Reclaim your creative energy

Heart-to-heart talk.

Aligning.

Releasing. Going deeper. 

Those are three words that pretty much sum up 2023 thus far. The space and the stillness here on the island

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are doing my creativity much good, but I'd be lying if I'd say "Aligning, releasing, going deeper" means it's all sitting in meditation on a cliff by the sea with a content smile on your face..! At times it's an unravelling that brings up the deepest creative blocks, the hidden limiting beliefs, the old identities that are stubbornly demanding for their right to exist although you know you've outgrown them.

A couple of months ago the "cork popped" in my biggest creative block in 2 years. I didn't consciously even realize I was going through a creative block. I'd forgotten about how nasty that feeling is, when the pressure of Resistance starts building up. It builds up slowly, over time. Usually there's outside factors and shiny objects that have been demanding your focus, so you don't even notice you've started accumulating the ingredients of a creative block. Then, at some point the buildup becomes so big it immobilizes you. I don't know about you, but for me it literally means looking at the piano and being unable to even move in its direction. Thinking about singing and being unable to open my mouth. All songs that I know, suddenly lose all their meaning. I completely blank out. 

This is the stuff people usually don't talk about. The scary stuff.

The blank out phase is the first phase of the creative block as I know it. The flow freezes. The connection is lost. After that, it gets really dramatic. My mind thinks of a song, and Resistance shouts back: "I don't even WANT to sing! I HATE singing!" The shame you feel for feeling like that and being dramatic. Next, comes the sadness, the grief. This is when I think I've lost the connection forever. In my mind, I say goodbye to singing and music forever. I feel like I've lost the "Why" and I've lost the connection, so there's no other option but saying goodbye. My heart breaks in a thousand pieces. Tears are shed. This phase can last for a couple of days, weeks or even months. 

After that, begins the slow resurrection back from the darkness. The way back to the creative Source.

It's in that part of the process that you usually start noticing things like:

"My creative energy has been leaking!!!"

It's been leaking left and right, in shiny objects, in all kinds of projects, past and present, and you only got the scraps of what was left of it for yourself. It's been leaking to outside circumstances and dealing with life stuff. So you start patching your leaks, summoning back all that energy that is yours. 

You also might notice your creative energy is depleted from having operated too much from the "Yang" side of energies. There's a world-wide energetic epidemic going on: an imbalance in the energetics around how we work, how we are drilled to be in action and to produce non-stop. This imbalance exists deep in the layers of our society, and it finds its way even into the arts institutes and onto the work floor. It's disguised as "working so hard because you love what you do" and in "having a professional attitude". But what it really does, is get us on the hamster wheel. It takes a dangerous toll not only on our creativity, but also on our nervous system health. It needs to end. We need to realign. 

No matter how you got out of alignment, finding (back to) alignment can be a messy process, which is why it can be such a scary undertaking. Many people avoid it all together. They choose the discomfort of being blocked or they numb themselves with distractions, instead of facing the fears related to get into alignment. It's scary to look beyond that block, to look Resistance in the eye. And it's so easy to get lost in all the outside noise, to stay in your head rather than connect with your body, and keep so busy that you can numb out that still voice that says "Listen to me!".  It's much more comfortable to stay with your old stories, habits, mindset, beliefs & patterns, because if you start changing them, you're letting go of something familiar. It can feel safer to not really voice your unique voice. To keep singing the songs or creating the art that you think people expect you to create, the "safe choices". To keep up with unsustainable ways that drain you and your creativity, and leave you with little room to really thrive in your artist life, because breaking out of the status quo would be too uncomfortable and too much work. 

But it's worth the work. Because when you do find alignment, it's like that moment when the music flows effortlessly through you, your Inner Critic is silent and your voice connects straight to your Source. I think that's what we call "vocal freedom", if we're singers. And we keep searching for it in vocal techniques, but that's not where it comes from. Freedom is a sum of many parts coming into alignment. Body, voice, mind, spirit and energy. Creativity and craftsmanship. Roots and rediscovery.

And once you've tasted some of that alignment, you wanna have it in all areas of your artist life, not just in your voice or your musicianship. That's when you realize you're a conscious co-creator of your creative life, and you can create one on your own terms. A radical reimagining of your possibilities. 

"No more record company men telling me what I can and cannot write!", said one of the songwriters I met with last week for a coaching session.

"I am framing non-negotial things and building helpful systems for my money, building for the future and getting to know what I really need, instead ofwhat I thought I could get", said one of the performance artists I've been working with.

That's huge! It's stepping back into your own creative power. 

Personally, I decided to get off the hamster wheel some years ago, and I'm not planning on going back. I think my latest creative block had to do with part of my creative energy still spinning on that wheel, out of habit, although the hamster (me) stepped off. So I'm noticing what I'm really doing right now, is reclaiming the last bits of my leaked and drained creative energy from years and years of hamster-wheeling.

Your creative energy is a life force. And your creativity is linked to everything else in your life. When you (re)align yourself, and summon back the creative energy that you've been leaking, it changes your entire life. You'll find back your own voice. Reconnect with your artistry, with your purpose and your joy. Learn to trust your intuition and the seasons of your creativity. Let go of what is holding you back and make room in your life for the person behind the artist. Build an artist life & biz that's supporting your well-being.

That's what I'm here to help you do, in my coaching work. We can get there through many ways: through vocal coaching & working with the elements of music, through creativity coaching, mindset coaching, life coaching, spiritual coaching or biz coaching.  

I love working with my own coaches too, and sometimes I need to “coach myself” - like now: I decided to design a 40-day (or more) creativity practice for myself, with creativity, energy, spiritual & mindset practices, artistry & Sing From The Source practices. It felt necessary, considering that insight about the creative block I told you about - and it felt like now’s the right time. 10 months ago I let go of my teaching job at the music university, and ever since that decision, my life has been in a whirlwind of change and surrendering to inner guidance. Little did I know that this journey of rediscovering my roots, also had to do with reclaiming my creative energy!

Where are you at in your creative life right now? Is your creative energy aligned? Or is it all over the place? Is it drained? I'd love to hear from you about where you're at right now 😊

Sending you much love from Åland, 

XO Katja

1. The first leg of my journey in this adventure of figuring out where to settle next, has been spent on the beautiful Åland Islands, an autonomous region of Finland in the Baltic Sea.