Creativity is an essential part of our life. It has existed in every culture, in every lifetime. Even in the era of Neandrathals, art was an avid practice. Even in cultures ridden with strife and war, art is engaged in protest, in solidarity, in expression of pain. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (a model stolen and appropriated from the Blackfoot peoples) has creativity positioned at the top of the hierarchy in self-actualization, known as the fulfillment of one’s potential. This is not an accurate reflection of creativity’s influence (nor of the original Blackfoot philosophy), for creativity is a lifeline in suffering, a mirror reflecting our Inner Life.
Creativity has no purpose other than for pleasure so it is relegated as “unnecessary” by systems. Creativity is looked down upon as a mere hobby or not taken seriously, seen as a silly endeavour.
But silliness creates space for Insight. We need Space for Insight. Insight happens when we have Space. I have the most insight when I am washing the dishes or in the shower or driving or just before bed because my mind is still. I am fully present.
Capitalism purposefully micromanages our time and creates internalized shame for using our time for anything but for productivity. This is on purpose because with Insight, we can envision a new way, a new world. If we are constantly exhausted and just getting by, we have to space to dream. Creativity is a revolution.
Creativity is not necessarily creating something that has never existed; originality is not synonymous with creativity. We are often inspired by other peoples' works before fully developing our own style. It is important to honour this phase as part of the artistic practice, to allow yourself to be inspired and follow where that inspiration takes you. It takes time, space and patience to develop your own style so experiment with what you are attracted to, what colours move you, what techniques come most naturally. There can be a pressure in creativity to birth exquisite, profound art. While this is noble, it is not the Purpose of art.
Art is meant to be enjoyed, to be pleasurable, to be play.
We are all creative. Our creativity is not always aesthetically pleasing and there are always people who are more technically proficient, but these are mutually exclusive measurements from creativity itself. We need to have an outlet for our creativity, or the creative energy becomes stagnant. If creativity was not valued in your family of origin, you likely channelled your creativity into other areas, such as sports or cooking, or distanced yourself from these impulses entirely.
Creativity is like a plant; when it is in a big enough pot, it will grow exponentially. Notice where your creativity has been channelled, or if it has been repressed. How would your like your creative life to be shaped?
Creativity becomes unbalanced when we are so focused on the physical world: paying bills, going to work, stuck in our routine. Creativity requires space for flexible thinking and space to engage the imagination. When are tunnel-visioned and stuck in the rut of the “outer world”, we tend to ignore the callings of our inner world. Creativity becomes unbalanced when we allot scheduled time, such as 30 minutes, expecting the Muse to visit us within that short timeframe. Creativity requires space for Flow to take over, we should become engrossed in our creativity. Flow is the experience of losing track of time and space and is where our intuition brings forward our imagination. Creativity is a powerful avenue to express our inner-most experiences
To engage with your inner creativity, start by setting aside time. Have 2-4 hours open for you to engage your creativity. Tapping into our imaginative potential takes time to build, much like engaging in foreplay culminates to orgasm. Follow your intuition and allow yourself to Play. Draw circles or spirals, dance to music, shape Play-Doh. Participate in creative activities with no end goal, just for fun.
I started painting in kindergarten. I loved painting whales and I would completely hog the painting station in my afternoon class. I remember having a hard time with the colour wheel and some of my whales turned out brown, but I loved them. Every day I came home with a stack of the day’s artwork. One auspicious day, I was home a bit early from my kindergarten class, carefully escorted home by my sibling in exchange for a dime, and I saw my mom leaving the house with a huge pile of my paintings in front of her. When she saw me, she said she was putting on an art gallery for me. But that didn’t happen. She was actually on the way to the trash with all of my paintings. I painted a lot and now as an adult, I would never expect my mom to keep every painting I ever created, but it stung nonetheless. My child self internalized the belief that painting took up too much space, that there wasn’t enough room for my creations. Still, creativity oozed out of me and to my mom’s credit, she did nurture my artistic side. I turned to writing instead of painting (after I acquired the necessary skills) and found a more enclosed container for my creativity within the confines of journals.
I didn’t paint again until I was in the therapy room. My dissociation and anxiety were so strong that my therapist suggested I doodle with oil pastels during the session to keep me grounded. It was the single best suggestion a therapist has ever made for me and created a path to healing that wouldn’t have been possible. Creating during the session kept my hands busy, my anxiety at bay and it allowed me to share more deeply for some reason. It was as if the pages of colour and smudges were a conduit for my pain. Seeing my inner experience appear magically in front of me, I was able to be part of my own narrative as the story was being told.
