Coaching for Your Creative Soul
There’s a special place in my heart for people who yearn to express their creativity and finally dare to do so later in life. I have experienced the pains of that story myself, and it is so healing when I can help people reclaim that creativity and empower them to use it in an intentional way.
Born Creative
When I was a kid, I drew constantly. I would have a drawing pad or notepad at the park. And since I wasn’t allowed to bring my drawing pad and pencils to church, I would draw on the offering envelopes placed in the pews, using the little golf pencils they kept beside them. I would always be drawing.
Fun story: My drawing pad was such a fixture of my childhood that I even brought it to a small Broadway (or maybe it was off-Broadway) production of Shear Madness! when I was about eight. I remember this not because it was extraordinary to bring my art supplies everywhere (it was normal) but because I was called out by one of the actors during a breaking-the-fourth-wall sequence near the end. (For those who don’t know the play, the killer and ending are determined by audience vote during an interactive back and forth with the characters.) I raised my hand for someone other than the most popular pick. Trying to convince the audience to change their mind, the most popular pick pointed at me and said, “I’d trust the kid with the pad!”
As I grew older, I took every art class my high school offered, I took private painting lessons with a sometimes-struggling artist friend of the family, and I entered and won a few competitions. Almost every Christmas or birthday gift from me was a pastel or painting or torn-paper mosaic. And I wasn’t just a two-dimensional artist. I was in every play I could get into, and I wrote and even directed one-acts for the annual student theater festival. I was an artist.
Although I played a couple sports and worked hard on academics, my identity was centered around art until college. Then I had to “grow up.”
I know I’m not the only one.
The Creative Heart Grown Cold
Like many of us, I was taught that art was a hobby and a pastime, but that it wasn’t an occupation or at least not one that you could count on. And since I wasn’t only an artist (as if anyone is only ever one thing), I decided it was safer to explore other professions. After all, I could always do art in my free time, right?
So when 1999 rolled around, and I was applying to colleges, I chose only one very selective art school—if I got in, it was “a sign”—and the other schools I applied to were traditional liberal arts programs.
I did not receive the “sign” that I was supposed to be an artist, so I didn’t go to art school (the school was RISD in case you’re curious). And that’s fine. You don’t need to go to art school to be an artist. And in a liberal arts program, I could take art classes (or not because their long-ass studio time interfered with all my other classes). I could make art in my spare time. And yes, I made a few paintings and torn-paper mosaics in my spare time in college. But it was harder to believe in that identity as an artist the less time I had to devote to it.
What little creative energy I had went into theater and dance, which had evening classes and rehearsals. I was still involved in “the arts,” but I was responding to the energy of my director or choreographer, not creating my own unique expressions that were messy and time-consuming and not directed toward a clear external goal validated by others (i.e., performance).
After college, I had more time for art, but I was focused on my career, which absorbed a little creativity and a lot of energy. And when I made time for “real art,” it was commission-based. I was producing something. I was no longer creating from my soul.
But that creative spark doesn’t ever go out completely. Something stays flickering in the soul. And when things feel darkest, it may be all the light you have.
Undying Creativity
How often do you nurture that spark? How often do you breathe life onto the embers? Most people don’t find the time or energy to do so very often—or so they assume—yet it’s there. Sometimes it shows up in the most unexpected places.
It may not appear in the way you think creativity is supposed to appear, but there’s a generative energy source within each of us. Painters and musicians and actors and designers all display creativity in ways almost everyone can recognize. But so do cooks and entrepreneurs. The person who figures out how to wrap a paperclip securely enough around a pencil to hook a ring and pull it up out of a grate is a creative genius. If you’ve ever been that person, you know that rush of satisfaction at your own brilliance! The creative fire is there when we need it: innovation/invention is the child of desperation/necessity after all.
Those who have studied chakras know the source of this energy as the svadhisthana or sacral chakra, which is associated with passion and creation, as well as sex and reproduction. We birth things from this sacred space inside—the Empress and her ability to birth are not just for people with wombs! But it’s not just about producing like a machine but out of a place of desire and emotion.
Making Space for Your Creative Soul
As I’ve grown older still, I’ve come full-circle back to that old fantasy of making a livelihood from what I can create. I’m not a professional painter or comic book artist or animator, all the artistic occupations I thought might be my way of monetizing my creativity. But I have discovered how to tap into my creativity by focusing on what my soul yearns to create.
It isn’t easy, and my productive rational side has all sorts of projects that constantly vie for my attention. Those are fun, and some could probably do well in “the marketplace,” but I rarely finish them because they’re not what feeds my soul. I don’t make time for them. I don’t make space for them. And that’s a problem because a flame needs room to breathe, or it will get snuffed back down to embers.
If you’ve felt disconnected from your creativity, it could be because you aren’t giving it the space it needs. You may be forcing something or feeling trapped in one form of creativity that isn’t what your soul needs right now. You probably are also using your creative energy in ways that you don’t see as creative, and that’s using up all of the spark with no return ventilation to help replenish what’s been consumed. (Look at me, talking as if I know how chimneys work!)
As a Taurus, I’m a big advocate for taking space and time. It’s important to let yourself indulge in the experiences that feed your soul, even if having five minutes is an indulgence for you. (I see you, overworked parent with a child who has special needs.) Even allowing yourself that is so good for the soul.
Creative Coaching through Tarot
Much of my work is designed around thoughtful tarot spreads or tarot-adjacent activities that force you to take time and slow down. Most of these are self-paced, and you can find all of my freely published tarot spreads here on my blog. My books Tarot Tableau and Awaken the Court Cards offer you a longer transformative journey. And all of my courses all include in-depth reflection and relevant exercises that allow you to layer your learning as time allows.
But this year, I decided to create a program that is geared toward a form of creative practice that is near and dear to my heart: Tarot for Writers. It’s a series of three classes with in-depth exercises to help make time and space for a specific form of creative production (writing) that anyone can do. The specific lessons and exercises are forced and structured to work with a general class audience in order to teach particular skills and strategies. But they create space to explore and play, and most importantly, they give you the tools to find your own soulful expressions.
And if you want to create something new in your life that may be less tangible and more personally transformative, I want to coach you toward your specific goals as they align with what your soul needs right now. My small-group coaching program Tarot to Transform Your Life was designed for creative and soul-led artists, leaders, entrepreneurs, and dreamers who read tarot, whatever their occupation, and it will help you identify where it is that your soul and the universe can work together right now, as well as provide you with the knowledge and frameworks for continuing that work on your own after the program is complete.
For those with unique needs or more longstanding blockages (or that don’t read tarot for themselves), I am starting up a brand-new one-on-one coaching sequence for 2023: Clearing the Cascades. It combines past life healing, shadow work, and monthly energy forecasts (along with practical coaching) so that you can work seamlessly with your past, present, and future selves to move in alignment with your soul and dare to achieve your dreams. I’m super excited to be able to share it with you all since it synthesizes all of my specialties, and I hope that you consider me when you find you need someone to coach you through your blocks.