Creative expression is deeply fundamental to who we are. We come into the world without any self-consciousness around how, when and where we express ourselves. We take great joy and delight in playfully riffing with reality. The world is our canvas and we are the creators, inventors and curators of our inner and outer worlds. Then we are taught over time that there’s a right way to do things and a wrong way and that it’s much safer to do what we are told rather than what our instincts might be suggesting. Inauthenticity isn’t in our repertoire when we are small children until we learn incrementally over time that we must trade in our authenticity for belonging. Our creative spark starts to go dormant and for so many of us, it never again gets uncovered.
Studio sessions are a place to unwind and peel back the conditioning that disconnected us from our intuitive and creative capacities. They’re a place to rediscover how intrinsic and natural it is to create. The sessions are designed to be a space to reunite with your inner creator – it’s both a reunion and communion with the parts of Self that have been waiting patiently to be seen and heard. There are many reasons we might be drawn to doing this work. We might be working with charged personal material that we want to explore and move from a new angle. We might have grief or fear or anger we’d like to externalize and transmute. We also might want to simply practice bringing online more of our right-brain faculties given that we exist in a left-brain dominant culture. Or we just want to be in a room full of art supplies and see what happens!
I believe our inner landscape and the quality of the relationship we have to our own Selves, dictates and drives so much about what shows up in our outer landscape. Therefore, the work I feel called to do in this space involves a process by which I support individuals in strengthening their connection to their own higher Selves through meditation. From there, we move into creative process from a place of embodied presence. If we deliberately get out of our own way by demoting the ego mind/intellect, we can begin to get in direct communication with what psyche wants to reveal. We let go of what we "know" to create room for what "wants to be known". This is where we start swimming in the waters of creative alchemy and transmutation. Anything is possible from this place.
The creative process, once engaged, is a force unto itself. It shakes loose old, stuck material. It opens us up to unconscious material that wants to be seen. It reveals to us a grace and beauty that we didn't know we had the ability to connect to, let alone create. A beauty that comes from within but also links us to something bigger than ourselves. It’s in the connection to something larger that we are often able to perceive a true sense of non-contingent belonging within the larger web of reality once again.
Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. - Rumi