Hello, Creative Mind! I recently reconnected on social media that I have been busy this past year fulfilling my dreams- I had an internal shift (sparked in part by the pandemic- did you?) Why wait? My dreams will happen only if I face the profound vulnerabilities that come along with their pursuit. I promised that I would tell you how it all happened- so- let’s start!

Let’s explore- through the lens of your life, your goals and your future. I have been studying the past few months with Creative Minds from all over the world in creativity classes with the Creativity Association and Eric Maisel- and the inspiration and wisdom is abundant and contagious! In classes this week we talked about the biological imperative of independence in creative people. Creative people are blessed with the need to make meaning of the world around them and find their own way, along with the energy and passions that it takes to accomplish this (read: it is not easy!) I talk often at Creatively about your personality having big feelings. Big passions. These are Nature’s way of giving you the tools you need to succeed at making meaning. It is important that you use them, however, because left idle they can become problematic. 

Over the years I have had Creative Clients come to me with problems like chronic anxiety, depression, mood swings and other problems. I am not disputing that these things can be clinical. However, what I more frequently found was that these were creative personality assets misdirected or underused.  When understood, channeled, supported and utilized by the bearer, chronic anxiety is a Creative Personality’s powerful drive to create. Mood swings are passion to work and understand the world around us. These are the tools nature gives us to work, understand, pursue, and grow. They are our passion and creative drive. When we don’t use them, doubt ourselves, let fear and mistrust of ourselves and others get in our way, we become frustrated, thwarted and unwell. 

In many ways for myself and others, the pandemic acted as an existential reset for Creative People. It forced us to stop doing things that were distracting, less healthy or investments of our time and energy that didn’t serve us as well. It forced us to look at our lives and what mattered and reevaluate what was important to us, and how we interacted with our world, and what we wanted to say about it with our work. 

Here are some realizations and changes that I made last year:  I realized the way I was extending myself outwards energetically was unhealthy. I was sending out too much energy and leaving myself with too little to resulting in emotional and physical backlash. I made some important pivots in the way that I treated myself and ran my business to show up for myself and my clients in a more holistic and healthy way. I also decided it was time to face fears of scarcity and about my lifestyle and that it no longer served, and our family relocated and moved into the home of our dreams. And-I decided to fulfill a childhood dream to learn to ride horses.

There is so much more I could say about all of this but what I want to leave with you is Creatives are meaning makers. You have the internal strengths built in to do this work. Because of this not only is it important that you do the work, but it is also important that you simultaneously actualize what is meaningful to you in your own life. This will mean deep honesty within yourself, facing fears and working hard. Above all this will mean intense trust in those inner resources. The work is intense and difficult. The rewards are epic and without compare. You are a dreamer, Creative, but also made of the stuff you need to live those dreams.

Do you believe you can have the life of your dreams? I would love to help get you there. 

(c) 2021 Creatively, LLC

Summer 2019 re-post- inspired by what has been in the rooms this week- please enjoy!: 


Hello, Creatives! The Summer has truly swept me away in the best possible way- the warm air, butterflies and lightening bugs, soft breezes, sounds of cicadas and frogs, and bright sun green through the filter of leafy trees have taken every moment I can spare- but it does feel good to take a moment to sit and write to you again.  I am both excited about today’s topic and inspired by the sensory experiences of Summer- today we will discuss sensory sensitivity in Creative People (say that five times fast!)


Like many of the gifts that our creative personalities give us, this, too, is a gift with two faces. We have explored in blog posts past (or if you have been on the Creatively couches, in the workshops, or in the groups) ad nauseam about the Creative Person’s expanded emotional capacity.  The new information: with expanded emotional capacity comes an expanded sensory capacity.  These two things together are what allow you to tap into and translate your experiences into your art form.  Usually your senses are especially sensitive in the same lane as your preferred artistic expression: dancers are kinetically and tactile-ly more sensitive, musicians auditorily more sensitive, photographers, graphic designers, illustrators, painters are visually more sensitive, chefs and culinary artists may be more sensitive to tastes and smells and so on.  While specifically more sensitive in a specific area, you are in fact more sensitive in all 5 senses overall as a creative person, generally speaking.  This is logical because this is where our emotional experiences also occur- in the body.  We experience and sense the world around us very strongly therefore our real-time input channels are powerful.


