Behold:

This is one wall of the new library in my home.  Yes, I now have a library.  Don't be too jealous.  It took hours and hours of clearing, cleaning, and moving books and bookshelves from the living room into the room formerly known as the guest room.

But it was worth it.  The coolest thing in the whole world is to sit in a room surrounded by books.  (The other wall has two full bookshelves on it.) And now that the room is finished, I realize how much stagnant energy was released from those bookshelves that hadn't been rearranged in years.

So often in life we get stuck.  Not just in our writing, though Lord knows we writers struggle with that often enough, but in life.  And sometimes we might not even realize how stuck we are.  Like the old bookshelves, we're harboring stagnant energy that prevents us from moving forward with our writing, our creativity, our lives.

But lately I've been working on a two-step process that helps you to get unstuck.  And actually, I think the process works well for when you want to create some garden-variety energy.  Ready? Here goes:

1.  Vent.  Vent like you've never vented before.  Give it all up.  All the crap from your dark side that you've been hanging onto.  I got the idea from Marianne Williamson, in her new book on weight loss.  She suggests writing out responses about your anger, your greed, your shame, embarrassment, when you feel superior, when you feel inferior, what your worried about, why your heart is heavy…you get the idea.  But take this idea and really run with it.  Don't just write for 10 minutes or so, go deeply into all these feelings you've been carrying around and get them out onto the page.  It might take awhile, but it is so worth it.  You will feel immediately lighter and more buoyant.  (Which is, by the way, my current favorite new word.)

2. Be grateful.  Now that you're all light and floaty from releasing so much dreck, think about what you're grateful for.  Say out loud what you are grateful for.  Write down what you're grateful for.  Saturate the air around you with what you're grateful for.  Kathleen Gage suggests that you feel grateful for the things that are working in your life.  Like your furnace (its very cold here in Portland today and every time the furnace clicks on, I'm grateful.) And your electricity and the water that flows through your pipes at will and your computer and the internet and all the other things we take for granted.  Odds are good that if you are reading this, you have, not to put too fine a point on it, a shitload of things to be grateful for. 

That's it.  Couldn't be simpler.  Or more profound.  It's a great process.  Try it and report back.