Creativity = Health

You CAN feel better!

Get the free Grounding Guide, and sign up your uplifting weekly health newsletter.

In honor of the second chakra this week, I am sharing with you an article I once wrote for a feature on Art Snark’s blog many years ago. I still love it and it holds true!

How The Simple Act Of Creating Must Create Physical Health

I took the scenic route in becoming an artist. The really looooong way around. The kind of path that took me through medical school, residency, and a bit of clinical practice as a physician before I had children and realized my heartsong was to be a mommy and an artist. That kind of long way around.

For many years, I tried to merge my two lives… there must be some way (I kept banging my head against the wall) to be an artist who can still heal people medically. Right? It should make sense. I thought about becoming an art therapist. Maybe medical illustrating? I invented some new medical/art therapies including casting the human body and then painting it as a work of art mounted on a canvas. Labels… labels… Must. Label. Myself. Something. Am I a physician-turned-artist? An artist with a medical degree? A temporarily side-tracked doctor?

And finally, FINALLY, I realized what I intuitively knew all along… creating *is* healing. Cut out the middle man, no need to invent a new medical therapy… To create at all, in any form, is to create health. The very act of creating allows health to flow.

Creating is life. Being alive is to create. There just isn’t any other way around it. All you have to do is sit there and breath, and you are creating.

Because never, in the history of ever, has there been another person like you, living this moment of time, breathing this breath of air that you breathe… so everything you do is new and unique. And never, in the history of ever, will there be another being exactly like you, living this moment of time, breathing this exact breath of air… So the very act of being alive is to create something new and irreplaceable.

But, you can take it a step further and a step further every moment. Because the more you create, the more life force you draw through you. So even though just taking a breath is a creative act, creating something more out of the moment will draw more life in you and through you, and more health to you.

The healthiest thing you can do is to create and allow your life force to flow through you.

One form of creating is no better or superior at creating health then another form of creating. Being a painter or an author or a poet is no more healthy or creative then creating a new meal, decorating a room, cutting your son’s hair. All work can be creative. All work can be meaningful.

In fact, classic artists like painters and sculptures can be the worst at using creativity in their daily lives. As pointed out in the book The Path Of Least Resistance, Learning to Become the Creative Force in Your Own Life by Robert Fritz, artists typically sequester the act of creating to just their chosen art form. But creating is something we all do, we need to do, just as naturally as we need to breathe. It can not be sequestered away. It can not apply to only one area of our lives. It is life.

Most people live with a problem solving mind frame. And even though this is extremely effective at what it does (solving problems) what you are left with is the absence of a problem. This is far different then creating something that wasn’t there before.

To create is simply to make something new where there wasn’t anything before.

If you are going around problem solving your life… you will be left with a void… no problems, everything solved… but nothing created.

And what usually happens when you have an empty space to fill? Our minds are great at jumping right in with *helpful* things like nagging suspicions, nit-picky chatter, jealousy, gossip, finding something else to be dissatisfied with… even a new symptom or a re-emergence of an old disease pattern comes back once the problem is solved, because you have not actively *created* something to take it’s place.

In short, you are creating a new problem to have something else to solve.

What if, instead of solving a problem and getting rid of something, you decide instead to create. To make something new that wasn’t there before. To bring into your life, and this world, a new situation that is exactly how you want it to be.

This is not staying still, battling off problems, living in the defensive. This is taking a step in the direction you want to go. This is creating. This is art. This is filling a blank canvas with what you want to fill it with. This is healing. This is the flow of health.

Creating allows life to move with you and through you and allows health to flow.

Back to basics. You can’t *not* create. You being alive fulfills that contract. If you are alive, you agree to be creating in every moment of your life, every fiber of your being.

So what do you want to create? If you block creation by problem solving, your energy stagnates and creates dis-ease. If you create instead of problem solving, you allow the flow of life to sweep you off your feet and into the future of your dreams.

Need some inspiration? What about these tutorials from my blog:

1. Inspirational Art DIY

2. Fire Starters (by far my most pinned tutorial on Pinterest!)

3. Crayon Art

4. Photo Blocks

5. Sew Your Own Underwear this weekend 🙂

x0x0x0, Laura