What happens when you permit yourself to create?

Creating something simply for the joy it may bring you, without considering its use or purpose for productivity or gain. Not treating it like a performance tool, but merely a tool of being and enjoyment.  

Your creativity can hold the key to your restoration, creating balance and promoting self-care. It can be a way to reclaim your inner voice, process your emotions more healthily and return to your true self. 

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes… including you.” – Anne Lamott

 

Why Creativity Matters for Well-being

We often consider the word creativity to equate to being artistic; however, it's more about engagement with your inner world in a way that can be liberating and freeing for the mind, body and soul.

When we write, sing, play music or even play, paint, dance, or build something new, we:

• Start to breathe more deeply
• Notice tensions loosening within the body
• Notice perspectives shifting
• Feel happier
• Regain knowledge of who we once were under the daily grind
• Find you again.

Creativity can help bridge the gap between the chaos in your life and clarity.

What Happens When You Permit Yourself to Create?

 Here are five results of using creativity to help you reclaim your voice and restore your energy:

1️⃣ It Bypasses the Inner Critic

• Your rational mind may overanalyse, but creativity comes from a deeper space.
• It allows you to express what you feel, without needing it to make sense.
• 💎 Ask yourself: “What colour or shape would my current feeling take if I had to draw it?”

2️⃣ It Creates Emotional Release Without Words

• Feelings like frustration, grief, and longing cannot be explained in sentences at times.
• Art and releasing your inner child through play or dance can provide an outlet for expression when words fail.
• 💎 Creativity doesn’t need a point—it just needs a place.

3️⃣ It Rebuilds Self-Trust and Intuition

•  When you make something from within, you are reconnecting and trusting in your inner voice.
• 💎 “When I feel most like myself, what am I doing with my hands, heart or words?”

4️⃣ It Helps You Access Joy and Presence

• In creative flow, time slows down, and worry starts loosening its hold on you.
• You return to the present moment, where healing happens.

What counts as being creative? It can be anything, writing poetry without a structure, choosing to doodle between meetings, putting pen to paper, drawing a picture, singing on a walk or even rearranging a room or shelf within the house. 

“Art is the highest form of hope.” – Gerhard Richter

5️⃣ It Reminds You That You Are More Than Your Productivity

•  Creativity will remind you that you are allowed to exist just to be you.
• The time to explore, feel, and wonder is for you to decide upon.

 When you next feel disconnected from the joy in life, or have lost that sparkle in your eye, or spend hours lost in thought, take a step back and ask if your creative self is asking to be heard.

• What does it need from you that it currently does not get? 
•  What are you craving that feels more “you”?
• What have you not done in years but remember loving? Was it drawing, writing or crafting?
• What do you want to say, but are not sure how to write? 

Give yourself 10 minutes to an hour this week to create without fear of judgment. Permit yourself to be playful. Create from a place of joy and not from outcome. 

 Let us know what or even who you find.