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?

There's a saying:

How you do anything is how you do everything.

Have you heard it?

What does it make you feel? What do you think about when you read it?

What does safety feel like to you?

For some people, the answer is 'I don't know'. Particularly for people living with a lot of trauma, or for those under a lot of stress or going through challenging times. The idea of feeling safe seems a bit abstract and unknowable in a real world sense.

Sometimes it's hard to know what safe feels like in our increasingly complex and fast paced world.

One way to begin to find a sense of safety is by starting with your imagination…

When was the last time you were mind-full? With your mind too full of what you were doing in the moment to contain anything else? No worry. No stress. No thinking about that amazing comeback you wish you'd thought of yesterday. No thinking about tomorrow's deadlines. Absorbed in the present.

It's a very restful place to hang out that is wonderful for your mental health. And it's a place that's relatively easy to visit, if you know the way.

Creativity is for you. Singing. Dancing. Making art. Not just for people with 'talent'. Not just for professionals. For you.

Humans are inherently creative, but many of us have been taught to believe that 'creative' means 'able to paint a masterpiece that will end up on a gallery wall'.

How might your life be different if creativity was something you did, the way that birds just sing, rather than something to ‘be good at’?

Short answer: no. That sounds kind of creepy. But it’s a question I get asked a bit.

The reason why I can't look at something you drew and see into your psyche is because your creative process is unique to you. The colours you choose, the way you express yourself on the page, the images you create relate specifically to your thoughts, beliefs, emotions, dreams, fears, trauma, lived experiences, etc.

If you can't imagine an option, you won't choose it.

Those times where you feel like you've got two choices and they both suck? What if there are more options, but you're not seeing them yet? Or perhaps you are seeing them but they feel out of reach or unrealistic or the cost doesn't seem worth it.

Here are a few ways to expand the amount of paths you might like to take.

"I can't draw."

I hear that a lot from people. I used to hear that a lot from myself. For decades. I made a lot of art, but it was all abstract or stylised because I couldn't draw "real" things.

It was true that I couldn't draw, but only because I hadn't learned how yet.

Learning to draw is like learning to read - when you've learned the letters and the basics of grammar, you can read whatever you want. When you've learned the basic principles of drawing, you can draw whatever you like.

Did you know you could go to the future and meet your future self?

How far in the future is up to you. A week from now. A decade. Longer - what if you met yourself after you'd passed through the veil from life to death? What stories would that version of you have to share?

Our future selves know things we don't know - these challenges we're living through? They've already found their way around them. And if we go to meet them, we can ask them how they did it. And they can offer us perspectives and paths that we can't see from where we're standing.

We often walk through doors and across thresholds in time without really stopping to notice the transition between here and there. The moment when we're not here any more, but neither are we there yet. A change is happening, and we long for 'changing' to become 'changed' because the messy middle part is… messy.

What if we did take the time to notice? To pause there a moment. To take our time with 'changing'. What might we feel? What might we find?

Do you remember your dreams?

Musings on what dreamwork means to me, and an invitation to be part of a new dreaming group, starting soon.

Dreaming isn’t like being awake - different rules apply.

What’s something that’s feeling a bit challenging in life right now?

What if you had a fantastical creature or being who could help you with that?

What if these imaginings weren’t “just” your imagination? What if they weren’t childish, what if they weren’t a frivolous waste of time? What if they could be powerful allies to help you navigate life with more creativity, more lightness, more playfulness?

Want to give it a shot?

Imagination is sometimes dismissed as childish or frivolous (it’s ‘just’ your imagination), but it’s one of the most powerful tools we have. Before we can create anything, we have to imagine it, from something as simple as a sandwich to something as complex as a skyscraper.

Everything we create is born from our imagination. Imagination is what shapes our world - the stories we tell about ourselves and our place in the world, the meaning we make from the things we experience - imagination is the glue that holds us together.