I’ve been working on a bunch of exercises that are aimed at using art and creative expression to heal, remove blockages, and tap creativity. The plan is to take about 10-15 of these and create an e-kit of it. It’s been fun so far with what I’ve put together and I thought that I would show a few of these as I went along. This one that I worked on last night and finished up this morning was particularly enjoyable and eye opening so I thought I would share. The important thing to keep in mind is that you do not have to consider yourself an artist or even artistic to do art like this. You just need to be open-minded to the process and, in the case of this exercise, be willing to let go of some stuff.
This exercise is one used to let go of thoughts that have been holding you back from creating or manifesting something in your life. When I was working on it I focused most specifically on the very thing I’ve been working on, creating art and art based healing practices. But you can use anything!
So here are the steps…
1. Pick your issue. What area of your life or what situation has negative thoughts or energy around it that you have been carrying with you, especially things that you know you’ve been carrying that you should release? Find one of these situations that you really want to release the anchors from.
2. Make a list. List out all the specific thoughts, statements, ideas, and concepts that are weighing you down. This can just be single words or you can have whole scentences. This part is a journaling exercise that will set the ground work for your art exercise, so go wild and write however you feel you need to. The point here is to get onto paper all the specific things that you want to let go of and release. It can be things like “I’m not good enough”, “I’m not smart enough”, “I’m not creative enough”, and so on.
3. Draw it out and let it go. This is where you’re going to start getting artistic and truly expressive. There are no hard and fast rules for how to do this, except one. Whatever you do, however you choose to express the things you have on your list, you need to represent a method of release. Need some ideas?
- Write your words or statements on art paper and then “destroy” them with paint.
- Create a folding collage; take a large piece of art paper and fold the two outsides toward the center so you can open it like window curtains. On the outside flaps draw or paste words and images representing what you are releasing and put something inside that represents life with these these released.
- Draw or paint and ocean scene with little bottles being sent out to sea, each carrying a word from your list you journaled.
When you’re done at that point you can store it in an art journal {that’s what I did}, you can frame it, hang it, or even burn it to truly represent the letting go process.
This is what I worked through…
I have been feeling horribly down and very stuck lately. I’m dealing with being in that in-between place once again where I know that in a handful of months I’m going to have to make another huge move and I feel like my life is in another holding pattern.
I’m also just, generally, not real happy with where I am right now and I find myself spending a lot of time watching webcams online of places in San Diego that I either used to live or used to hang out. It has had me doing a lot of thinking about the “grass is always greener” concept.
The truth is…it’s never greener. There are dirt patches in the grass no matter where you go. The trick is learning how to plant a flower in that dirt.
That’s where I’m at now.
But I’ve also been extremely stuck creatively because I’ve been in this massive dreaming and planning stage which has left me with loads of awesome and amazing ideas. Lots of wonderful, helpful, healing work that I can do, beautiful things to create, but little energy to actually do it.
That’s when I realized what it really is the big, dreaded fear.
The fear of failure.
The fear of rejection.
The fear of being seen as unoriginal {which is a huge thing that I’ve been working on and I’ve got a ton to say about that at this point}.
So as I started to work on this exercise I took out some paper to do the journaling part I froze. I stared at the blank piece of paper and could feel the fear of putting onto paper the things that were in my head. When you put it on paper that makes it “real”. And when you make it real, you have to deal with it.
After a little time or just staring and hearing the little voice in my head tell me all the things that needed to go on that paper, I started to write it down. I picked a few of the big ones and got ready to start with the creative part.
Right away the image of letting go of balloons came to mind. Let them go, filled with the problem, and as they are lifted to the sky ask the angels and the Gods to take them away, transform them, and send that energy somewhere else.
And this is what came out of that:
This morning I decided it wasn’t really done. I needed to do something else. Since I used watercolor pencil to color it all in I used a brush and water on the whole thing.
Happy accident: The pigment brush I used for the words in the balloons ran. But since the balloons seemed “off” to me, after they were dry, I went back over them with more pencil.
So it was like releasing, destroying, and destroying some more…it worked well in the end.
The point of the exercise is to let go of the things that are causing your creative garden to be overrun by weeds and garbage so you can make room to plant something better.
