The Artisan Workshop with Indigo Williams

In my last article I wrote about self-development and today I want to be specific about my latest self-development journey. 

I decided I wanted to develop my writing skills in regards to poetry so my writing can be authoritative without having to be performed to bring life to it's words. I wanted to cultivate my writing to bring out it's own power on the page. I had high aspirations for them to create the same elegance and refinement in poems I have wept over in crumpled books. I wanted to finally make the transition from writing selfishly with the purpose of venting to make myself feel (a lot) better, to writing for an audience which invites them in to share these feelings alongside me. 

I was hungry for knowledge regarding the theoretical skill of writing poetry.

So I asked around.... "Where do I go to become a better writer?" 

I kept hearing the name Indigo Williams, and if I was serious about understanding the technical side of poetry then that was the person I needed to go to, and luckily for me she was having a workshop coming up in the next few weeks in London. 

I was excited. 

Here is some of her work so you can have a taster before I go on... Indigo William's Poem: Dark Black

So now you understand. 

Indigo Williams was one of the first spoken word artists I most admired when I first learnt about the art of spoken word poetry only a few short months ago. I would see a chemistry lesson's worth of colours being exploded within fire as she would perform on her YouTube videos. She had something mysterious to me about the way she put words together and I could not miss the opportunity to be in a workshop with her and unravel first hand what made her writing so powerful. 

I live in Nottingham. The course was four weeks in London with one week at an open mic at Come Rhyme With Me - (by the way an unmissable night of spoken word in London). I didn't care, I just had to find a way to be there for every session or miss out on something great. In my eyes this was the same as travelling long distances for true love, for which people would suffer intense rainstorms, exhaustion and spend their life savings, just to get to their love's front door. Except this time my "love" was poetry, as taught by Indigo. London was the rainstorm and I exaggerated a bit on the exhaustion and life savings by watching too many romantic movies. 

But the question really is.... how far would you go for self-development?

Apparently I was willing to 1288 miles and this included the journeys back and forth over the five weeks. Now, if you are sitting at home and your self-development journey involves you going 10 minutes down the road, then you really have no excuse not to go!

My gut told me that this journey would be valuable and I am glad I listened. A whole new world opened up to me where dead poets, and those that were very much alive, started talking to me from the page telling me about structure, style and meanings in their poems. Between sessions, the Poetry Library in South Bank beckoned me in also out of the rainstorms (and often snow) and told me to keep warm from all the knowledge and experience these books had to offer me. I would get my list of books out that Indigo suggested to the class to read and I would get lost again in middle of London. 

In the sessions we dissected poems like dead bodies. I use this smilie because we had to say something interesting about ourselves in the first session with Indigo and I said that I used to dissect dead bodies for my anatomy class for my science degree which always gets an interesting response from people (...big up King's College, Biomedical Sciences class of 2008!) So I feel this smilie is rather fitting for this strange reason. 

Back to the point. Indigo's class was possibly poetry habit changing, like when you realise you are an addict and need help to break your old addictions, my hand is broken now to my old poetry habits. I now will read every new poem with a suspicious eye, knowing some poems would be bad influences on me to try to entice me back to my old way of thinking but I will laugh at those poems and move forward to better poems with a promise and a future. Now I am able to analyse and break each poem down knowing how to interpret a poem and the elements and stylistic qualities it used to create it's central voice.

After all of this intense learning, I must admit that the secret highlight for me was listening to Indigo's theories of life and looking at how her brain puts together the different truths of life into one thought provoking sentence. All I am saying is that you need to get yourself down to Indigo's next set of workshops to experience this yourself. 

If you are a poet you will learn from someone who is experienced and willing to give you all of her knowledge for the minimal price of the cost of the workshop. If you are not a poet then after Indigo's Artisan workshops you will become one. Any human being will benefit greatly from her life lessons. You will leave feeling awe-inspired and either not want to leave the building when she is still in there to share her passion of poetry or be scrambling for the nearest pen and paper to start writing for your next class.

