Exercises to Spark Your Creative Spirit

Creativity comes alive when our senses of hearing, taste, sight, smell, and touch are awakened and revered. And realizing the immense gift of our full sensing body often demands slowing down, getting quiet, and becoming deeply aware. The senses are our raw creative data and material. We are called to reconnect to our own nature, our own body first. To wake up to ourselves as a sensing organism, living amidst other sensing organisms. 

This practice invites you to slow down and connect with your body, with your own animal nature, before you enter into your creative practice. 

Most of us want to say yes to our creativity more often, to give ourselves more time and space to follow our creative impulse. Our creative instinct, if it’s strongly held within, is to say yes. This is why saying no can be a more psychologically rich practice and also more psychologically challenging. 

Creating a Code of No means writing down your own rules for when you will say no to something that will keep you from saying yes to your creative project/s at hand. Or, write yourself up a list of ten or so No Commandments, your own personal “thou shalt nots.”

Creative expression has increasingly become a prized component in many of our life’s endeavors; in fact, there are many paths to instilling and nourishing creativity. Deep Creativity by Deborah Anne Quibell, Jennifer Leigh Selig, and Dennis Patrick Slattery offers practical guidance for getting in touch with your own unconscious reservoir as well as engaging your everyday world to deepen the source of creative expression.

An important practice is coming at one's subject matter from an oblique angle. This is the opposite of what feels more intuitive—to come at something straightforwardly. 

There are two ways we can come at this problem from an oblique angle. One is to approach it through an oblique medium or discipline. Another approach is through an oblique subject matter - leaving our subject matter entirely and studying a related subject matter.