Healing Creative Wounds

Two weekends ago, I led a virtual retreat for my Secrets of Storytelling mastermind members. 

The most powerful part of the weekend was our work on healing creative wounds. 

All of us have creative wounds. And when we don’t surface them, expose them to light and air, feel through the emotions they create… they fester. And they prevent us from creating.

I define creative wounds as any time you made something and it wasn’t received the way you had hoped. 

“Making something” = a drawing you made as a kid, an idea you suggested in a work meeting, a paper you wrote in college, a pitch you made for work, a song you sang or played or wrote…

“Wasn’t received the way you had hoped” = the thing you made was outright rejected, ridiculed, critiqued, mocked or laughed at… or your idea was ignored, stolen, or someone else took credit for it later… your drawing wasn’t hung on the fridge or your parent laughed at it or ridiculed it… the joke you told wasn’t laughed at… any or all of the above, or a million other reactions that simply didn’t line up with your hopes.

Last weekend I did this exercise along with my clients: 

Set a timer for 7 minutes and write down in a journal (handwrite, if you’re able to): What are ALL the times I can remember making something that wasn’t received the way I had hoped?

Include everything you can remember from early childhood up until today.

I was surprised by one of mine. Here’s what happened:

A few months ago, I was scheduled to record on someone’s podcast. This person is a relatively big name in my industry. I had pitched them seven months earlier and gotten a yes. I had sound checked for the podcast twice - it had been rescheduled twice because the host had had two emergencies come up.

The morning we were due to record, I woke up terribly sick. Like: couldn’t get out of bed sick. Like: canceled the very first session of my mastermind sick. 

And when I emailed the podcast team to let them know, the host responded: ‘While I thoroughly sympathize with illness, I always send this note after a late-cancellation. I think we'll pass on rescheduling.’

What I wrote in my creative wounds list was: 

[The podcast host] rejecting me because I was sick.

I had done a LOT of processing of this interaction, and yet… I hadn’t processed the creative wounding of it.

I had wanted to make that interview so badly. And some part of me felt rejected because I was sick. (As someone who struggles with chronic illness, that is a deep-seated fear.)

Here’s what we did after writing down all the creative wounds we could think of in seven minutes: 

We imagined that we were standing together around a great bonfire.

We gave voice to wounds that we were ready to share and release. Sharing them with each other, having them witnessed, was incredibly powerful. 

We imagined tossing those interactions onto the fire and watching them burn to ash. 

And then we visualized, when the fire had burned down, that the ash was transformed into a nectar that could nourish our creativity going forward. 

One person commented afterward that it was so powerful to hear the themes that every person had shared - to know that we were not alone. That everyone had had experiences that wounded their creativity - some had happened as children and some had happened just the week before.

Don’t just read this post - work through the exercise. 

See what unlocks from there…

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