I often think back to my art foundation year at Central St Matins. I remember a class in the first week in which we were asked to look out the windows of our beautiful Clerkenwell skyline (we were on the top floor) and draw one liners of what we saw without looking at our paper, then continue with our non dominant hands. The room’s response was how childish it was, meant negatively as if the exercise were pointless or beneath us. This was one of my favourite classes of that year. It felt so liberating. I was able to draw without any internal (left brain) voices critiquing every mark on the page. I was free to draw from a much freer place, that encourage me to really see what I was drawing and have a much more embodied experience doing so as it was without any shaming dialogue. These were some of my favourite drawings I produced during that time.
Four years later after finishing my Fine Art degree (also at St Martins) and having a much more head-driven experience over that time trying to find endless meaning within my work that just was, I realised I had fallen out of love with what creativity and the arts meant to me because I had been encouraged to contextualise every mark I made over that time. What became clear is I no longer wanted to “be” an “artist” but wanted to find a way of using the arts to help me feel again, to be in creative flow without context. It lead me on a journey through training in psychotherapeutic counselling using the arts, where the arts (whether painting, drawing, clay, movement, music, poetry) became the voice of a person intrinsically and I was there to encourage that voice to be heard. Wow did the whole context of the “arts” change for me here. This is what I was talking about! This was a pure feeling experience that allowed expression that words couldn’t match. When we access our creativity, it opens up the right side of the brain which is naturally linked to our feelings and sensations, so when a person is in a creative process or in a state of “flow” it can allow for deep self reflection. This is the same part of the brain that will get activated during a yoga practice or when we’re exercising our bodies. It allows for a somatic (physical and feeling led) experience which can offer deep opportunities for healing. For a while my dear friend Krysia Howard and I ran retreats specifically designed around exercising the feeling muscle. We felt that the creative arts alongside mind/body practices such as yoga, mediation and reiki offered this perfect somatic dance where emotions were being deeply uncovered and felt through the creative practice and being expressed through physical movement and practice. I still believe so deeply in this union.
With the wellness industry being as big as it is right now I think it can feel easy to get lost amongst it. How wonderful that there is more focus on creativity, self practice and tending to our needs but with this opens up so many ways in which we are being told to do it. For me it’s pretty simple and I think back to that first week at St Martins and the answer was there all along. Find your childishness. Open up whichever box it is that brings you that child like joy, where you can “be” without judgement. We have spent too long damning the child in adulthood, labelling childishness as a negative. I watch my four year old in his play, acting out his day, his experiences both positive and negative as ways of understanding his emotions in response to them. If this isn’t the most intelligent way of recognising our need to go inward and process our emotions as well as express them, then I don’t know what is. If we began to explore what we love like a child would, find creativity in our day to day lives through our own adult versions of play, deep conversation, dancing, the expressive arts, being in nature, yoga, sport, wherever we can allow ourselves to feel silly and playful. Let’s let the children teach us here and really allow creativity to become our healing tool.