Trusting Creative Desires is Equal to Trusting Our Bodies

You may be in a space where you constantly get confused about your creative motivations, desires, or process. If you grew up not being allowed to follow and trust your creative nature or natural inclination to explore and discover, or you were shot down and forced to do what someone else wanted you to do, or you were shunned or redirected from doing what felt natural, you can have trouble bringing creative endeavors to fruition.

You may constantly question your creative impulses because you didn’t learn how to trust your body. If you weren’t able to create a relationship to your body; and explore and trust your body, then this can show up as an entrepreneur and creator when you receive creative impulses. Your creative impulses run into all the harbored fear and trauma.

If you spent a lot of time growing up not being allowed to trust your body, you can learn not to trust your natural creativity, too.  You may ask, “Is this mine”? “Is this genuine”? “Is this meant to be shared”? “Is it even worth sharing?” “Will I get in trouble for this?”.

If you reflect back (feeling safe enough to do so) to childhood,  were you encouraged to follow creative pursuits consistently and safely? Did you experience environments that were not safe for expression? Were you allowed to trust your child intuition and create? If not, this may have followed you into your entrepreneurial and creative endeavors. You shoot down your genius before even bringing it out to the world, because that’s what was done to you at such a young age.

You have creative sparks and hits of intuitive genius and downloads of entrepreneurial fire and then you squash, shun, or question it because you don’t know how to nurture it, since it wasn’t necessarily nurtured for you in the past.  We were trained to feel and think that our intuitive genius didn’t mean anything, so we now have that relationship with it as creative adults. This may not have even showed up as directly correlated to creative pursuits, but could have showed up in wanting to express ourselves in other creative ways; with friends, in the kitchen, or in some other capacity that felt natural, but we were not allowed to do so. Brute-force is not a nurturing activity.

Learning to trust ourselves, our desires, motivations, and inclinations is directly related to trusting and learning to trust our creative process.

Here’s how this showed up for me in this work I am sharing with you right now about trauma-informed entrepreneurship/creativity with this Transforming Trauma project: For years I felt I was meant to do this work in some way, shape or form. Read that again: I FELT it. But my mind interjected: How can that even be possible? Are you sure you can trust that? This can’t be real. My mind did everything it could to keep me in safety. My body reacted with extreme dysregulated responses. So I got confused. I didn’t share my healing journey with people that could have benefitted along the way. Because I didn’t trust my body or my creative process and unique, intuitive downloads.

What isn’t nurtured genuinely and gently, goes into hiding…waiting until it’s safe enough to show itself. But unless we become conscious of how we still feel unsafe, even if we are no longer in an unsafe environment, then we perpetuate the same un-safeness and never share the full genius of our creativity.

If you grew up experiencing abuse of any kind, creativity takes the back-burner. Your focus becomes survival. It’s hard to create in survival mode. It can happen that these creative pursuits get buried way down. So as an adult you are getting these creative PINGS like a soul Instant Message, and it’s coming up against your experience of complex trauma, physical dysregulation, and potential mental health challenges.

Learning to trust our creative hits and entrepreneurial tendencies is equally related to us trusting our bodies. Our souls and minds have deep wisdom and creativity trying to come forward in this life. Your body exists to serve you in these pursuits. But first, you need to tune in real deeply to what these creative tendencies may be smacking against that is no longer part of your REAL-ity now.

Some ways to check-in about this can include:

  • If it’s not harming or hurting you or anyone else in any way, it’s likely a worthy pursuit, creative inspiration, or endeavor that you can trust.
  • Usually what’s happening here is DEEP FEARS of criticism, judgement, and repercussions. That what you are doing is bad and you will be punished for it. Are the repercussions you fear “real” anymore? Can you get in trouble now? To your body, repercussions may feel very real. But if you are no longer in an environment where repercussions are dealt, you are no longer in direct harm.
  • Sit with yourself and ask, “Is this coming from a pure place?” Trust what you hear and feel. You can even ask, what darkness may be leading me to share this? You’ll likely be shown the darkness you fear doesn’t exist. It’s not actually about your creation, it’s about how you feel; the fear and dysregulation in your body.

Working  through our creative processes can help us work through and process fears and beliefs that trigger dysregulated nervous system responses.

Some of the fearful thought patterns that present for me when I am talking myself out of a deeply creative and unique pursuit include:

The feeling of anxiety and shame. How this presents in relation to me sharing my insight around trauma-informed creativity/entrepreneurship is the actual shame around the very thing I am sharing. Shame about my actual story. What’s the shame in a story? There is none, but I feel the shame in my body as if there is something to be shameful of. Here I am, doing my best to share my process anyway!

I don’t want to be seen as a victim. ‘If I share about traumatic experiences and mental health, people will see me as a victim or think I am ‘playing the victim’. And I just can’t have that! Here I am, doing my best to share my process anyway!

What’s the point? At times in this creative process I can feel a despairing recurring physical sensation and simultaneous thought come to my mind: What’s the point of this? It’s going to be shunned. It FEELS bad. But as I write this, I can tell that is coming from fear, and that’s all I need to know in this moment to keep on going.

Own and share your story without the disempowering stories you tell about yourself in the process.

That ^ is a process. But you can start tapping into the mental loop that is going off in your head and the resulting feelings in your body as you create. Take it slow, though. You don’t need to brute-force your way through to the expression of your creative endeavor. Treat yourself kindly through this process. Get to know your body as you create. Feel the fears that come up, telling you that it’s not worth it. The erratic feelings you may be experiencing that are tricking you into thinking this is somehow bad for you.

Learn to trust your body while you learn to trust your creative genius.