What we’ve been reading on the Creative Mind
The Artists Way by Julia Cameron BUY NOW
A twelve-week course that guides you through the process of recovering your creative self. It aims to dispel the 'I'm not talented enough' conditioning that holds many people back and helps you to unleash your own inner artist. Its step-by-step approach enables you to transform your life, overcome any artistic blocks you may suffer from, including limiting beliefs, fear, sabotage, jealousy and guilt, and replace them with self confidence and productivity.
Finding Flow: The Psychology Of Engagement With Everyday Life by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi BUY NOW
A prescriptive guide that helps us reclaim ownership of our lives. Based on a far-reaching study of thousands of individuals, Finding Flow contends that we often walk through our days unaware and out of touch with our emotional lives. Our inattention makes us constantly bounce between two extremes: during much of the day we live filled with the anxiety and pressures of our work and obligations, while during our leisure moments, we tend to live in passive boredom. The key, according to Csikszentmihalyi, is to challenge ourselves with tasks requiring a high degree of skill and commitment. Instead of watching television, play the piano.
Sensitive: The Power of Feeling in a World that Doesn't by Hannah Jane Walker BUY NOW
Drawing on a wide range of experts, ideas and experiences, Hannah challenges the myth that sensitivity is something negative, and seeks an answer to the question: how useful is sensitivity to the world, and what is it for? She discovers that high sensitivity is sometimes connected to higher levels of empathy, emotional intelligence and creativity, and that whatever our level of sensitivity, it can be beneficial for us all. Society has undervalued sensitivity, teaching us that only the tough succeed, but this book seeks to change that story. Sensitivity is not a weakness or something to be ashamed of, but an invaluable form of strength, offering so many new ways of looking at the world.
On Becoming a Person (A Therapists View of Psychotherapy) by Carl Rogers BUY NOW
Contemporary psychology derives largely from the experimental laboratory, or from Freudian theory. It is preoccupied with minute aspects of animal and human behaviour, or with the mentally ill. But there are rebels, of whom the author counts himself as one, along with Gordon Allport, Abraham Maslow and Rollo May, who feel that psychology and psychiatry should be aiming higher, and be more concerned with growth and potentiality in man. The interest of such a psychology is in the production of harmoniously mature individuals, given that we all have qualities and possibilities infinitely capable of development. Successful development makes us more flexible in relationships, more creative, and less open to suggestion and control.