Being more Creative: 4 Ways In
Is there something you’re working to bring to life right now? A book, a painting, a business vision, a family vision …?
That creative baby needs nurturing. So I’d love to nourish you with some pathways I’ve found to be helpful for creativity of any kind.
The kind of stuff I’ve learned in the past three decades of writing, performing, singing/song-writing and business-midwifing (including two books, a poetry chapbook, an actual baby and membership in a spoken word band). All while also coping with being neurodiverse in a world set up for neurotypical brains.
Listen deeply
I invite you to …
Listen deeper than the surface sounds.
Listen with your body, as if you had antennae.
Listen to the birdsong and not the Google bird identification.
This deep listening waters our creative spirit.
Which is so much more than just making more ‘things’.
It’s about more vividly seeing, feeling and hearing what’s already there and letting that speak to you.
Don’t rush — let it distill
It’s wonderful that in some ways, many of us are feeling more permission than ever before to have a voice and be heard.
I celebrate this. I love supporting others to uncover their creativity and express it in the ways they long to.
And … in our culture and time, there is such a rush to communicate, share and commodify everything right away.
Have an idea = Put it out there. Instantly.
Because you can.
What if we could sit with the creative force a little longer, see what it wants to say, how it wants to move, without the eyes of everyone on it?
What if we could let it take its shape without the interference of ‘thinking of your audience’, or worrying about criticism?
Let it distill.
It will be truer to you.
“In nature nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.” — Alice Walker
Honour the ebbs & flows and welcome transitions
Have you ever noticed that your creativity isn’t linear?
It pulses, peaks and troughs, and goes through its own cycles, and so too does every creative project we birth.
Honouring this with patience isn’t always easy!
Lots of gentleness, even with the frustrations, can help.
Trying something else, something different, can also help.
And taking a break and stepping away from it all, allowing ourselves to go blank and into the void for a time, is also beautiful medicine.
Trusting that our creativity is still there as we replenish our wells. Honouring nature’s flow through our creative cycles.
I do this every month as a practice. And I also have times where I allow myself to ‘fill my well’ with the inspiration of arthouse movies or novel, without expecting myself to ‘make anything new’.
Let yourself be wildly enthusiastic — however that looks!
When we’ve received messages that we are too much or in some way don’t fit … that our creative expression isn’t quite what is wanted (how many people have been told they can’t sing or paint or write by school teachers or parents?) or is threatening to others …
It’s so easy to shut our wholehearted excitement down.
To go small and hide from others and even ourselves.
This is so, so understandable as a way to keep ourselves safe. And it needs compassion and patience from us.
And when our creative spirit is speaking to us, nudging us with little voices of ‘try this, go here, do this’, we are called to go bigger and deeper.
This can be scary!
It counters all the voices we have internalised from parents, school, friends, peers and partners.
(and maybe you had fantastically supportive parents and schooling experiences — wonderful! I had a granny who nurtured my reading & writing. We still all live in a society where we are pressured to fit a mold).
Maybe others were jealous of us. Maybe they needed us to stay in a box for reasons unconscious even to them.
But we don’t have to stay there now.
We can come out. Let our wild currents of joy, passion and excitement flow free as we find tribe that supports us to grow.
Even in the smallest of ways.
Creative expression is our birthright.
How are you nourishing it today?
I’m nourishing my creative spirit with lots of time outside, looking at the colours of flowers, listening to birdsong. I wrote about the healing properties of nature connection for neurodivergent folks (+ everyone!) here.
Join me over at Wildmuse Portal to explore a life of authenticity, creative expression and nature connection, and check out my book, ‘The Wild Wandering Arc: A Journey through Vanlife, Nature & Love’.