Wellness practices are no longer niche. Fully integrated into everyday life, most people practice, or know that they ought to practice, some form of self-care such as movement, mindfulness, or self-motivation.

I have practiced and studied yoga and wellness for decades. All that time, I longed for creative fulfilment. I often felt like I was hitting a roadblock around creativity, especially around music production. Let me explain my wellness to creativity in this post. I will unpack my 12-step experience of finding a way to cue (activate) my creativity using my wellness practices.

Creativity: The Cornerstone of Self Realisation

The deep work of yoga, meditation, and self-help is both wonderful and challenging. But, it is only a means to an end. The final purpose is: self-realisation.

The Why Behind the Wellness: find what you have inside

Why practice wellness?

People get to yoga when they are tired of suffering. This old adage is found in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, and in Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths. These traditions teach that it is the ignorance of one’s true nature (“avidya”) that is the true source of suffering. Their solution is spiritual: “vidya” (knowledge) that allows a person to unite with “Atman”, which is higher consciousness.

What’s your wellness goal?

This question is highly relevant given today’s global society and the preponderance of cultural appropriation. The conflict around embracing another culture’s spiritual traditions has antagonised me for decades. I don’t have the definitive answer. But, I am part of the cohort of yoga and meditation practitioners who do not feel the need to pray to anyone’s God, and whose only faith is the belief in the flow of the Energy. I am spiritual, but not a believer. Faith is believing in something without having proof. Spirituality is about feeling the energy of all that surrounds you and realising that it is feeling your energy, too.

If not faith, then what? Creative expression.

In the absence of faith, we have creativity. Creative endeavour is the “tao” (path) of non religious self-knowledge. It is unhindered by doctrine, and untethered from ritual. But, it is a powerful tool for the knowledge and manifestation of the Higher Self. It may appear individualistic, but creative pursuit is so hard, and so humbling, and takes so damn long, that it it connects artists to our souls via our striving and our failure. The highest form of self-realisation is creativity; the highest form of creativity is self-realisation.

Finding your creative outlet

Childhood dreams

You were there all along, you know. All the dreams you held in your childhood heart; they never went away. Your childhood dreams may have lain hidden for decades while you ran a business, climbed the corporate ladder, and raised a family. They probably showed up in your dreams, your home decor, and your hobbies. But they were never given centre stage.

When working with clients, these childhood memories are some of the most important. Before we are schooled and moulded, we are timeless dreamers, experimenters and boundary pushers. We can become disconnected from this creative little kid during our householders years, but as we age, we can choose to reconnect with our inner artist and make manifest what we hold inside.

Glimpses and glimmers

Glimmers are little events that unexpectedly bring joy into daily life. When we engage, even lightly, in consciousness raising activities (silent meditation, deep breathing, contact with nature, emotional self-regulation), we are gifted with little glimmers. Life is constantly bestowing us with miracles, if only we remember to look-.

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You may have been blessed with some moments of clarity during a yoga class, meditation, or ecstatic dance. And certainly those insights would have whispered to you from a deeper part of you. But, life didn’t leave you room for those frivolous artistic pursuits. Now, you are at the point where you want to integrate those glimmers and create something from them. Welcome!

The big reveal

And then, right on cue, and if you are lucky, you reach the age of 50. The brutal realisation that you have fewer years ahead of you than behind you shocks you awake.

That inner voice no longer accepts being silenced. It starts to talk to you in louder tones. It keeps you awake at night, it whispers that maybe there is indeed more to all this.

Eventually, you listen. And then, you start to create. You create FROM you, FOR you, and BECAUSE of you. You create to leave a trace. You create to leave a legacy. You create because it is just what you do. If you don’t create, you consume, and overconsumption leads us down a very different path, one that I won’t even talk about here.

The Late Bloomer

Capitalism tells us “time is money.” This is an outright lie. Time is not money. Time is life.

Rigidly believing in milestones and linear timelines can rob us of the time that we need to bloom as creatives. If we think that we are too old, or that we missed our one and only chance way back when we were seventeen, then we will never achieve our creativity peak.

Late bloomers are myriad in the arts and elsewhere. Late blooming women, freed from fertility, are almost duty-bound to create. The womb that is no longer preparing for procreation becomes a fertile guide and voice for wise women.

It took me 12 years to learn to produce music using Ableton Live. But I got there in the end!

As if on cue, you find you

The brutality of the midlife crisis is an energy that can be harnessed in order to live your best life. You either sink or swim. If you have been doing the deep work already, dive deeper. Put order to your story and connect the dots. As Bob Marley sang in Buffalo Soldier “If you know your history, then you will know where you are coming from, then you would not have to ask me, who the hell do I think I am.”

Creativity Coaching – the program I am working on – is my method to help you work out who the hell you think you are, using creativity. Stay tuned and sign up to my newsletter if you are curious to know more about Creativity Coaching.

My 12 steps

Each person will have their version of the events, decisions, and twists of fate that get them from where they were to where they are now. My twelve steps were:

• Living through a series of hard to process life events which left me with powerful feelings that were hard to express, and yet which sabotaged me at unexpected and unwelcome moments.
• A need to put order to my intrusive thoughts and feelings so that I could feel calmer and have the world make sense. Finding yoga. Finding mind-body wellness work
• Words and music flooded through me, at random times, unbidden. It could not be turned off even if I wanted to.  I consistently wrote poetry, prose, and songs.
• Feeling more frustration at NOT making music than making music, but without recognition or recompense. Keep going even if my music got no applause and no pay. Resilience.
• Through the deep work of yoga, slowly overcoming shyness, self criticism, and self-doubt.
• Shaking, breathing, and humming trauma out of my body.
• Learning to set healthy boundaries.
• Valuing my time and focusing my efforts in order to improve all areas of my life, including my art.
• “Music maker, any way” – recognising that many paths lead to the same goal.  If the singer-songwriter thing wasn’t going to fly, then DJing could.  Climbing down from preconceived ideas about what music to make and how.
• Furthering my formal education in order to give myself a sense of sturdiness and knowledgeability.  Overcoming imposter syndrome. Studying music theory. Studying Neuromusic.
• Finally having a breakthrough by consistently dedicating time to music production, asking for (and paying for) help with mixing and mastering, investing in the distribution platforms and subscriptions necessary to market my craft.
• Recognising that I have, effectively, achieved the goal that I set out to conquer, so many years ago, and feeling so elated that I want to share it with anyone else who is longing for creative expression and not sure how to get there.

Your 12 steps

Your journey may be 12 steps long, or it may be 20. It is totally personal and completely unique. Believe in yourself, in your pursuit of purpose, and the power of your creative vision. If my words resonate with you, and you feel like connecting, drop me a line or give me a follow. If you think that you might like some help defining your purpose, of getting clarity about your journey, let me know. Take care, Rachel