Re-membering the creative body
Reflections + prompts to navigate the shape of this season
I didn’t feel like writing this letter, but I did anyway.
There is an important distinction between pushing yourself to do what you don’t want, and pulling yourself away from the places that make you believe it doesn’t matter, when deep down, it really does.
I wrote this letter, despite not feeling like it, because I’m working on growing my writing hands back. And when a creative limb has been severed, it is our responsibility as artists to do what must be done to help it grow again. And for that, we must simply re-member them. We must reattach them to the creative body, and guide them to do what they intuitively know, but have forgotten.
A severed creative limb looks like:
Moving at a rhythm that isn’t yours
Mistaking productivity for devotion
Forgetting that play is also a form of prayer
Lending your hands to someone else’s vision for too long
Letting your creative feet walk away from your rebellious path
Allowing your inner critic become the editor-in-chief of your imagination
Have you ever dealt with a creative dismembering?
When a creative limb is severed, when the hands that once made go still, when the feet that once carried us toward what we love lose direction, when the vision itself becomes muddied, it can feel like our power has been stolen away.
Myths remind us otherwise.
In The Handless Maiden, her hands are cut off by forces that should have protected her. She becomes powerless, unable to touch, to feed herself, to hold anything. (spoiler alert) Eventually, her hands grow back. They return because, instead of giving into despair or waiting passively for something outside herself, she, very literally, takes her life into her own hands, and that is exactly why they grow back.
In The Red Shoes, the protagonist deliberately chooses to cut off her own feet. Because the cursed shoes are obsessively dancing her into madness. At times, we are the ones that choose to sacrifice a creative limb that has overgrown or become crooked.
Artists know this story intimately. Every time we betray our values for approval, every time we let our creative nature be dictated by performance, or perfection, we lose a hand. Every time we turn away from what our feet know, we lose our ground.
Our hands show what we are truly devoted to; our feet show what we are willing to walk toward. And so, we must bless them often. We must notice what numbs them, and protect them from what exploits them. It is our creative duty to meticulously observe if they begin to shrink, to shrivel, to shake uncontrollably or turn left when we want to go right.
Certain narratives inevitably lead us to lose our hands and feet, or to sever them ourselves. They ask us to move faster, follow a rigid roadmap, and compress the vision. We end up running blindfolded on a looping path, and inevitably, we fall. Strangely enough, these same narratives often pretend to carry the medicine, to save us from the very wounds they caused. They ask us to look outside ourselves, to trust something external to restore what they broke. In doing so, we outsource our power once again.
That is precisely how a creative limb gets severed: because we stop trusting our own agency.
And when that happens, when something cuts us off from our own power, we can ask our creative spirit to lead us back to the diligent work of re-growing hands that can shape again, feet that can dance again, eyes that can envision again. Sometimes that means lying in bed with our easel propped above us like Frida, and keep painting until our creative hands grow back.
Dear creative mind, do not dilute your voice, do not make it perfect and palatable. Resist the forces that keep you divided from your own vitality. There is no shortage of stories, people, tools, shoulds, rules that will make you doubt, second-guess or gaslight yourself. First comes the courage to walk on your path, and then comes the dedication to continue doing so.
We must devote ourselves to something larger than the wound, and allow the creative body to re-member itself. Because, at some point, we must choose to love our creative life more than we love cooperating with our own oppression.1
In my own creative life, my relationship with my writing hands has felt tangled. For that reason, the book I’m writing has been returned to the shelf of my creative mind. I don’t know for how long, and this feels harder than I’d like to admit. I struggle with putting something down, and, it’s also what precisely drives me to burnout when I haven’t cultivated the discipline (or wisdom?), to know when to let it rest, to let it breathe, and to let myself breathe.
Part of this creative dismemberment comes from my own urge to go faster than their natural rhythm. Part comes from relying on tools to correct mistakes as I’m not writing in my mother tongue (French), which has erased not only mistakes, but my voice as well.
Playing with mud, digging my creative hands into clay, has been a practice that is allowing me to grow them back. It’s also been the best way to root myself into new soil here in Portugal, and an interesting mirror of the muddiness of this process of re-rooting my wobbly feet. The frustrating and healing thing about ceramics is that it will show you very quickly if you’re going too fast, too slow, or if you dare to think about something else for a single millisecond. It is the wisest teacher in presence, focus, and rhythm. There are practices like these that will never allow your hands to get cut off. What is yours?
