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Successfully Sensitive | Julie Cusmariu

Intuitive Consultant and Life Coach

Julie CusmariuI love this clear statement from Julie Cusmariu’s website: “At the root of Julie’s mission and philosophy is that we can best serve the world when we first serve ourselves.” This speaks directly to the sensitive soul’s challenges of balancing our own needs with the needs of others and finding empowerment.

Extensively trained and wonderfully easy to connect with, Julie helps people develop intuition as a tool for tuning in – to ourselves and others – through her coaching, consulting, writing, website, blog, and radio broadcasts.

In every one of Julie’s broadcasts I’ve listened to and in the online pages and emails I’ve read, her calming manner, deep wisdom, and genuine willingness to listen and learn shine through.

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In what way are you most successfully sensitive?

In understanding what I need most in order to feel good and be at my best in any given situation and in understanding others and the environment in which we are in. My sixth sense (aka intuition) works in partnership with my five senses and thus I stay informed, aware, and open to my environment and the possibilities.

What or who has inspired you to embrace your sensitivity?

Lots of important teachers, mentors, and therapists along the way. My life partner has played a pivotal role in inspiring me to embrace my sensitivity. His incredible emotional sensitivity and his willingness to be vulnerable have enabled me to love and accept this sensitivity in myself. My mother is very intuitive and through her way of being I see what sensitivity feels and looks like.

What are your eternal fascinations?

An interesting question! Well, I’m eternally fascinated by the sky and the earth. This idea of Mother Earth fascinates me. The subtle energies I cannot see but can sense and wonder about eternally fascinate me. What also fascinates me to an infinite end is the strength of the human spirit.

What quest currently captivates you?

The quest to not have a quest! And at the same time, the quest to experience peace in each moment and also to experience moments of great fun and excitement. That’s no small or unfamiliar quest for me!

What is your favourite kind of help to give?

The kind that allows me to be me while inviting others to be themselves as they open to who they truly are and to all the infinite possibilities available to them. To give the kind of support that heals, uplifts, and inspires.

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For more information, explore Julie’s blog and radio broadcasts.

Photo from Julie’s blog.

Related reading: Successfully Sensitive | Saskia Röell, Personal Symbology and Intuition

Creativity Prompt | 171

What’s the irritation?

How can you turn it into a pearl?

~~~

Daily Creativity Prompts deliver a perspective-shifting zap to your creative process.
See Grace Kerina’s Creativity Prompts Compendium for more tools to spark your genius.
Related reading: Creativity Prompt | 148 ~ Pep Talk | Revise the Story

Creativity Prompt | 170

Are there paradoxes?

Allow them.

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Daily Creativity Prompts deliver a perspective-shifting zap to your creative process.
See Grace Kerina’s Creativity Prompts Compendium for more tools to spark your genius.
Related reading: Creativity Prompt | 49 ~ Conversations Between Me and U

Pep Talk | Step Around

Vintage Paris, by Lena_JRemember how it feels when someone else makes even a little effort to step around your bad mood – or your bad moment, or your major flub-up? It feels great, right? Well, now it’s your turn.

When you look the other way, you can save someone’s day.

Yes, identifying mistakes, down to the infinitude of the sub-atomic level, often comes with the territory of being sensitive. Add the innate urge to right wrongs and you’re doomed, now and then, to feel a frightening urge to point out someone else’s error. What if, instead, you closed your mouth and stepped around it?

Have pity. You’ll be the dork again someday.

In Paris, people don’t scoop poop. Newcomers take missteps that lead to mishaps, but after a while they develop a second sense. Seasoned pedestrians glide around, their highly developed poop-sense taking care of things without even causing a pause in the conversation. Be like them. Avoid error-exacerbation. Develop a second-sense for being kind through enlightened ignorance.

Walk like a Parisian. Do the do-step around someone else’s mess.

~

{ PEP TALKS deliver a bracing blast of Grace }

Flickr photo: Vintage Paris, by Lena_J

Related reading: Pep Talk | Back Away, The Benevolent Love Bomb

Creativity Prompt | 169

Ignore all interruptions.

