts out from the archives, and the every-day posting schedule was too much. If I stopped, I’d have time to pursue the idea of producing hard-copy decks of prompt cards.

Card Decks

Months of research and development later, I held a beautiful deck of 101 prompt cards nestled in a neat kraft-paper box. One of my website readers, a professional marketer, had contacted me to say she was interested in helping me market them. I was good to go.

But the more I ran the numbers and the deeper I got into preparing a marketing plan, the more obvious it became that the cards wouldn’t be profitable if priced low enough to actually sell, particularly if I included my time, and even though I’d streamlined the production process, with help from a design and printing professional.

Subscriptions

Now what? Musing took me back to an idea I’d had from the very beginning: to offer the prompts as a subscription, delivered by email. Unlike at the beginning, though, I now have enough Internet technology know-how to set up a subscription service. And there are many more prompts now, too.

I’m glad to offer daily Creativity Prompts again – this time in a way that allows anyone to start at the beginning and receive them all. Creativity Prompt subscriptions (www.creativityprompts.com) are delivered in three volumes of 101 prompts each. The first two volumes are the prompts previously posted. Volume 3 is all new.

* * *

Thank you very much for your feedback and encouragement along this journey. May I help you as much as you continue to help me by reading and commenting.

Flickr photo: come n say ‘hello’ to my new friend, by linh.ngân

My dear friend and fellow highly sensitive person Carrie McCarthy has just relaunched her Style Statement website to deliver more great information about being all you, all the time. I love Carrie’s unending, enthusiastic confidence that everyone is capable of homing in on what’s meaningful and beautiful and personal. Her message is to figure out how to love the whole package. Hmmm … sounds a lot like my message and my wishes for highly sensitive people in particular.

Besides information about the Style Statement service and book, the new website offers stories, video clips, articles, and more. (And some beautiful photos.)

Thanks to Carrie, too, for mentioning me in her recent post, “5 Loves | Smart, Lovely People.”

Related reading: Interview | Carrie McCarthy

Photo by Evan Kheraj.

Saving the world is good. (Duh.) But we can’t do it if we’re dead.

Or lying on the floor in a puddle of half-checked to-do lists. Or transfixed by the three-digit number of unread emails. Or brow-beating ourselves for being in debt or fat or lonely or dorky.

The first world to make sustainable is my own. Your own. Our own little bit of the whole. This is not about whether or not you recycle. Sustainability is about living your life in a way that gives you sustenance. Sustenance nourishes us to flourish.

If you’re reading this, you’ve automatically got a great head start. After all, if you’re alive, you’ve been sustainable for years and years now. Good job. So how sustainable are you?

When the ecosystem of your life provides you with ongoing, constant nourishment, you’re grounded. (See? It is about the Earth after all.) When grounded, you’re a renewable resource.

Figure out what works in the microcosm of you. If unread emails pile up, unsubscribe. Or do a Delete All once a month. If you’re lonely, ask everyone you know to introduce you to someone you might like. Do whatever it takes to prioritize self-love. Do whatever it takes to breathe life into the places where you’re dying.

Own your world. Take responsibility for the state of the world of you. Be the benevolent dictator of all you survey, inside and out. Be the epicenter. Be stable. Be durable. It’s the only way to help the world.

Related reading: Book | Fitting in is Overrated, Pep Talk | Choose

Flickr photo: will fails as atlas, by meigooni