Three Simple Tips to Get the Most Out of Any Classes You Take

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Pile of Journals

I was recently documenting my process for gatherings like Reading Hour* in ​The Studio​. It got me thinking about all the classes I’ve taught, all the classes I’ve taken and the strategies for learning I’ve developed over the years. Today I want to share a few with you.

No matter the subject, no matter the teacher, these three simple tips will help you make the most of any class you take.

Give Yourself Time to Arrive

Life is busy and we often barrel into class catching our breath, barely landing before we’re leaving and on to the next thing. Having a short and simple routine for switching gears helps us get present and available for learning. For me, it’s making cup of tea before class and having my journal and pen at the ready. For you it might be lighting a candle, doing a little stretch or taking three deep breaths. The key is to choose something that feels good to you, something you look forward to. Repetition is your friend here. Over time, this mini ritual will become a mental cue that signals, “This is class time.”

Ask a Question on the First Day

Here’s a little secret I’ve been using since university: I always ask a question on the first day of class. Why? Because silence is a barrier to engagement and the longer it goes on, the harder it is to break. Your question doesn’t have to be earth-shaking. It could be about the schedule, the supplies or even where the bathroom is. The important thing is to use your voice (or type that question in an online class). Once you’ve crossed that threshold, each subsequent interaction becomes easier. (This tip is especially recommended for my fellow quiet good girls!)

Take Five Minutes to Gather Your Learning

We all know about taking notes in class. Usually we’re diligently writing down information or instructions from our teacher or classmates. But what are we thinking, feeling or wondering? Take five minutes directly after class to write down your own responses to the content. Even a quick one-minute write before you pack up can make all the difference. This short period of reflection can unearth questions, spark inspiration and awaken possibilities you might have otherwise missed.

These are three of my go-to strategies for making the most of any learning experience. What do you do that supports your learning? What personal rituals or habits help you engage?

*Btw, we’re hosting a free Cozy Reading Hour on Black Friday in November! Curl up with a cuppa tea, a good book and good company. We’ll pull together a list of everyone’s books so expect to fill your TBR (to be read)! We’re setting up registration now. Sign up for The School of Creative Magic to get the registration announcement!

The Magic We Find in Books

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My mom got me my first library card on my second birthday.

That was the earliest the library would let you have your own card. Right away, I used it extensively. In every childhood bedroom I remember, there was a spot on my dresser for library books – a pile for those to be read and a pile for those to return.

Books were one of the first places I encountered magic. There were the stories themselves, like The Witch’s Buttons by Ruth Chew, The Cuckoo Clock by Mrs. Molesworth* and the tales of Narnia too. Less explicitly magical but magical nonetheless were books like The Secret Garden and Jane Eyre.

I learned that reading itself is magical. When I opened a book, I stepped into a different life and found new places where characters became companions. I had many amazing adventures while never leaving the living room floor. (For some reason curling up on that white shag carpet was my favourite place to get lost in a book.)

As I grew, I discovered that books offer a transformational magic. We can be changed by what we read. Sometimes, this can be difficult. In high school, it took me a year to recover from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In the best scenarios, books change us by giving us a new understanding of ourselves, the world and one another, particularly people, places and times that were hitherto unknown to us.

Now I find the books that bring me the most meaningful pleasure are the ones that remind me of the beauty and magic in everyday life, like the memoirs of May Sarton or The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl, which I read at this week’s Reading Hour.

All of this magic is why I included a monthly Reading Hour in The Studio: Your Year of Creative Magic. In this fast-paced world of doom-scrolling and dopamine hits, we can settle in for a time and remember the magic of reading. Perhaps, we will be lucky and that magic will spill into the world and our lives in all sorts of wonderful and unexpected ways.

with love,

Jamie

This is an excerpt from Letters from My Studio. You can subscribe here.

Three Ways to Welcome Creative Flow: Creative Living with Jamie (eps 294)

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Creative Living with Jamie Episode 294:
3 Ways to Welcome Creative Flow

As creatives, we long for creative flow. In this episode I share some thoughts on how we impede it, how to work with it if you are an intuitive or intentional artist and three concrete ways to welcome it in art-making.

