why you're blocking your own creativity | may self-love book club

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Transcript

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I have a question to ask you. Do you think that your creativity loves you? Most people believe I love creativity, or they believe that they need to be more creative. But what if creativity is trying to reach you? What if creativity is trying to meet you halfway? Take this story. For example, there's an environmentalist professor and she's two questions for her students. The first is, do you love nature? All of the hands in the classroom go up. Her second question, do you believe that nature loves you back? All of the hands go down. The thing is, is that nature does love you back just as your creativity. Loves you back, but you need to believe that it loves you back. Loving our creativity and it loving us back is an exchange. Creativity meets us halfway, but we need to believe that it meets us halfway to really allow. For the most amount of creativity to come into our lives, the exchange of love between Earth and people calls forth the creative gifts of both the Earth is not indifferent to us, but rather calling for our gifts in return for hers. The reciprocal nature of life and creativity. You need to believe in your right to exist, to be here at all, to be deserving, and to have the permission. To have creativity and to create. This was such a big part of our book for the Month of May, big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, and that story is from one of her friends and professors named Robin. And a couple of quotes from the end of the book in the chapter Trust. In this episode today as part of our self-love book club, we are gonna be talking about a reflection of my relationship with creativity and basically why most people are blocking their own magic. The magic, the big magic of creativity. Hello. Hello. Welcome back to the Self-Love Archives podcast. I am your host, Julia Salvia, also known as your self-love bestie. But for today, I am your creative bestie because this Self-love book club book hit me. I was gonna say, hit me where it hurts. No, I think it just really touched my soul and as a creative myself. I would consider myself a creative, I mean, I created this podcast episode you're listening to. I have been creating since the beginning of time. And to my astrology girlies. Yes, yes. I am a Pisces, and I think Pisces are very creative, but we're all creative. We all have so much creativity within us. We all can connect with creativity in so many inspiring ways. So I'm really excited to talk a little bit more about this book, a little bit of my interpretation of this book, and a little bit more about creative living beyond fear. Thanks to Elizabeth Gilbert, you don't need more creativity in your life. You need more courage. Courage is the very first part of big magic and it takes us through how a life driven by curiosity instead of fear, how we should be living a life led by curiosity, not fear the person. Quote, unquote person that is driving the car is our curiosity, not our fear. And if our courage dies, our creativity dies with it. So the number one thing that we need to do in order to reach big magic, in order to meet creativity halfway, is that we need to have courage. I think a lot of times we think that we've lost our creativity or that we're not creative enough, but I think truly. It's not that we have lost our creativity, it's that we are not brave enough to respond to it when it comes to our creativity. Have you ever been in like one of those places where you're like, Ugh, I've lost it. I'm not creative anymore. I, I don't, I don't know what I'm doing or I'm not creative, or I've lost my creativity. I, I've lost the spark. What I actually think that means is that you haven't been answering to creativity at your door. You haven't been brave enough to open the door and respond to it. There have been so many times in my career as a creative where I have thought my creativity has gone down the drain. I have thought I woke up with no creativity today. I am not creative. I am on a, a non-creative streak. Nothing's coming to me. Uh, my, the things that are coming to me aren't good enough when in actuality I just wasn't curious enough to meet. With creativity to meet things that could have been creative. I didn't have the courage to seek it, to find it. I didn't have the courage to meet it at my door when it knocked. When we have the courage, try something new, to post something without caring about what other people think to do something and to let it out into the world. That is courage. And by having courage we become more creative. We allow for our scope of creativity to grow because we're giving it the room. We're saying, Hey, hey, I'm here. I'm here. Come at me. You've opened the door yourself. Whether creativity is added or not, and it's not that creativity isn't choosing you. It is that fear is answering first. You are letting fear stop you from opening the door to creativity. A part of the book that I think had me take a couple steps back because I've been creating in the social media space since 2012, really long time, really long time, really ages me Aging is privilege, I think. That when we went on into the book and it talks about how creativity is not a career path, it is a way of being alive, that being an artist and being creative isn't something you should do to seek out a monetary return, to seek the validation of others. Being creative is something you choose because it just brings you joy. Holy hell. Does this bring everything that we have talked about this month, in this month of being aggressively whimsical? Does it bring everything together? Like it truly brings everything full circle? Because being whimsical, aggressively whimsical, the whole point of romanticizing our lives, being whimsical is to bring us joy, and that is what creativity is supposed to do for us. That is the whole point. The point of creating is to create just for joy. And if what comes out of that is literally useless, who cares? We've been taught that if we create and we monetize that creation, that it justifies the creation of it. And if it doesn't. Get monetized or it doesn't get any validation from another person or someone higher up or from people that it's shared with, that it's unjustified, that it was a waste of our time to create it to begin with, but creating is about decorating your life while you're here. It's about creating joy while you're here in the chapter called Permission. Talking about giving