Lately, I’ve been paying attention to the shape of many things. The shape of a project, the shape of a day, the shape of a conversation, the shape of an experience, the shape between things. When I make pottery, I wonder what shape will best serve the function, which smaller shapes will come together to create the final one, and the shape my hands make to guide the clay in just the right way. When I paint, I train my eye to zoom out, unlearn what it thinks it sees, and relearn what is actually there. I abstract complex forms into simpler shapes. Which is, I believe, what this season calls for.
So let’s talk about the shape of the next few weeks.
Samhain to Yule
Creative energy forecast, what to work with, pay attention to and practice.
For me, the shape of this season is a “U”. A descent into a hollow space, and a rising back up with a reignited creative fire.
If the journey from Samhain to Yule teaches and asks for anything, it’s to reshape what needs reshaping. For that, we must practice discernment. We must learn to know what, when and how to reap, store and cut away. We must reclaim our creative authority, and choose for ourselves what will be sacrificed, before some external force chooses for us.
As we venture deeper into the exhale of the year, we might notice how often we only exhale partly. Rarely do we allow ourselves to breathe out completely, and just when we think we are ready to inhale again, there is still more to release. A little reminder I got from the doctor last week as he showed me how to properly use my inhaler. (I can’t fully understand Portuguese yet, and he didn’t speak any other language, but somehow we managed to figure that much together)
As we make our way to this point of the breath cycle (the emptiness, the void, the womb of the year) we might wonder if there is something more we can give away, release, sacrifice, in the name of emptying ourselves and becoming vessels for something else to come. We cannot afford to bring too much in the deep cave of the winter months - we must rid ourselves of what’s heavy or superfluous. What do we want to make space for, and what in return, must we let go of? What are old habits, ideas, projects, stories that feel unnecessary?
Artists, perhaps more than anyone, are attuned to transformation. We chose to incarnate this strange human experience as the very essence of change itself, as living vessels for what is ever wilting, ever awakening, ever blossoming. We entered life to embody it fully, to become its pulse and breath, walking reminders of impermanence, of mystery, of magic.
No true transformation can take place without an offering of some kind; there must be matter to be transformed, something we lay into the fire so it can be changed. Something new can only take shape once we have emptied ourselves enough to receive it.
Prompts to play with the energies of this season
Josh Schrei (who I’m beyond excited to join for a year-long program) often speaks to the magic in the simple gesture of opening the hand, both as an act of offering, and as the perfect way to receive. It also brings to mind this uncomfortable and relieving phase of the creative process, when we dare to share it with the world, when we dare to let it find the heart of the people it’s meant for.
Prompt 1: Draw two hands. On one, write or illustrate what you’re offering; on the other, what you’re calling in.
Prompt 2: Design a personal ritual that honours your hands. It can look like a short ceremonial gesture you do before you begin your creative practice, a written prayer or affirmation to bless them:
Dear creative hands…
Art I’m grateful for right now:
I’m reading Your Attention is Sacred (except on social media) by amelia hruby, phd, which I highly recommend.
I’m drawn to Ileana Moro’s paintings, which, to me, carry a feeling of “calcination” (an alchemical phase I associate to this time of the year).
I’m admiring coaching client Kenzi Rayelle’s work, and the deep vulnerability it takes to lay your entrails bare in your creative practice.
I’m re-re-relistening to this Emerald episode, because… well, listen to it and you’ll see ;)
I’m learning so much from The Alchemical Imagination with Eliza Swann, and it’s flowing into my coaching practice in exciting ways.
What are you listening, watching, admiring, enjoying?
What surfaced for you as you read this? I’d love to hear your reflections and discoveries. Feel free to reply or share with another creative mind.
Receiving support in your creative life would feel like a big exhale?
I believe our most profound art emerges when we stay with the question long enough to hear what it’s really asking. I hold space for that work: listening deeply, discerning what to release, and noticing what wants to come through.
To navigate it, we sometimes need guidance. Someone to walk alongside you, and help you unearth what is ready to emerge into form. I’d be honoured to be that creative companion for you.
When you’re ready, here’s how I can support you:
꩜ 1:1 coaching partnerships: let’s meet in a free clarity call.
꩜ The Creative Liberation Portal, a self-coaching space to move from self-denial to self-expression.
꩜ Email coaching, a simple way to receive guidance & direction.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves