Have you lost your creativity because of worry and stress?
Would you like some ideas to get you restarted?
When our kids are struggling, creativity can go by the wayside.
Finding your creativity is healing and helps you feel happier.
That is why I’m thrilled to welcome my friend and creative inspiration, Shelley Richanbach. Shelley shares how she found her way back to feeling comfortable expressing her creativity.
You work with women in the creative arts. Can you share your journey and the benefits of exploring your creative side?
As a kid, I loved it, and I think all kids love to dance, draw and even write. I enjoyed these things growing up. I graduated from high school, married, and had three children. All of those creative activities just went by the wayside.
My most creative project when raising the kids was to make the occasional soccer banner.
I wasn’t a craft kind of person, and I always thought that if I were going to draw or paint something, it would have to be perfect.
I never got past imagining getting out my pastels or paints because I would stop myself and say, “I don’t have time.” The kids need something. My husband needs something. The school needs something. Something always took my time away, and I would get in this mode of saying, “if it’s not going to be perfect, then I’m not going to do it. I would start gathering resentment. That didn’t serve me at all.
I noticed two women in my exercise class using The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I had never heard of it. They were both talking about how great it was, and they were both trying to write. They talked about how great this book was about getting them to their creativity. I thought, okay, I’ve got to see what this book is.
I bought the Artist’s Way for myself as a Christmas present in 1998 and then put it on the shelf for two more years. I just couldn’t let myself have this gift of what I imagined was in this book.
The journey was opening the book and doing the first thing she suggested journal writing. As soon as I allowed myself to do three pages a day of stream of consciousness, no capital letters, no periods, and no worrying about spelling, I was amazed at how fast I started finding my way.
I realized that I had this inner critic. I used the tools she gave me to identify the inner critic and learn new affirmations about changing negative thoughts to positive ones. I came into contact with my values. I had value collisions with the relationships I had in my life.
I realized I had some poisonous relationships that I hadn’t addressed, and I would let those relationships be in charge of me instead of being in control.
So all this writing every morning, just three pages, was helping me gather information about myself and helped me start seeing these value collisions, including medicating myself because I was in this victim, martyr, or any number of negative modes that came to light.
It was like I was flashing a flashlight on what I was doing.
With the book’s help, I began to see how to change these things. I credit The Artist’s Way for helping me find my recovery and helping me find my way to training in movement-based expressive arts education.
Once I allowed myself to give myself this gift, this synchronicity started happening, which sounds magical, but honestly, it is just permitting myself to live the life I wanted.
What suggestions do you have to help women be more in touch with who they are as a person?
When I suggest journal writing to women, often there is a lot of resistance to it. If you can break through the resistance and make sure it’s your own private thing.
Even if you can try hard at least once a week, to walk in nature without listening to anything, just smelling the air, seeing what you see, notice what you notice, really open your senses to the leaves blowing in the trees, to feel the breeze on your skin.
We are all creative when we’re born. We need these images and an artist’s date, even it if is a walk downtown, window shopping, or getting images and filling this well. I call it filling my well full of juice colors, smells, and sights. It just energizes me.
To summon the courage:
- Take one 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper and make a little courage page.
- Cut pictures you see in a magazine.
- Take the magazine or a couple of magazines, then shred them.
- Don’t worry about how you are cutting the shapes.
- Just get some words and images on a piece of paper.
- Glue them down and make them your little courage board.
Get a small piece of paper and make a self-portrait. It could be a collage, or it could just be a drawing. Who am I now with some words and phrases?
On a second piece of paper, who do I want to be or what do I want in my life? And then look at the two and see where you want to go. The vision board is having an idea and using your imagination about how you want to be seen and how you want to feel. What you see and imagine, you become.
One simple thing for me is to have some flowers in my garden that I can grow just to cut. It could be just a few strands of lavender or even some herbs. You just cut them and put them in a little tiny vase or go to the grocery store and buy a bunch of daisies or whatever the flower is growing. I see them, and I’m giving myself something special. The colors and the shapes remind me that I’m important. I deserve to have a good, fulfilled life.
