Bringing a creative spark into reality and flowing with your inspiration is so much easier when your inner creative space is healthy. Yet, so many of us carry around old hurts or fears as silent wounds that limit us from taking risks or dreaming big.
Just like clutter collects in a physical space, it’s easy to let things like embarrassment, frustration or disappointment collect in the nooks and crannies of your thoughts. When your mind and heart are plugged up by ghosts or big expectations, your creative desire gets bogged down by old ways of thinking and feels heavy instead of freeing. This is what makes it so challenging to see the potential you carry within yourself at every moment.
In order to take these emotional experiences and turn them into creative fuel, it helps to regularly sort through and release inner clutter like past hurts, fears and self-limitations. This self-supporting practice can help ensure the state of your internal creative space is evolving instead of limiting your vision of what’s possible.
The first step is making your inner creative space a priority. To help you get a head start, The Creativity Kick-Start theme for this week is… Getting your Internal Creative House in Order.
Give Creative Hurts a Facelift
Emotional residue builds up over time and plugs up the view of your personal creative potential. These emotions need to be acknowledged and offered a healthy outlet for release, instead of feeding off of and draining your creative energy.
Time to turn those feelings into creative potential by giving them a facelift. Instead of feeling the sharp pang of an emotion over and over as if it’s happening to you right now, or doing everything you can to avoid feeling it ever again, be willing to own it. Call it out for what it is – a fear, disappointment, a personal hurt. There’s no specific answer or right words – just call out what it is to you and show it a little acknowledgement and light.
When you can be honest with yourself about what you are holding or hiding, you take the first step towards cleaning up your inner creative space and make room for something new to grow.
If you aren’t exactly sure what your creative hurts might be, why not take an hour alone and ask yourself? Make a short list of what pushes your buttons or gets you frustrated when it comes to your creative flow or expressing yourself. Toss in any feelings cluttering your inner creative space or emotions that other people trigger in you when you are in a collaborative environment.
This simple act of observation is an exercise that puts you in the driver’s seat, empowering you with choice instead of burying you in thoughts and feelings that have no clear identity. It also gives you a chance to take the emotion out of it all so you can see things more clearly and be willing let them go.
The True Potential of Transforming Creative Hurts
The creative hurts you’ve buried or hidden away are actually the true raw potential waiting in the wings of your inner creative space. When you are willing to move through the emotions attached to an idea or thought and really feel them, you free yourself of three important things:
- Self expectations
- Limitations of others
- False stories the mind created in the past for self-protection
Without these monsters crouched in your inner creative space, scaring you into limiting yourself in ways that no longer make sense, you are free to just be, create or grow in a healthy way. It also allows you to share what you’ve learned by turning the experience into a spark that fuels what you create moving forward.
Toss out the old-style viewfinder that only allows you see one single image per click in a small square frame. Break free to see a full 360 degree view all the time by giving creative hurts a facelift, freeing up space to shape a healthy inner creative space that supports who you are right now.
Want to expand into a bigger sense of self and let go of old creative hurts? Sign up for my Mini Guide for Connecting with your Inner Guidance and Creative Fire. Also check out a few of my previous posts for additional support around clearing your inner creative space: An Inspiring Creative Space is a Cornerstone of a Creative Budget and Honoring your Creative Timeline.
Photo Credit: See-ming Lee, Joel Cooper, mindfulness