Art Therapy

It's going to come as zero surprise to you when I tell you that having a regular creative practice can help you live better.

Aside from the mental health benefits that come with focussed creative time, it’s related to the idea that how you do one thing is how you do everything - you tend to have ways of thinking and feeling and moving through the world that are similar, no matter the circumstances you find yourself in.

And so if you regularly play with a blank page (or in your kitchen or your garden or sewing room - however you like to create) and watch what you do and how you do it, the parts that feel fun and the parts that challenge you (and how you deal with those challenges), you might start to see connections with how you live life in the world outside your blank page or art journal or kitchen or garden or wherever you like to create.

Want an example? Read on...

If you think about it, symbols have a huge capacity for holding meaning, packed into what is often a very simple shape. For example, a cross is just two lines… and yet it also holds millenia of meaning, both collective and personal.

Anything can be a symbol, a visual representation of something else. A heart, for love. A dove, for peace. An owl, for wisdom. A white stick figure on a blue background for here's the toilet.

Once you start looking, they're everywhere.

I talk about creative self care a lot, and for me, that's not just about engaging in creative activities as a way of caring for myself, it's also about caretaking my creativity itself - finding ways to surround myself with inspiration, so that when I'm tired, or feeling flat, or have run out of words, or I want to draw my way through a challenging feeling, or go on a quest in my art journal to find answers to a particularly tricky question* that life is throwing at me, there is something there to draw from.

What's your oasis of calm?

If calm isn't the word, maybe stability, or peace, or ease.

Another question - where is your oasis of calm?

It can feel a bit like a mirage at times, or like someone snuck in while you weren't looking and brushed away the path. I used to feel calm, but I don't know how to get back to that place. I don't have time. I have a to-do list as long as my arm. Time is going too fast (time is absolutely going too fast for me - I'm looking for a time elf to magic it slow again for me. If I find one I'll lend it to you, if you like).

There's a part of you, of me, of everyone, who knows what to do.

Maybe you forgot how to hear it - I know for me it's a process of remembering and re-remembering. Sometimes weeks or months go by when I just don't hear. It's an easy thing to do, forgetting how to listen to the part of you who knows. The world is full of voices telling you to listen to them, instead. Buy this, follow my ten step process, take these pills, read this giant pile of self help books. The external voices are loud.

The internal voice, the one that knows, can be quiet. And sometimes it tells us things that don't make sense in the context of capitalism.

Creative self care is the best self care. I talk about it being good for stress relief and finding flow, but it occurred to me that those are very 'proper' (and maybe slightly boring) reasons. It's also good for much weirder and more whimsical stuff. Here's a bunch of weird reasons that I've been hoarding like a dragon sitting on a pile of gold.

We are made of stories. Who we think we are, our histories that have led us to come to know ourselves. The values that we live by. It's all stories.

I'm creative. I'm a victim of this circumstance or that one. I'm someone who hates the cold.

Because I hold these stories about myself, they influence my actions in various ways.

Because I tell the story of hating the cold, I live in the tropics and refuse to go south in the winter.

What if I tried on the story of being an Antarctic explorer? Perhaps I'd buy some warmer clothes and go south for the winter, treat it like an expedition into the unknown… it'd be a very different experience of life from my current one.

What if you were a landscape?

A place, deep and wide, full of weather and tides?

How would it feel?