~~~

Daily Creativity Prompts deliver a perspective-shifting zap to your creative process.
See Grace Kerina’s Creativity Prompts Compendium for more tools to spark your genius.
Related reading: Creativity Prompt | 159 ~ Time Management for Highly Sensitive People

The Fun of Change

Electric guitar, by Jsome1“Social change is so much more fun when you sing.”
~ James Keelaghan

Every summer we spend the weekend of the Vancouver Folk Music Festival immersed in a culture replete with the fun side of social enlightenment and positive change. Musicians sing about righting injustices, bridging gaps, and including everyone. Truths come to light, tolerance expands, and children (some of them quite old) romp in the setting sun. The water is filtered. Garbage is separated down to the level of compost. We leave our belongings all day on our staked-out spot in front of the main stage and find them intact when we return. The water of the bay glitters before us, meeting the mountains on the far shore.

I believe what I heard Canadian singer and songwriter James Keelaghan say this weekend, that social change is more fun when you sing. The metaphor extends easily. Social change is more fun when you play. And personal change is more fun when you play (see Stay Afloat When They’re Rocking Your Boat for an example).

What positive change are you in the midst of that feels hard, or even just un-fun? How can you turn the process into a song or a festival or a party? You can invite others – even one other – to join in. You can arrange a play date or a series of play dates. Or lace the whole process with joys only for you, with tailor-made, guaranteed grin-inducers, wonders, and rewards. Practice until you find what works for you, then build on that.

Let self-recrimination fall by the wayside. Don’t urge yourself forward. Instead, lure yourself into the life you want by strewing the path with enticements and pleasure. Sweeten your journey. Change and fun are not mutually exclusive.

Flickr photos: Electric guitar, by Jsome1
Related reading: Play Anyway, The Power of Community

Creativity Prompt | 168

Explore opposites.

~~~

Daily Creativity Prompts deliver a perspective-shifting zap to your creative process.
See Grace Kerina’s Creativity Prompts Compendium for more tools to spark your genius.
Related reading: Creativity Prompt | 75 ~ Cage or Gate?

Creativity Prompt | 167

Revise the goal.

~~~

Daily Creativity Prompts deliver a perspective-shifting zap to your creative process.
See Grace Kerina’s Creativity Prompts Compendium for more tools to spark your genius.
Related reading: Creativity Prompt | 141 ~ Pep Talk | Revise the Story

Creativity Prompt | 166

How can you inject more playfulness?

~~~

Daily Creativity Prompts deliver a perspective-shifting zap to your creative process.
See Grace Kerina’s Creativity Prompts Compendium for more tools to spark your genius.
Related reading: Creativity Prompt | 94 ~ Book | Orbiting the Giant Hairball

Creativity Prompt | 165

Throw some money around.

~~~

Daily Creativity Prompts deliver a perspective-shifting zap to your creative process.
See Grace Kerina’s Creativity Prompts Compendium for more tools to spark your genius.
Related reading: Creativity Prompt | 56 ~ The Link Between Mess and Abundance

Reading as a Way of Life

Total cliche of the heart, by Irargerich“My heartfelt belief was that all meals should be eaten hunched over a desk with your nose in a book and everything you were eating chopped up and eaten out of a bowl with a spoon, the better to scoop it up without having to lift your eyes from the page.”
~ Polly Horvath, The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane

What a relief it is to find buddies who understand the cellular-level imperative to delve for treasure in books. They’re the people we don’t have to explain our love affair with reading material to. It helps to grow up with such folks. And – my point here – is that it helps to be such folk, to champion love affairs with books everywhere and anywhere we can.

Growing up, I often enjoyed blissful breakfasts with my mother and my brother as we faced each other across our round dining table, lost in our own worlds, mesmerized as we impatiently turned the pages of our book-of-the-moment. To make the picture in your mind’s eye complete, you need to know that we each had a little sturdy wire book stand, so the book would sit upright and the pages wouldn’t flap around in the breeze coming through the open window. The nerds at home.

Further early training to revere and honour the bookish life came in the form of a delicious urgency about libraries. We moved an average of once a year, all around the southern U.S., and the moment we’d loaded all the boxes into the new place, Mom would haul us kids to the local library, get us all library cards (our own cards, mind you), and set us loose, with no limits about the type or quantity of reading material we chose. No matter where we were, I thus felt at home. The pure joy (writing this makes the hairs on my arms stand up with remembered thrill) of exploring a new library salved many wounds incurred in the process of being a painfully shy girl having to enter a new school and make friends all over again.

