From “Artist’s Recovery” here is a prayer for Francis Gaspar: “God, please help me to open my eyes and my soul to the beautiful things and feelings that bring me the most joy.”

“Teach me to trust that I deserve joyfully and peacefully to be my creative self as an act of worship to you. Thanks for caring.”
I have no personal idea of how Francis teaches in the classroom but I have personally experienced how he conducted drumming sessions, at least twice. Francis develops leaders not followers.

I remember his injunction during the drumming sessions. “Don’t follow my beat. Drum your own way. Listen. Decice when to insert your beat.”

Developing leaders and not followers is no easy task. It would be easier to train others to conform, to obey,to follow. But Francis thinks out of the box.

In his training sessions and in his management consultancies I can imagine his struggles. I can imagine the tension between going the easy path by giving in to the participants who think echoing him or following his lead please him. Or should he challenge them to maximize what is already in them as personal gifts?

The temptation would be to earn his keep and to leave his students/participants choosing the easy way out. I suspect that sometimes Francis gets better response from his many pets especially from Bruce their family dog than from humanity. This means that Francis has a unique style of communication that even animals naturally understand but human beings deafened by social conditioning especially from verbal priorities cannot. Martha Beck has so much to tell Francis.

This is why an artist like Francis needs an expansive dimension: “to find his creative self by an act of worship.”