Ariana Newcomer

Healing the soul's voice

Do you let your voice out to play?

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do you let your voice out to play

Being creative is essential to our success – in whatever we do. I wrote 2 articles recently about the process of creativity – Are You Crazy?, and The Art of Serendipity.

Here’s another crucial piece of your creativity that no one is telling you about: Your voice.

I’ve seen it over and over again with my clients. When you free up your voice, when you learn to play with your voice, and gain a greater range of self expression through your voice, your creativity sky rockets.

Your voice is an expression of your essence.
So, if you’re holding your voice back (which most of you are doing without realizing it), you’re holding back your essence. And you’re holding back your creativity, which is tied to freely expressing your essence.

Here’s what I recommend:
Read out loud regularly, especially from books or poems that are just silly and fun, so you can actually PLAY with your voice. 10-15 minutes 3x a week is enough. I love Dr. Suess books for this practice.Continue Reading

Creative people are crazy, right? Umm, not exactly.

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It’s a common story about highly creative people – that they’re basically crazy. Creative geniuses end up as loonies, or borderline loonies, or minimally functional. The reclusive writers, the drunks, the suicides, the painter who cut off his ear (Van Gogh), the institutionalized artists…

Turns out, creativity is complex. It’s not dependent on your IQ, and you don’t have to be crazy. There are many characteristics and traits that go into being highly creative, and highly creative people may actually be MORE sane than “normal” folks.

Last week I wrote about boosting creativity through cultivating the Art of Serendipity. (Read that here.) This article builds on that one.

Here are some of the characteristics of highly creative people:

  • cultivating serendipity, or discovering “what they were not in quest of”
  • introspection and openness to their inner life
  • preferring complexity and ambiguity over black & white perspectives
  • a high tolerance for disorder and disarray
  • yet they are able to extract order from chaos
  • being highly independent and unconventional
  • willing to take risks
  • tolerance of uncertainty and contradictions

Highly creative people develop a higher self-awareness – including awareness of the “shadow” or “darker” aspects of the self. They engage with both the dark and the light – the full spectrum of life. The whole enchilada. The whole human being. All of themselves.Continue Reading