This means a couple of things for you, Creative.  It means that you need to feed these channels in order to stay well.  It means you need to be refueling your sensory channels often because your fuel tanks for these are necessarily bigger because your input levels are stronger, so your responsibility to keep those tanks full requires more regular work and attention (read: regular mindfulness practices and regular creative practices!!) It also means that when you are sensorily deprived, you will not feel well and you will notice.  You will feel depressed, disconnected, low energy, like you aren’t experiencing life, poor self esteem, blocked from your creativity, and generally not like yourself (read: regular mindfulness practices and regular creative practices!!) The final thing it might mean is irritability. Let me explain:


Do you ever notice it is really difficult for you to get pulled away from a task, project, experience or moment? This can be pathologized as something else, and maybe in your life it was. Imagine a person without what we are calling a creative personality, someone with normal levels of creativity (after all, all people are creative) looking at a beach scene.  Imagine them connected to their experience by 2 hooks. The hooks represent how much attention is invested by absorbing the scene. Someone calls out to them for their attention, and it is fairly easy for them to disconnect from their experience.  The same situation repeats for a creative person, except imagine this person is connected to their experience by 12 hooks. This is much more difficult for them to disconnect from. It requires more effort and strain and can generate irritability which might even be misdirected at the person calling to them. 


Let’s imagine this same situation again, except now instead of hooks the creative person is holding a bucket, which is already full of water. The person without a creative personality is in the same situation with a bucket half full of water.  The bucket of water represents how saturated the person is sensorily in their experience of the scene. Now imagine a lifeguard drives by on a loud ATV right in front of the scene. This adds 4 cups of water to each bucket. Non-creative personality’s bucket can withstand the volume. Creative person’s bucket overflows, again creating irritability. When you are more sensorily connected to your experiences as a creative person, added sensory information can more easily overwhelm and irritate you than a less creative person.
So I said we would bring this back to mindfulness.  After all, isn’t that what we are saying by default, that a creative person should also have an increased capacity for mindfulness tools? To be present? Ultimately, mindfulness is the perfect natural tool to harness this gift of increased sensory sensitivity to our experiences, whether they are outside of us in the world, or inside of us in our feelings and reactions to the world. Mindfulness helps us with the element of choice when processing and receiving this information.


Intrigued in learning more and jumpstarting your own creativity and mindfulness program? I am here to help you learn how.


(c) 2019 Creatively, LLC

It is in your soul as a creative person to make meaning in your life. You could go along with the normative milieu, status quo, and live a low maintenance life- but I’m going to bet that this is not you. Most creative people feel a deep drive to life authentically, meaningfully and purposefully. It is when they are living in this way they are truly happy and feel they are truly living. If you know this about yourself, Creative, this naturally begs the question, how will you make your meaning? What will be your purpose? What does your soul need this to be? Like the North Star of your creative soul, you need a purpose to be your creative direction, to guide the decisions you make in your life. One way to do this is to take the time to author your own creative life purpose statement.


A creativity coach whose philosophy I greatly admire, Eric Maisel, in his book “Coaching the Artist Within,” (a read I also highly recommend), describes a process for generating a life purpose statement, which he states generally has six main elements:


“- making use of your innate talents and abilities, your heart, mind and hands

• using your whole being every day, rather than intermittently or sporadically
• Serving truth telling and other important values
• Getting genuine satisfaction out of life
• Working hard on meaningful projects
• Entering into loving relationships”

In his book, Eric Maisel goes on to recommend creating a statement that incorporates these components into a single statement that will guide the decision making processes of your life. This is not easy and will take a lot of brain power to accomplish. You will need to write down your statement and likely revisit it often over a period of time to finalize it. When I wrote mine, I looked at it again a month after I had written my original statement, only to realize, the second component of what I thought was how I wanted to pilot the purpose in my life, was what I had defaulted to but not what to me was truly meaningful. This is in fact the reason you want to do this work.


Your statement may not include all six of these components but focus more deeply on a select few. Take the time to closely check in with your emotional needs and desires for your life as you think about your life purpose. What has brought you happiness? What has drained you of energy vs built you up? Are you feeling resistance towards any aspects of your desired life purpose (e.g. I “should” or “shouldn’t” include certain things?) This is all part of your process.


When you have finished your statement, you need to take the time to memorize it. To put it in a place of full recall, that you can spout off to anyone who asks you, at any time, anywhere. You want to be able to bring it to the front of your mind on demand when making any decision, big or small. After all, this is going to serve as your guiding light, keeping your life on course, pointed in the direction of your choosing. So go ahead, Creative, as I so often joke in the Creatively offices- stitch yours on a pillow.


