Do you have an artist in you that you’ve tucked away because…
In today’s episode, I invite you to come back to your inner artist. Not only for the sake of your own healing, but for the healing of your community and the world.
Never have we been in such dire need of creative ideas, creative solutions and open, creative hearts to shape and shift the path in front of us.
Tune in today for some nourishing, easy ideas to bring back the artist in you.
I promise it will be worth it.
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Host: Ally Fallon // @allyfallon // allisonfallon.com
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back together with the words you write, all the beauty and peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when you write your story. You got the words and said, don't you think it's down to let them out and write them down on cold It's all about and write your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back to the Write your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm your host, and I want to talk about today the importance of having a creative practice. If that phrase doesn't make a lot of sense to you, don't worry. I'll unpacket on the episode today. But I want to talk about how having a creative practice is what guides us through our life and through our story. If you've been around this podcast for a while, you know that I am a huge advocate of having a writing practice, a daily writing practice, which for me looks like just five to twenty minutes a day of putting pen to paper, writing whatever's on your mind, writing about what's going on in your life, writing about how it makes you feel, writing about what sense you make of it, what it makes you think, the thought patterns that are in your brain, and that when you put pen to paper like that, you end up discovering that you think things or feel things that you didn't know you felt, because it takes you deeper, It takes you into a deeper part of your brain. And I will forever stand behind having a regular writing practice. But today I want to expand the lens a little bit and just talk about having a creative practice. So even if you don't feel like writing, even if writing isn't what's right for you in this season, even if you know you have long periods of time where putting pen to paper just doesn't feel accessible to you, that having a creative practice can provide you some of that same support. In fact, maybe even other aspects of support that writing can't offer you. And so I want to expand the lens and talk about what that looks like in my life, what I've noticed it looks like for others, and just invite you to have your own creative practice because of all of the benefits that it can bring into your life. This is coming up for me because I reread a book that I had read I don't know probably ten times before, called The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. I will put the link in the show notes. If you haven't already heard of this book, you should go and order it immediately right now. Like, go to your local bookstore, go find The Artist's Way. I can guarantee you they have a copy of it in stock if they don't, ask them to order it and keep it in the store, because it's just one of those books that you can return to over and over and over again and reread and reread and reread, and it just takes you deeper every single time. Like I said, I've read The Artist's Way at least ten times in my life and gone through the program. I don't know as many times, probably as many times I haven't counted, but I hadn't revisited the book in several years and found it when I was going through a box of books that had been in storage, and so pulled it out and started going through it again and was just blown away by the value and the depth and just the generosity of the practice that she teaches in the Artist's Way. So the book is by Julia Cameron. It's called The Artist's Way or the book. Literally write this minute, order it on Amazon, or even better, order it at your local bookstore. But go find a copy of this book and get it in your possession and just start reading. Julia Cameron walks you through a three month practice that's called the artist Way. That's returning to the heart of the artist and the way that I would define the artist. I don't think she necessarily defines it this way, but to me, the artist in you is the true you. The artist in you is the you that many of us have rejected. When I teach writing workshops, one of the first things I ask is I ask people to share what their earliest experience was with writing, because you'll hear these amazing stories. Like some people's stories will be something like this. My earliest experience with writing was this writing teacher who called me out and told me I was a great writer and really encouraged me, and gave me a notebook and a pen and told me to keep writing for the rest of my life because this was something I was really good at. So that's one version, and usually that person is still in a practice of writing. Another version of the story is my earliest memory with writing is I was writing in a journal and I had the journal hidden under my bed, and my mom found it and I got in trouble or she told my friends about it, or she burned the journal in the fireplace. I'm not joking, I'm not exaggerating. I've heard every version of that story that someone's mom found something that they had written that was meant to be private and either made it public or told their dad, or something bad happened quote unquote bad happened because the parent