us permission to be creative because we already have permission to be creative however we want to. Elizabeth talks to her neighbor, and her neighbor is someone who gets tattooed on a whim. She just goes out and gets a new tattoo, goes out, gets a new tattoo, doesn't make a plan, doesn't even know what she's getting. She just goes and gets tattoos. So Elizabeth asked her. How could she allow her body to be marked up permanently like that? And her response was, oh, but you misunderstand. It's not permanent, it's temporary. And of course hearing this, you're probably also confused like, what do you mean it's temporary? No, like that is permanent. You are permanently tattooing your body. And she goes on to say, my tattoos are permanent, but it's just my body that's temporary. I wanted to decorate myself as playfully as I can while I still have time, but she's so right. The tattoos may be permanent, but her body is temporary because it is a, it is obviously a fact that we are all going to die one day that our vessel is not going to live forever. Our soul. Sure. But our vessel is not going to live forever. That our vessel, while we are here for hopefully a long time, it is temporary. So she goes on to say, I also want to live the most vividly decorated temporary life I can because. Look at the creativity in that you have the permission to live a life so vividly and so joyously and so creatively, however you choose for yourself. And I think that that is so magical. So I don't think that a lot of us here listening are very judgmental people. I think that we don't. Maybe always judge a book by its cover, but I think that the understanding of why someone chooses to be creative in the ways that they choose to is so incredibly interesting. And so why not be inquisitive towards it? Why not ask why and get a better understanding of how other people view life? Because that was just. Incredible, especially as someone who doesn't really get tattoos. I have one measly little tattoo on my finger. It is actually a white heart, so you could barely see it. It actually kinda just looks like a scar now at this point, but it really does for me, have so much meaning. And the reason why I got it white and the reason why it's on my ring finger, actually is really representative of self-love. So. If you wanna hear more about that, let me know. But I do have a tattoo, but besides that, I don't have tattoos on my body. So to hear someone else's perspective and really unique perspective on how they decorate their life and their vessel with something that is so permanent and how they view life and this vessel as the this vessel that they are in as temporary is just. Honestly, that blew my mind. Blew my mind in this book. And truly, you are not here to make everything meaningful. You are here to make things that make you feel alive. You are here to create a life that makes you feel alive, one that you want to live inside of. You don't need to have permission from the world to create. What you need to do is stop waiting for permission from the world. You need to stop waiting for the green light to be curious to create. You just need to go and do it. I have always believed that you need to have passion for what you want to do, but actually after reading big magic, I don't actually think you need to have passion. I think that you just need to actively be curious. Passion is intimidating. Curiosity is an invitation. The more curious you can get, the more curious you can be about a subject that you are interested in or something that you find beauty in or something that even piques your interest. The tiniest little bit, the more you can. Go deeper into that curiosity, into that topic, into that certain thing. Curiosity asks, what are you interested in? It can be heavy, I think, to have all of this passion or feel like you need to have all of this passion and devotion to something to actually act on it or do something about it. But what if I'm allowed to just be curious about it? Passion can seem intimidatingly out of reach at times, but curiosity is a milder, quieter, and more welcoming entity. You just need to follow what's interesting today in this moment, and let that lead you. Somewhere or nowhere. So you don't need to have some life changing passion that you are going to stick with till the day that you die. What you do need is to just follow what feels a little bit interesting today in this very moment, lead with curiosity. What I think I really loved about. Big magic and about conversations that I have with people, and maybe it's because I'm a Libra moon keeping with that astrology, but it's the, the paradoxes, again, I think that's the plural of it. It's the, the paradox of this and that, of this and that and everything in between. Right? It is that our art matters, but it also doesn't. That it is sacred, but it is also playful. It is this, but it is also that creativity is never asking anything of you. It's not asking for you to be perfect. It's not asking for you to be successful. It's not even asking for you to be good. It's just asking for you to say yes. Because what I think is so incredible about creativity, about this big magic is not the question of whether or not. You're looking for it. It is that it is already looking for you. I am linking big magic below so you can get your hands on our May Self-Love book club. Read by Elizabeth Gilbert in the show notes below. Thank you so much for. Being here for sticking with me, for talking to me about creativity and the magic of creativity. I wanna hear your stories about your art, about your creativity, about your journey through being so courageously creative that you know that you have the permission and the persistence to find the, the divine creativity. I would love for you to be a part of our Self-Love Book Club community on the Fable app. It is completely free to join. We discuss the book, we read together, we talk about all the things, and share our favorite moments and quotes from the book. And I would love for you to add to the conversation that is also in the show notes below. So make sure to check that out. And before we go, before we close out this podcast episode. I wanna thank you for being here, and I wanna leave you with this question. Why wouldn't creativity love you back? I love you to the moon and back. I will see you next week, same time where we go over our theme for the month of June. Spring is slowly coming to a close and I cannot wait to share with you our last theme of quarter two and for you to start impressing your inner child. I love you. I'll see you soon. Bye.