My Creative Journey

The Magic of Play

"We are quicksilver, a fleeting shadow, a distant sound...our home has no boundaries beyond which we cannot pass. we live in music, in a flash of color...we live on the wind and in the sparkle of a star!" -Endora, Bewitched

As a child I was drawn to imaginative play: dance, drawing, painting, storytelling. Those activities kept me sane in a world that often felt overwhelmingly chaotic and harsh. Color, form, music, movement all brought order and soothed my world.

When I entered college, I declared Advertising as my major as I believed it was a way to use my creativity while also being practical and “earn a living.” The sixty’s sitcom Bewitched held a special place in my heart. Samantha’s magic felt so comforting and natural to me, despite the limited, confining world I was taught to navigate. She represented so many possibilities to my inner world. Her husband’s advertising career also held an allure that brought me to the school of Communications and focus on the courses that seemed like “practical creativity”: Advertising.

Never underestimate the power of 1960s situation-comedies!

Words Matter

I still remember sitting in the auditorium filled with hundreds of students, taking notes on a lecture on advertising. The professor was handsome, charismatic and a veteran of Madison Avenue. An original Mad Men, like Don Draper, perhaps. I was captivated by his every word.

“Unless you are a creative maverick in advertising, you will NEVER make it in this industry,” he announced emphatically from the lectern.

The words hit me like an executioner’s bullet.

“I’m no creative maverick,” I thought. “I’ll never make it.” I could already feel the failure in my bones.

A few words, even spoken unknowingly, can change the course of a lifetime.

The time of death of my advertising career was called before it even started, and I was charged with finding a new path. Looking back now, I realize my creativity was too precious an entity to place in the arena of corporate games and politics. At that point, it was best kept in a safe place.

Life Takes You on Your Path

Faced with changing my major, I totaled the electives already completed by my junior year and realized the courses in the social sciences added up to a few hours shy of a degree in Psychology. Done!

My BA in Psychology held little practical use for employment without graduate work, but I needed a break from school. I landed, interestingly, in the landscape I rejected with advertising and spent the next fifteen years in the corporate world.

The financial industry afforded little opportunity for creativity and self-expression. Zipped up in business suits, panty hose and heels, I sat rigidly in a cubicle and typed away at spreadsheets and reports. Attended endless meetings, worried pathologically about deadlines and quantitative standards. The more hours I spent fitting into the constrictive, linear, production-focused world of corporate America, the more my soul longed for the creative expression that nurtured me through childhood. My career yielded a very good income and funded the “toys” and past times that our culture tells us will give us joy. For me, only fleeting moments of happiness. were the results.

I sought out all the creative outlets I could find to keep myself afloat in a career that drained my body and my psyche. I painted. I crafted. I began to write. I trained as a yoga instructor. I moved beside the ocean and drank in the beauty of the vibrant Pacific Ocean.

My body would not allow me to return the dance instructions of my early years, so I found the gentleness and grace of yoga offered healing movement and ways to release and expand the tightness in my body that the business-world placed there.

Life Continues to Flow

When my son was born, I left my office job and immersed myself in motherhood. Creative endeavors continued to be an integral part of managing life and I slowly began to embrace the power of play. It took me several years to shed the heaviness of my achievement-orientation and learn to embrace imagination and expressive play as valuable and healing.

I stumbled across a therapy called HANDLE, as a support for my young child, and soon I was training to be a Practitioner. The neurodevelopmental approach beautifully melded my studies in Psychology with my experience in dance and yoga. I trained under the founder, Judith Bluestone, who became my mentor and taught me so much about “living a life outside of the box”.Judith taught me to step outside of expectations or fast assumptions. The willingness to entertain possibilities beyond what our logical mind instructed proved to be a valuable lesson for me and my clients.

Change and Growth Continue

My HANDLE work is now expanding to include expressive arts and journaling. I’m currently training in Family Constellation work and plan to incorporate expressive arts to facilitate the process.

In the past twenty years creative outlets have been a major focus of my life. As a student of meditation, journaling, expressive arts, fine art, The Artist Way and many somatic therapies, I’ve been supported and guided through life’s ups and downs.

I’ve found myself stepping up (sometimes crawling) to the canvas time and time again as a refuge from moments of overwhelm or confusion. Grabbing the paintbrush and swirling colors across the fabric of the canvas never fails to transport me to the present moment. To drink in the quiet and beauty of expression and art. The overwhelm quiets. My breathing steadies. My hand revels in the swirling dance with the brush and paints. Often clarity will arrive. Sometimes joy. An insight may arrive during the process.

But time spent with the canvas always offers a respite.

Let’s Go!

“Our universe is still unfolding and human beings are active and creative participants. Creativity is both the universe’s ordering principle and its process, part of the greater creativity of nature.” -Russell Ackoff

We are living in chaotic and stressful times. Individual, local, national, and global challenges are pushing us to search for creative solutions to systemic issues. All the more reason for us to collectively and individually stay centered and expand our thinking and problem-solving skills in creative ways. These are transformational times and my desire is to facilitate creativity in whatever way I can. Step up to the canvas with me!