Find all about Indigo from her website: http://indigowilliams.co.uk
She post a lot of insightful posts on her Tumbler: http://thestufflifeismadeof.tumblr.com
She is very opinionated on her Twitter: https://twitter.com/Indigowilliams
...and check out her videos on YouTube for some more good stuff. 

Self-development: How Much Do You Want It?

Self development is the key the success, fulfilment and worth. 

As a person you are either developing yourself in a direction that is moving you forward or you are being stagnant and moving backwards, losing the muscle memory to the skill or talent to which you were potentially gifted. 

"The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will."

Vince Lombardi 

"Action is the foundational key to all success."

Pablo Picasso 

The question so often is how badly do you want it and what are you willing to sacrifice in order for you to get what you desire? Focus is extremely important as it is where your thinking and physical energy is being directed at any moment. To achieve goals and ambitions you will need a lot of it focused in that direction. In my own life I recently had to acknowledge that focus takes a lot of discipline and sacrifice as it is not giving into temporary pleasures that do not benefit you or reach you closer to your goal in the long run. This very hard and sometimes it hurts. Whether it be in weight-loss, exercise, education or self-development in any other form. Once you have an actual choice, it's hard to make the right one over the more self-indulgent one. The following video is helpful in illustrating this point as well as being very motivational.

I personally find that one way to keep your self on track regarding focus is to submerse yourself into the activity by visualising the expected outcome every morning, reading inspirational books and quotes regarding the subject matter and allowing your brain to be so filled of that thing that it is unconsciously thinking about the subject matter even when your brain in a relaxed state, coming up with further solutions or motivations on it's own. That helps you to move closer to your desired goal and the expected outcome of success.

This works well for me but of course it is good to get healthy breaks from any action that is your complete focus. You do not want stress to creep in and then for you to become unproductive. I find the best way to overcome this is to build in structured breaks around whatever you are doing. Something that completely takes you away from the task at hand, so away from your computer, the running machine, your books etc. Let it be something that you look forward to that helps you to relax and something that you can consider a treat. A word of warning though, is if you have just come from exercising the best "treat" might not be a tub of ice-cream, so still consider your overall life goals when choosing your treats. For me I much look forward to my green tea breaks which takes me away from my desk and allows me a "treat" which will enhance my mood and focus when I return to my desk again.

When you start to fulfil the goals you have set for yourself then you start to experience fulfilment in that area of your life. You will start to attract people into your life who are on a similar journey and who will appreciate the focus you have towards your goals as they have similar ones towards theirs. Someone who is working towards their goals becomes a very interesting person regardless of the actual goal, be it having an elaborate stamp collection or a becoming a stunt double. Working towards your passions speaks very loudly and is appreciated by the person you are in conversation with as people love to learn about new subjects from a passionate person. There are many people not living according to their passions, as they have accepted what life has given them as opposed to moulding life around their passions. So those who take a risk in life to follow their passions with action and heart, maybe criticised and frowned upon sometimes but in the end they can say that they lived, not just existed.

"When you fully focus your mind, you make others attracted to you."

Toba Beta 

Please leave a comment telling me if you liked this article and if there are any other factors you feel contribute to success from your experience..... I would love to hear from you to be able to enhance myself as well as others who are reading this that are on this same journey. Thanks.

One Child Under Five Dies Every Four Seconds.... The Invisible Children

Click Here To Play Spoken Word Piece "Children Of The Light"

This spoken word piece was written in the early hours of this morning for the 150 million or more children all over the world who do not have a warm bed to wake up to and are so often ignored by the media and are so often forgotten by us. I think it would do everyone in the Western world good to wake up every morning and remember that there are innocent, beautiful children in the world that are fending for themselves and hence end up dying alone. This number does not include the children with families, who die due to poverty because they were born on the wrong side of the world. 

A poem is not enough for this cause