Find Your Creative Flow

How many of us have blocked our creative flow because of a negative experience decades ago?

The singing teacher who told you to mouth the words.
The art teacher who told you cows weren't green.
The English teacher who pulled apart your essay.

Today I'm inviting you to rekindle your own unique creative flow, because it is a deep storeplace of wellbeing.

Self-expression in any form can be expansive, uplifting and exciting, when we can work with awareness through the deeply held, negative beliefs which hold us back.

Transcript

Hello my gorgeous well-being family,

It's lovely to be back with you.

I've been having all kinds of wonderful holidays,

It's that time of year isn't it?

So I've just been in Bali for 10 days where really the reason that I went there was to intensify my yoga experience and expose myself to kind of new forms of yoga and meditation and pranayama.

It's a very exciting time for me,

I think I'm going to dive quite deeply into yoga in the next six months or so.

I'm hoping to do a yoga teacher training in Goa to complement the yoga teacher training that I did online during the pandemic.

So I'm very excited about that and I wonder what exciting things you're thinking of adding to your life skills.

This is kind of what I want to talk about today really.

I've been wanting to make a podcast about creativity for quite a while and I think I've touched on this a few times but I have been pondering it a lot in my life because in the last two years I've taken up ceramics and suddenly there's this explosion of visual art in my world and I am just curious about why that's happened now and it's been very interesting to uncover some of the fixed beliefs that I've had about myself and about creativity and you know I was just doing my little yoga practice before coming in to record this and realizing that you know one of the things we say in Gestalt is that understanding ourselves and building awareness it's like the peeling of an onion so we're endlessly peeling layers off and that really never stops like here I am 20 years in on my journey and I'm still peeling layers of fixed beliefs,

Negative beliefs,

Beliefs that don't serve me,

That keep me small,

That stop me from trying things and all we can really hope for is awareness that will help to understand and realize oh why am I thinking that?

It's like my yoga teacher used to describe taking a step away from the mind and its machinations so that we can actually think oh that's really interesting that I'm having that thought right like who is watching the thinking?

Is anybody watching the thinking?

Because that's really what awareness is.

You know when we're lost in our mind and lost in our train of thought no one is,

There's nothing to stop the momentum of that train of thought and it's often very repetitive and often very negative but when we can catch ourselves,

When I,

I'm gonna make an I statement,

When I can catch myself in the middle of my negative train of thought and think oh this is familiar,

I've been doing this for a really long time,

I've been thinking these thoughts and often it will remind me,

I will immediately go back to an experience that I had when I was quite young.

Like I still have a vivid memory in art class in grade,

I don't know,

Grade three of drawing a cow and I couldn't draw,

I still can't draw.

That doesn't mean I'm not creative and it doesn't mean that I can't do visual art right but I got this feedback from the teacher that cows didn't look like that and they're not green and from that moment I think I just shut down,

I shut down,

I gave myself this message,

This is what happens when I gave myself this message,

I can't draw,

I can't do art,

I'm no good at this,

Other people are better at this than me right so I looked around and saw that other people could actually draw a cow that looked like a cow and it was brown with white spots which is the way cows are meant to be,

All of those things right and so I squashed,

This is what we do,

Squash our own capacity,

Like abandon ourselves really and push away whatever might be trying to emerge and it's a really,

Even as I say that I find it's such a sad thing right,

That we squash away our own capacity,

Tell ourselves we can't,

Keep ourselves small and then somehow two years ago a friend of mine said why don't you come to the studio,

Come down and just play with some clay and it was that invitation that started me off and I remember going down there and I felt so paralyzed and so frozen and all the voices in my head were screaming at me,

You can't do this,

You don't know how to do this,

You're not artistic,

You're not creative,

You know,

I'd even created devious little ways around it where I was saying you're musical,

You don't have the visual arts but you've got the musical so just stay with music,

It's amazing really how our devious minds can keep us away from shame really,

It's about our mind,

The inner critic is there protecting me from overextending myself into a place where I didn't think that I was very good and being shamed for it,

Right,

That's really what this whole process is about,

My inner critic being really harsh and letting me know that this is not an area that I should even wander into because that's where I might be shamed,

Right,

Someone might tell me again that my cow didn't look like a cow and cows aren't green and so my inner critic was screaming at me to protect myself from that.

So I got beyond that,

I kind of realised,

Oh this is interesting,

I've been telling myself this story a long time but I'm curious about clay,

I'm curious to try some of these things that I was seeing that my friend was doing and the first six months I really had to work with what I'm going to call shame and expression that,

You know,

The reason for creativity is that it is so exciting to be self-expressive,

Whether that's self-expression through words in a therapy session,

Which can be incredibly therapeutic,

Or expression through painting and art or music or any of the myriad ways that creativity can express itself,

Writing,

There's a million ways,

I you know,

I haven't gone and studied creativity,

I'm just speaking from my own experience in my life and my experience of my clients.

So I quite often have used art in the work that I've done when I take people away on workshops and either visual art or writing and it's so lovely to see others discover that they enjoy,

When they're invited to,

That they enjoy creating something visual.

I remember one of my clients saying I'm gonna buy myself some oil pastels when I get home and a little book and just make drawings for no particular reason,

Just because it feels good.

