CREATIVITY Coaching/Mentoring
What’s your life experience been re: art-making and art class as a kid, or your beliefs about “artists” (famous ones and/or ones you know personally), and your own sense of innate creativity? I’d love to hear about it.
How’s your relationship with Creativity these days?
Is it a readily-accessible source of pleasure, processing, learning, satisfaction, fun, challenge, aliveness, healing, growth, insight, freedom?
If not, I’d love to support your cultivation of the conditions in which such a relationship can grow!
I’m only equipped to work with people who are relatively mentally/emotionally stable, and can actively participate in their own gradual growth, healing, and learning process. I cannot hold space for folks in extreme mental states or acute psychological distress. I’m a teaching artist and creativity mentor/guide, and while I do bring a trauma-informed, therapeutic, spiritual, and social change orientation to the topic of my own and other people’s creativity (based in over 20 years of my own inner work) — I’m not currently a clinician or therapist.
My sensibilities around understanding, recovering, and developing creativity are rooted in The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, by Julia Cameron — especially its 10 Basic Principles, and its 12 areas of recovery.
Other books that have enriched my relationship with and perspective on creativity (at least three aren’t explicitly about that, but I find the interconnections very relevant to my thinking on the subject):
Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Writing Down The Bones, by Natalie Goldberg
The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, by Charles Eisenstein
Drawing Out Your Soul, by Deborah Koff Chapin
Writing As A Way of Healing, by Louise DeSalvo
Syllabus and What It Is and Making Comics, by Lynda Barry
Standing At Water’s Edge, by Anne Paris
Steal Like An Artist and Show Your Work! and Keep Going, by Austin Kleon
In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, by Dr. Gabor Mate