Questions to Awaken Your Creative Power to the Fullest

Questions to Awaken Your Creative Power to the Fullest by Michele Cassou.

"Judgements point out to you where you are closing the door to your creativity." (p.27)

I am very, very resistant to the philosophy of process painting. Learning about it and doing it are part of the process for certification as a Birthing From Within Mentor, though, so I'm being "forced" to push into this resistance . . .

I know my judgements about process painting close the doors to some creativity. I do. But my judgements are really strong. I have really strong "agreements" or rules about this. But I'm not at all sure what they all are.

Here are some preliminary guesses . . .

Rule: creativity is relational. What I create is not just for me. It's for the community I'm embedded in.

Rule: a beautiful thing is more beautiful if it is also functional. I.e., when I create something, I don't want it to be only aesthetically pleasing. I want it to be useful, too.

Rule: corollary: time spent on creativity must be useful (produce income, entertain others, etc.) - not "just for me"

I'm not phrasing these very judgementally, but there are strong judgements embedded there.

I also found this book an interesting one to read at the same time as another one I'm reading: Women's Ways of Knowing. One of the things the authors of that book talk about is where knowing comes from: not-knowing, knowing based on external authority, knowing based on internal authority . . . it seems to me that Cassou is reacting to common ideas about where it is okay for artistic knowing to come from. More on that later.