Love books. Love people who love books. Love helping people love books. Curiosity is key.

Flickr photo: Total cliche of the heart, by Irargerich

Related reading: Book Concepts, Interview | Nan

Creativity Prompt | 164

List five reasons you’re willing to do

whatever it takes to get this done.

~~~

Daily Creativity Prompts deliver a perspective-shifting zap to your creative process.
See Grace Kerina’s Creativity Prompts Compendium for more tools to spark your genius.
Related reading: Creativity Prompt | 126 ~ The Power of the Hero Alone

Creativity Prompt | 163

How will this project be described

by historians of the future?

~~~

Daily Creativity Prompts deliver a perspective-shifting zap to your creative process.
See Grace Kerina’s Creativity Prompts Compendium for more tools to spark your genius.
Related reading: Creativity Prompt | 106 ~ Real Adventures with Imaginary Maps

Unusual Writing/Editing Services

us vs. them, by chaosinjune

UPDATE in 2012: The services below have evolved into Writer’s Shepherd Services. For more information, including contact information, see instead the Writer’s Shepherd page on my new website: The Curious Writer.

I offer an editing/writing service that’s unusual, but effective and efficient. It requires a degree of participation from you, but the outcome is writing that speaks in your voice and says what you want it to say. Think of it as assisted writing, with a final edit for completion.

I’ve successfully used this process to help people finalize web pages, media kit resources, emails, letters, articles, and much else.

I’m good at helping people translate all kinds of things into words, including instructions and emotions (tough letters to family members, for instance, can be written with both power and kindness).

Here’s how it works:

  1. You send an email to me telling me a bit about you and your project.
  2. If I can help, we schedule a phone appointment that’s appropriate for the size of the project.
  3. I bill you via PayPal (which accepts major credit cards) and send an invoice to you for your records, via email. Payment is required before the session begins.
  4. You email to me the Word document or documents you’re in the process of writing. Yes, there needs to be work in progress to begin with. I don’t write for you from scratch. The process works best when you’re clear about the purpose you have for the written piece. The more thought you put into the piece before you send it to me, the easier you may find our session to be, since I’ll ask clarifying questions if something seems unclear to me. I’ll never judge you or criticize the writing you send – it wouldn’t even occur to me to do so. I’ll only help you say what you want to say how you want to say it. That’s one of the ways I enjoy helping to empower people.
  5. During the phone session, we edit together – each of us looking at the document at the same time. I listen and suggest, confer and tweak. I make the edits on my computer as we talk. Depending on your degree of interest in learning how to improve your writing, I can also tell you what and why I’m making the changes I suggest as we go along. By the end of the session I have a document to email back to you with the revisions already completed.

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Flickr photos: us vs. them, by chaosinjune

Pep Talk | Revise the Story

Broom at the market, by kobylibYour story file weighs you down when its contents perpetuate a dim view of you. Jettison the pity party going on in that mental drawer. Give the bad endings a makeover and lighten up so you can move forward with more tra-la in your step.

Revise your stories to add swing to your swagger.

Rather than telling yourself you were wrongly dumped by that bastard or that bitch, revise the story and tell yourself a different truth, that the two of you weren’t compatible and it wouldn’t have worked out even if you hadn’t been given the heave-ho. And she didn’t screw up your chances of success when she steamrolled right over you. Nope. You weren’t paying attention and you let things get out of hand, but now you know better. Lesson learned. Hit the ejector button, with vigour.

Resentment is a tale begging to be retold.

Take charge of your archives. Remove the landmines from your memory. And if the prospect of clutter-clearing your deep storage rankles, don’t think of it as forgiving or forgetting. This is between you and you. Open your heart to your own self. Give yourself a lighter, spiffier future.

Veto the dust bunnies. Reclaim a clear mind and a strong heart.

{ PEP TALKS deliver a bracing blast of Grace }

Flickr photo: Broom at the market, by kobylib

Related reading: Pep Talk | Chin Up, Book | One Small Step Can Change Your Life, A Forgiving Tale