Resources & Mentions

BONUS Content

I’ve made an accompanying ezine to go with this episode – complete transcripts, an accompanying exercise and links to all! Download the full transcript ezine here.

Transcript Excerpt

Today I want to talk to you about the relationship of intention and intuition when it comes to you as an artist and you and your creative magic. Let’s go!

This weekend in my newsletter, I shared a little bit about how some of us tend to be more intuitive artists and some of us tend to be more intentional artists.

Intuitive artists are people who really love to pursue the mystery, who love to have lots of spaciousness, who need a lot of freedom in order to express themselves. They like to be in the process. They like to watch it happen. They like to pay attention as it goes and let the work lead.

Now, the other thing they do is they can get really shut down if things get too tight and too rigid. If the demands are too harsh, if the consequences are heavy, there’s just a way all that energy goes kaput. “I am not showing up. I’m not putting myself in that position. It’s too uncomfortable.”

Also sometimes they can feel a little insecure about whether they’re actually getting anywhere. They can feel a little bit like they’re just playing around and they worry that they’ll never reach a level of achievement that makes them be able to say confidently, “I am an artist.”

Intentional artists are sort of on the other side of the scale. They love to do research. They love to make plans. They love to make schedules. They like to plot things out and problem solve. Making plans and doing all that research is half the fun!

Now, their challenge can be when they don’t have some form of structure, they can feel a little lost. If things get a little loose, that’s when their energy dissipates. Whereas with an intuitive, if it gets too tight, their energy shuts down, with an intentional artist, when things get too loose, they get globby. They’re like, “I don’t get it. I don’t know what to do. I feel lost.”

Then they can start feeling like, “Oh, there must be something wrong with me. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go. I must not be a creative because when it gets into all this intuitive stuff, I just get lost.”

One of the things I’m here to say is that we, as artists, as creative souls, as creative spirits, we have access to and need of both of these energies.

Download BONUS CONTENT complete transcript ezine here.

A World of Creative Magic: Creative Living with Jamie (eps 293)

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Creative Living with Jamie Episode 293:
A World of Creative Magic

Turning creative ideas into living things is the work of a creative magician! It means finding inspiration, learning to wrangle time and so much more. I learned that (again) as I found my way to making the biggest venture I have ever created – and I hope you’re going to love it!

Resources & Mentions

BONUS Content

I’ve made an accompanying ezine to go with this episode – complete transcripts, an accompanying exercise and links to all! Download the full transcript ezine here.

Transcript Excerpt

I want to share with you something about the way my creativity works and how that’s sometimes reflected by the things that come out in the world. I tend to see all the things that want to be created through me all at once. Like, they just arrive and I know, “Oh, okay, we’re going to do that.” And what needs to take place in the material world is then I need to figure out time.

For those of you who’ve done Planning Day and for those of you who’ve done Devotion, you know this is something I talk about all the time. As artists, as creatives, we take this energy that shows up, something that wants to be created, and we move it from the ethereal realm, from the realm of air and imagination and ideas, and we move it bit by bit down into the material world, into the creative world, into the hands or the physical world where other people can see it and understand it and engage with it.

That’s a part of our job. I always think of it like the Magician card, one hand up, receiving and then one hand down, creating. We’re that kind of channel for creative energy.
There are some people that really love this idea phase, this airy phase. It’s so comfortable up there. Everything feels possible. There are a million ideas. It’s fun. It’s light. And then some people up there in the ethers feel like, “Whoa, this is confusing! I feel so ungrounded. I don’t know what to do. There are too many choices.”

Then down here in the earthly realm, some people are like, “Okay, good. Now I can do something. Now I can make a plan. Now I can use my hands. Now we’re dealing with some tangible things. I know how to do that.” And other people are like, “Oh God, here it feels so heavy. It feels so limiting. It feels crunchy. I feel so contained here in the earthly realm.”

