Daily Creative Practice to Heal Depression

Deepening Your Life with Creativity

 

A daily committed creative practice will help your life become more meaningful. There are many courses available on this site to help you to move your energy into a deeper more fulfilling place.

 

If you enjoy drawing try the 30 Day Expressive Drawing Challenges.

 

If you enjoy collage try making a 10 minute collage for 30 Days with Deepening Creativity.

 

Or if you want to create a more in depth collage journal try Expressive Art Journaling.

 

If you want to intensify the efficacy of your coaching appointments and increase your personal growth and learning pick any of the above to focus on.

 

Everything I offer you as a therapist, coach, and expressive art facilitator is something I have personally lived and embodied and moved through in my own life. I share my insights from this playful and profound "getting creatively alive process" with you through the wellness services available on this site.

 

My Creative Practice

My approach to creativity as means of discovering the deeper self is visionary and practical, disciplined and easily accomplished in the midst of earning a living and attending to the practical details of life. In my own personal creative practice I use spontaneous, expressive art to see what my unconscious levels of mind need to express and to see the truth of my life and it only takes a small amount of dedicated time in my working day.

 

There is always the "next edge" of creative growth and aliveness that we can sense into. If we are listening daily to our "growth edge", we can often prevent outer drama and turmoil. When we listen to and act upon what is arising within, we can heal and integrate our inner pain messages before they turn into illness, dis-ease, and emotional suffering.

 

In my own process of healing grief and loss and the resulting depression and lack of strength and direction in my own personal life, I have created hundreds of collages, drawings and expressive art and written journals over the years starting over 15 years ago. My own struggle to find my inner strength as a woman has informed my creative path towards healing and integration.

 

Since then I have dedicated myself to long-term healing expressive art practices. For example I remember writing a poem a day for a year and what an amazing experience to deepen over that year. I have dedicated myself to a spontaneous practice collage for years and daily written journals over the long-term. I have explored many other expressive art practices in depth such as madalas, spontaneous dancing, intuitive drawing and painting in many different mediums. My current favorite personal expressive art practice is inner focusing combined with intuitive drawing.

 

If you are drawn to the visual world, spontaneous art is a profound self-growth tool. Personally speaking, my spontaneous collages, drawings and writings have guided my life in ways that I could not have accessed from my everyday thinking mind and have accelerated my growth in a powerful, creative and joyful way.

 

Counteracting Inertia

 

If you are feeling depressed, stuck, blocked, bottled up or bored with the same daily routines in your life - commitment to a daily creative and spiritual practice with get your passion, creativity, insight and ideals for your life flowing again. Living your best life takes a daily intention and effort. Are you committed to believing in your percieved limitiations or are you committed to living your largest, most meaningful and contributive life?

 

A steady creative practice gradually builds the habit of risk-taking into your being. Rather than passively thinking of the same habitual limitations over and over, you can make room for increasingly honest, daily self-expression. A dedicated creative practice serves the purpose of stepping slightly out of your comfort zone so that you can make progressive, gentle changes into feeling and expressing more of yourself.

 

Your  daily commitment enlarges self-trust. When you keep your commitment to expand your truthful self-expression a little bit more every day it moves your energy forward. Through each time period of creative practice you digest the truth of your life a little bit more and gradually develop a stronger, more honestly expressive sense of self.

 

Author Barnwell, author of The Pilgrim's Companion writes about the importance of a daily practice:

 

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step," says a well known Chinese proverb. Nowhere is that statement more pertinent than in our urge to transform our consciousness. Despite grand schemes and noble ideas, transformation boils down to how we use the sixty-five thousand seconds that make up the average working day.

 

We know how difficult it is to break a habit that commits us to a negative pattern of behavior once it is acquired. What may not be so obvious is the ease with which how good habits also gain momentum and perpetuate themselves. The same habit forming consciousness that commits us to destructive behavior routines also allows us to cultivate constructive behaviors.

 

To keep the transformational process on track we must commit ourselves to daily practices. Such practices are very much like inputs of energy into a piece of machinery in order to sustain motion.  To keep a bicycle going uphill, for instance, we have to pedal it, or to keep a car running, gasoline must be fed into its engine.

 

This is necessary in order to counteract a natural tendency of the machine to slow down and stop. With us humans, things are very much the same. We have to continuously counteract tendencies towards inertia, narrow self-interest and ignorance.