3 DOing Tips for Creative Well-BEing when you don't know where to start in your creative practice
I have three tips to share that can be… well, everything when you just don’t have much to give energetically or are feeling particularly un-inspired or un-grounded in your Creative Practice.
Much of my teaching includes invitations and explorations into the art of being in our creative process and practice.
This “being” I refer to is not to be confused with not DOing (even though sometimes it can look like non-doing and even un-doing).
Creative BEingness is about presence and participation, on purpose. It is a sort of living relationship.
Sometimes there is stillness, yes… but even then, it is often an activated stillness.
Where we are choosing to be Awake. Remembering that we are Alive, we come into that felt spaciousness again. Conscious of resonance, vibration, movement, shifts and nuance in ways that often stay under the surface of daily functioning. We practice a posture of making, in wonder and willingness to engage with the rhythms of creative transformation.
The doorway to this creative beingness - as counter-intuitive as it can seem sometimes - is in the making of our art. That is, the actual DOing of our creative expressions in a very palpable, hands-on, practice-for-the-practice kind of way.
Sometimes, though, it can be really hard to muster up any ounce of energy for our creative practice - let alone originality or inspired ideas - even when we know we would feel better for it.
Some seasons are harder than others with this. Some years are especially hard, too… ahem, I’m looking at you 2020.
Here’s what I know from experience… art-making is a healing art.
Making creative connections is restorative.
Creative expression is a fundamentally necessary and often pushed aside part of our holistic well-being and how we relate to ourselves, one another, and this world we spend our lives in.
It can relieve, offer respite, lift up our inherent joy and desires, and help us release all the shit we can’t seem to let go any other way as well, renewing our sense of connection to… and gratitude for… the blessed particulars of daily life, as well as the bigger truths+ideals+visions that guide us.
I mean it when I say taking time to nurture our creative hearts+souls, by actively being in making, is Good medicine.
SO when you just can’t bring yourself to pick up the paintbrush, or it feels like there’s just too much to decide so why bother… here are three very simple tips I wrote on a post-it sometime last year (from a source I’ve long since forgotten).
These tips are a sure-fire jump-start for a rote creative practice, depleted days or in times of persistent unnecessary resistance or the snares of scarcity-mentality or comparisonitis.
Give them a try. Create your own variation. Make and See what happens in your sense of creative well-being.
1 :: DO WHAT YOU KNOW
Starting tip: Don’t know what to make in your art journal today? Fine, no need to start from scratch. Re-use your pre-existing ideas. Look at art you’ve made or tried before. Select an approach or subject you’ve explored. Then, DO it again. Add a slight variation if you want.
This is often how a body of work is created, a fresh exploration is imagined, or a skill is refined. Sometimes this is how we see how far we’ve come or open ourselves to the unexpected glimpse of what's next.
Repetition is our friend in practice. Slow-down into it. Revel a little. Zone out while you make… that’s a blessed resting+healing state in creative process and you should make a point to unleash yourself into its realms.
In a world that wants new, new, new and ever-more intensity + productivity at faster rates, with all of your attention on a screen, this is downright rebellious.
Another thought: sometimes we just need to get off the I-Need-To-Learn-More-First learning train and actually put to practice whatever we already know for awhile. Or what we already have…
2 :: USE WHAT YOU HAVE
Starting tip: This one explains itself, but just let me say it for those in the back still scrolling Amazon or Dick Blick for even more supplies… you don’t need fancy or specific supplies to make art!
Got scrap paper and a pen? Get junk mail? Have extra house paint around, or your kids crayolas? Get to it.
Have too many supplies sitting around screaming, “try me, try me?” Pack half or more of those babies up, put the box in the dark somewhere, and limit yourself to what’s left out. Get to it.
Or better yet, make a travel-size art kit for at-home with a toiletry bag and your must-have supplies, and get the rest out of sight. Then, get to it.
Clearly, this tip is also good on the budget - financially, of course… but energetically, too (especially when you give yourself the challenge of intentionally limited or selective supplies for a page, painting, or project). Try it.
Shopping and collecting supplies IS fun if you have the means to do it, no doubt - but it’s not creative practice.
Making something that didn’t exist before is, and it’s how you encounter and commune with your soul’s unique language, desires and connection to creative Spirit.
Nothing to it, but to DO it. So, get to it.
3 :: FINISH WHAT YOU STARTED
Start Finishing tip: I love this one… because some days that blank page is just too much decision waiting to happen - or suck us into its paralyzing vortex, ya know?
But also because this is the tip that teaches us 3 (or more) really good things:
1) Don’t be so quick to judge or dismiss - save starts and scraps in a designated small or big box for times like these
2) re-visiting something later can give us a fresh perspective or idea, and
3) how good it feels to shift our stance, express what is real+messy, or make beauty out of something unexpected and out-of-routine.
So, for this one… You can just finish what you started from using tip 1 or 2 or in a previous creative practice+play session.
OR use what I call a ‘palette’ page… you know, those pages that you put between and under paintings to protect surfaces that get all sorts of wild random marks and extra-paint smooshes+wipes on them… start & finish something on one of those.
OR find a piece you didn’t care for much or had given up on, and start to finish it. Maybe make a pattern on top, try two colors you never use, or do something experimental. Or start by flipping it around and seeing it in a different way. Don’t overthink, just get back on the page with some tangible substance.
Who cares if you mess it up more? You already wrote it off.
But maybe, just maybe, spending a little more time with it - moving color and mark-making or gluing stuff down with complete acceptance come-what-may - will bring it to Life in a new way or completely transform your relationship with it… and with your own overall creative energy.
Creative practice is like that, isn’t it?
It gives us energy and peace and a place to rest our over-worked, buzzing, numbed-out, seeking or weary mind-body-spirit, as a sort of holy anchor pulling us back to our own sense of Creative Source.
At least when we come to it without expectation, willing to participate with our time and presence, even in our extremely imperfect as-is-ness.
Yet, in times that we need it most, we skip it anyway… because we “just don’t have the energy.”
I hear this SO often from the women I work with.
Even though we know it usually somehow gives us energy when we allow ourselves the time and space to just BE in the doing of it.
Or said another way, when we make it a priority to DO what we need to individually, and through that to BE in a posture of receptivity and self-lovingness, we are filled up and have something to give to our shared life, even if we can’t explain how or why.
You, my readers and subscribers… well, I’m guessing you found your way here because something in you gets this… this need to be engaged with the mystery of creative Spirit.
Don’t ever doubt that seed planted within you.
Just come to your practice and explore that stirring.
Keep it simple and stay with it awhile.
And then, keep coming back, trusting what you know to be enough, what you have to be abundant, and that what you start has beauty + healing yet to be revealed as you tend and honor it (and You) to a sense of completion.
DO what you KNOW • USE what you HAVE • FINISH what you STARTED
Every cycle of completion expands what we know (and un-know), what we are consciously grateful for and attuned to in our midst, and to trust the rhythms of our creative process and callings more deeply.
May we be brave enough to begin, patient enough to stay with, and courageous enough to let go in Love.
