The other day I was talking to a friend and heard myself say “I am not really interested in creativity. Creativity is sort of just a bi-product of what I do.”

After I said it, it kind of hung in the air. I thought “Where did that come from?” And “What did I mean by that?”

Creativity. When I thought about my associations with the word, I realized to me the word “creativity” meant being clever about making something. It meant being “talented” at making art. And the thought that hit me hardest was this – I have been thinking that “creative” means that someone is good at “consistently producing something pretty.” Eeek. No wonder I didn’t want to have anything to do with that word.

But when I dug deeper into the word, creativity yielded all the things that I DO try to support in the studio. Creativity. To create. As in, to make something new. Newness. Yes, newness. Not something already figured out in your head, but something that arrives from the unknown. To create means to step out of the mind’s plans and desires to do something clever, make something pretty. Yes, and that it a key thought – true creatvity doesn’t come from the mind. It comes from giving permission to allow whatever arises in you to arise, even if it doesn’t make sense.

Michele Cassou (sort of a zen intuitive painting teacher) calls the place of creativity “Point Zero.” She says “You are at Point Zero when you let yourself feel, no matter what the feeling brings. Then, your feelings and perceptions mix and dance in you in a way you couldn’t have imagined and can’t explain. If you let your feelings be, they birth their own creation eagerly, as if they had been waiting for a long time.” (Page 22 from Point Zero. Creativity Without Limits, by Michele Cassou.)

Feelings, not thinking. They can guide you to places that your mind can’t fathom. Feelings (and the body they are felt in) tap into whole other worlds and kinds of intelligence! I’m starting to ramble here, but what I am excited to realize is that this place of not knowing, of standing in the blank space and LISTENING to all of these intelligences to produce something that your mind couldn’t come up with by cleverness – that IS creativity and it certainly is what I hold space for in the studio. So that the newness can arrive. The option you didn’t know you had. The expanded world with the expanded choices that your mind couldn’t conceive of. Creativity – to create. To bring forth of out the void. I definitely am interested in helping people step out of the closed loop of their minds, the limitations of stuck story and thought. Oh yeah, baby! I am way excited about newness. So I guess it turns out I really do care about creativity. I just had to check out my distorted understanding of it.

The picture above is of 4 different paintings by 4 different women, created in the same workshop. Watching each of them create these paintings was a huge eye-opener for me, and came just days after I began to mull over the word creativity. They all began with the same suggestion for a warm up (lying on a piece of paper and moving around as they needed to in order to trace their own bodies on that paper) I had been thinking of the suggestion as a warm up, but each woman became absorbed in the outline. And each woman CREATED a painting out of the blankness of the paper and her own deep listening to her unique inner impulses and directions. That is always so facinating to see the vast, PERSONAL newness enter the room.