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Transformational Talk
Responsibility for Creativity
Do you know how to take responsibility for your creativity? Like many, you may have trouble nurturing your imagination. Facing the blank screen, score, canvas, loom, or clay often brings up inadequacy and its undercurrent — fear. Whatever your medium, the challenges are similar – staying present with dissonance or emptiness until your muse arrives. When you delay or avoid projects, you miss the delight of ongoing creation.
Here’s the tip. Find a safe place to reach inside to the part of you that carries inadequacy and fear. Let him/her know they are not alone. Offer compassion for all the ways their creativity was unwittingly squashed by wounded caretakers. Allow vestigial grief or anger to move through your experience. Be tender. Breathe. Stay in your body.
Next, do a little dance, sing a little song, make silly sounds for a minute or two. Anything will do…the important thing is to move. Once you feel the pulse of life rising recall (or imagine) a time you were able to break through barriers in some project. Feel that triumph. Scan your memory to reveal how long it took before discomfort dissolved into flow.
Finally, next time you’re tempted to circumvent a project, first try grappling with it for 10 minutes. Most likely you won’t even notice the clock as you get caught up creating. Amazingly — ideas arrive, solutions appear. You can do this. You were born for this. Just begin. ©
Penelope Young Andrade, LCSW www.penelopetalk.com Call: 858-481-5752 fax: 858-484-8374 email: