Five Qualities of Your Natural Creativity

Julie Daley
Jul 10, 2017 · 6 min read
Mess Painting — Week Four

About twelve years ago, I took part in a wonderful course called Mess Painting. We were six students led by one teacher. Mess painting is a ‘lite’ and fun name for what is technically called the Creative Mobilization Technique. Mess painting is such a messy process that in order to complete the six week course that required me to paint six days a week, with at least fifteen paintings each day, I had to make a paint ‘booth’ in my apartment in Berkeley. Fortunately, I had a large apartment that had a separate room I used for an office. It was a big room with a high ceiling — big enough to create the booth in the corner with enough space to have drying racks for at least fifteen paintings. It sounds complicated. It’s not. It just takes space and some time. And it was so worth it.

Mess painting isn’t solely for artists, nor is it (necessarily) an avenue to create art. Art comes out of it, but that isn’t the reason for doing it. Instead, if you stay with the process what can happen is the opening of flow inside of you. What happened for me was an amazing experience of the release of creative energy. When this happened, I felt my creative source suddenly open and begin to flow in a very physical and visceral way. And I felt absolutely NO fear, which was truly a first for me in my life. The total absence of fear is an amazing feeling. It didn’t stay for ‘good’. I imagine I felt the absence for about an hour or so. I don’t think we are meant to go through life without fear. But there are times when it is not present, which means fear is not who we are.

It was about this same time that I began to teach Creativity and Leadership at Stanford Continuing Studies. I’d taught it before in other places, but now as I engaged the students to experience their own creativity, I truly knew, from my own experience, the powerful, visceral feeling when the creative channel opens fully. And I knew the feeling of the embodied qualities of creativity that come when the channel is open.

Take a moment to think about the times when you’ve been in flow. Have you ever noticed that when you are in that state of creativity where you are deeply absorbed in what you are doing, that you do not feel fear? that you don’t feel so many of those feelings that we tend to think of as ‘negative’ feelings? You might not have noticed it because you WERE in flow. When you’re in flow you aren’t self conscious. Instead, you are simply focused on that which you are creating.

The flow state is one in which the source from which your creativity flows is unobstructed — or at least unobstructed enough. I call it flow because it truly marks the state when your life force is flowing through you and you are happily engaged, focused, and not engaged in self-referencing with judgment, worry, or fear.

In the courses I teach on creativity and leadership, I refer to our creative nature as Essence — our essential nature. Essential nature is just that — our essential self without all the embellishments and that we humans tend to make up about ourselves including the ways we self-reference.

In that moment of mess painting when my creative flow opened, a pure and simple joy was present and incredibly palpable. But it wasn’t just joy — intuition, compassion, strength, and will were present, too. I felt strong. I felt clear. I felt as if I could do anything. And, my heart was beautifully open to the world. I actually wanted to go out my front door onto College Ave. and tell everyone I saw that there was nothing to fear. I didn’t. Without any background, I suppose that might have been rather strange.

Five Qualities

These five qualities of Essence are the universal qualities of experience present when the creative channel opens because they are five of the main qualities of our essential nature. Another way to see this is that who and what we are when we aren’t filled with fear, judgment, worry, stress and the many other things that keep us from being able to access our creativity IS our creativity.

You ARE your creativity. It’s your nature. And when you experience your nature you experience these five natural qualities of yourself. Why is this important? Because when you know that these qualities are who you naturally are, you realize you don’t have to make yourself more joyful, more intuitive, more compassionate, stronger, or stronger willed. You already are these things. They are simply covered over by the Voice of Judgment and its many ways of causing confusion, stress, worry, and fear inside of you.

When we are young, we learn that some of these natural qualities are unacceptable to the people we need to stay connected to.

Were you too joyful in a home that seemed to prefer more somber, sedate behavior? I know I was. There was a lot of sadness in our home and I learned that in some ways joy was not ’appropriate’ behavior when sadness and grief were present. Maybe for short periods of time, but not as a permanent situation.

Perhaps you told yourself you had to stifle your joy.

Was compassion considered mushy and weak in your family or by some of your influential teachers? Our culture, especially in the past, has looked at compassion this way.

You may very well then have closed off your heart and desire to connect to others this way.

Did your parents and teachers tell you that intuition was bunk and suggested you only trust your ability to reason?

Then most certainly in some way you make a decision (conscious or not) to be certain to bury that intuition someplace deep where even you could no longer find it.

And where you told that you were too strong-willed? That you had to defer your own will and strength in favor of the adults?

If so, you most likely suppressed your natural ability to get things done through your essential will, while at the same time suppressing the strength you need to get through tough times.

For most of us, not all five qualities were stifled, but most certainly some of them were. Some of this is acculturation. Our parents do everything they can to ensure we grow up to be acceptable members of society. But what I’ve seen is that most of us were told at some point or another to pipe down, to be polite, to not be so strong-willed, and to stifle our innate childhood wonder and joy. And I’ve seen that the suppression of these natural tendencies (and there are more qualities) is what teaches us to not trust our own nature and the flow of our internal creative energy.

So how do you come to know this flow within again?

(Because for sure not everyone can mess paint.) One way, and this is just one way, is to come to notice where and when you stifle these five qualities with judgment and then consciously notice the judgment and learn to relax it. You can read more about the Voice of Judgment here and here. So you can be more joyful, more compassionate. So you can listen for and follow your intuition. And so you can come to know your own internal strength and a deep will that can carry you through those unknown journeys that life is constantly offering up to you.

The thing to remember is that these are your natural qualities. They are intrinsic to who you are. You are naturally creative. There’s just a little judgment in the way.

If you’re interested in knowing more about how to unleash your creativity, both personally and within an organization, connect with me for a complimentary consultation session.

If you enjoyed this, please give it a greenand come back to read more soon.

Julie Daley

Written by

Leadership Coach & Mentor; Educator, Speaker. I guide people back to their own inner source and an unshakable self-trust. www.juliedaley.com

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