Values

Your Right Livelihood in the Arts — By Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

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When I developed TLA, I knew that Right Livelihood, the Buddhist tradition of work that builds our communities and betters our world, was essential. By holding brave spaces for people to share their truest words and name and claim their own visions of healing and transformation, we are doing the work of Tikkun Olam, the Hebrew term for helping repair the broken world. Yet we can only do this work if we find ways to sustain our livelihoods and respect our time and gifts.

Likewise, many of the qualities we cultivate for TLA—showing up fully, starting where we are, trusting our innate voices, and taking creative leaps into what wants to be written, said, or sung—are the keys to creating livelihoods that support you and grow the reach of our work. That’s what called me to create the Your Right Livelihood class and retreat, which began as a project of the TLA Network, then grew to be its own small business with new co-leader Kathryn Lorenzen. What’s more, thanks to a generous partnership agreement, all TLAN members receive a discount on our class and retreat.

Both Right Livelihood and TLA are actively revising some myths that don’t serve us, such as the myth of the damaged, starving, or invisible artist, or the myth (so popular in the writing world) that there’s only so many ways the pie can be sliced, leaving many of us with only the crumbs at best. Both Kathryn and I believe that writers, storytellers, and other word artists should be paid (or otherwise compensated) fairly for our time, effort, experience, and education.

We’re big advocates for bypassing the old only-so-much-pie storyline by baking more pies. After all, we’ve had the power all along to create our livelihoods to nourish ourselves and our communities. It’s important we get cooking because artists and facilitators of the arts are essential to this world, especially in times of polarization and uncertainty.

We come by this understanding naturally: Kathryn is a singer-songwriter who found her way into cross-country touring and having her music featured in films along with her twin calling of coaching hundreds of people in career transition over the years. As a poet and writer, I discovered my twin calling in teaching and facilitation, which, along with writing are how I support my livelihood, do my service, and create my art.

It’s no wonder that what we do in Your Right Livelihood is rooted in so much of what we’ve discovered as writers, performers, coaches, facilitators, and teachers is at the core of TLA: deep conversation, expansive writing, the power of the stories we live, the guidance we can glean from our creativity, and the importance of building a loving and wise community. Our annual class, Jan. 23 – Mar. 19, features a combination of all of this to help us grow our vision, plans, courage, clarity, and community, including:

  • Weekly Zoom discussions, many featuring luminary teachers (including Eric Maisel, Yvette Hyater-Adams, Gregg Levoy, Kevin Willmott, and others),
  • Online exploration and writing (and other arts) about our callings as well as the inspiration and nuts-and-bolts resources we need to put them into action,
  • One-on-one in-depth coaching on how to integrate our dream work into our lives,
  • A guided, personalized portfolio to create step-by-step sequences and priorities to make our next work happen.
  • To find out more, please contact us today for a Discovery Call (you can reach me here or directly set up a call with Kathryn here), and please consider joining us for our Jan. 4th Life & Livelihood Small Group Coaching session. Our super early bird rate ends Dec. 10th, so please contact us soon.

To consider whether the time is right for you, please take a look at Kathryn’s new blog post, “Waiting for the Perfect Time: Why?” Surely this is your time to shine, especially when the world needs your gifts so much, so please consider how to write and live your own Right Livelihood story in TLA.

P.S. Many wonderful people in the TLA Network (including a bunch of past and present board members) found the Your Right Livelihood class especially helpful in their work — see their testimonials here.

New Scholarship Fund Supports Access to Conferences and Classes.

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The Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg Fund was established in the fall of 2021 to honor the founder of the transformative language arts and the TLA Network. The Fund provides Power of Words Conference and TLA Network classes support for both BIPOC people and people who are living with serious illness and/or disabilities.

The following remarks by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg were made at the TLA Network’s online Power of Words Conference, on October 30, 2021.

I am so honored by this fund in my name, which will provide scholarships for people of color, people living with serious illness, and people with disabilities.

Why these communities, all of whom are negatively impacted in our problematic world:

As a survivor of both a very common cancer and a very rare cancer, and as someone who’s had the joy and education of facilitating writing workshops for 18 years for people living with serious illness – patients, survivors, caregivers, and community members, I know first-hand how essential is to to have supported spaces for big writing and witnessing.

I’ve also been involved with disabilities rights and communities through my husband’s work for 30 years as an occupational therapist and activist working with people living with disabilities.

