Process

Last year, I reconnected with my creative process. At the time, it was a reaction to unusual and challenging life circumstances, and it was a deliberate attempt to step back and gain the sense of perspective and insight that I needed. 

Apart from providing immediate mental first aid, this creative renaissance has had longer term benefits. It might look to an outsider like I have an odd assortment of strange interests, but it's a collection of reflective and meaning-making activities that allow me to take the chunkier and less cooperative elements of life and reshape them into something I can live with. I am less stressed now, happier in myself, calmer. It is also helping me to come to acceptance of my disability. The process of reflection and integration afforded by a practice like writing, for example, helps me to lodge important understandings in a deeper place in my memory - even when I can't recall the more superficial details. The creative output provides reference points in my emotional map and on my personal timeline, revealing the way some of my bigger questions, challenges, growth have unfolded, even when I don't remember the sequence or timing of significant events. This is a valuable tool for memory and insight, but more importantly, it helps me to feel whole when I have lost so much, so so much, of what once defined me. 

A creative process does not need to be something artistic, or even skilled. I remember one time, turning to the medium of colouring in. (You read that right: line drawing + pencils = colouring in). There is a page that I coloured while contemplating in a very focused way all of the elements of a particular situation I was in. Not an exercise in mindfulness exactly, as that would require calm sensory presence without thinking thoughts, but nonetheless a very powerful activity. The picture is of a patterned sun, rising in flames, mandala-like, over a turbulent sea. Coloured with all the energy and intent of my process, it is beautiful. Beautiful.  But one corner remains uncoloured. As I filled the page with swirls and vortices of colour, I became unbearably weary of thinking about this issue that had stymied me for so long, until I couldn't bear to give it any more effort, not even one more stroke of my pencil. So I stopped colouring, and went out and took very specific (and effective) measures to transform that situation. I was very clear about doing this without handing over any more of my colour, without giving away any more of my emotional resources, without ceding any more of my personal power.  That picture, unfinished, is a magical thing to me - not because it represents any level of artistic skill, but because creating it took me from the stuck and powerless place I was in, to a mindset where I was ready to act to transform it. 

The same is true every time we bring the quality of mindful intent to a creative activity. It provides a way to process our experience, either present or past, to make sense of it, to renegotiate our relationship with what is or what was. In the big things in life, it allows us to reclaim our power in the face of otherwise overwhelming, unfathomable circumstances by creating meaning and connection. In the small things, it affords us a breathing space, a valuable pause, fresh energy to continue on with.