And so each of us is looking for a sweet spot on the spectrum where we can actually bring those ideas into being. That’s a process. It’s something that we as artists learn over time and with practice. And I want to tell you that sometimes it’s really uncomfortable. There’s always going to be spots in the creative process that are uncomfortable. Often it’s that switching point. It’s that place where Air and Earth are meeting and they’re negotiating. They’re discussing with each other how much is air going to give up for something to come to earth and how spaciousness is earth going to give in order to hold what air wants to say?

And so, for me, that negotiation happens as I try to understand something in time, as I try to have a realistic view of how much can be done over what period of time.

Download BONUS CONTENT complete transcript ezine here.

Introducing The School of Creative Magic!

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I have been dreaming up something wonderful and it’s finally here, The School of Creative Magic!

This project has been transformational not only for the work but also for me personally. And that’s because…

What we create creates us.

We simply cannot enter a time of deep creating without emerging forever changed. Most often that change is a deepening of or a fundamental return to who we truly are.

Every bit of building The School of Creative Magic pushed me to articulate and align with what I believe. Every day it asked me to show up and step up. Its spirit called me to claim the magical parts in myself more fully and to remember the world I believed in as a girl.

The School of Creative Magic fueled the fire of my commitment to help people unfurl into the magical creatures they long to be, free of the fear that their gifts will forever lay dormant, their creative spirit not fully expressed and their art never realized.

Even when it was a slog, even when it was a hair-pulling fit of frustration, even when my brain shut down from decision fatigue, even when I couldn’t find the way through, every step affirmed this path.

Let me tell you about one of ways creating The School of Creative Magic showed me the way.

I love the photo that I shared with you today. It’s a moment captured be my sister Suzie, who took virtually all of the photos of me on the site.

What you can’t tell from the photo is that this is me getting changed in public!

I brought three changes of ‘costume’ for the shoot in the ravine just north of us. As I pulled my full-length skirt over my pants before peeling them off, a couple came down the walkway right beside me. There were many moments like this. A woman walking her dogs stopped to say my zebra print jumpsuit was chic. A boy with his mom saw me raise a cardboard crown to my head and laughed at the absurdity.

Do you know what I felt in those moments?

ALIVE!

There is an energy that comes with being an artist pursuing a vision, no matter how odd, unusual or out of place.

I didn’t feel weird. I didn’t feel awkward.

I felt like myself.

I was in the world, being true to me, my vision and my work.

That feels like freedom to me.

It’s a freedom I want for you too. Whatever it is you dream of creating – no matter how absurd or practical, mundane or magical – I want you to make it with courage and delight.

That’s why I created The School of Creative Magic. It offers paths and programs that support that artistic aliveness in you, your life and your work. You’ll find the Studio Yearbook there and Devotion. (Both are available now for the coming fall.) You’ll also find a new offer, a program called The Studio. It will be a magical year of practice and community and I hope you’ll join me.

​Click to Open the Door to The School of Creative Magic​

 

How to Read a Dreamboard Like a Tarot Card: Creative Living with Jamie (eps 292)

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Creative Living with Jamie Episode 292:
How to Read a Dreamboard Like a Tarot Card

I recently opened up the opportunity for Studio Yearbookers to submit their dreamboards for a ‘reading’. In this episode of Creative Living with Jamie, I go through four dreamboards, sharing what I see and offering techniques for how you can learn to read your dreamboard like a tarot card! I also share how backing out of a commitment kept me in integrity.

BONUS CONTENT: I’ve put together an ezine of the transcripts, includes a summary of strategies for interpreting your dreamboard like a tarot card!  Download here.

“WOW, Jamie. I’ve been doing SoulCollage©️ since 2012, and taken classes from a number of facilitators, and yet watching your process was amazingly inspirational for enriching my SoulCollage readings. Thank you so much for sharing your way of unearthing such richness, depth, and insight.” Carol R

Resources & Mentions

BONUS Content

I’ve put together a PDF of the transcripts in a  magazine style. It includes a summary of the strategies I shared for interpreting your dreamboard like a tarot card!  Download the full transcript ezine here.

