Your Life Is A Work of Art: Te Importance Of Creativity In Your Daily Life

“All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

--Pablo Picasso--

Having grown up in a household where my little brother and I had an arts and crafts table since we were old enough to hold a crayon, a home where my parents built our furniture, my mom made our clothes, and my grandmother made the most beautiful Christmas decorations out of yarn and felt and old tin cans and recycled cards; it’s sometimes hard to understand why people are so afraid of anything with the words art or creativity in it. To me those things are like breathing. Perhaps the lack of money created a need for creativity. Whatever the reason, I now can’t imagine being without some sort of creative outlet, whether it’s making my own Christmas balls, or painting furniture, or making jewelry, or painting, or writing a poem. I don’t work in the same medium each time. I think I would get bored if I “specialized.” For me, something strikes a note of inspiration within me, and then I follow it wherever it leads. I have multiple projects unfinished and in progress at any given time.

Yet people’s fear of having to be creative is one of the most pervasive fears and avoidances that I confront when working with clients and students. It’s intricately woven with low self esteem, fear of not being good enough, not measuring up, looking foolish. It is a fear of being vulnerable by putting your unique personal Voice out there in the world and running the risk of having people not appreciate you, or perhaps worse, not even understand you. And yet, when you don’t let that energy flow through you and into your life and your work in a constant and unblocked flow, when you don’t put your creative self out there, you become like a stream that’s choked off and stagnating.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a culture that encourages the development of the creative voice within us. Rational practicality is placed over all else. We have school systems that are under-funded; and the programs that are considered “expendable,” the first to be cut, are art and music. So we learn at an early age in life, that the expression of the voice of our soul through our art, is expendable, not necessary in our daily life. For most people, the idea of taking time each day to slow down and daydream and create something is a ridiculous notion. “Sure, it sounds fun, but it’s a little frivolous. Who has the time?...” There’s no connection with the fact that the time you spend on creating for creating’s sake, when there are no important stakes riding on it, is the very way you learn to incorporate the creative flow into everything you do in life.

Students and clients sometimes complain of not being able to come up with solutions to their problems, they feel that they are “stuck.” To me that’s an expression of a block in the creative flow, the inability to see an alternative path in front of them. The ability to create innovative solutions in your business, or creatively negotiate a difficult relationship, or envision the life that would be fulfilling to you are all outgrowths of how open the creative flow is in your life. If you don’t “practice” by being creative in the moments when there’s nothing at stake, how do you expect to have your habitual mental blocks disappear; and easily flowing creative ideas magically appear when you need them? They don’t. It’s a way of life that you cultivate by participating in the creative flow without self-judgment, on a regular basis.

The first year I ran my women’s retreat, there was one woman who came who, when I said we’d be coloring during part of the first afternoon, had a completely negative reaction. The beautiful drawings that we color are geared to open specific female energy for the rest of the week, but she immediately thought “Oh, God. Coloring?? No way – that’s stupid. What’s the point of that? I don’t want to do it.” Well, she did it anyway, and we never saw her again that week without her markers and a picture that she was coloring -- during conversations, over breaks, at meals, etc. She realized that her initial reaction had come out of the fact that when she was growing up, she was always told that she was the smart one, but that she wasn’t creative; and she’d lived her life with that belief about herself. Just through the simple act of coloring, it opened up a place that calms and nourishes her. She continues to color several years later, because it’s an immediate doorway to opening that flow in times of stress and feeling “stuck.”

Men sometimes get even less supportive messages around creativity than women (it’s a “girl thing”). The first night of the creativity retreat I run (Your Wild Creative Soul), I have people do an exercise where they write down all the memories they have regarding their creativity, good or bad; comments that were made as they grew up; things that were implied even if not said. For some people, the most powerful message that they got was silence. Nothing was ever said or attention put on creativity at all. You can’t get a more powerful message than something not being worth the time to even mention it. It’s important to bring some conscious awareness to those moments and messages, because otherwise these are the messages that are at play within us on a subconscious level all the time. They are a constant drain on our life force energy, because they lead us to cut off that innate creative flow. The ultimate point of the exercise is to allow us to recognize that our beliefs about our own creativity, and our “level of ability,” have been adopted by us from the outside in. They are not really ours. We don’t arrive here as children thinking “oh, I’m not very creative,” “I’m not an artist.” It’s not until someone tells us we aren’t creative, or that we aren’t as good as others, that we buy into that corrosive belief system.

Once people begin to feel those beliefs on an active level, they can begin to see that they are not true. We spend the rest of the creativity weekend doing activities where there is no right or wrong, where there is not a desired outcome. We don’t draw a tree in a visually realistic way so that people can then mentally compare their “bad” drawing to the actual tree, and feel like they’ve failed. We might draw objects, though we draw something about that object unseen to the naked eye. We might paint music. We might write, but we do it with a set of words given to you so the mind is jogged in a different way, because you don’t have to come up with the words from scratch. We move in ways that your body might not be used to because movement opens up different neural pathways in the brain, opening it up to new “paths” of creative thought.

It’s all about getting the old mental critic out of the picture, because the critic is nothing but a mental habit. People begin to feel a creative flow moving within them without judgment attached to it. And for some, it’s a first time to feel it that energy freely moving and uncriticized. One of the most common remarks we hear from people at the end of the weekend is about being surprised at how much moved internally just by spending a couple of days playing and having fun. People begin to feel the creative heart of who they are. There's nothing frivolous, or "non essential" about that. When is the last time you allowed yourself the breathing room to experience your creative heart and soul?

You are a deeply creative being,

and when you open to that creative flow within you,

the gift that arrives is that your life becomes your greatest work of art.