Art, in this way, became both a static reflection of my pain and a mutable alchemy in which I found a truer Self reflected back by the end of each session. I was so lucky to have incredible competent and compassionate therapists who have and continue to walk alongside my healing, but I credit art as the beacon that showed me the potential energy within.
As is my Capricorn tendency, I found a way to commodify the gifts that art brought for me. I developed a comprehensive 30-session Art for Therapy modules that blended emotional regulation and artistic expression for people recovering from addiction. At times, the management would ask us to create a specific type of art for an event, like butterfly canvases. I refused as much as I could. This was sacred space for us.
We were not an arts and crafts counter; we were confronting the depths of our being with paintbrushes.
The founding principle of this program was that everyone is creative, without question. Aesthetics were not even a consideration for our group. It took time to undo the self-judgment and experience true, intuitive release but when they found their way through the gate of artistic freedom, beauty was created. Tears were shed. The end of every session, clients could share about what their piece meant for them and that was my favourite. Observations from others, never interpretations, were allowed from the group. We would notice the person used only cool colours or that the brush strokes appeared staccato. But the piece was the Creators. I still shed tears looking at the photos we would take of their creations. Their inner world, here on the canvas. With such bravery.
See some of their work here
I loved facilitating these art sessions because I could see how much insight and wisdom the clients held within their own creative Bodies. I felt so honoured to witness their process. I participated alongside my clients every week too. I shared my own pieces, my own inner landscape so we could mutually witness each other. Those hour-long sessions every week were the only art I did during that time. I think part of me knew that unless I made art part of my job, I wouldn’t prioritize it. Workaholism is the addiction of myself and my family. We are afflicted by it. I knew that art could be healing for the people I was so lucky to work with, and I knew I had to make space for art in my own life. It feels embarrassing now to admit that I had to literally develop a program for my work so that I could justify painting for an hour a week. But that is where I was at the time.
I couldn’t use good quality material. My paints, brushes and canvases were all from the dollar store. It felt like if I had better quality materials, it would have to be used for deeply profound and artistically exquisite work. My creations weren’t worthy.
When I told my clients that aesthetics weren’t the focus in our sessions, I was also telling that to myself. Because I would see other peoples’ oil painted portraits that I could easily mistake for a photograph, and tell myself that it would be better if I left the canvases in the dollar store for “real” artists. That I had to earn my art by being “good”.
We experience creative blocks because we have learned we cannot be vulnerable. It is not about aesthetics - it is about vulnerability and expression. I was robbed of so many years of painting because perfectionism, procrastination and fear were trying to protect me from shame. From failure. And instead, these blocks only kept me from witnessing the landscape of myself.
My painting style has changed drastically since I started, even within the last year. It was so hard to start something I hadn’t yet mastered. But I knew I had to start. I made shitty art. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident. Sometimes I would start a piece and have no idea what I was doing and be completely terrified at the potential outcome. And then I remembered that the outcome is not important. I wasn’t doing this for the outcome.
Art fundamentally requires risk. We are not good right away and it is hard, in a performance driven society, to consciously choose to be bad at a thing. We need to undo the indoctrination that we will master a practice right away. Give yourself permission to be shitty. Creativity is inner child parenting. Be kind, be compassionate, be curious. I love doing art with children because they’ll draw a squiggly line and say it’s a magical cow that lives in a leaf. And you know what? It is.
Welcoming that fear has become part of my process. I don’t know if this the same for every artist, but developing a relationship with fear has been completely paramount to my process. When I am not afraid in creating, my art is too safe and is not in contact with my Centre. My centre is deep and vast and the more cartography I complete of my inner landscape, the less terrifying it is, simply because I become more familiar with myself. But still, there is fear. For me, fear shows me that my work is translating my inner meaning, it is important.
