My core passion is what I call the Empowered Creator. As a coach, artist and novelist, I’m fascinated with how we empower our creative voices. What opens our creative doors? What gets the juices flowing? What shuts us down as artists? What blocks us? This has been my fascination for decades.
Over the past couple of months, I’ve been going through a thick depression. I use tools like shamanism, tarot, acupuncture, and reiki for creative healing. I decided to go on a shamanic journey and ask my guides: “Help me understand this depression.”
If you don’t know what a shamanic journey is, it’s like a creative visualization where you go to meet a wiser being to receive clarity and support.
On the journey, I found myself running around a field holding up a cardboard cutout that I was hiding behind. A guide showed up and took me to the side of the field, where propped against a fallen branch were about six cardboard cutouts of me in various disguises, strong me, don’t-fuck-with-me me, disenfranchised me, etc. I ran across the field holding each one of these up, hiding behind them. Far off in the distance stood a circus tent. I ran to the tent, still hiding behind one of the cutouts, where I found a scared little girl. I was allowed to meet her, but that was it. She was just too scared to interact. I knew her to be my terrified inner child.
I left this meditation with the feeling that my depression was a result of living my life in hiding.
But, that was actually not the correct interpretation! I kind of knew it wasn’t as nothing shifted afterward. Usually when we find the truth, an organic shift happens.
A day later, I went to Michelle Molotte for a channeled reading. Michelle explained that I was going through a phase of dropping the pretense, and taking down the cardboard cutouts in my life (which is true), so that I could be myself. It was the putting down of the cutouts that was causing the depression, she explained.
As a small fearful child in an abusive household, I’d made an agreement with myself when I was very young. “I’ll only choose to be alive in this scary crazy world if I can hide.” Putting down these masks was bringing me back to the upset little girl, the little girl I met in the circus tent. It was my “original” depression.
I LOVE this kind of insight. The only way I can be a novelist and artist is to have this level of awareness. It’s the only way I can be an empowered creator.
But something even more interesting happened next.
Excited, I told my regular coach/healer the entire story, and how fascinated I was with the phrase: “I’ll only choose to be alive if…”
“You need to change that phrase. It’s time for a new phrase,” he said.
“Ok,” I said, excitedly trying out different options. “I’ll be only be alive if I can be my real self. I’ll only be alive if I can create art and be a writer.”
“Why include the phrase, ‘I’ll only be alive, if…?'” he asked. “Drop that part.” I knew he wanted me to change it to a positive affirmation, to say something like, “I’ll live my passion with courage.” Or “I’m living in my creative power.”
But using a positive affirmation didn’t work for me. It felt like I was being cut off at the knees, like I was being asked to leap over the very thing that fascinated me, that I was being asked to “live, laugh, love”, to live a platitude. It felt like I was being invited to a platitude party. We actually struggled with this during the session, client and coach, and I got off the call confused and consternated.
It took a while of me sitting with my annoyance to understand why I didn’t want to do a positive affirmation. In fact that night, my mind exploded with creative ideas, an art project, that was absolutely the opposite of any kind of Platitude Party.
“CARDBOARD CUTOUTS” came to me full-blown. It’ll include life-sized cardboard figures, outlines I’ll do of my own body, each painted with different motifs. One will be a body filled with hidden compartments, like an advent calendar, open each tiny door for a surprise, and not always a pleasant one. One will be a full-bodied ornate vagina, with one side bejeweled and the other darkened, bruised, and burned, representing the archetype of a global vagina, both adored and abused. One cutout will have holes in it, missing pieces lost along the way, the pieces floating above the figure’s head.
I then realized that this path to using art to understand the masks I wear (we all wear) actually started last year when I became fascinated with making outfits for a paperdoll in my studio yurt. See images above. I’d already started exploring the different personas we offer to the world, the costumes we hide within.
If I would’ve squelched “I’ll only be alive if…”, if I had denied that phrase and tried to turn it into something “pretty”, this art project would’ve died a premature and tragic death.
Why am I telling you all of this?
My goal as a coach is to change the world one Empowered Creator at a time. For the artists and writers out there, I would ask this: What are you squelching with platitudes? I think it’s crucially important for anyone who wants to be an empowered creator to understand the power of dark matter. It’s fodder for our work. Viewers and readers and listeners of our creativity can then see themselves in it, not just their happy selves, their anxiety-ridden, hopeless-in-this-dying world selves. We need our darkness reflected back to us. To bypass it with positive affirmations is doing the world a disservice. To own it, to bring it into your creative process, not only unblocks you, it also feeds others. I think positive affirmations have a place, but I’m not sure they belong in the very real, intense, dynamic excavation of our creative truth.
Where is your dark, wild, depressive self? Bring her out to play. We really want to meet her.
Contact me if you’d like to book a session with me. I offer a free discovery call if you’d like to write a book, as well as sessions where I use tarot to channel.