And I tell you what,

The vibe that comes out of someone who's doing that is just so beautiful,

It's like,

I guess it's what that psychologist with the unpronounceable name described as flow,

Right,

That when we're in this state where our minds are fully engaged in something,

We're excited about the idea of something and we're creating something,

Time stands still,

We're no longer aware of our surroundings,

We're no longer aware of ourselves and all of that repetitive thinking,

That negative repetitive thinking actually stops,

It goes on hold as we dive into this flow state.

And you know for most of us the flow state is pretty rare,

It's pretty rare for me.

I think the reason that I do yoga is that it puts me into a semi flow state and that that is very,

Ah,

It's just,

It feels good,

It feels good and it's good to get addicted to things that feel good that you can do for yourself,

Right.

So I started thinking about creativity and my own creativity and you know what it takes to foster and build a creative practice,

No matter what it is,

Whether it's watercolors,

Oil painting,

Ceramics,

You know,

Etc,

Etc.

Because I've now been around people who are also doing it for long enough to observe them and to talk with them about it and to become interested in why are they doing it,

How did they support themselves to do it.

And like I,

I do think that creativity needs a lot of trust and a lot of self-compassion and an ability to encourage yourself and not turn on yourself.

Like I still create things that I think are ugly and it's,

You know,

There's a kind of falling feeling in my gut when I take something out of the kiln and it's ugly and I haven't paid attention,

I haven't thought enough or the glaze hasn't worked or you know what was I thinking when I did that,

So on and so forth.

Like I can still speak to myself quite harshly.

But I try to turn that around pretty quickly into,

Well that was an experiment,

That was an experiment,

What have I learned,

I'm not going to do that again,

Right.

File that away for future knowledge.

And sometimes people will stay within a very narrow band of creativity because they've figured out something that works and they're just going to do that again and again.

That's certainly not me.

And I feel like if I'm not creating things that are uncomfortable and unpleasant then I'm probably not experimenting enough.

Like it is,

Creativity is also about experimentation,

Trying new things,

Wondering what will be exciting.

And I tell you what keeps me in my creativity is that not always but occasionally I'll create something that's so exciting.

It just excites me to look at it and I guess you know I find it beautiful.

I find it,

It's beyond just beautiful,

I find it exciting.

Like I've created something that has form and colour and contour and interest and when I put it in my room it changes the feel of the room.

Like that's the other thing,

When I first started making pottery I think I didn't have much of it out.

Like I would put maybe a cup in the drawer and I'd get that out to have coffee and I enjoyed that.

But now I've started actually putting my ceramics around the living room and even in the bedroom and giving them away to people and giving them to my kids.

And whenever I see something of mine,

Well not always,

I mean there are still things that are ugly,

But what's exciting is to see things that I've made and get excited about it and think wow I made that.

That's really,

There's this kind of feedback loop that happens right,

That then encourages me to go and sit down and try again.

And here's the thing,

Like every time I sit down and try again there's all the same old stories come up.

You can't do it,

This is not you,

You're not creative,

Like all of that right.

And I just have to speak really kindly to myself and think you know other people experience this too.

Even the great songwriters,

The great artists have experienced this and it's just about staying with it,

Staying with it.

It's a bit like meditation right,

Not letting yourself go off into that,

The world of the crazy thinking that wants to keep me safe,

That wants to keep me small,

That wants to keep me in my familiar uncomfortable comfort zone.

And to just speak kindly to myself and say oh well let's just see what emerges from this piece of clay.

Like yesterday I sat down with a piece of clay,

I wanted to try something new,

I spent quite a you know a couple of hours making something only to realise at the end of it that you know there was a pretty major flaw,

There was a weakness in the wall right at the base and it wasn't going to work and there was no way I could fix it up and so I just destroyed it.

And this is the thing I love about clay right,

That you can just put all that clay back into the reclaim and in a couple of weeks it'll be good to use again.

So you know I was yeah I was disappointed that I didn't end up with a beautiful coil built salad bowl which it looked like it was going to be and it was all exciting but you know I learned a lot about that process and I will try it again.

I won't just say okay well coil building's not for me,

I'll stick with slabs and I'll stick with the wheel.

I will try it again and I will remember that I made that mistake so at the very base I need to really make that seam join properly and make sure that the wall is in even thickness and that it doesn't collapse as I build like all of the things that I learned right.

So creativity needs a lot of loving and encouragement and I guess I've also decided that I need to not be focused on the outcome.

The outcome is almost like a serendipitous byproduct of the creative process and if I create something beautiful hey that's exciting but the real joy to be had is that I've just spent a few hours in creativity in this place of mental processes on hold and my mind in a really different brain space.

Like I think if scientists were to,

I'm sure they've done this,

Were to rig up EEGs on people who are being created they would find that their brain waves are different from when we're just in our normal thinking space and it's a really it's a really beautiful holiday from the normal way that my mind wants to work which is you know pretty small and menial and mundane.

So I'm gonna invite you into some creativity.

I wonder what your creativity looks like.

You know I'm gonna make cards for Christmas I think that's a beautiful way to become creative as well.

There's a million ways to be creative and I wish you joy.

Have a creative day.

See you next time.