This month’s theme is honouring your creativity, specifically rebelling against the idea that you have better things to do. Thai is a challenge to prioritize creativity in your life. We face many challenges when we try to prioritize our creativity and it can begin to feel like an uphill battle. My goal over the last year has been to increase ease in my life; to choose paths available to me that prioritize ease and peace. We don’t want another thing on our to-do list, another activity to check off at the end of the day that leaves us feeling more drained than when we started. Creativity should be a respite. It should be a place to rest and recover, to re-energize, and we can do that if we engage with it from a place of ease.
This week I’m sharing the ways I choose to honour my creativity with ease, and hope that at least one of them resonates with you.
Move Your Body - My creativity is very closely linked to physical movement. From my roots in dance to my passion training in the gym, moving my body is not only a form of creative expression, but it’s also a way to move creative blocks along. Whether it’s putting together choreography, hitting a gym session, or stretching at the end of a long day, movement is rooted in creativity; it is exploration through space. Connecting with your body creates a channel for creativity to flow through. If you listen to your physical body, you can find areas of tension, restlessness, exhaustion, excitement, flexibility. All of these physical sensations have a place in the creative world, and moving through these sensations, exploring these spaces within our bodies as well as our surroundings, gives us more attunement to our creative well. Moving your body opens a path of ease as tension is released and restlessness is soothed.
Consciously Consume Creative Work - Inviting more creativity into your life, making it a priority can be as simple as consuming creative work! Making it count is the key. Consumption of creativity can serve many purposes; inspiration, enjoyment, fulfilment, cultivation, habit building, exploration. Fully engaging with the art and creativity you consume paves the way for creative processing. The more you consume with purpose, the more space you create for your own creative essence to expand. I love reading, always have. It’s the main reason I love writing now. I want to write stories I want to read, and that pursuit is what makes me want to dedicate time and energy to creativity, but it also allows me to follow a path of ease, because I am first and foremost enjoying myself when I engage with my creativity.
Find Your Minimum and Meet it - Creativity does not have to become the main focus of your life, or feel like it’s overwhelming and crowding out your obligations, desires or joy. I would argue that to prioritize creativity is to follow joy rather than delay it. However, to cultivate creativity we do need to engage with it from time to time, and I have found that the best way is to create consistency. Find your bare minimum; 10 minutes, half hour, evening pages, morning stretch routine, daily sketching, rubics cube, word search, whatever it is, find your minimum - one activity for a particular length of time at a particular time of day, the minimum it will take to make you feel good, to give you a touchstone moment with your creativity, that’s all you have to do. If you can meet your minimum, not only will it feel like your creativity is manageable and giving, but you’ll begin to build a bridge of trust within yourself and in relation to your creative process which may or may not have been broken by years of betrayal and self doubt.
Doodle in the Margins - This is both literal advice and a concept to employ - take those small moments of expression and delight in them. Whether that looks like doodling in the margins or singing in the shower, dancing around the kitchen or making a list of whatever comes to mind, we need to identify and revel in these small everyday moments of stolen creativity. It doesn’t always have to be a planned or profound creative session, steeped in ritual or flow or intent. Sometimes creativity just happens, and we need to learn to identify these little sparks and let them enter our awareness. Learning to seize these creative sparks allows us to enter a pattern of ease in which we don’t feel pressure to force creativity to fit into a little checkbox. It’s more of an intuitive, organic engagement with your creativity and can actually help you develop a creative interest by becoming intune with these moments of opportunity.
I hope these small but mighty tips help you on a path of ease on your creative journey. It doesn’t have to be a struggle; this is a powerful narrative in our community, and for many who self identify as not being creative this is often the narrative that pushes them away. Challenges and blocks always come up, and almost always require a creative solution. It is my perspective that in order to meet those challenges and blocks when they happen we need to have cultivated a relationship of ease with our creativity so we can identify those small moments that can help us move those mountainous blocks from our path.
Comments