Spirituality can be
considered a search for meaning in life. By cultivating a sense of meaning, Spirituality
can provide an orientation to our lives, a set of values to live by, a sense of
direction, and a basis for hope. Creativity
is a powerful shaping force in human life. It is an intangible human capacity
of a transcendent nature – it moves us beyond ourselves in a similar way to
spirituality.
Faith and creativity are inseparable.
Creativity often is an act of faith. You have to have faith to step forward onto a
blank page, to take the first step in a dream or vision you want in your
life. You have to have faith to step
forward onto a stage or to put paint up to an easel. So as you improve your
conscious contact with a power greater than yourself, you are improving your
creativity - and as you improve your creativity, you are improving your
conscious contact.
"Creativity
is God's gift to us. Using our creativity is our gift back to God," Julia
Cameron observes in her best selling book The Artist’s Way. Far too often,
people think that being creative is for ‘artist’s but we are creative beings –
by the very nature of being human.
I believe that we
are all creative—that it’s part of our spiritual DNA—and that in order for us
to be happy and fulfilled as people, we need to be happy and fulfilled
creatively. Our life-force energy, our creative energy, our spiritual energy are
all interchangeable. When we are blocked
in one, it affects the others, when we work on our creativity we are engaging
with our spiritual energy and vice versa.
Often what we think of as neurosis is actually
blocked creativity. When people begin living in their creativity, the
"neurosis" disappears. Often,
we can become exhausted with talk therapy. Because The Artist's Way is experiential, it
brings people back into their bodies and their hearts. The group process
facilitates a safe space for individuals to explore their individual blocks to
being more creative in their lives.
One of the most
common blocks to creativity is that
people tell themselves they don’t have enough time. We yearn for
more time with the illusion that if we had open time we would be creating all
the time. The trick is to actually learn to use
the time which we have. So I try to teach
tools that allow people to be creative in the life they’ve actually got.
So what The Artist's Way tools do is reconnect
people to their own creative impulses, at which point people become far
stronger and begin to move in the direction of those impulses. It's essentially
a spiritual process, a listening process: using tools to kick-start creativity.
The Artist’s way is
a 12-week course and can prove to be a life-changing process. Along with a 3 hour group meeting weekly there are some basic tools that I recommend to everyone
who is trying to work on their creativity; The morning pages, which are three
pages of longhand morning writing about any topic. Morning pages are about anything and everything.
They are not like a journal. With a journal, you might write it like a diary or
notes on a particular subject. The
morning pages are like stream of consciousness writing – they have no order or
rules. It’s like you have a little whisk
broom, and you’re taking it into all the corners of your consciousness.
It’s worth it to
try. I would urge people to give morning pages a fair try. Twelve weeks of
doing them on the course brings about a huge change. As you work with morning pages, you become
clear as to an area that feels challenging and exciting to you. And that’s how
you learn where you want to go forward.
Facilitator,
Martina Breen is a Gestalt Psychotherapist with many trainings in exploring the
creative process in group work. She has an MA in applied Christian Spirituality
and has been facilitating the Artists Way and other creative development
courses for many years. Contact Martina
on 087 3296366 or martina@thedancingsoul.ie
The
next course commences on October 2nd at The Dancing Soul, Monksland.
