One of my favorite quotes ever comes from the mystical desert painter, Georgia O’Keefe. And it goes like this:

“I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from a single thing that I wanted to do.”

I love Georgia for so many reasons. Her paintings of course. For most of my adult life I have had at least one of her mystically evocative and divinely feminine inspired nature and/or abstract prints hanging prominently somewhere in my home.

She and I also share a passionate love for the ancient red rock desert of New Mexico. AND very specifically the Ghost Ranch Conference Center in Abiquiu, NM where she lived for 35 years and where I held week long Wild Heart Painting retreats for 18 years.

And finally, we are both fiercely committed to the creative process in all of its many forms.

She lived a wildly unconventional life and did things her own way. Many of her paintings were the center of a great deal of controversy because they looked like a close up, in depth exploration of a woman’s vulva. And even though she denied that association vehemently in her public statements, it’s almost impossible to look at certain of her paintings and not see the gorgeous sensual details of a woman’s most intimate bodily part.

So that quote of hers about fear has always intrigued and inspired me.

Because it’s also how I have lived my life. I left my family home of Pittsburgh, PA when I was 24 years old, hitching a ride with a friend who was headed across the United States with a final destination of California, in a beat up old Volkswagen Beetle.

I didn’t know anything about California except that it was where the hippies lived. And I knew that the provincial values of the urban midwest no longer aligned with my desire something more. Even if I didn’t know exactly what that more looked like.

And that was just the beginning of taking risks doing scary things that called to my soul without a clear sense of what I was getting myself into.

I created a life here in California based on those somewhat partially formed yearnings for adventure, for healing, for self expression and even transcendence.

And California in the 1970’s delivered in ways that I could never have imagined.

The 1970’s in the SanFrancisco Bay area were a veritable cornucopia of personal growth and healing modalities. So I signed up for everything I could find from herbalism, to polarity therapy, to swedish massage, to Reichian breathwork to Zen Buddhism to the Enneagram, to meditation, to Native American sweatlodge ceremonies, and more. And took what I learned through these various approaches to becoming more whole, and healed so many personal patterns, traumas and belief systems that were keeping me small, constrained and disconnected from my true self.

One of the most important things I learned on these many journeys was to feel and value ALL of my emotions and to not judge any of them as good or bad. And I also learned that my feelings were not only the source of my power but my connection to my most alive truth.

I learned that I could actually safely fall apart in a sobbing ball of snot and tears and that it was possible to be held and loved and comforted.

I also learned that I could express my anger and even my rage and nobody would die and the world would not collapse. And that healthy relationships would actually grow deeper when I let myself be pissed off and express clearly when I felt unsafe or a boundary had been crossed.

But feeling my feelings took a tremendous amount of courage, because I grew up in a family where expressing ANY emotion brought shame and rejection. And I had to unlearn my belief that emotional expression meant I was weak and out of control.

Another thing I learned was that I was actually a highly creative person. And that expressing myself creatively was something that brought me not only great joy but could be a powerful spiritual practice, that opened me up to my deep intuitive knowing as well as allowing me to be nourished by the invisible spirit realms.

But this also took courage, because I had a nasty innner critic that tried to undermine my creative expression with every brushstroke and every word I wrote. So I had to face the fear of not being good enough that is really at the core of every inner critic attack.

And one thing I learned through doing all this inner work of facing my fear, my shame and my deep sense of unworthiness is that more than anything courage is a state of being. Courage is that willingness to be present to all those gnarly, sometimes painful places in my psyche from a place of curiosity and compassion. Courage doesn’t try to fix anything. Courage is simply an act of sacred witnessing to ancient wounds that are lodged in the unconscious mind as belief systems that are NEVER supposed to be questioned.

Then taking the next step of shifting that ancient script by breaking the rule that these things should never be questioned and actually becoming curious.

Which meant asking things like WHY do I feel so afraid of my feelings? Why do I believe that tears are something to be ashamed of? Why am I so convinced that my creativity is not worthwhile?

Through asking those questions getting to the lightbulb AH-HA moment that those attitudes and beliefs were taught to me. And realizing that they had been passed down to me through generations upon generations of my ancestors who all believed the same shit.

And those ancestors … for whatever reason… didn’t have the courage to challenge these beliefs. Maybe they didn’t have the support or the capacity to take this project on. Maybe it was just too dangerous to ask why about anything.

But things are different for me, and for many of us, now. There’s so much more information about how trauma works. And so many more tools for psychological and emotional healing.

As well as so much more understanding about how the systems of misogyny, patriarchy, white supremacy and colonialism have all contributed to creating and enforcing those belief systems that live like weird alien viruses in our minds and hearts, robbing us of our creativity and vitality. And our ability to make the world a better place.

Georgia was always a role model for me, reminding me that we need huge doses of creative courage in order to face ourselves boldly and to systematically dismantle any and all unquestioned beliefs so that we can free ourselves from the ancestral bondage that maintains those internal self doubting complexes that keep our creative genius selves all tied up in knots.

Allowing us to live our lives as wildly liberated creative beings once more.

One way to get a BIG dose of creative courage while being supported in a community of other courageous folks on the path of liberation is to join us for our upcoming painting retreat in the desert November 7-13, 2026!! 

For more info and to register, click on the image below.