The space between the world of form and the world of the unseen has always fascinated me. When I was a child, I would spend hours in tall pine trees swaying in the wind. Hugging the trees, I could feel them talking to me. This communication beyond my ordinary senses nourished me in a way that other childhood pleasures could not. I felt at home in the indescribable.
The sense of oneness I experienced with the trees allowed me to relax into myself. Cradled among the branches, I felt no sense of comparison, expectation, or judgment. There was a feeling of being wholly loved and accepted. In that space, I was able to experience the truest me.
I have the pleasure of speaking with artists about their artistic process and creativity-based businesses in my work. Often, magic happens in the creation process that doesn’t exist among the marketing tasks. When we utilize the right brain, the half of our brain we use for creativity, there is openness, oneness, and harmony. It is my experience that through activities that allow us to access the right brain, we experience surrender and settle into the present moment. From this space, we can experience the true self. We always have access to this true self, but getting there in the day-to-day moments can be difficult. Surrendering the constant flow of thoughts is a pivotal piece to the experience of the inner self.
Creative activities are a doorway to that type of experience. Within 20 minutes of doing activities with our hands, our nervous systems can switch from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic response. In other words, we go from stress or distress to a more relaxed state. Perhaps this is a similar experience to knitting or darning socks in front of the evening fire, as our ancestors may have done. Our awareness shifts into this more relaxed state during such endeavors, and we can include more and different information. We can shift from worry to wonder.
In the space of wonder, our sense of play appears. We laugh more readily and come back into our bodies. We become more deeply connected to our senses and sensual experiences. We feel more alive. We also have more space to be with our grief and sorrow and can process our disappointments and challenges. That release and reflection can help us to forge a meaningful way forward.
In his Ted Talk “Give Yourself Permission to Be Creative,” Ethan Hawke talks about art as necessity. He mentions that often people go about their everyday lives not thinking about poetry or art, and then something terrible happens. Or, conversely, something unbelievably beautiful happens. People search for meaning in those times. We reach for others to reflect back to us on how they grappled with something similar. He says, “Did anybody feel like this before? What is happening to me? And that’s when art’s not a luxury; it’s actually sustenance. We need it.” According to Ethan, “Human creativity is nature manifest in us.” We all have creativity within us. Perhaps you were told that you were not good at making art, playing an instrument, writing poetry, or singing at an early age. However, these pursuits could be a doorway to joy and deep knowing. One of the statements Ethan made in his talk stays with me, and I’ve thought about it several times since watching it. “What do you love? And if you get close to what you love, who you are is revealed to you, and it expands.”
What if today, you gave yourself permission to do something you love? What if today, for 20 minutes, you gave yourself permission to play?