With love and wishing you clarity in finding your North Star,


Cindy

Hi, Creatives!


This month’s blog post is about a concept introduced to me by Eric Maisel (and if you haven’t read anything by him, I highly recommend!) A concept that I am getting to know and experience more- and the more I do the more I grow clinically, personally and creatively- and so want to take the opportunity to introduce it to you: it is the concept of dualities.


Dualities exist all around us in life. Opposite end-of-the-spectrum forces that naturally oppose each other and create tension. Philosophers are no strangers to discussing them- Heraclitus’ theory was based on constant change between opposing forces as the source of all movement and natural existence. He said, ““All things are in flux; the flux is subject to a unifying measure or rational principle. This principle (logos, the hidden harmony behind all change) bound opposites together in a unified tension, which is like that of a lyre, where a stable harmonious sound emerges from the tension of the opposing forces that arise from the bow bound together by the string.” The important concept for us as creative people is recognizing the value of dualistic forces in our own lives and embracing them fully: that neither part of these pairs of power is more valuable than the other.


If you get thinking about it there is no end to the pairs of dualistic forces at work in our world, and really what we are doing is operationalizing concepts so we can talk about them (which is fine- it is what language is for!) But of course, as a creativity counselor, what I am interested in specifically are two categories of forces in your lives- creative dualistic pairs and psychological dualistic pairs. Some of the classic pairs in creativity are process vs product, technique vs idea, flow vs stuck or block etc. In psychology they can be emotional pairs like happiness and sadness, anxiety vs peace. Some even blur the categorical boundaries between psychological and creative pairs such as struggle vs success or perfection vs imperfection. Take a moment to consider what sorts of dualistic pairs have presented themselves in your creative and psychological lives.


Just like step one of the process of creating your best life at Creatively is to know your creative self, knowing what forces are at work in your mind and heart and motivate you are important. If you know you regularly struggle with perfectionism, perhaps you can take time to try to accept imperfections. If you know you struggle with sadness, perhaps there are opportunities to find small moments of happiness. This is the type of room for work recognizing these dualities can give you.


The concept of dualities is pretty simple: both parts of a dualistic pair are equally important and powerful parts of your life story. In fact- in your life you will constantly experience and oscillate between these forces. To value one over the other is to deny important experiences and parts of self and life. As Heraclitus famously said, “It is in changing we find purpose.” And so, Creatives, it is with this topic today I propose to you recognizing areas of resistance in your life- places where we can learn to live our lives more fully and authentically, the way your creative soul was meant live.


(C) 2019 Creatively, LLC

Hello, Creatives! The Summer has truly swept me away in the best possible way- the warm air, butterflies and lightening bugs, soft breezes, sounds of cicadas and frogs, and bright sun green through the filter of leafy trees have taken every moment I can spare- but it does feel good to take a moment to sit and write to you again.  I am both excited about today’s topic and inspired by the sensory experiences of Summer- today we will discuss sensory sensitivity in Creative People (say that five times fast!)

Like many of the gifts that our creative personalities give us, this, too, is a gift with two faces. We have explored in blog posts past (or if you have been on the Creatively couches, in the workshops, or in the groups) ad nauseam about the Creative Person’s expanded emotional capacity.  The new information: with expanded emotional capacity comes an expanded sensory capacity.  These two things together are what allow you to tap into and translate your experiences into your art form.  Usually your senses are especially sensitive in the same lane as your preferred artistic expression: dancers are kinetically and tactile-ly more sensitive, musicians auditorily more sensitive, photographers, graphic designers, illustrators, painters are visually more sensitive, chefs and culinary artists may be more sensitive to tastes and smells and so on.  While specifically more sensitive in a specific area, you are in fact more sensitive in all 5 senses overall as a creative person, generally speaking.  This is logical because this is where our emotional experiences also occur- in the body.  We experience and sense the world around us very strongly therefore our real-time input channels are powerful. 