How can someone help themselves when they feel their life is “flat” and their creativity is stunted?
I’ve so been in that place. Sometimes I go from being pretty good to going back to that place. Being an ongoing creative being takes so much practice because we’ve forgotten how to do it.
Here are five things that help:
1. I sometimes flip back, so when I flip back, I ask myself, “What do I do besides getting outside?”That is the first focus for me. Get outside on a nature walk.
2. I love getting a sticky notepad and making it my permission slip.
I give myself permission to _______________.
Here are a few things I write:
- I give myself permission to be curious.
- I give myself permission to ask for help.
- I give myself permission to relax and take some time for myself.
- I give myself permission to use my voice.
- I give myself permission to take more risks.
- I even give myself permission to feel vulnerable and embarrassed.
It’s so simple, but it works.
3. Great quotes. I turn to any page in The Artist’s Way as it contains quotes. Sometimes just a quote will jerk me back into reality. “Every child is an artist; the problem is how to remain an artist.”
4. I also use decks of inspiration cards. One is the Power Thought Cards by Louise Hay. She is a good author for self-esteem raising. Another is My Daily Affirmation Cards from Cheryl Richardson. Sometimes, I’ll open up the deck and randomly pick a card, which will be my guide for the day. They are usually lovely cards.
A third is Medicine Cards: The Discovery of Power Through the Ways of Animals, by Jamie Sams and David Carson. There are animals in America that the Native Americans thought had special powers.
Sometimes I’ll pick an animal card, from a squirrel to a raven to a hedgehog. Each animal has a strong spirit and potent medicine. It’s a way to get you out of yourself. It’s decentering. It gets me out of myself and pulls me out of that feeling that “I can’t do it.”, “I’m not good enough.”, “I don’t have enough time.”
5. Two books that I would like to recommend from Brene Brown are the Gifts of Imperfection and Daring Greatly. She even borrows from Julie Cameron about allowing yourself to be this creative being.
How can creativity help parents when struggling with their child’s substance use?
If I could do it again with my three children, I wish I had picked up The Artist’s Way earlier because I was doing everything for everyone else. So I was dipping into the well, giving everybody else big pails of water, and I was thirsty. Everyone else had water except for me because I was giving out the water, but I was not taking any of the water.
You have to give something to your kids, no doubt about it. Still, my identity was around the school being the volunteer, trying to be the best volunteer, getting my self-worth and fulfillment through the care taking more than caretaking me, and allowing myself to bloom.
I’m looking at the beautiful flowers in my garden now and the gorgeous cosmos wafting through the breeze. I wasn’t allowing myself to bloom and flow in the breeze. I spent so much time helping others and ignoring my desires.
A quote in The Artist’s Way by Carl Jung captures the answer to this question.
Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.
I know my mom did everything for us. She would often let us know. She wasn’t living her life. It came out the wrong way. We all need to take time to give ourselves love and nurturing. This creative way is almost a spiritual gift. Creativity and spirituality go hand in hand.
When I allowed myself to do what I liked, is when my kids saw their mother happy. When they saw their mother getting resentful and overdone, they saw an unhappy mother.
Life is too short. Get out there and live a rich life.
I’m glad I found my way.
Shelley Richanbach, CADC, SRCD, is an Associate Producer of the Film, The Creative High. a certified drug and alcohol counselor, a Recovers®️Foundation recovery coach, and an expressive arts educator. She brings dance and the arts to her students and clients with a special focus on addiction/recovery. Shelley founded Next Steps for Women in 2010 and helped to create and establish one of the first Recovery Community Organizations (RCO) in California, Voices of Recovery San Mateo County, in 2009. For over a decade, Shelley has led expressive arts workshops, environmental arts, and play programs. She has provided development, support, counseling, and coaching for women of all ages and ambitions. Her passions include dance and performance, working and playing in nature, and as an activist for reducing the stigma attached to Behavioral Health and Recovery.