found this piece of writing. And of course those people feel all lucked up around their writing practice. They don't want to show up at the page, they don't want to write anything honest on the page. And of course they would because the pattern that got laid down really early is if I show up and tell the truth, I get in trouble. Imagine the kind of mind trap that that could get you into in other parts of your life that don't have anything to do with writing. If you believe that when you tell the truth, when you show up and tell the truth, that people are going to reject you, or people are going to betray you, or you're going to get in trouble in some way. Yeah, you would not really choose to do that. You would just be like, let me put on a mask, let me say what I know. You know, people want to hear, and the consequences of that can be dire in every single aspect of our life. So this is one of the things, one of many hundreds of things that writing can bring into our life. Is it teaches us to show up, to tell the truth, to say it with clarity, to say it with confidence, to say it with courage, to be honest at first with just ourselves, to just say something on the page that's true, and then to carry that honesty and integrity into other parts of our lives. And it will transform your life from the inside out. A writing practice will, but the same is true with a creative practice. And one of the things that Julia Cameron talks about is this abandoned artist, and it's really similar to the abandoned writer. To what I've always said about the abandoned writer, which is that we learn reasons to abandon our inner artist because our inner artist faced criticism or bullying or negative feedback or whatever it was in childhood, and so we've learned to kind of put this artist aside, to pretend like I'm not a creative person, and then to go out into the world and do what's expected of us and do what gets us good feedback and gets us accolades and success and money and all the other things, and a life can really start to feel suffocating. It can start to feel stale. We can start to feel depressed. When we deny our creative selves, when we push aside the part of us that wants to make something from scratch, we can start to feel really empty inside. We can start to feel really disconnected from ourselves. We can start to feel disconnected from the people around us. We can start to feel like nobody sees me, nobody knows me, nobody understands me. You know, my life is just sort of happening to me. I don't have any control over it. And one of the things that will heal those wounds is and I would argue one of the best things that we have at our fingertips to heal those wounds is a creative practice. Is coming back to the sense of wonder that children experience when they sit down to make art. This is so fun because my kids are with a perfect age for me to watch this take place in real time. My daughter especially is very into art, or what we would traditionally call art. My son is also into art, but his is more like building stuff. He likes to be in the sandbox and build sand castles and use magnetiles and blocks and all that stuff. So that's also a creative practice. But my daughter watching her with you know, craons and markers and colored pencils, and just for hours, she'll sit at the table and have all her supplies around her and just make stuff, you know, and she's not even worried about what the outcome is. She's not wondering who's gonna like this, or how many copies am I going to sell? Or you know, will Mom approve of this picture that I'm drawing. She definitely, when she's done with something, wants to bring it to me and show me how proud she is of it. And I can just be proud with her. But she's not making it so that Mom will be proud of her. She's making it because it's fun for her. She's made it because she can't not make it, because it's just part of who she is to create. And I guess the point I want to make on today's episode is it's part of who you are to create too. And when you begin to believe that that's not true, when you begin to believe that you're not a creative person. This is when a downward spiral starts to happen, where we start to feel really stuck in our own lives when we think, yeah, I would love to, you know, be creative, but I really just need to pay the bills. I really just need to do you know, what's asked of me. I have all these responsibilities and all these obligations. Life is hard. There's so many things on my plate. I'm just overwhelmed. I'm just trying to get through the day. These are valid feelings and valid concerns, and a valid tension that we all face in living an adult life. And yet a creative practice is the antidote. A creative practice brings you back to who you are. A creative practice will wake you up and revive you and remind you of what's true about you, which is that you have something beautiful to offer, that who you are is so unique. It's unique as a fingerprint, as the very fingerprint on your thumb. It is that unique. There is no other person in this world who could replicate who you are and the beauty and the gift that you have to bring. And in order to be reminded of that we have to be reminded of our creative practice. So this is what Julia Cameron does. Julia Cameron's creative practice consists of many different activities that you do to come back to your creative self, but one of which is what she calls morning pages, which is waking up each morning and just writing freestyle, stream of consciousness style for three pages. So you sit down to the page with pen and