Gentle Creative Rituals To Nurture Inspiration And Enhance Your Creative Flow
Thursday 5th September 2024 | Written by Stephanie Osborne
A gorgeous area that I always love to support my beautiful coaching clients with is the design and implementation of their own unique creative rituals. When it comes to creative rituals I’m referring to both the definitive and energetic space that is intentionally carved around a specific creative process, as well as to the simple and grounding practises that gently nurture our sense of creative wellbeing in the everyday.
I believe that creative rituals are powerful energetic bookends to the creative process and can be uniquely designed to enhance your most powerful and potent state of creative flow. They are a definitive opening and closing to your creative practise, carving out a supportive and nurturing space for aligned action to unfold as easefully as possible.
Creative rituals can also serve the purpose of nurturing your sense of inner safeness and sanctuary. They will support you in fostering trust in yourself and in your creative process, while providing an open space of receivership where you will welcome gentle pulses of inspiration, creative possibility and whispers of divine encouragement throughout your creative journey. They serve as powerful creative markers for setting the scene, declaring your devotion, and preparing yourself and your space energetically for your creative expression to reveal itself naturally.
Here are some of my personal recommendations for designing your own creative rituals. These are drawn from both my own experiences, as well as from suggestions and feedback provided by my amazing clients.
Choosing Your Environment
I would firstly recommend choosing a dedicated a space for your creative practise to take place. This might be a beautiful space in your home, somewhere public such as your favourite café or library, or it could even be a space in nature such as your garden or a local park.
When choosing and creating your space I feel it’s important to take into consideration your own creative needs, how much control you have over the space, as well as the kind of environment that will support your concentration as well as your intuitive heart expression.
Time of Day
The truth is that we don’t always get to choose when inspiration will strike, and speaking from personal experience, we will definitely not always feel creatively motivated either. When we’re working on a specific creative project or within a certain timeframe however, we don’t always have the luxury of waiting; waiting to feel inspired, waiting to feel motivated, waiting for the energy, or waiting to know how it’s all going to come together.
Creative rituals are a beautiful opportunity for you to take responsibility for your own creative dreams and goals, to understand and move with your unique creative cycles and rhythms, and to then take aligned action in a way that feels nurturing for your heart.
A part of designing your unique creative rituals to enhance creative flow is building an awareness around when you feel most creatively alive and inspired throughout the day. You could ask yourself…
What time of day feels most inspiring and most safe?
What kind of weather conditions make me feel creatively activated?
What mood or emotions do these conditions evoke within me, and how can I harness the beauty and power of these emotions within my creative practise?
Understanding the best time(s) of day for your creative practise will also support you in decreasing your procrastination tendencies, as well as soothing those feelings of guilt, overwhelm, discomfort, and resistance that can often arise when we are moving through our creative process.
Lighting
We can think of lighting in both a practical sense (having sufficient lighting to actually see the details of what we’re creating), as well as in a sensual and emotive sense (the effect that lighting has on our emotional state). Thinking about how much lighting you need and also what type of lighting will best support you in creating a space and process that feels both safe and evoking for your creative expression.
Natural lighting, synthetic lighting, or perhaps candlelight… asking yourself which option would support you the most to drop in to your creative flow state, and which option could best cultivate a connection or natural passageway between this world and the one you’re creating?
Lighting was certainly a significant component of my creative process writing Once Were Wounds. Because most of my writing happened during the late afternoons and evenings in winter, I loved to have very dim and minimal lighting in my space. It was a soft and yellow light that would often come from lamps as opposed to overhead lighting, and the addition of candlelight always made the space feel romantic and sensual as well… perfectly aligned with the creative energy of the collection.
Scent
Engaging mindfully with the scents surrounding us is a creative ritual I deeply love to incorporate within my creative process. It’s also a creative exercise I’ve included in my sensual Twelve Days of Creativity journey (You can download your complementary Twelve Days of Creativity calendar here).
Scent is a gorgeous way of elevating and enhancing our creative environment… invigorating and opening our senses to receive inspiration and fresh ideas.
Aroma is deeply arousing and inspiring, summoning emotions and sensations that can potentially be infused as words or colours, textures, themes or landscapes within your creation. You might like to infuse your creative space with the fragrance of a scented candle, incense, a gentle room spray or a diffuser.
For example, dropping in to a creative flow state can potentially be facilitated by lighting incense such as Palo Santo and lovingly spreading it throughout our space and around our body. When using Palo Santo we are intentionally clearing our aura, opening a channel to meet our creative energy with a sense of clarity, trust and transparency. By cleansing ourselves and our space with Palo Santo we are consciously beginning our creative practise with a blank canvas, enabling us to perceive our creation from new angles and fresh perspectives.
Sound
Silence? Music? Ambient noise? Rainfall or ocean waves? I really do believe that the sounds surrounding us in our creative space can have a pivotal impact on our ability to concentrate and feel intimately connected with our practise and with our creation. Sound can affect how grounded we feel in our creative process, and how creatively accessible and attuned we are with inspiration.
As a part of my creative ritual, sound can completely envelope me within my creativity, and it also has the power to inspire my creative direction. Sound becomes an embodiment of our creative energy, and it has a profound influence and impact on the overall essence of what we’re creating.
I encourage you to be really curious and mindful about what sounds feel most supportive for you and your creative flow. What sounds support you in feeling focussed, purposeful, playful and in flow? What type of sound evokes the vibration or frequency of your creative project, and fosters the energy or emotions you’re intentionally channeling?
Movement
I believe that our creative channels, our capacity to receive inspiration, as well as to hold compassion for ourselves within our creative process, requires an abundance of spaciousness and presence. We need to feel grounded and rooted within our body, as well as a sense of safeness and stability within our physical environment.
Designing a simple movement ritual around your creative practise is a gorgeous opportunity to release physical, mental and emotional tension within your being, enabling you to experience a sense of peace, fluidity, softness, lightness and creative freedom.
Movement not only supports us in loosening our muscles, but it also loosens and relaxes the mind and creates a more expansive space within our brain for our creative energy to breathe and experiment, to swim and flow. A movement ritual could look like dancing, yoga, stretching, running, cycling, walking, swimming, or anything in between. It could also look like a breathwork exercise.
Asking yourself, what form of movement makes you feel most present and clear within your mind and body?
Through ritual we are nurturing a sense of inner safeness and sanctuary, allowing more space to move with gentleness and ease throughout our creative process, as well as face any fear or resistance that might present itself along the way with trust and compassion. Through ritual we are intentionally texturing our creative environment with evocative stimulates and sensual symbolism that are designed to nurture a divine connection between with ourselves and our creative energy.
I would just love to reassure you and remind you that you are the leader of your own creative process. You can consciously choose to experiment with the rituals that feel most naturally intriguing and seductive to you. Approaching the selection and preparation of your creative rituals as an experiment, allowing room for changes to be made and for a sense of spontaneity to take place is all a part of the creative process. What feels good for you and your creativity today, might not feel so great tomorrow and that’s completely fine.
I believe it is a matter of taking what you need to feel nourished and supported, and leaving behind anything that doesn’t feel in alignment with where you are right now. Keeping it simple while remaining intentional can still evoke the depth, connection and richness you’re longing to experience within your creative practise, and within the beautiful creation of your wholehearted life as well.
With Love,
Stephanie xx
Journey A Little Deeper…