Art

I read several articles from Creativity Portal that really spoke to me and I think I ‘m going to make a weekly routine of reading. There are several newsletters that consist of several articles and three in particular spoke out to me. I will place an excerpt of words/pargraphs that spoke to me.

The first article said: Art is a wonderful playground! Play is never a waste of time. It happens when we let ourselves go beyond the rules and expectations of everyday life. Art is a wonderful playground. If we can let go of needing to make our artwork overly important, creativity can be a simple gesture of freedom. A splash of orange here, a touch of green there. We can wear our heart on our sleeve.Creative play is one of the best ways to experiment and learn about our feelings. It involves risk and this gives us the opportunity to perfect ourselves. It is a form of thrill seeking. Within spontaneity are our hearts, our feelings and our souls. Play is never boring because it follows it’s own interests. If creative play becomes boring, we are planning and efforting too much.Play is in truth our natural state of being and we can choose to live our lives more and more from this open, effortless state of awareness. Creativity opens and conditions this wider awareness. By allowing our thoughts to flow organically and effortlessly during play, ideas arise spontaneously and we can access an intelligence and inspiration far greater that our familiar minds. Play can inform our lives in surprising ways.

I absolutely love that sentiment!

Second article:“The truth is when we let ourselves be vulnerable the inner stored pain does intensify. It peaks almost like a volcano erupting, but it is the only way to release it and get to the other side to insight and inspiration.”
Often we can fill our lives with so much busyness we lose touch with our deeper selves. When I teach expressive art I am speaking to the part of ourselves that is heroically out front in our lives, feeling overwhelmed and too busy for self-reflection and self-discovery. I know when I do too much in my outer world, my inner well starts to feel barren and empty and I can feel increasingly depressed and uncreative. Often we do not realize how bottled up we are inside. When we do not attend to our inner life we can feel overwhelmed and exhausted.What sustains me through my busy life are my expressive art and collage journals because it gives me pause to express the feelings below my everyday thinking. There is such wisdom in spontaneous art making. It reveals things that are true that we might not realize about ourselves. It is amazing what a simple doodle or a quick collage can express. Sometimes my drawings haunt me with mystery and I do not know how to read them. Sooner or later however I fully experience the feeling they convey I go back into my journal with gratitude to my unconscious mind for expressing my inner overwhelm so clearly.

Then the writer continues to talk about her drawing and her thoughts about her drawings spoke to my spirit of that’s soo me. She mentions a desire to "heighten", to continuously elevate my thoughts and actions to a spiritual peak. The figure is flying. She is not grounded in any way in everyday life. She is focused on an ideal self-created future. She is trying so hard to be superwoman!

Another aspect in her drawing she sees is that it “tells me there is much more to me than how much I can efficiently accomplish in a day”. We all have a vulnerable creative self that lives very close to our souls. Our sensitive, vulnerable parts of self are right there below the surface concerns and survival activities of life and often they will express themselves through spontaneous imagery. Our competent survival masks miss out on true connection to our souls because they are designed to protect us from our fears, insecurities and discomforting feelings but when we move through these feelings we can access profound intuition, sensitivity and creative insight into life.Allowing each dimension of ourselves full expression reveals that there is far more to us that meets the eye. We are not empty inside or uncreative at all. We have a vast inner words to discover. Expressive creativity invites us into profound self-acceptance that allows every part of ourselves a voice. When we express all of ourselves we free up inner blockages and can more easily access our natural vitality and intuition. Overwhelm ceases when feelings are expressed and released. Once we get clear inside we can get back to creating a life of meaning and unique purpose. Third article that spoke to me:Creativity offers this ability to find the “more” in you. It is a wonderful loosening of old habits and beliefs. I have discovered that I have choice. I can change my perspective. I can paint new colors into my experience. The daily practice of creativity is an invitation into something new. When I engage my creativity, new probabilities reveal themselves. I see who I am and glimpse what I could be in a visual way. It seems that as I discover and integrate more parts of myself then I can accept and embrace more parts of others. It is a vibrant feeling to include more and more into my experience of living. Connecting with myself makes my relationship with life and other people grow in depth and meaning. This fills me with fire and passion. I wonder; can I hold the whole world inside of me with love?Seeing in PicturesStart to see your whole life in pictures. This is the intuitive way. The soul sees in pictures. Imagery I am drawn to shows me something about what I am within.
BeginningsIn many ways, I have struggled to open up to my most playful and spontaneous creativity.Reclaiming Wholeness
It is part of the human journey to forget who we really are. I have yet to meet anyone who was deeply mirrored as a child for who they are in their entirety. We are all born as unique beings but as children we cut off the parts of ourselves that do not match our parents or our culture. This is because they cannot recognize or accept them in us. And so these parts go into our shadow. At some point in our adult life we need to find a form of accurate mirroring and reclaim all of ourselves to be whole.I always knew that I would reclaim my wholeness though art.

I did not feel safe to express my own uniqueness. I feared that if I did, I would not be loved in some private, primal, childhood place. But as time passed I realized that we all follow this path of early family conditioning, and at some point in our maturity we are called to differentiate. We can spend our entire lives living in the dreams our families and culture holds for us, or we can find a way to wake up to the true essence of ourselves. Life, with its inner urges and outer surprises has its way of moving us along to this end.I was eager to recreate myself completely. I was optimistic that this would happen quickly but life and creation is wisely slow. It has been a long and patient uncovering of the limiting beliefs and stubborn habits born in childhood, and in my own learned humanness, that block my intuition on this path to a radiant, truthful life. This is a journey that I share with you in the spirit of deep and abiding connection.In teaching and writing and reaching out to more and more people with this offering I realize that we are all longing to uncover the truth of our authentic selves. If we are residing in the familiar comfort of old habits and beliefs there is always a stirring of “divine dissatisfaction”. We may choose to accept it’s prodding toward uncovering what wants to be born or instead to meet it with addictions, and distractions of every kind. It is our purpose to love and see every part of ourselves. All of life wants to be accepted and included. This is our creative path and our destiny.