paper, old fashioned, real pen, real paper, first thing in the morning, and you just sit down and write. My caveat to this would be if writing first thing in the morning is not accessible to you because for any reason, because maybe you have kids like I do, and they wake up early and you don't have time to wake up before them, then don't worry about it being first thing in the morning. If writing for forty minutes or three pages is not accessible to you, don't worry about making it forty minutes or three pages. Find a way to make this fit in your life and be committed to the practice, and you will begin to see changes. You will begin to see shifts. So if it's five minutes first thing in the morning, or if it's five minutes at nine point thirty after you drop your kids off or whatever. Find a way to weave this into your practice. Weave this into your daily habits, and you will begin to see shifts and changes. One of the spaces and places where I find time to write is in the car. And I know, if you're a mom out there, you're feeling me on this one. There's something about being in the car after drop off or whatever, you know. Or sometimes I'll have my kids in the car and we'll go through a drive through or something and get a treat, like we'll do Starbucks drive through and get a treat, and then they're buckled into their car seats, they're eating a treat, I'm drinking a coffe whatever, We're sitting in the car and it's just, you know, not quiet, not utterly quiet, but it's like peaceful for ten minutes maybe, And maybe that's the place that you find where you can jot a couple of notes down. I've talked about this on a previous episode, but I've started the practice of just writing the date at the top of a note in my iPhone and just recording anything that happens to come to mind. So maybe my practice isn't forty minutes first thing in the morning. But maybe my practice is five minutes here, five minutes there, two minutes here, one minute there, thirty seconds before I go to bed, and maybe it adds up to somewhere around twenty minutes by the end of the day. Whatever it is for you, find a way to make this practice work for you and work in your schedule. Don't feel like you have to do forty minutes or it's not good enough. Just find a way to make it fit for you, and I promise you you'll start to see shifts and changes. You'll start to feel these waves of insight, these waves of epiphany come through. It's almost like you talking to you, or maybe you like to think about it as like you in contact or in touch with the divine light that's in you, that's guiding you, that's speaking to you, that is the original you, that is the divine you, that is the artist in you, that has gotten lost somewhere along the way in the complications of being a human being in this three D world. Which I'm not of the camp that says, you know, the physical world doesn't matter. It's like I talked about in last week's episode. You have asesinas, you have practices in yoga, you have the physical postures that then trigger or bring up the deeper work. They bring up the inner yoga. As I said, my teacher Missy talks about so physical practices, you have the asinas that's outer yoga. Then you have the inner yoga, and the outer yoga triggers the inner yoga. And I said in the last week's episode that Missy talks about Baron Baptiste who says, until you want to come out of the posture, the posture hasn't really begun. So we need the physical practice. We need the physical postures in order to bring us into attention to what's happening at a spiritual level. So I'm not of the belief that the physical world doesn't matter. I think the physical world matters deeply. Your responsibilities, your obligations, your to do list, it all matters. And it isn't until those physical things in your life bring you into attunement with the inner yoga that the real meaning starts to come to the forefront. When it's just physical and there's no spiritual, when it's just material and there's no emotional, your life will feel flat, it'll feel meaningless, it'll feel it'll be lacking, it'll feel depressive, it'll feel boring. But when there's a physical obstacle in front of you and you're aware and in tune with the inner yoga, the change that's happening inside of you because of this obstacle, Suddenly life suddenly, problems, suddenly, obligations, responsibilities, loss, is grief, rage, all of it starts to feel meaningful. It starts to feel like this matters for something, This means something to me. It's all part of this journey that I'm on. And this is what creativity does for us. Creativity brings this to life. Speaking of yoga, I'll bring this into the conversation for just a second, because speaking of yoga, yoga is absolutely a creative practice. I used to give the advice to writers that I was working with when they were experiencing writer's block to get their heart rate up. So I would say, you know, if you're sitting at the computer and you're staring at the blinking cursor and you can't think what to write at the very least, get up and do like ten pushups and then sit back down, or even better, get up and you know, run around the block and come back, or walk around the block and come back to your computer. There's something about that physical practice. There's something about getting the heart rate up that drops you from your frontal cortex into your limbic system and that allows you or invites you to use even more of your brain and even more of your body, that invites you to come from a more physical place, that invites you to come from a deeper place, a more