How to Make Your Own Creative Mini-Retreat: Creating Tangible Inspiration

photo by thejourney1972

This is the final part of a series on making your own creative mini-retreat. Today I will describe different ways to create tangible reminders of your vision and inspirations.

1. How to Make Your Own Creative Mini-Retreat: Introduction

2. How to Make Your Own Creative Mini-Retreat: Exploring a New Medium

3. How to Make Your Own Creative Mini-Retreat: Journaling and Visioning

4. How to Make Your Own Creative Mini-Retreat: Creating Tangible Inspiration

Exploring your values and your vision takes a lot of deep concentration and effort. When you gain certain insights, you feel pretty incredible afterwards — but how long does that feeling last? For some people, the feeling lingers strong. But for others, epiphanies aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. A flash of insight, a rush when you think your life will deeply change, and then a whole lotta nothing the next morning.

So how do you make these insights linger? How do you make them wedge their way deep inside your chest?

One option is to follow up the visioning, journaling, or experimenting with an exercise in capturing those insights. By making a conscious effort to capture them, you’ll reinforce your awareness of the ideas and they will begin to seep into different areas of your life. The two methods that we’ll focus on for capturing those insights are vision boards and maps.

Vision Boards

Most of you have probably heard of vision boards — I believe The Secret had a strong hand in popularizing them. They were actually around long before The Secret, and since I haven’t seen the movie or read the book, I can’t promise my explanation will match up completely. But no matter, as my first rule for vision boards is that they can work however you want them to. These are the very basic instructions:

1. Find a piece of poster board, large paper, or whatever surface you choose.

2. Decide whether you’ll focus on a specific goal, a certain theme, or a broad, undefined vision. Don’t worry, you can change your mind as you go.

3. Glue on things that vividly represent your insights, goals, or vision.

All three steps are very flexible. For Step 1, you can choose a conventional surface, or you can choose to make a small vision booklet that fits in your purse. Whatever excites you most.

For Step 2, you may want to work with insights you gained from journaling or visioning exercises. For example, after I devoted time to making a list of my values, I used those values as the centerpiece of my vision board. If you want to focus on a certain theme, you could do a whole vision board about fitness, or about your various creative outlets. To do a broad, undefined vision, you can simply start gluing on things that evoke positive feelings and visions for you.

For Step 3, you can look in magazines, newspapers, old birthday cards, photos — any inspiring words and images you have lying around. The images can be literal (such as a photo of someone doing yoga to paste on your health & fitness board), or they can have a very specific connotation just for you. Gather a pile of clippings, then go through them again and decide which ones you still feel strongly about. You may also want to add your own artistic touches and writing. If you have a theme or goal in mind, put something at the center of the board that represents it. As for placing the rest of the images and words, just move things around until they feel right. This is your vision board, so it only has to speak to you.

Maps

Another option for making your insights tangible is to draw a map. Collage Diva has an in-depth post about personal map-making, which is worth checking out if you choose this route. I love the concept of drawing a map of your vision, because it seems like a perfectly sensible solution when you’re figuring out how to get to a new place. You can draw a map with landforms and bodies of water that represent different people, events, or ideas in your life. You can sketch your own silhouette and map out the things that you do, hear, feel, say… You can map out where you want to go, who you want to be — your options are vast.

If you choose to do a map, you’ll want to have a selection of arts and crafts tools at your side. I used handmade paper, oil pastels, markers and tissue paper for mine, but the Collage Diva post has ample supply ideas to choose from.

Again, you can be as literal or as abstract as you want. I ended up doing a map + vision board during my creative mini-retreat, because the combination suited me perfectly. Here’s what my creative process looked like:

And here’s a blurry photo of my map + vision board (even though I’m shy to show it in detail, I think it helps to get an idea of how it turned out):

Diving into Your Own Mini-Retreat

On a final note, before you dive into your own creative mini-retreat, remember that this day (or 5 hours, or 8 hours) is solely devoted to explorations within yourself. If that means cooking banana pancakes between exercises or dancing around the room to the Gipsy Kings for inspiration, by all means go ahead. Just make sure that you are fully engaged in whatever activity you’re doing — after all, this mini-retreat is about breaking free of the scattered mindset.

I’d love to hear about your ideas and plans for your own creative mini-retreat. How will you indulge your creativity?

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