Weirder reasons why creative self care is the best self care.

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.

It opens hidden brain doors! Creative work is great for finding your way down hidden or forgotten paths in your own brain, leading to untapped deposits of inspiration and new ways of thinking about old problems. If your mind is a labyrinth full of treasure, creative practices and processes are how you find that treasure and bring it back with you so you can spend it on making your life more awesome - feeling more like your unique self, living your unique life.

It's excellent for time travel and visiting alternate dimensions. You can transplant yourself back in time to change events that have already happened, you can visit the future for sneak peeks of what's to come.  If you've ever wondered what might have happened had you made a different choice at any point in your life, you can do that, too - travel down a different path for a bit and see what might have been, and use that information to inform what you'd like to do next. Invite a bunch of renaissance painters for a tea party and ask them for advice… it's all possible. I did that once - I invited Leneor Fini (a woman who was painting at the time of the surrealist movement who lived life very much on her own terms), Gandalf and the moon, and I still live by a lot of the advice I received from those three.

Ever thought about being an alchemist? Turning emotional lead into emotional gold... creative self expression is wonderful for that. Taking an emotion or a place of stuckness to a blank page, and through the creation of an image, transforming it into something else. Lead into gold. It's kind of like magic, and one of my favourite ways to work with my own challenging feelings.

What about developing the power to bend reality? (muahahahaha)... Through regular creative practice, you can learn to see the world in a much more fluid way, with more possibilities and more opportunities, which in turn leads to more flexibility and optimism and also, importantly, more fun. On a page, everything is changeable. Don't like it? Paint over it. Really don't like it? Cut it up and transform it into something else, stick it to a new page, burn it, evolve it into something never seen before. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking reality isn't as malleable as an empty page, but it is, if you've been engaging in ninja creative training.

But what about improving self esteem? Does that too. Completing a creative project is a unique brand of satisfaction that bleeds into other areas of life - most creative work consists of overcoming challenges (expected or unexpected), and navigating those is a skill that applies in all areas of life.

Good for finding lost inner children. Creative activities can put you in touch with your inner child (maybe you have one of those telephones made of tin cans and string - remember those?), allowing you to access a more playful, fearless, and imaginative part of yourself that often gets buried underneath adult responsibilities. An antidote for modern living and the ruts we sometimes fall in.

Marie Kondo your mind... Regular creative self care is magnificent for spring cleaning and decluttering your brain. If you find a regular form of creative expression, taking what's inside and expressing it outside, it's like brushing away internal cobwebs (leaf blowers are fast and all, but there's something meditative and soothing about actual sweeping with an actual broom… same goes for mental sweeping). And when there's less brain clutter, there's more room for new thoughts and new ideas and inspiration to visit.

So there are a few of the other reasons why creative self care is probably something you should fall in love with and do for the rest of your life, in my highly biased and extremely correct opinion.

Got any more? I'd love to hear yours.

And, if you're not sure where to start or you'd like some company, come along to the Online Art Group - a friendly creative space where we do many strange and wonderful things that will give you one or many of these benefits. I look forward to seeing you there.

Next one is this Thursday June 6th - we'll be creating a map of our emotional landscape. I'm going for one of those cool pirate style treasure maps with 'here be dragons' in the corner, but Art Group has no real rules so yours could be something completely different.