When I was married was, I painted the least. My husband at the time didn’t understand the creative mind. He didn’t comprehend ‘flow’, when I would become encapsulated with a piece for hours. It was inconvenient for him. Art was a luxury to him, a leisurely hobby considered “unnecessary” in our budget. He saw art simply as a financial burden. There was no space for my art in our marriage. In many ways, our relationship was a rerun of my childhood wounds - he confirmed what had always been insinuated. I didn’t even have physical space for my art. I asked for a small corner of the garage, full of his activities, which he declined. My healing work and my art were relegated to the same space and my art, which took up much more room, was stuffed into the closet. It remained in the closet until I would have inner volcanic eruptions that could only be contained on the canvas. I didn’t even have an easel so I painted on the floor and I can still see the searing look of disappointment on his face when he realized that oil paint doesn’t come out of carpet. I justified this because he had other interests and who am I to judge someone else’s’ propensity? But he judged mine.
I left my husband because I started painting again. There were so many reasons to always leave him but it wasn’t until I invested in a two-day intuitive painting course that I started to see myself as a whole Being again. At first, I thought there was no point to pay for an intuitive course (what would they teach anyway?) but I knew that I wasn’t painting at home and that dedicating the time to myself was what I needed.
After that, I stopped asking for permission and started prioritizing myself.
I painted at home. I did yoga in the living room, under the watchful eye of my dog. When I finally left him, I made sure that the house I moved into had enough space for myself. I set up an entire art studio in the basement of my new home. I bought a telescopic easel second hand and bought the next step up from dollar store paint. I bought huge canvases. I couldn’t afford therapy anymore, so I painted. At first, I only painted for 20-minute stints. It was like as soon as I got close to my Centre, I put the brush down. I remembered the two full days of intuitive painting and slowly started painting for longer. I cried every time I painted. I threw coffee grounds at the canvas, speared skewers through the canvas and painted layers upon layers, until the canvas grew by inches.
Then I stopped painting for a while. My basement got cold. I was focusing on yoga and it seemed that for a while, yoga and painting had switched places. I cried every time I got on my mat. I could feel my Centre as I sat with myself in different postures. I had to coach myself with compassion to stay on the mat for more than 20 minutes. To keep this space for myself. Whether I was on the mat or with paintbrush in hand, I always felt the Pull of something Else. I had always been able to project it beyond me: my ex didn’t understand my art, my mom didn’t make space for my painting. But here, in this house by my Self, I still felt guilt subsume my creativity, at least for a little while. Weren’t there better things I could be doing? Didn’t my Tupperware cupboard need to be organized? Isn’t there “real” work I could be doing? Who was I to take so much time for myself, with so many other things to be done.
It was when I realized that I was afraid to take more than 20 minutes for myself that I realized this was an artifact of indoctrination. I had the painful realization that if I cannot give myself more than 20 minutes of my own goddamn day, I am not living my own life. I was the only one responsible for my art now and I wouldn’t let it go.
Most creative blocks exist within our Selves, beliefs implanted from the oppressive systems in which we dwell. Capitalism demands our activities to be purposeful, to be successful is to make money. Even in our leisure. Our blocks are comprised of our excuses and attempts of distraction. It’s like when we’re getting together with someone we don’t exactly want to see, and we hope the other person will cancel. Except the other person is our Self. There are a million other things we can do but when we chose our Selves through creativity, it is a radical act of self-love. The realm of creativity is ripe for self-betrayal when we choose other people or other things over our creativity. What counts as creativity is up to you. For me, it is unapologetically taking up space. Not being told what to do. Extracting my inner experience onto a canvas or onto my body like a paleontologist finding artifacts in the sand.
In some ways, my ex-husband was right that art doesn’t have a purpose. It doesn’t. And it doesn’t have to. I don’t need to justify a purpose to art. That’s what is so beautiful about it. In a capitalist culture that commodifies everything, that distills everything we enjoy to have an explicit purpose, that how we engage with our Time has to financially “worthwhile”, art without a purpose is a revolution.
In the meantime, I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Big Magic”, which has become my manual for creative living. The way she talked about her relationship to her creativity resonated so deep within me. She describes her creativity as a relationship, one that she is committed to supporting. Gilbert intentionally does not rely on her art to provide for her financially; on the contrary, she is determined to build her life to provide for her art. This was a huge relief to me, a Capricorn recovering workaholic, that my art could just be for its own purpose. I didn’t have to commodify anything. I was able to relinquish pressure I was putting towards myself. My art doesn’t have to do anything, I will always make space for it.
Since art doesn’t produce anything that the system of capitalism sees as useful, it is relegated to the outskirts. It’s partly why my mom carted my pile of paintings out of the house. They served no purpose. I love art because I don’t make any money from it. Maybe one day I will but that won’t be a marker of success to me. It will simply be a new expression of my relationship to creativity. I do not want my art to serve the machine of capitalism so I will always protect it.
