by Tara Joyce | Mar 31, 2017 | Featured, Self/Business Growth
Do you know the Greek myth of Icarus? Icarus is the son of Daedalus who dared to fly too near the sun on wings of feathers and wax. His father cautioned him that flying too near the Sun would cause the wax to melt. But Icarus became enthralled with his ability to fly and forgot his father’s warning. The feathers came loose and Icarus plunged to his death in the sea.
As I see it, this myth is a lesson about balance, about finding balance with your ego and with your gifts. It was Icarus’ choice not accept his gift as it was and to see it as enough. Instead, he chose to push it further, to a place where his gift was destroyed, and he destroyed himself in the process.
We all have, and are given, wings to fly on and it is our choice what we do with them. Do we not use them and never take flight? Do we accept them as they are and fly proudly on them to new destinations? Or do we misuse them, flying too high, too close to the Sun, destroying our gift and ourselves in the process?
If you don’t fly—or you try to fly too high like Icarus, the myth teaches you’ll find yourself falling into the depths of emotional despair, drowning in your egoic feelings (as represented by the sea Icarus drowned in).
To make the most of your gifts, you don’t need to make yourself into more than you are, you don’t need to fly higher than you can and burn yourself, but you also don’t need to stay down on earth, denying your own wings to fly. You are enough. Icarus teaches you have power over what you do with your gifts, and to what heights and destinations they take you.
photo credit: Benjamin Carnevale
by Tara Joyce | Mar 17, 2017 | Innerpreneurship
Every craft-person has a toolbox of tools and techniques they use to bring their work to life. You too have a toolbox full of the tools and techniques you’ve picked up over your lifetime that have helped you to shape your life into what it is today.
Your tools are very personal, as are how you use them. You can hear people talk about employing techniques and tools generally, but only you can determine how they will work best with your creations.
Like artists, you must discover the truth of your own vision, and take action through this, using the unique tools you have available.
photo credit: Jeffrey Pot
by Tara Joyce | Mar 10, 2017 | Cultural Creativity
We need to resolve our past, so we can expose our truth and move forward with our lives. We are drowning in our unresolved emotions. Unrecognized, they weigh us down. Depressed by them, we unknowingly hide and mask them.
So often we think our uncomfortable emotions away, doing everything we can not to feel the truth of them. Our rationalizations become what is real to us, and what we feel. What is not comfortable we do not acknowledge.
Disconnected from the truth of our emotions, we become unaware of what we truly value and love, and we find ourselves investing in things that are not right for us. Not acknowledging what we feel, we look to others to validate how we ‘should’ feel, using them to rationalize what we want to feel into ‘reality’.
We need to resolve our past and what is uncomfortable to us, so we can fully live our lives. To do this, we need to be vulnerable with ourselves and with others. This begins with accepting our fear of vulnerability, of intimacy, of our defenses being breached. It’s okay it feels more safe to feel in control and to remain hidden, it’s okay to believe then scary things won’t happen that we can’t handle.
While it is nice to feel we can make predictable our feelings and their magnitude, we simply cannot. At some point, we must surrender to our lack of control. We must hand over the tightly held and relinquish the guarded. Despite what we fear, our hearts will not break, we will not be in mortal danger. We can peer deeply in. We can feel our hurt and survive. We don’t need to protect ourselves from the truth of our feelings. What we need is to drop the mask and to reclaim our vulnerability.
When we don’t explore the emotions we find so uncomfortable, we create conditions that support others in avoiding theirs. Yet when we face our past and our truth, we make it easier for others to the same. There are always reasons why not to feel something, why not to be something, why not to do something. In helping our self take the risk of vulnerability, we release our self from our past and allow our self to move forward with our life. Being what we truly are, we support others in being the same.
by Tara Joyce | Mar 2, 2017 | Innerpreneurship, Personal Branding
Creating a business is just as abstract as creating a painting, and while you can go to a million painting classes and learn a thousand difference techniques, what will end up on the canvas depends on you. Knowing how to do something doesn’t makes it special—it’s the art of it, the You in it, that makes it what it is.
The right way to run your business, the art of your business, is learned through experience and in a growing awareness of what you know, what you are good at, and what you can do. It’s through this understanding that you uncover how you want to and ‘should’ do business.
If it was so easy to be great simply by knowing how to do something, wouldn’t there be more great people doing really great things? Knowing how to do something is easy, it’s the art of doing it that’s hard. That takes creation, and it requires a stretching of the mind that can be so uncomfortable many people spend their whole lives avoiding it.
photo credit: Alex L’aventurier
by Tara Joyce | Feb 23, 2017 | My Journey | What's On My Mind
I can’t take ownership of these feelings, these thoughts.
These issues are not mine to hold.
I am without scars; flawless. Undesirable qualities, I have not.
It is You that is angry. Jealous. Insecure. It is You that is to blame.
It is You that has these faulty thoughts, incorrect feelings.
You are the source of what I do not like.
About myself.
You are my projection.
It is You that I can blame for these uncomfortable feelings. For my distress.
It is on You that I can dump and disown what I do not want to see.
About myself.
Disowning myself and disrespecting my truth makes it easier to disrespect Yours.
My thoughts, motivations, desires, and feelings do not matter, so why should Yours?
photo credit: Gabe Austin
