So, you describe yourself as a creative person. But you work a 9 to 5 at an accounting firm, or as an engineer, or maybe a store clerk or a math teacher. What do you do with all your creative energy? I mean you are a rock star in the shower or driving alone down the highway. You could rewrite half of what you see on TV with way better endings! You are a genius creating graphics out of your old photos and such that no one will ever see. Your doodles belong in a museum! You can clear the dance floor any time, no alcohol needed! Do any of these things sound like you? What is all that really about?
You are creative!
Creativity has several different forms. The innovation of ideas, technology, businesses, etc. Creating new life. Creating a home environment. Inventions. Art. Creating a new mindset to overcome old ways and to heal. Creativity is even involved in coming up with new creative, and of course, safe ways to occupy one’s toddler! All deserve acknowledgment as part of potential human progress. Here, I will stick primarily to creating art and creating a healing mindset as these are the areas of my own expertise and experiences.
Creative works of any kind can indeed lift the human spirit and offer hope and solutions to whatever we collectively or individually face in life. But the ability to take life’s pain and grief and darkness and channel those emotions through a funnel of art is a special kind of ability and brings a healing that nothing else I have experienced can match.
When I was a young woman in my 20s, and beyond. I was so used to having a daily way to manage my stress and my emotions as I was a professional dancer who used this as part of my job. But I took it for granted since the practice was so familiar and I had grown up with that incredible benefit. I felt it saved my life emotionally from a very difficult childhood. However, one day I had just lost a beloved kitty who had been struggling with an illness that I tried so hard to save her from. She did not ultimately overcome it. I was devastated.
I grieved and sobbed uncontrollably for a few days. Suddenly without knowing why it came to mind to do so, I started to sing. A sad song, not a happy one. It was a vulnerable song about loss. My pain was so deep at that moment I felt it was too much and I would be unable to continue. I had a split-second choice to either cave into the tears, stop singing and continue sobbing my eyes out, or dig deeper, breathe into the pain and give the full impact of the pain into the vocalization. I instantly chose the latter.
It hurt for a moment to do it and then a powerful sound came out and I felt like I actually had a voice. Mind you, I am not a singer unless you count my audience of pets and the doors and windows all shut tight so no one can hear me! At that moment I felt the emotional pain, all the grief, leave my body with the power of the sound. Not as if in a sudden smiley happy face “I’m over it” kind of feeling that is more about denial. But as in a deeply profound sense of relief that allowed me to breath and relax. This began a more tolerable grieving process that I have learned to return to whenever I have lost someone.
A mentor of mind many years ago told me that creativity comes from “surplus emotional force” as he put it. Life’s pain and struggle, illness, abuse, etc. builds up within and creates a whirlwind of emotional reaction to the trauma. That energy needs to go somewhere. Channeling it into creating a business or into sports or into making money can all help use that energy. But it doesn’t HEAL it. Art is like a healing turbo charged method of going directly into the emotion and transforming it! This is why the human race needs art. This is why the individual needs to understand and use his/her creativity.
I feel, at least for me, that creative art, especially performing arts even if only as a hobby behind closed doors has a far greater impact than any other type of healing modalities. It is the gift of art, a channel to push those painful emotions through that may otherwise get stuck, turn into physical pain or even addiction in some cases.
Not being a real singer, but being a dancer since the age of 5, I decided to test all this out with a group of friends and students. I formed a class to teach them how to use their creativity in movement. I taught them to do exactly what I had done that day but with movement instead of singing. They took something that was making them feel stuck in their lives and we spent each session working through it with movement and music. By the time the class was completed we not only had a room full of beautiful moving choreographic pieces of performing art but each and every person reported back to me in the days and weeks following, that they had significant relief and breakthroughs. I was even told by two ladies that their therapists wanted to send me their patients!
This class was made up of 20 to 40 something adults from different career paths, engineers, a computer programmer, a couple of dance students and a couple of secretaries, a carpenter, etc. Both men and women. No professional dancers, choreographers or artists. Just folks dealing with life’s painful idiosyncrasies. If I had told anyone they were going to learn how to choreograph they would not have signed up for the class. It was just a fun experiment for anyone who liked music.
And choreograph they did! I LOVE the performing arts. It heals like nothing else for the most difficult parts of life. Emotions are not the enemy, but instead the tools! There is no judgement in art. It is expression and a channeling of one’s raw emotions into a higher purpose. It is healing. It is a gift. Professionally it is one of the higher callings in life when the purpose is to serve others as well as self. That is what I know of it and how I always experienced it on stage myself.
It is also a communication with this universe and in that way a spiritual undertaking. I am grateful for my life in dance and my ability to use my creative self, one way or another. I hope that any of you reading this will consider trying any of the arts to help heal whatever troublesome emotions and life circumstances you may have. You don’t have to be a pro! If you have emotions, you can do this. It is a learned skill!
Happy dancing, singing, drawing, whatever…..!