Liberating creativity from my expectations

Can I commit without certainty?

Announcements

• Enrollment for?Rewriting Our?Rest Stories?opens on February 21st:?This is my 4-month?group program for API women and femmes to liberate themselves & their lineage from intergenerational cycles of burnout in community through rest.?Head to the website learn more, get a feeling for what the Resties Village might offer you,?and to sign up for the waitlist!
• Experience the "Rollercoaster Year-in-Review" exercise to start 2025 with greater clarity:?January's Community Rest Session replay is now available on Patreon?along with a library of guided rest and somatic practices. You can sign up for a free 7-day trial to begin.?

Hi community,

The act of creation is one of the most vulnerable things we do as human beings.?

To allow our minds to wander beyond the confines of what we know in search of what could be...

To dabble in dreams, imagination, and curiosity until something – an idea, download, or intuitive can't-explain-why nudge – takes us?for an adventure...

To court that creative energy for days, weeks, months, even years,?wondering what it?wants to become, what to do with it, and?maybe even "Why me?!"...

All of this?without ANY guarantee that it will manifest in the?physical world as Some Thing... nonetheless Some Thing People Will Like.

Said another way:?The act of creation is one massive leap of faith.?You can give your ALL to the creative energies that have chosen YOU to be their vessel, steward, and partner... but at the end of the day, all you can do is jump without knowing what awaits in advance.

Who you become? Where this all leads? How many people you touch? What you learn from it??You'll have to live it out to find out. It's the only way. Talk about?vulnerable and terrifying!???

As someone who's been a self-employed small business owner for 5+ years, I've gotten pretty intimate with this process through extensive exposure. But I still feel vulnerable and terrified?whenever I share something I've been working on for public consumption / consideration?on the Internet!

The discomfort of baring a piece of my soul has never fully gone away. I think I will always feel a bit naked, but I'm at a point where I can finally make peace with it.

You might've seen in my recent newsletters that I launched a new offering called Rest in Crisis & Change: Slow Study Group. This is an?8-week introductory course to teach?people how to rest even when the conditions are far from ideal AKA?how to rest amidst unrest.?

This course builds upon the 2 hour workshop I facilitated throughout 2024 and I've been super excited about it. But enrollment has been really sluggish.?I haven't heard back from folks on the waitlist.?Only 1 person has signed up so far. And enrollment closes tomorrow Friday 2/7.

As a result,?my anxious parts started worrying that it's because I'm terrible at marketing (admittedly, facilitating,?teaching, or coaching?is my preferred role). Meanwhile my ashamed parts fear that being honest about this means you'll judge me or my work as less credible (even as I know from experience that the success of an offering is the result of many factors beyond me).

I gave myself a week to move through some really tough emotions: disappointment, sadness, scarcity, self-doubt. Then, that?wise?part of me that?remembers?how the?rollercoaster of creation goes steps in to remind me that sometimes I?will create things that land and?sometimes I will create things that?flop. The things that flop are not a waste of time. Every contraction makes space for the eventual expansion. Every part of the story plays a crucial role, one that I likely cannot appreciate until much later down the road.

So I'm going to breathe and do the hardest easy thing for a human being to?do: surrender.

In the void of not knowing whether this course will go on as planned or not, I can choose to affirm why I create at all:?to?express what's most important to me in these times like?practicing community care, addressing?human suffering, and refusing to give up on the possibility of a better world.?

I can commit to?my?creative energy?independent of what it can do for me or my expectations of what it should result in.?Because doing / being / embodying this energy, especially in times of crisis and change matters THAT MUCH?to me.?

So I'm putting out this one last call today. If it doesn't work out right now, I trust there is something else I'm meant to steward creatively in the meantime.

Whatever you're gestating with YOUR creative energy, I hope you choose to keep going even, and especially IF, you don't get the results you hope for. If it keeps you vitally alive, soulfully nourished,?and connected to something bigger than yourself, it's worth investing in. This, too, is food and sustenance.

To contemplate:

• Does creative energy?have to produce (AKA manifest something tangible)?in order to?exist or be valued??
• If I can feel how creative energy is alive in me –?shaping how I think, feel, breathe, and move through the world –?is it any less real if it does not have a physical form?
• Why do I doubt the existence of something simply because a certain outcome has not yet arrived or taken a form I recognize?
• How can I trust in the not-yet-manifest more?

?? LEARN MORE ??

Each week we'll gather to practice rest, develop your toolkit of go-to practices for stress relief, and build capacity to be with the?challenges that can come with slowing down or listening to your body.

You’ll cultivate the somatic awareness, relational skills, values-aligned friendships, and increased capacity for discomfort necessary to show up with agency, vision, and response-ability in times of crisis and change.?

We prioritize these skills in community to not only survive better, but to navigate an increasingly unstable reality with more creativity, care, and choice.

Your Restie Bestie,

Cassandra Lam /?Lam Thùy Dung

Founder of Collective Rest