Transcript Excerpt

: I promised something a little while ago and it’s taken me a while to get to it because I’ve had technical difficulties. Hopefully, fingers crossed, it will go well today. I’m trying to trust that there’s something in the energy of today that is ready to come through that maybe wasn’t before. So that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

So what I’m doing today is I opened up the opportunity to people who participate in the Studio Yearbook to submit their Full Moon Dreamboards (it’s something we do in our yearbook every full moon) for a bit of a reading.

The reason I did that is in the studio we have a three-point process for creating dreamboards. The first is to do some reflection, and we do that with the inspiration of the energy of a particular full moon. Many of these are from the Full Worm Moon, so it was about what’s emerging, what dreams are trying to break through and be seen. It seemed a really good one to work on.

We do a bit of reflecting and then with that in our minds, all the thoughts that have been stirred, the question that’s been asked, we gather images that call to our heart. We glue them in our Studio Yearbook. Then when we are done, we go back and look and say, “What do I see here?”

The reason being is a dreamboard is really a two-way conversation. You know, out there in the world, when people talk about vision boards, they’re really often talking about one-way communication. “Here’s what I want, Universe. Let me show you what I want.” And that works. But here’s something that is so rich and deep, and I’m doing this so you can really explore this aspect of what’s available.

The richness that’s available in a vision board or a dreamboard is to go back and see what it’s telling you. What is it telling you? When we pick images, there’s something happening energetically. There’s something that’s calling to us. It’s in part rooted in what we know we desire, but it’s also rooted in the unknown, and that’s why I think this is such a crucial step and I wanted to share it with you today.

Now before we start. I want to do something that I do in all my classes, which is light a candle. This is a way of us bringing our intention and our energy present. It’s a way of calling back in all the parts of us that are somewhere else, that are listening to me but also scrolling on Instagram, that are listening to me but also worrying about what’s for dinner.

Instead to say, “Okay, hold on. I want to invite some magic in so let me signal that invitation to my heart, my spirit, my body and the powers that be by lighting this candle and inviting this moment to be full of magic.”

So I’m lighting this on all of our behalf, an invitation to intuition, an invitation to inspiration, an invitation to one penny dropping, a moment when you realize something you never knew before. I’ll leave that there. Even though it’s such a bright day you can barely see it, it’s there to guide the way.

Okay, let us start. I am going to look at four dream boards, two in more depth, and two with a light touch. They just had a couple of themes I wanted to pull out for the people that submitted them.

Let’s start.

Download BONUS CONTENT complete transcript ezine here.

We Are Capable of Creative Magic: Creative Living with Jamie (eps 291) featuring artist Lola Yang

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Creative Living with Jamie Episode 291:
We Are Capable of Creative Magic

In this episode of Creative Living with Jamie, I share how creating shows us what we’re capable of. Plus I interview mixed media artist and Devotion alumna Lola Yang about how she approached being an artist as a mom of a young child and also how she made her dream of a minivan art studio come true! We hope you’ll be inspired to pursue your dreams too.

BONUS CONTENT: I’ve put together a PDF of the transcripts in a bit of a magazine style. It even includes a little creative assignment for you to keep the inspiration going and the creativity flowing.  Download here.

FREE E-BOOK: The Dreams Do Come True – and Yours Can Too e-book is also available to studio members! Join the studio and you’ll find the book in the studio resource page.

About Lola Yang

Lola is a self taught mixed media artist inspired by nature, she enjoys living by the sea and working in her mini van art studio by the sea.
She makes collage art that reflects what a gift it is to be alive.
She journals to find her inner voice and sketches to capture the beautiful moments of everyday life.
She also leads creative workshops for those who believe in magic like she does.
Born in China, currently living with her husband and her 3 year old daughter by the sea in Israel.
Visit her and her mini van art studio journey on instagram @Lolayangstudio

Resources & Mentions

BONUS Content

I’ve put together a PDF of the transcripts in a  magazine style. It even includes a little creative assignment for you to keep the inspiration going and the creativity flowing.  Download the full transcript magazine here.

