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You Can Use Your Own Creativity For Healing In 7 Simple Steps—Here's How
Whether you’re occasionally overwhelmed by your daily schedule, navigating intense collective energy, or going through a season of major change or challenge, dedicating time each week to a creative hobby can have a miraculously healing effect on you and your life.
Follow the steps below to start, or restart, a healing creative hobby.
Find a creative hobby that fully engages your mind
Whether it’s making collage art, concocting new recipes, or cultivating a garden, find a creative hobby that occupies all your attention when you’re immersed in it.
This will aid your inner artist in going down the creative rabbit hole to bring forth something unique out of raw materials or significantly alter something that already exists in a creative way (think bedazzling a plain t-shirt).
If you don’t consider yourself a creative person, engaging your mind fully in the creative process will provide the healing realization that you are inherently creative. Life itself, with all its choices and options, is a very creative process.
Set aside time to pursue this creative hobby uninterrupted
Part of the healing factor with creative hobbies is that they allow you to get lost in liminal space when time seems to stop and the rest of life falls away. You’re both here in reality and inside a creative world all your own.
Creatively cocooning for a certain amount of time with minimal distractions gives you a break from outside stimulation as well as your normal worries and responsibilities. Having a small reprieve from our regular lives and routines—even if we love them—is restive and restorative…or healing.
Pour yourself & your creative impulses into a creative project
Creative hobbies can be a healing way to get to know yourself better. The colors and patterns you choose for a piece of pottery, the type of music you play once you learn guitar, or the themes you’re drawn to as a creative writer might reveal essential sides of your nature.
It’s always healing to lean into our authentic selves, and it can even increase our sense of self-love and self-acceptance.
Don’t put pressure on yourself to finish a creative project at a certain time
Life can put a lot of pressure on us. Each day can be filled with many mini-deadlines. So it’s healing to allow yourself at least one area of life—like a creative hobby—where the pressure to finish at a certain time, or finish at all, is removed.
You might spend 10 hours on a creative hobby one week, and none the next. In a goal-oriented culture, it can be a relief to carve out time where the only goal is to let yourself be creative.
Allow a creative hobby to evolve
Don’t put any limits on your creativity. Some people who are wildly talented creatively, and spend a lot of time creating, choose to never pursue creativity professionally.
For me, what started out as a creative hobby—spiritual writing—did become a career. (If you’re a spiritual author, or would like to be, check out Spiritual Author Academy.)
When you feel called to share your creative projects with others, whether it’s a select group of friends and family or the entire world, give your hobby the grace to evolve into something else. What’s healing for you might help heal others.
Remember that healing often happens in the background of creative projects
Healing will naturally happen in the background as you commit to a creative hobby. It might be healing your sensitive nervous system from an overstimulating outside world while you retreat into a creative hobby. Or time spent on a creative hobby might give you something else to focus on instead of trying to speed up or force a healing journey around your physical health, relationships, career, or finances.
Sometimes a creative hobby will be a cathartic way to process emotions and past traumas. Healing journeys always go at their own pace, yet they tend to go more quickly and easily when we relax—and creative hobbies are super relaxing.
Let creative output reinforce that you’re a powerful co-creator
No matter if it’s a lopsided cake the whole family has a good-natured laugh about or a stunning hand-knit sweater even strangers compliment you on, let the fruits of your creative labors reinforce the fact that, as a human, you’re a powerful co-creator. Even when we find ourselves in seasons or systems that severely compromise our free will, there is often a way we can be creative about how we approach life. Creative hobbies remind us of this healing power! You were truly born to create.
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