This means a couple of things for you, Creative.  It means that you need to feed these channels in order to stay well.  It means you need to be refueling your sensory channels often because your fuel tanks for these are necessarily bigger because your input levels are stronger, so your responsibility to keep those tanks full requires more regular work and attention (read: regular mindfulness practices and regular creative practices!!) It also means that when you are sensorily deprived, you will not feel well and you will notice.  You will feel depressed, disconnected, low energy, like you aren’t experiencing life, poor self esteem, blocked from your creativity, and generally not like yourself (read: regular mindfulness practices and regular creative practices!!) The final thing it might mean is irritability. Let me explain:

Do you ever notice it is really difficult for you to get pulled away from a task, project, experience or moment? This can be pathologized as something else, and maybe in your life it was. Imagine a person without what we are calling a creative personality, someone with normal levels of creativity (after all, all people are creative) looking at a beach scene.  Imagine them connected to their experience by 2 hooks. The hooks represent how much attention is invested by absorbing the scene. Someone calls out to them for their attention, and it is fairly easy for them to disconnect from their experience.  The same situation repeats for a creative person, except imagine this person is connected to their experience by 12 hooks. This is much more difficult for them to disconnect from. It requires more effort and strain and can generate irritability which might even be misdirected at the person calling to them. ​

Let’s imagine this same situation again, except now instead of hooks the creative person is holding a bucket, which is already full of water. The person without a creative personality is in the same situation with a bucket half full of water.  The bucket of water represents how saturated the person is sensorily in their experience of the scene. Now imagine a lifeguard drives by on a loud ATV right in front of the scene. This adds 4 cups of water to each bucket. Non-creative personality’s bucket can withstand the volume. Creative person’s bucket overflows, again creating irritability. When you are more sensorily connected to your experiences as a creative person, added sensory information can more easily overwhelm and irritate you than a less creative person.
​
So I said we would bring this back to mindfulness.  After all, isn’t that what we are saying by default, that a creative person should also have an increased capacity for mindfulness tools? To be present? Ultimately, mindfulness is the perfect natural tool to harness this gift of increased sensory sensitivity to our experiences, whether they are outside of us in the world, or inside of us in our feelings and reactions to the world. Mindfulness helps us with the element of choice when processing and receiving this information.

Intrigued in learning more and jumpstarting your own creativity and mindfulness program? I am here to help you learn how.


(c) 2019 Creatively, LLC

Hello, Creatives.  In addition to working with Creative People one of my clinical specialties has been working with anxiety disorders- and for many reasons it is not uncommon for creative people to be anxious.  So, in this week’s Creatively Blog, I bring you a self-coined term I have identified from working with anxiety to help you understand some ways you may be compensating.
​

Let’s start with some basic information about anxiety.  Anxiety indicates a physiological aroused state where your body- to varying degrees- is perceiving and preparing for a threat.  Anxiety is an emotion that activates your limbic system- some of your more basic brain functions live here- something I talk about in session as “lizard brain.”  More or less, anxiety acts as a switch, either activated or inactivated.  The prevailing psychological model for reducing anxiety is exposure response prevention, or, gradually reducing sensitivity to physiological arousal to perceived threats. Anxiety can be summarized as how sensitive our body is to activating emergency response mechanisms when a threat is perceived- and this sensitivity is largely inherited but also can be impacted and changed by life events (eg trauma).  A frequently used set of terms in anxiety treatment are “triggers” (what makes you anxious) and “coping skills” (how you manage that anxiety).  Some of these are fairly universal and some are more individualized.  A coping skill that I see a lot, and that is frequently subconsciously used, is increasing the level of control (type A, much?) to offset the feeling of anxiety. An exacerbation of this relationship can be seen in classic OCD presentations. Anxiety is not always bad and in fact evolutionarily the emotion functions to keep us prepared and safe.  Unlike many other emotions, it is not an emotion that you can “stop” from doing- in fact trying to “stop” anxiety may worsen it.  Ultimately the best anxiety strategy is to not over-attend or feed into the cycle; allowing it to run its course, and reducing its overall severity and disruption is key. For more about anxiety, reference the “Pet your Inner Cat” blog post about self soothing and self care- a place I usually start treatment with most of the anxiety diagnosed clients that I treat. For more about anxiety and creative people, reference the “Creative People, Anxiety and Intuition” blog post.