place that you can't just do when you're just trying to figure out the problem from the top front part of your brain. Your prefneral cortex is extremely important. You could not exist in this world without it. And yet when your prefneral cortex is driving the show, then you're making every decision from a place of logic and no decision from a place of creativity. Because all your creativity, all your imagination, all of your ability to dream up something new and dream up something different, comes from the lower part of your brain, from the limbic part of your brain. Yoga activates that limbic part of your brain, so does pretty much any form of exercise, anything that gets your heart rate up. A walk around the block is great not only for getting your heart rate up, but also for activating the bilateral parts of your brain and again inviting more of your brain to the conversation, more of your brain to the table, to the party. And yoga is a practice that has been used for thousands and thousands of years. This is an ancient practice that's been around forever. It's been used by many, many different cultures. There are energy centers in the body that are activated when you're doing these yoga poses and these yoga postures. They're not just meaningless postures. It's not just for no reason. You know. A warrior one is not just a warrior one. A warrior one is activating parts of the body and inviting you into more depth with yourself. And even if we don't fully understand why or how all of those things are working, the fact of the matter is this practice has been working for human beings for thousands of years across many different cultures, you know. And then we bring yoga practice into the West, and in the West, we have this obsession with figuring things out and defining the science, which is such a gift and such a beautiful thing. And so you have scientists who are figuring out all of the reasons why for so many thousands of years this practice has been working. You're finding now that science is proving that the benefits of yoga are really taking place in the brain and taking place in the body. And so you're seeing this merging of an ancient practice and also a modern quote unquote proof that it works. And it's really cool to be able to see that happen. But a yoga practice is a creative practice, and yoga is one really amazing way to reactivate that creative part of you that so many of us have set aside. So yoga is one way to do this. Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way is a great way to do this. I talked about how she has you do morning pages. She also has you take yourself on what she calls artist states. So artist states are where you take yourself to do something unusual or unexpected, outside of the normal. It's just you. Nobody comes with you. There's no taglong kids, there's no taglong partners, no spouse's come. It's just you taking yourself to do something that activates the senses. And I love how Julia Cameron talks about the well that you can't draw from an empty well. And so if you are feeling burnt out in your life, if you're feeling overwhelmed, if you're feeling like you're running on fumes, you're burning the candle at both ends, whatever it is is. If you're trying to have a creative practice in the midst of those feelings, the creative practice is going to feel pretty dry, because you're drawing from a dry well. Well. What fills the well, according to Julia Cameron, is sensory input. So sensory input, first of all. Other acts of creativity fill the well. When you read a book, when you listen to a podcast, when you have an experience at a retreat, when you take in someone else's creativity, It fills the well. When you go get a latte and it just is beautiful and it tastes so great, and it's got the latte art on the top, and you're taking it in through your eyes, and you're taking it in through your nose, and you're taking it in through your taste buds. That's filling the well. I used to go on Artist States to Whole Foods quite a bit. I haven't done this in a really long time, but I used to really love going to Whole Foods. Especially when I was younger and felt like I would go into Whole Foods and couldn't really afford much of anything. I would walk the aisles in Whole Foods and just admire the way that the shelves were stocked and the prepared foods, and you know, all these beautiful like colors and labels and smells and sights and sounds, and just take it all in and would always buy myself a little treat while I was at Whole Foods, And that was my artist date. Now these days, my artist state might be taking myself to Shelby Park, which is not far from my house. I can drive myself down there and listen to the crickets or listen to the frogs, or just take in the sites, the sounds, the smells, the feel of being in the park, regulate my nervous system through nature, and just take myself there alone, you know, or maybe I'll go grab a coffee and then take myself down there. So artist states are a beautiful way to fill the well so that you have more to draw from when you come to your creative practice, and you can begin to come back into touch with that creative version of you that creative side of you, that part of ourselves that so many of us have set aside. I have started affectionately calling my inner artist the poet, because if you are familiar at all with IFS or internal family systems, this is a type of therapy that I've used on and off over the years. I've had a few therapists who have been trained in IFS and who have used this tool with me, and it's been extremely