From as far back as I can remember I have been invested in the creative process because it offers me a safe space to explore my inner world. This is a place where I can contact, feel and express or release anything I need to, whether it’s a joy, a sadness, an anger or something taboo. Anything and everything that seems unacceptable out there in the “real” world, feels invited to the table through the creative process. It’s a place where everything in me can exist, be seen and felt.
Putting these feelings, whether they are stagnant, stuck or free-flowing states out into the world in whatever way feels best provides a sacred type of container for feelings and impressions that are hard to articulate otherwise.
Impossible to bring to the surface sometimes in a conscious way, they require an unconscious surrendering to the emotional world that lies within us which we are often expected to repress.
Art in this way can function as a medium through which we liberate the parts of ourselves we hold prisoner. Because this sense of hiding or severing at one point in time was adaptive and purposeful it's worth honouring this aspect of ourselves as an ally since it has likely helped us to survive. However, without a tangible way to reprocess and transform our unresolved pain we remain cut off from vital life force and a deeper sense of joy, wholeness and peace that could be in our lives otherwise.
By willingly moving through our pain with the creative process as our guide we become alchemists capable of transforming the deepest wells of darkness back into light.
Art making can be used as a tool to explore and process our dreams, to re-frame our experiences in waking life, creating positive changes in our lives. Through the creative act we can begin to build new neural pathways and narratives about ourselves and the world we find ourselves in. We can connect with our higher selves and over time become more identified with the witness of our experience rather than being hijacked and over-identified with our pain bodies.
In this space of curiosity and surrender we can embrace the power we all have to re-write and re-wire things, to start fresh and create a new story, one that is authentically ours rather than handed down through generations of recycled wounding.