I have learned that my inner world is far more real to me than the outer illusion that keeps us moving at a breakneck pace. As I explored my inner world through art, it became alive and I learned how to inner dialogue. It was awkward and disjointed at first, but I practiced self-communication and I learned so much about myself. This dialogue expressed my inner experience without the filtration of my ego, it transcended my impulse to censor myself and allowed my Truth to speak for itself. The myth of Persephone has become my artistic mandate.
Persephone spends 6 months of the year as Queen of the Underworld and 6 months of the year as the Goddess of Spring. Both the under and upper world hold important tasks and she invests her time and presence in both. Art is much the same, there are dark times of chaos and hardship as we sweat through the inner murkiness and then we emerge into the light of spring with the birthed project. Art has natural ebbs and flows, natural seasonal cycles that we can grasp loosely, instead of trying to control. I have tried to schedule art time for myself and it has never worked for me. I will sit in front of my easel during the allotted slot in my calendar and nothing comes. I can hear my inner creativity gently, and sometimes not so gently, reminding me that slotting in my creativity is an attempt to control it, to harness it. For me, it doesn’t work like that. I’ve seen this work for many people and their creativity is very happy to have a scheduled time to look forward to. Mine feels more like the earth swallowing me whole or being swept onto an unchartered island and I must relay every detail of this new earth before the sky fades away.
This summer, I was painting in a field, throwing paint carelessly in the general direction where my easel held my canvas securely. An older gentleman walked by and asked if I was an artist. I became embarrassed, stumbled over an incoherent answer, offering a caveat that I was just starting art as my career but denied being an “artist” per se. The answer was obviously inconsequential to him, as he walked on, but I was plunged into an existential crisis.
Was I an artist? What is an artist?
A few minutes later, a young child walked by and posed the same question. Without hesitation, I agreed I was indeed an artist and she helped me throw paint at the canvas for the rest of the afternoon. What was it about the innocence of the child’s question in comparison to the projected authority of an older man that allowed me to own my Self as artist?
Whenever I receive tarot readings, children come up again and again. I have never been keen to having children of my own, though I absolutely adore other peoples’ children. My interpretation of this pattern is that there is a loss in translation. The presence of children in the cards is actually indicative of my creativity. I often describe my creative process as akin to emotional childbirth: there is suffering, pain, chaos and labour to bring this new life into the world. A new life that has never before existed and one that I could never recreate again.
I have often been plagued by an imposter syndrome with my art, since I haven’t had formal training in it, apart from stand-alone workshops. Fortunately, Elizabeth Gilbert came to the rescue again. In her podcast, Big Magic, she describes the insanity of university training being the standard for an artist, considering MFAs have been around for only a short time compared to how long art has existed. I have friends in MFA programs, and it is so inspiring to see their growth through the program and maybe one day I will take the MFA plunge. But it will not be from believing I lack in anything. So am I an artist? To me, an artist is someone who does art. It is a verb, not a noun. So yes, I am an artist. I sit down to do my work, not everyday but I am committed to showing up and when I do, these powerful forces show me different kingdoms within myself, stroke by stroke.
When I started dating again, I started painting again. My Body had a lot to say and the canvas was ready to listen. My current partner is also a creative and it is such a relief to not have to explain myself. At first, I projected my creative potential onto him. I said I wouldn’t be an artist if it weren’t for him. But I have always been an artist. From my brown kindergarten whales, to doodling my tears to now painting bodies, by far my favourite canvas.
Taking time for myself to do creativity meant unlearning capitalistic ideals of time. Living in a workaholic family, weekends were for performing free work, for doing paperwork, for serving others. I can still remember the taste of one of my first restful weekends in my home. I did whatever I wanted. I felt so free and simultaneously apprehensive, the nagging feeling when you leave the curling iron on. I have named this Capitalist Guilt and everytime I pick up my paintbrush, I can feel revolution on the horizon. My art has no purpose and it doesn’t need to. Offering space for my creative landscape to unfold is a gift to my younger self and a commitment to my future self that I will never forsake Her again. Creativity is not just putting pen to paper or brush to canvas, it is showing up for yourself, taking up space, communicating to yourself that you are worthy.
Why are you here? Why are you doing this work? For what is your creativity?