Why is it so hard to just sit down and create?!
I get asked this question a lot. In fact, I ask myself this question a lot.
My thoughts, energy, and personal journey have been swirling around this question over the past few weeks. I am pretty sure I am not alone here, so I thought “why not invite you all along with me in this exploration!”
Why is it so hard to take that deep breath and just make something?
And then once I do get creating why is it so hard to sustain a daily practice?
Why do I prevent myself from showing up to something I know is so nourishing and important to me?
Many of us have a deep desire to create but we are paralyzed with fear, uncertainty, exhaustion, and pain among so many other weights we carry in our lives. The questions we all wrestle with are…
How do we change this?
Drive a wedge into it?
Offer something new to the doldrums of creativity and life?
Over the next few weeks, I want to explore this with you. I want to offer you both practical tools and big insights to chew on. I want to break this down bit by bit and help you find some perspective on your own unique story.
I will be offering you some insights and tools exploring both mindfulness and the expressive arts. It feels like a worthy venture to take together. I hope you will join me.
You can join in live through my weekly emails which you can sign up for here. Or wait and follow along anytime after on the blog.
In each part I will challenge you with some simple activities and ideas to explore to help you make sense of getting started creating and staying in a creative place.
My intention is to offer you a few mini lessons in creative mindfulness through this magical thing we can email. If we are all here together we should use our time together thoughtfully. Watch for the first mini lesson next week…
In the meantime, I have a bit of pre work you can do to prepare for this… It’s simple, just a question to ponder and perhaps even an answer to settle upon.
What image, shape, line, colour, texture, or word would you use to symbolize your personal relationship to your creative practice?
A flower? A hammer? A squiggly line? The colour pink? Bumpy sand? A simple word?
What symbol fits for you?
Trust your impulse and see if you can express this through your imagination rather than your words.
Let this question ruminate in your mind for the next week and see if you can settle on something that you feel really characterizes your relationship to your creative practice…. Trust this process, you might just surprise yourself!
I look forward to picking up on this next week and diving in deeper to this question of what prevents us from showing up fully to our creative practices… I hope we can emerge on the other side with some insight and tools to help you get creating with more peace.
This is part of a longer series you can check out all of the lessons here!