The Artist Awakes…
“The satisfaction of the creative impulse is a basic, biological need, essential to the health of the individual. Its aggregate effect on the health of society is inestimable.”
— Mark Rothko
Everyone is creative. Not as an idea, but as a lived possibility, if you’re willing to access it.
This isn’t about art as a profession. If there is one thing I have learned over 30 years of working as a creative professional - creativity does not belong to a select few. It is a fundamental force, universal in nature and local in expression, moving through each of us all the time. The real question is whether we create the space for it to appear.
You can’t teach creativity. But you can remove what gets in the way. For over three decades, I’ve worked with people to do exactly that, setting the conditions for creativity to flow with clarity and purpose. What becomes clear is this: creativity isn’t personal, it’s transpersonal. We are not the source, but the instrument. You are not a fixed thing, but a living process, shaped by possibility.
Last weekend I led another beanddo™ workshop: Awaken Your Inner Artist: The Art of Flow.
What We Did
The workshop unfolds in two parts.
We started by letting go of what creativity is not:
The pressure to produce
Output over process
Comparison
Perfectionism
The need for control
We have often been told that there are external rules and requirements to success. They are NOT. They are habits, internal mental patterns. And they are what create the so-called “block.” When pressure and judgement take over, the system tightens. Curiosity fades. Flow stops. You can watch a video where I explain how this resistance happens.
We began with a series of simple (and fun) exercises to expose resistance, fear, and the inner critic. Not to fix them, but to see them clearly and move beyond them.
Then we expand. Larger work, freer expression, including the creation of an enso, the Zen circle. Here, the process takes over. Breath, body, and action come together in the moment. From there, participants move into a final shared piece, working at scale and in flow. The intention is to discover that space where anything is possible. As attention moves, form begins to emerge. One action leads to the next. This is flow, a continuous unfolding where effort softens and something more natural takes over.
You don’t need to be “artistic” to experience this
The second half we then increase the scale and ambition of out output. Working together on large sheets of paper we state with free expression work supported by something very profound: the creation of an Enso (Zen circle) individually and together. This is the moment where we cross over from focusing not on output but on processes where being and doing collide into the NOW and where full body, breath and action collapse into one. From here workshop participants then moved into large scale conscious action through creating one large final piece.
Testing our way
To help with new ways of observing the increasing quality of our new perception we came back frequently in moments of self-reflection using my four-A tracker (you can read more about this tool to support meditation in my book - A Modern Way to Meditate. The objective (although that is a strong word here) is to cultivate and shift all four of these cognitions and accompanying mindsets. The idea is open up and enhance perception. Everything is linked to how we see, not what we see.
Attention – where you place your focus
Attitude – the quality you bring to that focus
Awareness – what emerges when attention softens
Action – what naturally follows
Mick’s Four A Modern Meditation Tracker Tool
You can read more about this unique approach to everyday meditation in his book - A Modern Way to Meditate. Avabille on this website
The result is astonishment that workshop participants, for a moment, let go and did something they never thought they could do. People don’t just create something, they experience something.
A moment of letting go. A sense of joy, lightness, even surprise. Many reconnect with something they haven’t felt in years. Others leave ready to continue, sketchbook, paper, paint. Many report being filled with joy, optimism and purpose (pretty much how they felt when they were kids).
But more than anything, there is a shift. A recognition that they are not limited by old thoughts or habits. That something more creative is always available.
That’s the real work.
It made me happy too.
There will be more workshops coming. Just watch this space.