helpful in a lot of different ways. But the idea behind IFS, and I'm paraphrasing here, and I'm also not a therapist, but I'm in a paraphrase quickly, that IFS is this idea that you have many different parts of you, and that the therapeutic work is to welcome all the different parts of you that some of us are trying to cut off, the part of us that's angry, or cut off the part of us that's wounded as a child, or cut off the part of us that talks too much, or whatever it is. And IFS is really about working with the parts. It's about integrating the parts so that they can all become part of one healed, well integrated human being. But that all these parts are welcome, that the wounded five year old is welcome, that the you know, angry mother is welcome, whatever it is. And one of the things that I started talking about in therapy is this part of me that I call the poet, and the poet is the artist part of me that I decided at a young age wasn't acceptable to be seen in public. You know. The poet was the part of me that was secretly writing poetry on the side, which is how she got named the poet. So the poet in me was secretly writing poetry on the side on the bus at home in my free time, whenever I had a moment to myself, I would just kind of hide out in the corner and write a poem. Well, then I would go to school and realize that in order to get accolades at school, in order to get the straight a's that I wanted, in order to be successful to my teachers and to my parents, that I had to act in a different way. I had to really like think in a more linear way. I had to really focus on staying really present in class and maybe presents the wrong word, like paying very close attention to what the teacher was saying, memorizing facts, answering the questions correctly, learning you know, the framework that the teacher wanted me to learn, getting the answers right, getting the straight a's, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that carried me through, you know, my entire school experience. I went to college, I got an advanced degree. I went to grad school and was obsessed with getting straight a's, getting good grades, getting teacher's approval, you know, just having people think like, oh, she's such a good student. She always knows the answer, she's always raising her hand, she's always sitting in the front, she always shows up on time. And so I started calling that part of myself the valedictorian. Which side note, I was never the valedictorian, which is always a little bit of a sore point for me. I was salutatorian, which meant I got one B straight a's, but one B in geometry I think it was anyway, I can't even remember now, see, not important, not important, but it felt important to me at the time, and I remember feeling so devastated that I wasn't valedictorian. All of that to say, so I have this valedictorian part of myself that really is about being successful, seeking approval, getting other pe to think a certain way about me. And she is welcome here. She is welcome here, and she has served an absolute purpose for me for so long. She has earned me a lot of respect, She has earned me a lot of money. She is part of how I got out of my abusive relationship and paved away for myself moving forward. And then there's this poet that lives inside of me, the inner poet as I call her, but for the sake of you, as you're listening, it's just your inner artist. There's a poet, an artist inside of me that I have set aside because I decided that she wasn't welcome here. I decided she wasn't acceptable here. And the valedictorian has taken up so much space, and the poet has not had as much space to take up. And what would happen to me, to my personality, to my experience of my life if I gave the poet a little bit more space to exist. I had this old memory pop up of a teacher in high school, missus Gardner was her name. She was my English chief. So I had turned in many essays to her and always gotten a's on all my essays. And then for one project that we did, I don't remember what the requirement was. I don't know why I did this, but I decided to put my poetry together into a little poetry anthology and turn my poetry into her and I remember she said to me, you should probably stick with prose. You're much better with prose than with poetry. And that was maybe my sophomore year of high school, junior year, I can't remember, but I think it stealed the deal for me in terms of sharing my poetry. I felt like, Oh, I worried that it wasn't acceptable for me to show my poetry. And then I took a chance and I shared it, and I realized I was right that it's not acceptable for me to share this part of me, this poet part of me, is not welcome here. And I think so many of us have stories like that. If you can just take a minute and think about the input that you got from adults as it related to creativity in your life, as it related to writing, as it related to poet, as it related to music to dance. You know, another memory that has come through for me is of my ex husband telling me when we first got married and moved to another state, I really wanted to take a dance class because I had grown up in a dance studio and I was actually a really decent dancer as a young child. I was on dance team. It was such a huge part of my life for so many decades. And I was feeling really lost and sad, and I was missing my family and missing home and feeling homesick, and so I was like, I would love to take a dance class. And he said to me, if you can show me one measurable way that taking a dance class will add to our bottom line, then you can