75% of respondents to the well-known – and still relevant – Adobe survey on creativity in the workplace with respondents from across Europe, the U.S & Japan, said they were under pressure to be productive rather than creative, despite the fact that they were increasingly expected to think creatively on the job.
Only 1 in 4 people surveyed as part of the study believed they were living up to their own creative potential, and more than half felt that creativity is being stifled by education systems, leading to limiting beliefs about who is creative or not, and that creativity it’s not that important.
The research tells both a story about what we are facing as humanity, and who we have become: our great collective forgetting that we are all creative beings is perhaps precisely the reason we find ourselves in dark & challenging times.
Remembering ourselves as creative beings is therefore an essential part of what is asked of us here and now as changemakers: I would go as far as suggesting that it is a vital part of our evolution as humanity – key to our capacity to be present with, and contribute to what lies before us.
I invite you to breathe with me as you read this. And imagine life reaching out a hand to each of us and all of us inviting us to re-activate an innate knowing: I am a creative being. I am a creative being!
Creativity is our natural, intrinsic life force energy. It exists within all of us.
And working with it, is in turn intrinsic to living and leading an authentic, liberated, healthy, joyful life.
When we don’t express our creative selves, we eventually become low; even depressed, sad, resentful, jealous, numb, rigid. This is a place of scarcity, of contraction. We lose our connection to the spirit of aliveness, to our heart’s whispers. We tend to shut down in many ways, and become a smaller, less expansive version of ourselves. Our emotional range gets limited. We become more machine-like.
We look to the outside for information about ourselves, in particular our worthiness, and we internalise messages from the outside about ourselves: that we are not enough for example, or that we are too much. Which tends to lead us to compare and contrast ourselves with others, and look to others to validate us, or grant us a sense of belonging.
We likely push for outcomes from a tight place within, yet get surprised when whatever it is we are creating is not flowing.
Perhaps you know a version of what this feels like.
Accepting the invitation to remember our creative selves is a tender thing.
We are going to need to practise compassion, patience, kindness, gentleness, and remind ourselves that at the heart of it is a journey of unlearning separation and profoundly re-connect with life.
In its essence it is a journey of moving inward – into ourselves – and downwards: nurturing our relationship to Earth: life’s very self-sustaining root-system.
As our creative selves begin to re-emerge, little by little we start operating from a sense aliveness again.
We make decisions and create things from what brings us joy, ease, peace, expansion. Our wants and desires instead of obligations, or any need to prove ourselves, be successful or perfect.
A sense of awe and wonder starts to emerge and bubble up within us, as we now have a direct phone line to our hearts and other parts of the web of life.
We begin to trust ourselves more and can therefore start to trust in life more: in life’s capacity to regenerate, in our own capacity to regenerate.
Creativity is the essence of regeneration.
And saying yes to this moment’s invitation to remember ourselves as creative beings is therefore possibly one of the biggest liberating shifts we can undertake in our lifetime.
It’s a switch from relating co-dependently to interdependently with life, with ourselves, with the world around us; letting go of our addiction to giving in order to get, instead creating because we are.
I’m going to write that again so we can sense into what it really means:
Not giving to get (validation, a sense of enoughness, belonging, approval from others) but creating because we are (we create simply because we exist, because that’s what every cell in the ecosystem of the great web of life does).
Inviting in this shift is for sure a healing adventure of some magnitude, and we need support to embark on it and stick with it. There are of course countless books and courses offered where we can receive guidance, simple rituals, practises and affirmations that will help us remember, little by little, that we are gloriously creative beings, simply because we are born.
As part of our journey we will also likely need to say yes to grieving the hurt of being disconnected for so long from our creative selves, and how it came to be so in the first place. Our bodies will want us to start moving in non-linear ways. For sure we need various forms of nourishment. Importantly we will need community.
We need community to hold us both in our scars – the wounds that tell of all the places within us where our sense of wholeness got severed – and community to simultaneously hold the highest vision of us as creative beings.
And that community needs to be both safe and brave. And of the kind that nurtures us to build capacity to hold ourselves and see ourselves, and each other.
Because creativity flourishes when we feel a sense of safety and self-acceptance. Bravery is also needed, because we cannot remember without a consistent tangible practise of sharing and shining from our creative selves.
It’s a vulnerable place, one which most of us are fearful of.
Over the past month, as Nature-kin such as flowers, trees and birds have been giving us a masterclass in what expressing our creative selves can look and feel like, we have been diving deep into our relationship to our creativity in the Glade and are co-weaving an energy-field which allows us to both lean in and step fourth.
What’s been bubbling to the surface is the pure beauty of self-expression mixed with the raw courage that comes with setting ourselves free from the old scripts, constructs and constraints that have held us back and dimmed our light.
Those that never belonged to us in the first place.
Together we come to know that there is no such thing as creative and non-creative people: only used or non-used creativity. We come to see that creativity exists in every area of human activity, from physics to woodwork, accounting to agriculture, football to management consultancy, sewing to skateboarding.
Because it is the natural order of life.
And therefore the natural order of being human.
The Glade is an online community membership space for regenerative practitioners and changemakers from all walks of life, who desire to live and lead in harmony with Nature’s cycles & seasons and the longtime wisdom of ancestors and trees. You can join us anytime and cancel anytime.