Now that you have some basic information, let’s move on to the phenomena I started to observe.  Like many things in clinical work, I noticed it together with a patient during a breakthrough in session, which allowed me to see it again with another patient, and then another, and so on.  Before I knew it, there was a behavior or series of behaviors I was watching my anxious clients engage in as a way to cope with their anxiety, which ultimately once labeled could serve them to identify the worsening or a change in their anxiety symptoms. What I noticed I began to call the “Control Perceived Imbalance Correction” or “CPIC” (pronounce see-pick).  In my overview to anxiety I said that subconsciously many anxious people balance or offset their anxiety with control- they believe- usually erroneously- that by increasing control over something they can also increase control over a different thing. Often we feel excess anxiety about things we cannot control, and to offset this it feels good to take control of something else. For example- a person may be feeling anxiety about increased tension in their marriage- a perceived loss of control- and so to correct this imbalance they binge eat- an over use of a coping skill psychologically used to restore control or correct the imbalance.  Sometimes there is a sense of self-fulfilling prophecy or self-sabotage- someone may be feeling a loss of control of personal finances, and to correct the perceived imbalance of control go on a shopping spree.  On a psychological level they are taking control by doing what they want with money, but in a literal way of course worsening the stressor.  CPIC is one, driven by the emotion of anxiety and not by logic, and two, is usually subconscious, and this combination can be problematic.  Once I see this relationship with a client, I can help them identify the imbalance correction (eg overspending, overeating etc) and this can be used by the client to pinpoint the source of stress in the future and change course sooner.  This is one reason why in therapy I will usually ask you about your week- anything unusual? How have you been sleeping, eating, etc? I am looking for evidence of changes in your life.


CPIC is a bit more of a cerebral concept, but, I have found it very useful to my clients once applied.  It is certainly something easier to unravel individually by example and through deduction and fact rather than hypothetically and conceptually in writing- and so I invite you to come sit on my couch and learn about yourself, Creative! Come start creating your best life. 


(C) 2018 Creatively, LLC

This week’s post is again inspired by clinical themes I have been seeing this month. 
At this point I have published enough yummy articles on my blog that they gorgeously cross reference and complement each other- in this way this topic is related to many others- so when it speaks to you and emotionally connects with you, I encourage you to pull the thread and browse some of the other topics and past blog articles. 

Today we are going to talk about the psychological concept of distress tolerance.  In simple terms, this is our ability to stand still in a certain intensity of stress.  I don’t mean change it, avoid it, or do anything with it- simply tolerate it.  This underused but powerful skill allows our emotions to communicate their vital messages and naturally dissipate- freeing us to stand empowered in our lives to make better choices for our own happiness.  It takes the power from variability and the unexpected and allows us large scale emotional peace and freedom. 

(I will give you the caveat that if you are in crisis, severe stress or worse, then tolerance is not your course of action.  If you are unsure how this topic applies to your levels of stress, give me a call and let’s talk).

In several past articles, I have referenced the biological function of emotions to communicate chemical signals and messages between the brain and body. In an ideal biological and natural sense, whenever we have an emotion we would fully express it and allow our brain and body to absorb its lesson (interested in the topic of the biological functioning of various emotions? Browse those past blog posts!) What happens instead is we feel emotions with an intensity we don’t like and avoid or bottle up, we absorb sociological lessons about which emotions we are allowed to express or not (different for males and females traditionally), we lose touch with what are emotions are, what they are telling us or how to feel or express them. This diversion has the unintended consequence of weakening our distress tolerance.

What I am saying to you is our sociological adaptation to avoid emotions has weakened our ability to handle stress.  This is unfortunately not to our advantage.  Think about exercise as a parallel here.  What we are doing is avoiding exercise because we don’t like it, which has the unintended consequence of making it harder for us to take the stairs when the elevator is out. Just like we build our muscles by slowly increasing our physical activity, we can regain our ability to tolerate stress by acknowledging and feeling emotions when they happen in smaller ways, and doing nothing else with them. 

Ultimately what our emotions “want” from us is to be felt without resistance. This allows them to fulfill their function. Emotions, as the communication signals they are, naturally crest and fall.  If we don’t feed them, fight them etc, they communicate their signal in whatever intensity, then fall away.  If we simply acknowledge and feel them they naturally dissipate.  

To begin repairing and strengthening your distress tolerance try a version of this exercise: pick precipitating events of small emotional weights and allow the accompanying feelings to crest and fall while you simply experience them and survive. 

As your distress tolerance builds in strength you begin to experience stronger and stronger stressors without becoming overwhelmed or destabilized.  You are free to make choices about action or inaction and how you can better shape the variables in your life.  The end consequence we are going for here is (as always) empowerment to create a life that is happy and fulfilling. 

How strong is your distress tolerance? What are your personal patterns of emotional avoidance? Want to regain control and build towards more peace and happiness in your life?  I can help!​

(C) 2018 Creatively, LLC