“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” ~ William Wordsworth
Are you a passionate person? Are you passionate about your writing, your craft or your art? Everyone says you should be. But why is that important?
Art is, after all, a shared experience. If you want to have an audience for your creations, then your creations must connect with people. Humans want to feel something, to be moved and changed somehow. They want to feel like they’re not alone, like they’re not some freakish exception to humanity.
Your audience wants to feel a spark of life inside them. They want to feel your passion come to life within them.
How do you make people feel your passion?
First of all, you need to wake up your senses. You, as a human being, need to experience the life within you and how it connects to the world around you. You need to be willing to experience pain and joy and every sense in between. Otherwise, how can you express it?
Once you’ve experienced passion, how do you express it? Do you talk about it with joy? Do you write about it unabashedly? Are your words luminous? Do they burn into your soul as you write? Do you paint with abandon? Do you allow yourself to bathe in utter ecstasy without monitoring yourself, without embarrassment, without letting others shut it down?
So many of us are afraid of letting others know how we feel. We’re afraid of rejection, afraid of criticism. We suffer from self-doubt, thinking our ideas and feelings are not worthy of sharing.
But artists and writers need to own their feelings. We need to know at the deepest level of our beings that the ancient wisdom inside us is a universal truth that must be shared in whatever form comes out of us, be it a painting, a screenplay, a novel, or any myriad of other artistic forms.
There is no room for embarrassment.
So how do you awaken your senses? Here are some suggestions.
Make a list of all the things you loved to do as a child and think about how those things made you feel. Imagine yourself as a child doing those things.
Take regular walks in nature and allow yourself to feel wonder at the plant, animal and mineral life that surrounds you.
Find something every day to be curious about and follow your curiosity.
Keep a journal about your feelings. Write without restraint. No one but you will see it, so let yourself have a guilt-free, cathartic writing orgasm.
Make a list of emotional verbs. Be specific. Think about how each one of these verbs makes you feel.
Take regular breaks from your computer or canvas and do things you love to do, things that inspire you.
Keep a list of activities that bring you joy and do them.
When you eat a meal, take time to savor the taste of the food and notice how it feels in your mouth.
Create a vision board for your story or painting.
Take an inventory at the end of each day and note your favorite things.
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Diana Osberg is owner of Mia Terra Retreats and Inner Story Retreats, and is co-owner of Mia Terra Mar. If you’d like to learn how to put passion on the page and screen, join Diana and writer-producer-director Heather Hale in the heart of Tuscany, Italy for a week-long, small group immersion in the ecstasy of the Italian culture.
