For those of you who have been following our series of walking through The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown, PhD, LMSW, you may have noticed that we took a break for the month of March. These spring days are whirling by and we are now being called back to focus! As we move into April, we pick up with guidepost six: “Cultivating Creativity: Letting Go of Comparison”. Whether this is your first guidepost or your sixth, I invite you along the wholehearted journey with us.
To a certain degree, cultivating creativity might be the easiest guidepost to mentally comprehend. The idea is to intentionally and actively pursue whatever delights your particular creative spirit on a regular basis. That could include any number of a whole host of things such as: painting, vision boarding, knitting, singing, dancing, baking, drumming, graphic design, story telling, coloring, crafting, drawing, acting, or photography, among others. The invitation is simply to listen to what intrigues you and do that which brings you peace, joy, and/or energy.
The difficulty is in letting go of our patterned beliefs that we’re not “artistic” or “creative” enough. It’s moving past our high-school English teacher who told us our writing was embarrassing or our choir mates who reminded us that we are tone deaf [I may or may not be speaking from personal experience :) ], so that we can tune into what moves us, regardless of our skillfulness. To begin, we may have to heal our hurts or are “art scars” as Brene calls them in order to move forward.
Letting go of comparison making helps us to remove limits that only serve to bind our energy and heed our fear. As Brene reminds us:
There’s no such thing as creative people and non-creative people. There are only people who use their creativity and people who don’t. Unused creativity doesn’t just disappear. It lives within us until it’s expressed, neglected to death, or suffocated by resentment and fear.
Thus, let’s not stifle our creative spirits but rather give them room to breathe and play and express themselves. Just as the colors on this Midwestern canvas return, let April be a month to cultivate our creativity, both individually and collectively. Feel free to share your stories of creativity with your providers here at WECHC; we’d love to hear them!
Many blessings and happy creating,
Nikki Holm, MA, Chaplain