Transcript Excerpt

Jamie Ridler: Everybody, I just have to share, recently Lola and I celebrated 10 years of inspiration, connection. I’m so excited to bring her here on the podcast. Lola, why don’t you tell us all a little bit about you and about your creative life?

Lola Yang: Okay, so my name is Lola and I was born in China. And right now, I’m living in Israel with my husband and my three-year-old daughter. My creative life looks like every morning I wake up around the sunrise and I take a short walk by the sea to my minivan studio. And when I arrive there, I light a candle and then I start my morning routine. Usually, it takes about two hours and it’s movement and meditation and tarot card reading, plus journaling. If it’s a new moon or full moon I would do my new moon reflection practice and full moon connecting. All of this takes about two hours.

At 8:30 I will go back home to have breakfast with my husband. Then after that I come back to the studio again, spending time with myself until the lunchtime. Usually, these three hours I’ll be working on something I chose in Devotion, the projects that I chose in Devotion. And then the afternoon, I usually spend the time with my girl. And if that evening I have Devotion, I will be in the studio again a bit more. If not, I would just spend the rest of the day with my family.

Jamie Ridler: You’ve touched on a couple of things that I really want to dive more into. One is I for sure want to ask you more about what it’s like to have a minivan studio, but also, I want to mention for people who don’t know what it is, Devotion is a program that I have. It’s a three-month immersion into embracing yourself as an artist, into creating your artwork. I also have a mentorship program afterwards. Lola did Devotion and now is in the mentorship program so that’s what she’s talking about, setting a goal, a “something” you want to create for your season, and then spending intentional studio time for that. It’s been and continues to be a joy to have you in that program, Lola.

Lola Yang: For me, Devotion is my self-care. Once I joined it, I think, “Why, why don’t I take care of myself better?” It’s nourishing me. It’s just giving me energy. It really boost my immune system, I would say, to be with you, all of you.

Jamie Ridler: One of the things that makes me– Oh, I’m going to just have to go all over the place and follow all these threads because there’s so much inspiration here. I’m going to come back to the minivan studio, so don’t let me forget it. But one of the places I wanted to take you was, I know that when you came to Devotion, one of the challenges was, “How do I be my full creative self? How do I be an artist and also a mom of a young child?” And I know on this side of it, so much has changed for you. Tell us a little bit about that journey.

Lola Yang: I look back, really in the last 10 years, and I would say my biggest challenge is really three years ago that my time and my space was– All of a sudden, because I become a full-time mother, I’m wondering, “This full-time artist, where is she?” I mean, “Where is her time and her space?”

This is why I always believe challenge can bring me gift. The space that I lost, I got a minivan now. And the time, I didn’t know how to make it and now I have Devotion. So this is my two biggest gifts from the challenge.

Jamie Ridler: What do you think it’s like for your daughter? How is it different for her now that you’re saying, “I’m a mom and also, I am an artist”? What do you think the impact on her is?

Lola Yang: Hmm. I think when she was two, I really felt that I couldn’t fully spend time because whenever I have a moment, even if she’s sleeping, I can do my thing, but I’m around her and any moment somebody can tell me, “Stop.” I really never been interrupted like that before.

So, I came to Devotion and in the beginning it’s difficult for her because she didn’t understand how come you suddenly need to hide in a room for one hour, two hours? Also, I can still hear she’s crying. It takes time, but for her it was pretty fast. I feel like almost one month she’s starting to understand that I have a date with Jamie. It’s a bit before she go to bed because of the time difference. It’s around 8 to 10 o’clock. So she’ll wait me until I finish and then she’ll hug me and we’ll go to bed together. And I think that there is this one month that she need to get to understand.

But now for me, it’s such a blessing every time she remind me, “Hey,” (or even we have the breaks between Devotion, she would remind me) “Why you don’t meet Jamie?” It’s sweet. It’s just, I don’t know. I feel my heart is… Now with her and her support, I feel this is really a gift, all the challenges I felt.

Download BONUS CONTENT complete transcript magazine here.