Creativity is a process with the power to alchemize your grief

Creativity is a process with the power to alchemize your grief.

Yet in our scarcity-minded society we push both of these away - our innate creativity and our experiences of grief. It’s no wonder you have been left without practices and rituals to process that grief into your healing and next vision.

Career grief can feel isolating and guilt-producing, especially because career grief is unacknowledged grief that others may not support or validate, which is exactly what lands it in the category of disenfranchised grief. I see a parallel treatment of climate grief in my workshops on building climate resilience.

When you overthink your body’s felt sensations and emotions, your brain is creating a teeny tiny view of what’s really happening around you. It makes sense then that folks want to compartmentalize or to intellectualize grief. Trust me, I’ve a chronic recovering overthinker and overanalyzer, so I get this. Who has time to be knocked down by waves of grief or time to sit and dream and envision your better life or bolder impact?

Here’s the thing that I’ve learned: Overthinking is a form of rescuing behavior. And creativity serves as an outlet to shift out of that. When you overthink it’s an attempt to try and control external outcomes. And in doing so you’re pushing away the present experience (which is all there is anyway) and you’re living in past and future versions, but those aren’t necessarily the best or most truthful versions of how yours and the world’s story goes.

Embodied creativity work helped me (re)learn what a ‘hell yea’ is in my body so I can make choices that shift me closer to the creative being I am. Overintellectualizing and overthinking in the past only flung me towards more over-functioning and burnout. That then fueled a sense of hopelessness, not critical hope and action. Essentially, I disenfranchised my own grief which kept love and joy at bay and enabled my paralysis.

Learning to be with your grief through creative work can offer great clarity and purpose. And cultivating your creativity practices and rituals can allow you to let grief guide you back to love and joy.

Here’s a cute example from the other week. My tween and I have a routine of dog walking before school at about 7:15 every morning. A ritual - creative habit - that I engage in is taking a photo of something that captures my awe - flowers, sunrise colors, frost, and the like. That particular week, the kid was performing impatience over this 10 second pause in our walk for whatever reason. I loved their comment of, “observe the Mom in her natural habitat.” Awwww, hell yea, that felt true. It caused me to reflect on this little creative practice and how much joy it brings me. While I feel much climate grief daily, this practice invites me to fall in love with Earth and her Nature beings in my neighborhood.

This is why creativity alchemizes grief. Love and awe are partners to grief. I don’t want to be rescued from that - I want to open up more to this. I hope you do, too.

Grief and creativity is a partnership that you can develop. I have an accessible pathway of transitioning into that for you in this next six week round of Creativity Lab that starts May 22nd focused around the theme of Creative Cocooning. The invitation is for you to join us in community for one hour each week and dedicate that time to learning and building your own creative practice - to build a habit, to experiment in a low-stakes environment, to play with your own ideas, and to nudge yourself forward. Join us to learn practices that can offer you increased self-awareness, new meaning-making, resilience rebuilding, and social support.