For many years, I created in isolation. Yes, every once in awhile I would attend a collage or jewelry class, but those were the exceptions. The problem I found, was a common one: motivation.

And I wasn’t alone. The more I talked to friends, the more I realized that they too had a desire to create but because of their job and family responsibilities didn’t have the time or even the energy to devote to creating on a regular basis.

At about the same time, two things were happening in my own life:

1. The first was that a friend and I decided to do a hot chocolate tasting tour of our city. It made me see community in a different way. Gathering, often in a coffee shop, we sipped hot chocolate and talked about our lives. That sense of connection was something I had lost, most recently working at home.
2. The second was my own personal exploration of creativity and spirituality: how the act of creativity is a sacred and communal act. This all collided with me seeing an online sale of the Creative Circles Guidebook authored by Connie Solera (someone I had gone on a mini creative retreat with here in my hometown). When I purchased it, I promised her I’d keep her creativity alive here, since she now lives in Arizona.

And that is how Creating Plus was born.

Creating Plus is a gathering intended to bring people together to create an artsy project while sipping delicious beverages and tasting yummy treats. And that’s just what happened when I invited a few friends, who were also craving creativity and community to join me earlier this year on a Sunday afternoon.

The host prepared a hot beverage – this time it was hot chocolate but in the summer months, I envision offering cocktails and mocktails. Each person then was asked to bring something to sweet to share, and did they ever. We had a delicious chocolate trifle and someone even made hot chocolate cupcakes.

I provided the project inspiration. For this gathering, we experimented with paint – creating color blocked canvases using tape, embossed designs painted over with watercolor pencils and flat backgrounds covered over with a single image.

I also asked everyone to bring a base they wanted to work on, whether it be a wood block, canvas or something else. Myself and the host provided the remaining supplies.

After I showed the demo pieces I had created beforehand, we all set out about creating and conversing and snacking for the rest of the afternoon. I created a Facebook group in advance, so I asked people to post images of their created works taking the communal creating experience virtual. Brooke, one of my friends who attended, wrote a blog post on the experience that nicely sums it up.

Communal Creativity 

But that wasn’t the last of my experiments with communal creativity and keeping the Creativity Circles inspiration alive, I have facilitated two other groups since then – one online and another local in-person gathering. I’ll be sharing those stories in the future to inspire you to form your own sacred creating tribe.

How have you created with a group? What worked? What didn’t? And how did you keep the inspiration alive? 

Almost 10 years ago, I was working at (what I thought was) my dream job. I was an educator in a museum. What this meant was that I not only developed educational programs to teach visitors about art and architecture, but often I taught those same classes on a daily basis. From the outside, it sounded like a great job. Still to this day people don’t understand why I left.

It appeared I had a glamorous life living in the nation’s capital and doing what I thought I loved, until one day someone said to me, “be creative” about a work problem I was trying figure out. Those two simple words struck me and changed everything by taking me on a path to discover my own creativity and myself.

Although, like most people, I’d probably heard those words hundreds of time, this time it stayed with me. I started to ask myself what that meant. What was it like to ‘be creative?’

My initial answers were startling. I didn’t know what it meant. For as long as I could remember I’d been teaching and empowering everyone around me to be creative with the programs I led and the artists I worked with. But I didn’t know what that meant myself.

Why?

Because, I later realized, I’d been nurturing everyone else’s creativity but my own. At that point, I decided to step away from the life and career that I had built to figure out what being ‘being creative’ meant for me. It took me on a journey discovering not only that but who my real self was – and she was creative!

So how did I do this?

I started by leaving everything I knew: the city I lived in, the only career I had, my educational training. I stripped everything in my life away and moved back to the place I was born and had grown up in but had not lived in 12 years.

I also started by devouring everything and anything I could on creativity and started a blog on what else… creativity. As I delved into studying creativity, I learned techniques and the process that shaped my own path.

The first was brainstorming. There are so many different techniques out there (and I’ve probably tried most of them) but my favorite is mindmapping. As a visual person, I found this to be the best way for me to organize my ideas and plan for the future. I created dozens of mind maps plotting out everything from my current skills to my desired skills in order to find a new suitable career.

Another creative brainstorming tool I used was visual collage. Similar to a vision board, it allowed me to visually see my interests and strengths and goals. I simply found and arranged images that spoke to me and my future self. Once completed, these visual collages helped me establish my brand and discover more of who I really was.

Once I had a clearer vision of myself, I started experimenting – mostly through art. For me, creativity was the outlet that allowed me to become who I was meant to be. I signed up for classes on mail art, sea glass jewelry, collage, anything I could to exercise my creative instincts. I found I liked some more than others. But in the end, this allowed me to play and dabble and let my mind wander in a way I’d never let it before. It was here that I had some of my best ideas.

My other creative outlet was writing my blog. I had long dreaded writing as a creative exercise because I felt self-conscious about my style. I had even been criticized for it in graduate school. It was through blogging about my creative journey that I found my voice. The more I blogged for myself and others the louder it grew. Eventually it led to a career change and one that involved communications and social media.

But before any of that, I had to fail a couple of times.

Like the creative process, failure is a part of life. It’s at that stage where we learn the most about ourselves and our resiliency. The path to finding my true creative self led me down some dead ends. There were consulting projects that ended abruptly or ones that turned into nothing. With each failure, I learned more of what I didn’t want in my life and continued to strip it away. I felt the more I failed the more I grew.

Creativity is funny like that.

It’s always changing and evolving. There is no right or wrong answer and what I found was that there is also not a singular way of ‘being creative.’ It’s an individual journey we all need to take. It’s a journey that allowed me to find my true self through imagining the possibilities, trying them out and even failing. I know my path is an evolving one, but after this recent journey I also know it couldn’t have been done without tapping into my inner creative.

My word for this year was SHIFT, and wow, did I ever! Actually, there were two, almost harmonious parts of my year that defined this. The first part was marked by a lot of stress and uncertainty in my life. In this part, I began to see the need to shift my perspective and how I viewed my life and the role that creativity played in it. It was also a time of much growth, although I couldn’t see it at the time. I relaunched this blog as part of this process, with a fresh new design and ideas for the future.

And then the real shift took place, as I dealt with a sudden loss. A loss that left me with plenty of time to regrow myself and strengthen my creative muscles. This time has been marked by immense growth both spiritually and creatively. It has allowed me to refocus my energy on this website and let me dream and plot and plan for its future.

Creativity anew is the phrase I’ve been using to describe this. For me, it was sparked by a sudden shift, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Creativity anew can happen at any time. It just takes an intentional mindset to achieve and the upcoming new year is a good time to start cultivating that mindset toward your own creativity.

In 2011, I wrote a post on New Year, New Creative Goals. It seemed appropriate this year to revisit it and create some intentions for the upcoming year. The purpose of the intentions are to keep them simple. You limit yourself to three. They can be big goal creative dreams or simply a new technique to learn or a new medium to explore. After much thought, here are mine:

• Take an improv workshop
• Collect essays for an actual book
• Learn to crochet

What are your creative intentions for the new year so that you can begin with creativity anew?