Welcome to Create From The Source!

Hi! Welcome to Create From The Source - a weekly-ish newsletter and seasonal podcast dedicated to exploring creativity, creative practice, well-being in your (artist) life & business, and how your creativity relates to your purpose, energy, spirituality, and more. I’m Katja. I’m your host, your guide, and your fellow traveler on the creative journey.

About Create From The Source:

Create From The Source is an ongoing exploration on what it’s like to live a creative life.

Here we’ll explore the sometimes messy journey of creating, and how to:

• Move through Resistance.

• Create without your Inner Critic.

• Have a daily creative practice.

• Find your unique voice.

• Free your self-expression.

• Approach your creative practice with curiosity, openness, patience, appreciation and trust, instead of from a place of fear, judgment, impatience or criticism.

• Shift Starving Artist mindset.

• Become aware of how your energy affects your life & creations, and how to shift your energy with practical tools.

• Recover your creative energy and heal from burnout.

• Get off the hamster wheel of hustle and drain, and create a thriving artist life.

I write and create podcasts as my whole self: you’ll meet the coach part in me but you’ll also meet the artist part in me who is your fellow traveller on the creative journey and is still trying to figure out many things.

You’ll find longer and shorter writings, essays, notes, questions, insights, resources, behind-the-scenes looks on my own creative process, occasional poetry or creative writing, alongside with podcast episodes that are a mixture of solo episodes and conversations with specialist/artist guests.

I might also be inspired to write about & make podcast episodes related to singing, though the main purpose with this publication is not to get into the technical aspects of singing. If you are interested in that, you’re welcome to learn more about my work as a singing teacher and vocal coach here.

About me:

I’m an artist too, and I’ve been many things and worn many titles over the past 25 years. Singer, musician, artist coach, voice teacher and vocal coach, singing voice specialist, music interpretation teacher, choir leader, music educator, early childhood music teacher, voice over artist, theatre maker, performer, speaker, strategist, consultant, facilitator, creator of many projects and programs. As a singer and musician, I mainly gravitate towards musical storytelling in styles like folk, jazz and Brazilian music.

My creative journey started in my early years, and it’s been filled with curiosity and explorations, an insatiable love for learning, freedom seeking, connecting the dots, innovation, wrestling with Resistance, navigating the waters of creative blocks, getting lost in listening to the voice of my Inner Critic and the collective limiting beliefs and narratives, burning out and losing my creative energy, healing and summoning it back again. I know all about how to get out of alignment, and how to find back again.  

In all the training and coaching I’ve invested in over the years, I could not find a place where all the tools and support an artist needs to build and manage a sustainable life and business was coming together with the support an artist needs creatively and spiritually. That’s why I created it myself. It’s called Create From The Source. It’s these pages, this newsletter and this podcast. It’s an artist community and my coaching work. It’s the work that grew from everything I learned - and keep learning - on my own journey back to my Source, from my work as a coach for other artists, and from what I keep learning through my current explorations and experiences.

On these pages, in the newsletters and in the podcast, you’ll get my personal stories, together with inspiration and real-life strategy from me and other artists that I’ll share conversations with. I’m hoping this place will be a place where my real-life experience as an artist, maker, performer and teacher, coach, consultant, strategist, seeker and explorer can all be of service to you. A place for nourishment, inspiration, information, and rituals that keep you connected with your creativity and your Source. 

I write for this publication in English, and though it’s not my native language, it’s become my main language of writing over the past two decades, probably because I have lived a life that probably best could be described as “international”. My native languages are Finnish and Swedish, and I have also written and published articles in Dutch - a language that became one of my fluent languages during the 21 years I lived in The Netherlands.

I recently returned back to my roots in Finland, where you often can find me either by the sea or in the forest.

Why subscribe?

When you subscribe, you’ll get the latest content delivered straight into your inbox and you won’t have to worry about missing anything.

For the time being, all the content in Create From The Source is available for free. Having said this, it takes time, energy and expertise to create this content, which is why a part of the content will become a paid subscription in the future. If you enjoy my writing and podcast, you can already pledge for a future subscription. You won’t be charged anything until I enable paid subscriptions (and you will be notified about this well in advance, so that you still can decide if you want to become a paid subscriber to support my creative work or not).

Pledge a future subscription

Create From The Source is free today. But if you enjoy these posts and podcast, you can tell Katja Maria Slotte that their creative work is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.

You can find my website here and my Instagram here.

Thank you for being here, for being a part of my journey and for supporting my creative work. I look forward to showing up here sharing and connecting in meaningful ways.

XO Katja