take a dance class. But otherwise it's a no. As these stories come back to me, and as I remember them and tell them back to myself, I can trace back the lineage of this idea that I have in my body that my poet, my artist is not welcome here. And I think this transition that I've been in in my life where I've been training to become a yoga teacher, I took a step back from coaching. I took a pause on teaching my online course a book. In six months, everything that's been going on in my life. I think what it's really been about is about taking a pause for long enough to invite back in my poet, to invite back in my inner artist, to give space for her to breathe. And I will tell you one thing. Julie Carmeron's book, The Artist's Way is a fabulous way to It's a program that will invite back in your inner artist. And one thing I want to add to her program is space. Just space, just white space in your life is a way to invite back in your inner artist. We are terrified in our culture of white space. We are terrified of having unscheduled time. We are terrified of the quiet. We're terrified of downtime. We're terrified of not being productive. We are so afraid to just let there be space. And I'm telling you, just having space in your life, just not having something scheduled every second of every day, we'll invite back in your inner artist. And maybe at first that feels like just crying for no reason at all. Maybe at first it feels like panic. Maybe at first it feels like frustration or anxiousness. That's another big one. Sometimes we feel anxious when we have white space because we're like, I'm supposed to be doing something. I think I'm supposed to be getting something done. The anxiety, the fear, the sadness, whatever it is that comes up for you is the breakthrough of the inner artist. It is part of the process of inviting that artist back to the table. And I'll say, just on a philosophical level, the reason for inviting back in the inner artist is not just so that you can feel happier, Because you will feel happier as you invite your inner artists back to the table. You'll feel more in touch with yourself, You'll feel more in tune, You'll be more present, you'll be more excited to wake up in the morning, You'll feel more depth and meaning in your life. All those things are true, and also on a level beyond the personal. We are in a time in our world, in our culture where we desperately need creativity, where we have to look at the problems that are at hand and ask ourselves, how can we approach these with a new lens. We have to be able to step back and see from a thirty thousand foot view the issues that we're facing, and see each other through the lens of an artist through the lens of your analytical note taker, your valedictorian, whatever you want to call that part of you. Through the lens of your analytical note taker, you're valedictorian. You may look at a problem like what we're facing in our culture right now, and you might have a really great step by step A to be a through Z plan for how to solve the problem. And I think this is part of the issue we're facing as a culture, is that everyone seems to have a structure, a plan, a program, an idea of how to resolve these issues, and we're all fighting about it. We're all just arguing about it. And the only way to really find a path forward is for us to reconnect to the inner artist that is open. The inner artist, as opposed to the intervaledictorian, is open to new ways of thinking and new ways of seeing. Can receive what someone suggests without immediately shooting it down and see what's good about a suggestion instead of immediately what won't work about it? And I think that we have to find a way to communicate and to connect with one another from the standpoint of the artist. I mean, you watch kids. My kids are a part of this wall door fee outdoor play program where they just play with these other kids all day. And when you watch kids play together like that, it's amazing what you watch them come up with. They are so creative. We are creative by nature. The child in you, the five year old in you, the four year old, and you the six year old in you. You know, between those ages of like four and eight, that version of you is so unbelievably creative, and so unbelievably open, and so unbelievably collaborative with the people around you. We need to reconnect to that part of ourselves. We need to find again a way to be in community with one another and to work together toward change. I really believe we won't make it through this time unless we're able to do that. And so it's not just about you becoming happier, although it will make you happier, it will make you feel more engaged with your life. It is a way to become unstuck, to become more connected to that inner artist. And also it's also a way to become more connected to those around you and more collaborative and more generous and more generative, and to find a new way and a new path forward. So I invite you to go by the artist's way. I invite you to come back to a creative practice that you've lost more along the way. I invite you to reflect on the stories from your life about where you tucked away your inner artist, why you tucked away your inner artist, what you decided about who that person was, or how that person was unacceptable inside of you. And I invite you to find a way to welcome your poet, your artist back to the table today. Until next time, I will be thinking of you and your inner artist, and I will be so excited and grateful to have you back next week on Write your Story podcast. I'll see that