Live to tell

Lauren has already brought her complicated love life back to minimalist innocence, but almost missed out on writing her masterpiece.
Or rather;
A Mistresspiece.

It was in the final 5 minutes of our coaching call when it hit me!
Creativity coach Sara and me had been going over my newfound love for my yoga studio, and my decision to write only for pleasure.
Not as a business model.
However, with writing not making any money of its own, my desire to step up, educate, entertain or even speak about being a secret mistress had vanished.
No money, no honey.
Which was fine because I was totally uninspired to curate my pieces on mistresshood and sexuality, for a book called The Big Mistress.
And felt even more hopeless about writing a comprehensive mistress guide where I would teach all the lessons I had learned along the way.
Twelve steps in becoming a mistress or something.
I don’t know.
Whatever it was, I didn’t want to write it.
And I didn’t want to compose my books from the perspective of helping people either. The thought that I had to break it down to the level where everybody had their fears dealt with and had their biggest objections addressed?
In the unlikely situation I would actually succeed making my mistress model into a self-help tool, it would be a toothless tiger.
And still put me at risk of scrutiny or social exclusion.
I just wasn’t willing to take the fall for that.
But then again, to have another framework – yet again!- slip through my fingers the moment it was ready to be released into the world?
That was painful.
Sara comforted me by saying that although I am one of those artists who has qualities throughout the whole cycle of the creative process, my true passion lies at the beginning of it.
With The Expressionist.
That is where I pick from The Void, a subject of interest. It can be something no one appreciates yet, or it can be something that others deeply respect.
It can be a sacred thing.
I snatch it out of the air.
Study it, chew on it, try things out.
I examine it, dissect it, turn it inside out, and fix the pieces temporarily, onto some sort of already existing foundation.
And then I start building it up from there.
Connecting the different pieces, and going higher and higher.
Ultimately, I take the earliest framework out from underneath it, only the finalized structure remains.
And then it is done.
The Mistress Framework for the other woman.
Or the White Tigress work for single women.
Even a yoga book I had practically all done and ready… and I never published it.
Because when it is time for it to start making its own money, and for me to illustrate how the model can benefit you. When it is my time to guide, to listen, to understand?
All I want to do is crawl under a rock and die.
Which is why all those creative endeavors start highly productive, yet always end with me wasting months in resistance, and ultimately abandoning the project. Because I realize that I m not going to do this work that I SHOULD do.
Fuck the shoulds!
I just wasted months of my life, NOT creating what I really wanted to make. NOT being in alignment.
NOT living from soul.
And instead eyeing out this project as if it was a one liter bottle of cod-liver oil I had to gobble down before I was allowed to go on with the rest of my life, maybe.
Because my first priority would be to talk about the finished project, and guide it into the world like a baby taking its first steps. You can’t build an audience and a following unless you’re available to talk about the finished product!
But I didn’t want that cod-liver oil…. I didn’t want fame, or money. I didn’t even want to help anyone. I just wanted my life back!
And Sara?
My bold and beautiful creativity coach?
She GOT that!
She has understood a long time ago, that although I use guides myself (hiring coaching at critical stages of my life or business) I AM not a coach myself.
I am an artist.
I’m also an inspirator, an energizer, an uplifter.
YES!
I can build you up, just like those models. Using some tools and frameworks that we can ultimately take out, because they’re no longer needed.
That’s when you are standing on top of the mountain, and you spread your wings.
And you can fly.
We will both delighted at how magnificent you have become.
But I’m only good with people who know they want to fly. Who are CONVINCED they can fly, and just need someone to show them the hows.
But even all that?
Is not my task as a writer, not as an artist.
Here, I want to express freely.
No wonder I look at all those helpful books I could write, based on everything that I now know, as if they’re a death sentence. The thought of creating a book on a subject that I have outgrown, is almost blasphemy.
And then I saw it!
“Sara! It just hit me! I know what it is!”
I yelled into our Zoom connection, excitedly jumping up and down my chair.
“I know the answer, I really do!”
When we started working together, Sara made me fill out a creative framework
and it brought up the most peculiar result…. at the far end of the creative process.
It was the phase where you share your work with the world.
And although I hit some marks here and there, that would help me to get my work across, I felt the biggest emotional connection to the final personality marker.
The Disruptor.
It is the one who weakens and ultimately destroys existing structures of power or social conventions.
It takes down anything false or redundant.
And contrary to a guide a Disruptor leaves chaos and doesn’t offer any solutions. His gift is that he releases you from the lies you’ve been living in.
“It’s just like what Alexander Mc.Queen said about his fashion shows, Sara!”
He had defended his bloody, misogynistic fashion shows with titles like “Jack the Ripper stalks his victims” and “Highland Rape” by stating:
I don’t want you to walk out feeling you’ve just had Sunday lunch!
I want you to be repulsed or exhilarated. As long as it’s an emotion.
“Sara, that’s my final stage of a project!
It’s a show, a one-off thing.
It’s where I speak my whole truth and in the process blow everything up!”
So that there will be a void, from which new life, new art, will be born again.

NB: within an hour after my call with Sara, I offered The Mistress a place behind my desk. I asked her to tell us everything she knows.
And to not spare us.
A Mistress Speaks.

<3LSH
An unexamined life is not worth living

Mindset Yoga: de echte life makeover (Nijmegen)

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Live to tell is the twenty-fifth chapter from Project M.

tenth anniversary of the book that changed my life!

Summer 2008 I started writing in English.
Dutch American Diary
Just like now, I was in love with two men. And just like now, they were both taken.
And – yes, just like now – I had no idea where life would take me.
This 2008 diary became the only thing that offered stability during a time where I had just left my partner after fourteen years and the two new men were driving me crazy.
A book about starting over in your mid-thirties and reinventing yourself as a lover;
As a woman;
And as a vengeful fury from hell.