Five things you can do to (re)connect to your creativity right now

Dear Ones,

I want to offer you some mid-week inspiration to keep you connected to your creative spark. These are practices I have found useful in my creative journey as a poet, sound artist, and sound healing practitioer.  Enjoy!

1. Start small. It is beautiful to have a grand creative vision: a book you want to write, a show you want to create, an album you want to record. But the gap between where you are and what you want to create can be paralyzing. Instead of setting a huge goal with lots of pressure, begin small. Start with 10 minutes. Begin to explore in a low pressure way every day or a few times a week or even once a week. Let yourself build the desire so that you can’t wait to to start writing (or painting or dancing or...). Increase the time you set aside as your desire grows.  Experiment with finding a time that works for you. I like to start first thing in the morning before I check my email or begin to tackle my other responsibilities. Other people I know love to work in the deep quiet of night. Once you find your rhythm,  I recommend putting it in the calendar, so you honor your commitment to yourself.

2. Follow your obsessions and curiosities, even if you don’t know where they are going, even if you don’t understand them. They will reveal themselves to you. Are you obsessed with the color blue? Start to take notes on everything about the color blue. Read books with blue covers, buy blue glass beads, listen to the blues. When I wrote Eyes, Stones I did not start out by saying “I am writing a book about what it means to hold the Jewish and Palestinian narratives in my body.” I started out by getting curious about the pain in my heart around the schism between my love for the place that had taken in my grandparents after the Holocaust and my growing awareness of the suffering of Palestinians. Which led to conversations, exploration, and eventually poems. And then eventually a book. You get the picture.

3. Work outside your chosen artistic medium occasionally; it can be especially helpful to choose a medium which is not one that you have an attachment to succeeding in. As I’ve shared, I’m not a “dancer” but I take movement classes regularly because it connects me to my body and gets me out of my head, and frees up my creative impulses. I also have a supply of mini canvases and acrylic paints which I break out occasionally. It feels so good to create in a discipline in which I have no attachment to being “good” at. I often get lost in the creative process and end up being happy with what I have produced which I did not expect when i started the journey.

4. Make time for creative input, as well as creative output. Read a book, go to a museum, take a walk without your cell phone so you can be totally present. We don’t create in a vacuum. Yes, it’s essential to give yourself time and space to create, and it is equally important to make time to take things in, to fill up the well. Art is in conversation with other art and with the world.

5. Find community. Join a workshop or a class, so that you have a regular, dedicated time devoted to your creative pursuit. Start a creativity circle, a place where you get together with friends and share work or use the time to create together. You don’t have to do this alone. And it can be a lot more fun not to.

I hope this is helpful and gives you some ideas to play with. Start now. Don’t worry about not getting it right. Turn off your phone. Follow your impulses. Give yourself the gift of creative expression.