Can you tell me a Story about Creative Recovery Coaching?

Kyoko had been feeling like she had given up. A few years earlier, her design business wasn’t bringing in enough money so she had switched directions and found some paid work. The only problem was, it was stealing her soul. She still needed some money, but thought maybe she could find a way back to some of her creative strengths. Yet how? In her fifties and discouraged, she needed help finding her creative inspiration again. After some coaching and direction-finding exercises, she finally, after decades, picked up the book project she had been telling herself she would write. She is already up to chapter six!

Julia Cameron’s classic 1992 book The Artist’s Way introduced many people to the idea of creative recovery but her work certainly wasn’t the first! For a long time, artists and creatives have been devouring the published works available to help them along the path of creative recovery. From Brenda Ueland’s remarkable If You Want to Write, a Book about Art, Independence, and Spirit, first published in 1938, to many books written by Eric Maisel, the founder of the creativity coaching movement, the literature on creative recovery remains vital. Blocks can run deep and it takes practice, courage, resilience, patience, and support to change a lifetime of thoughts about our creative selves. That’s where Creative Recovery Coaching comes in!

The world we live in values material possessions and material success. Even if you are creating, you may feel like you can only create if it leads to a show, or to a certain amount of financial success. Finding room for your artistic self is not necessarily about making a grand splash with your amazing talents. It’s about cultivating a self that values what you create and helps you find consistent time for it.  Do you have a negative voice that seems to think that creating is all or nothing? Creative Recovery Coaching is a technique to calm that voice.

Creativity is a tricky love; it is always there but hides in deep recesses of our beings. Whether we trace it back to our parents, a critical teacher, or a lack of opportunity, too many of us feel like being an artist somehow lacks merit. It doesn’t earn enough. It's a waste of time. Artists are scatterbrained. The stereotypes are everywhere and we don’t seem to be changing our dialogue about them.

Many creative recovery participants start with the Artist’s Way while others jump straight into individual coaching. The twelve-week Artist’s Way course helps you welcome your wounded artistic self and rebuild. Sign up for a group class through Midori Creativity! The class helps you explore from a unique viewpoint with exercises from both Julia Cameron and new ones from Midori Creativity. New viewpoints, gentle voices -- the group synergy is vital!

For one-on-one Creative Recovery Coaching, the focus is all on you.  The work we do depends on what you are bringing to the sessions, where you are in your life, and how much is buried. We can do exploratory work, find resources together, make shopping lists for new artistic tools, or work with blocks.

When you make a commitment to a creative recovery process, you have no idea what you will find. You may discover a long-lost love or find that a new creative world is beckoning.  What is important is you. Your loves. Your passions. Your road. It’s a journey that we all need to take.  Life can take us off course, take us away from the gems that are inside of us.  Creative Recovery Coaching brings you back to where you need to be.