Last week, I touched on how intentional choices create coherence in our lives.
This week, I want to share something quieter and more mysterious; how creativity rewires us from the inside out. Not through thinking, but through becoming.
I must admit, this post didn’t come together like they often do. After spending a day being frustrated, my desk full of rewrites and the piece not sitting right with me, I paused.
Ah yes, I know that feeling. It’s the same feeling I’ve had when I’ve tried to push a painting to completion or rush through the ugly stage that they all go through. I can’t think my way through a creative project, no matter how hard I try. And believe me, I’ve tried.
And in that pause, I remembered what my paintings always remind me: We don’t create by forcing clarity. We create by letting ourselves be changed.
It’s Always More Than Paint and yet … it’s Just Paint
It isn’t just that we paint. It’s how we live. It’s how we show up. It’s about making a life. It’s the chemistry we generate with our choices. This is the essence of Intentional Creativity (IC) which expands on a philosophy of being, living, and falling in love with our lives, one another, and creation itself.
As an IC Instructor, I don’t teach people to “make good art.” I guide them to know and become more of themselves through the painting process. The art we make isn’t about the end result but the discoveries and shifts made along the way.
What we make is not the point. Who we become in the process is the point.
Creativity is how energy becomes matter through us. It doesn’t exist until we bring it into form. And it opens one luminous pathway into self-awareness, growth, and self expression.
When Energy Meets You
Every impulse begins as energy; a frequency moving through the unified field. It meets you; your nervous system, your memories, your edges.
You feel. You think. You respond (or not).
What you create shapes how you live. How you live shapes what you create. It’s a feedback loop that keeps unfolding.
When we engage that loop with presence, it becomes a living practice of coherence.
The Doorway
A while back, I began a new painting with an intention to know my next step.
After several layers of paint, an unexpected doorway appeared on my canvas. It felt like it arrived on its own.
I knew one thing: I wanted to walk through it. I could feel the excitement of something waiting for me on the other side. Not a goal, not a plan, just possibility, pulling me forward.
When I stepped back to pause, I could feel what the doorway was asking of me:
Are you willing to take up more space?
Are you willing to be truly seen?
Are you willing to follow your full bodied Yes?
The painting didn’t give me that permission.
The process did. It changed me enough to claim it.
Color, shapes, markings, layers, breath, movement, and choice shifted something in me at a cellular level. I wasn’t thinking my way into the next step. I was embodying it.
Living Through the Body
When we paint, we’re not imagining new possibilities. We are living them through each stroke, each reflection, each frustration, and each aha moment along the way.
The past holds what has been and the future holds what wants to exist. But the alchemy happens only in one place: the present moment.
And that moment asks us to commit. Setting aside time. Buying supplies. Making space to create. These aren’t logistics. They are declarations. Future, I’m willing. Meet me here.
From that grounded presence, the future can draw you forward - embodied, not imagined. And yes, life still includes noise and taxes and human realities. We don’t transcend the world; we beautify our way through it.
A Living Practice of Coherence
When chemistry shifts, ideas arise. When ideas arise, we may act. When we act, lifestyle forms. Lifestyle is simply a worldview made visible. This is the power of creative practice: it’s not separate from life. It is life becoming conscious of itself.
Every brushstroke and breakthrough
every meal prepared with love and attention
every word offered with care and integrity
all becomes a creative way of charging matter with love.
Creativity is not separate from life. It is life remembering itself through us.
What if everything we touched received that level of presence?
Walking Together
This Substack is part of that practice for me. A woven space of story, art, and the subtle frequencies awakening in all of us. A place where intentional creativity becomes my way of life.
So I’m curious: Do you notice a deep longing, a calling or sense of something, perhaps undefined at this point, but something that is wanting to be expressed by and through you? What if you pause, and listen? What then?