Both people living with serious illness and disabilities, which sometimes go hand-in-hand, are so often limited in accessing workshops and conferences like what TLAN offers, and not just by a lack of wheelchair ramps. The isolation and pain, overwhelm and fear we face in such situations can make us feel so alone with our pain, dread, anxiety, difference. 

We are missing such important voices at the table, ones that have so much to teach us about resilience in real-time, what it means to age and change, and how to grapple more directly with being humans who are mortal. Scholarships can help us bring life-giving creativity and community into people’s homes through their laptops. 

Black, brown Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, and other marginalized people of color have too often and so extensively, to the detriment of all of us, been silenced or had their voices abused. My more personal connection is that I live in the home of Haskell Indian Nations University and the ghosts land burial ground where so many children died when it was a boarding school. I’ve also witnessed many people’s stories through teaching at Haskell and facilitating workshops for many years with Indigenous women.

When we started the POW conference, we began with a commitment to continually work on undoing racism and inviting many more voices to the table, or even forgetting the old table and making a new one. From our first conference, we had scholarships for POC, a determination to bring in keynoters from unrepresented communities, and outreach to communities of color. Most arts-based organizations like ours are primarily white and although we’ve come a long way, we have so so so long to go. 

Removing financial barriers where and when needed is part of this work, and it also helps foster new leadership and a more attuned vision to how TLA can bring voices previously ignored or debased into our civic conversations. 

In 2014, we were able to bring close to a dozen people living with serious illness and disabilities to the POW conference to share their stories and truths. A year later, we brought 15 young people of color, all in the foster care system, to the conference. How wonderful it would be to have scholarship funds available for people who want to attend Angie Ebba’s superb upcoming TLAN class, “Not Enough Spoons: Writing About Disabilities and Chronic Illness” and to next year, have even more black and brown faces, people undergoing heavy cancer treatment or navigating disabilities in an ableist world at this conference.

Please consider giving what you can give to make our offerings more accessible to others. Please help create this new table where we can all come and speak our lives and visions.

Contribute to the Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg Fund here.

All funds will be processed through the TLA Network’s fiscal sponsor, The Foundation for Delaware County. When contributing via FDC, make sure to note your donation is made “in honor of Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg.”

Values of the Future with Doug Lipman for What We Need Now

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Doug Lipman, one of the foremost mentors in storytelling and otherwise unearthing our most vital truths, explains of his upcoming class, “Values of the Future,” that “Our current economic, political, and social systems are serving fewer and fewer people, not to mention destroying the environment. I don’t know what a future society will look like, but if it is to meet our human needs better than our current society does, I believe it needs to be formed with certain values in mind.”

Listen to Doug’s powerful TEDx talk, “What Can Storytelling Teach Us About Creating Connections?”

His focus in this class is to help us find, amplify, clarify, and share our values for the world through stories, writing, and other arts and also, as he explains, “through the very processes of telling or creating stories….In other words, our artistic processes themselves can give people experiences that open them to values that are necessary for an improved society.”

The six-week class, kicking off Sept. 4, is all online, which means you can do it from anywhere and at anytime, looks toward how to cultivate the kind of world we envision through the process of our stories and storytelling, the power of listening,  the importance of relationships and openness, the preciousness of every human point of view, the universality of human potential, and other values that bring us all to the table.

The class is ideal, according to Doug, “for storytellers, fiction writers, narrative poets, songwriters, improvisational singers, dramatists, etc. – all who use language to help people imagine or convey their experience – especially those interested in teaching their art or discipline with an eye toward promoting generative values.”

“Taking a class with Doug Lipman is like sitting down with a trusted friend and mentor, who believes in you with all his heart and guides you to new ways of living.” — Laura Packer, storyteller and writer

Doug found himself becoming a storyteller when he was a struggling teacher of troubled teens, who responded positively to him telling them a story. From there, he has coached hundreds of people on their storytelling, writing, and recordings. He is the author of three books on storytelling (Improving Your Storytelling, The Storytelling Coach, and Storytelling Games), scores of published articles, and over 150 issues of his own email newsletters, including “eTips from the Storytelling Coach (http://StorytellingNewsletters.com).

A professional storyteller since 1976, Doug has performed and led workshops on three continents and led many online courses and webinars. His ongoing search for effective ways to teach the transformative power of storytelling has led to projects such as a new paradigm for coaching storytellers, an exploration of the seldom-noticed Hidden Storytelling Skills, and the pursuit of ways that storytelling and related arts can allow our true humanity to blossom. More about Doug here.