I recently had a conversation with a beloved long time student who I hadn’t seen in awhile.

We were reminiscing aout the first time we met about 15 years ago when a friend of hers brought her to one of my weeklong wild heart painting retreats. And she shared with me how coming to that workshop was like diving into a deep pool of creative waters that allowed her to quench a desperate thirst that she didn’t even know she had.

She was the expressing the archetype of the starving artist, but not in the traditional sense of the artist who isn’t making enough money from selling their art. She was actually starving herself from making art and by coming to the retreat she fed that hunger to be creative again.

For many moons she made a yearly pilgrimage to that same retreat, guaranteeing that she would feed her creative soul at least once every revolution around the sun.

But then life got busy and she stopped coming to those workshops. And as we talked she revealed that she hadn’t been creative hardly at all since then. I asked her how she dealt with that creative longing and she told me that she kept appeasing her creative self by telling her she would get to her creativity “later.” Always later. And of course, later still hadn’t arrived.

By naming that pattern of appeasing her creative self with false promises, she got in touch with a profound sadness over how she had been neglecting this core aspect of her being for so long. And had been tricking herself into thinking she was addressing that need by the bullshit story of later.

Of course, I challenged her to think about how she could change that story of later to NOW. And she realized that she actually could make time in her schedule to take an art class she had been wanting to participate in for a long while.

This pattern of creative neglect is all too common among creative types. And we each have our own bag of sneaky strategies that we employ to silence that creative longing.

So my question for you is how do YOU keep your creative hungers at bay? How long has that been going on? How do you feel about that when you allow yourself to recognize that is happening? And are you ready to make a commitment to stop putting off your creative needs and begin feeding yourself today?

And if you’re ready to feed your creative self again, I have a fabulous opportunity coming up on Saturday, August 15th at my one day Into The Deep Online Wild Heart Painting Workshop.

Click on the button below for more information.