Nancy Mills, the founder of the Spirited Woman Approach to Life, has put together a fun, user-friendly blog, www.TheSpiritedWomanBlog.com, where you can subscribe to her fabulous free newsletter, sign-up for the popular Spirited Woman Workshop (we’ve hosted several at Creative Juices Arts), connect with other spirited women, and tell the world why you feel you are a spirited woman.
Nancy recently interviewed Chris. Here is Nancy’s introduction to the interview, followed by the interview itself.
SPIRITED WOMAN Q & A with Chris Zydel
by Nancy Mills
Last year I led a workshop in Berkeley, and one by one, these enlightened and remarkable women walked through the door. Chris Zydel was one of those women. Tall, charismatic, with a smile that lights up a room, Chris really got into the workshop, and told us about her pretty amazing life. She left Pittsburgh about 30 years ago, drove solo to California, started her own house cleaning business, put herself through graduate school, got married for the first time at 44 to a man 13 years younger, and basically lives her life to the fullest.
Chris, 52, is also the dynamic owner of Creative Juices Arts, a thriving “creativity center” which is housed in this grand (and very cool!) old Victorian house in Oakland, where she teaches wild heart painting classes, leads women groups and healing circles, does counseling (she’s got a Masters Degree in Clinical Counseling), and is an evolutionary astrologer. She also takes women (and men) on wonderful growth retreats in Hawaii, Santa Fe, and Northern California.
One of the major threads in her life is her work with creativity and it’s use as a healing tool. Basically, a renaissance woman of creativity – she paints, dances, writes, cooks, is a photographer, therapist, and healer – Chris works in all forms of creativity, teaching others to create such things as spirit boxes, collages, and masks. Her radical approach to teaching creativity is just that – radical – and it deserves attention from one and all. And I think after reading what she has to say, your eyes will be opened to a new window into your own creative soul.
Now, as I said, earlier, grab your creative crystal ball and read this totally inspiring interview!
Q. Chris, what is the basic philosophy of Creative Juices Arts?
A. Creativity is part of our hard wiring. We are born with it, and it is part of our natural birthright. Our basic philosophy is that creativity is something that is really essential for spiritual and psychological growth and self-awareness and that it is an under-utilized tool for psychological growth and self-awareness. We provide the environment, the support and the permission for people to be creative and to learn to use it for the goal of healing and for the goal of getting in touch with their inner world and inner life, not just focusing on product, or technique, or skill. We support people in recognizing that creativity is not just about being commercial and making money, it is really related to the capacity to re-new yourself, and to regain your passion and intensity of life.
Q. What does it mean to paint from the wild heart?
A. Again, there’s that whole inner world and that whole inner life that everybody has – that connection to your soul. And that connection to your soul is something that can be very wild. And there’s that whole inner world that is mysterious – it’s the world of the unconscious, the world of the dream, of the dreamtime, and in that world you can do anything without consequence. So you can paint yourself having anything that you want. You can paint yourself flying or as a goddess or just really letting your imagination fly and your imagination flow exploring all the different wild places inside of you, because that sense of wildness is something that we are not encouraged to have. Within that wild heart painting you can do whatever it is that you want.
Q. You say you’ve developed a radical approach to teaching creativity – what is it?
A. What most of us learn about creativity is that it belongs to just a few people. Few people get to have talent, or be the artist in the society, and everybody else’s job is to just sit around to be passive, to be observers, to be the audience. So part of my radical approach is the notion that everybody is creative and you don’t have to have skill or talent, the way our culture defines it. Creativity is not skill. Skill and technique are very different from creativity itself. And the final thing is radical self-acceptance, which is what I encourage people to do when they are being creative and to accept everything that comes out of them without judgment. To create and express with an attitude of absolute acceptance, which allows people to experience a great deal of self-love and also encourages them to embrace all the different parts of themselves. We work a lot with the voice of the inner-critic, and how you learn the difference between listening to your own intuitive and that critical voice that shuts you down and stops you from being creative.
Q. What advice would you give us to get in touch with our intuitive, creative self on a daily basis?
A. The main thing is to make the commitment to do it and to make a decision about what it is you want to do. You want to choose something that you feel drawn towards. But, first of all I would advise you to make it simple. Do something like writing – because you can easily get a pad of paper and a pen or get some crayons or get some chock pastels and a piece of paper and just start doing art that way. Or another really nice thing to do – instead of doing a writing journal is to do a visual journal – get a journal, some crayons, a few magazines, maybe you do a little bit of collage – and you do it every day – maybe 15 or 20 minutes – just so you are doing it every day. And then the next thing that is really important is to practice curiosity, being curious about what is coming out of you rather than judging it, because the judgment is the thing that kills creativity. What I tell people is that I can’t teach them to be creative, all I can do is to tell them how to get out of their own way.
Q. What if someone considers herself creatively challenged?
A. Feeling creatively challenged, you are really listening to the voice of the critic, and that voice is telling you, you can’t do it. That voice says no. It is the voice of limitation. So creativity is really the way out of that – it breaks you out of that box. If you’re thinking that you are creatively challenged – it’s not really about creativity per se, it’s really about ways that you are thinking about yourself and keeping yourself small. What I would encourage you to do is to face that voice down and say, no, that’s not true.
Q. Tell us about your personal growth creativity retreats – what are they like, where are they and what do women do on them?
A. These are one of my favorite things. I hold them in really beautiful parts of the country so that you’re surrounded by the land and the beauty and the inspiration of where you are. I have three a year. One is in Hawaii in May, another is in New Mexico in September, and the third one is in northern California in January. They are relatively rustic – there are no phones, there is no television – it’s not like going to the Holiday Inn (she laughs) when you go on my retreats – but it’s a way to really go on retreat, because you’re not being stimulated by the outside world. The retreats mostly focus on painting from the wild heart and I encourage a sense of community – it’s usually between 10 and 14 women, so it’s relatively small. One of the ways I do that is every morning we do movement to music, and then we do a circle. Everyday we spend 2-3 hour sessions painting, and then we have time during the week for people to go off and play and explore. I also offer throughout the week a group process and then I do something that I call show & tell or talent night where people come up with some form of creative expression themselves.
Q. Chris, why do you feel you are a spirited woman?
A. I feel that I’ve really lived my life and done what I wanted in my life on my own terms in a lot of different ways. I’ve taken a lot of risks. I haven’t had a real job since 1977. I’ve worked for myself the whole time. I started out with a house cleaning business and used the money from that to subsidize my training as a healer, and then I went back to graduate school, became a therapist, and did various expressive arts trainings. I’m married to a man that’s 13 years younger than I am, and I feel very happy with the choices that I’ve made and feel like I have a very dynamic, colorful, full, rich, fulfilling life and I think that’s a definition of a spirited woman.
THANK YOU CHRIS. YOUR CREATIVITY ROCKS THE UNIVERSE.
This is a great article. I just wrote about something similar on one of my blogs. I really love the part about defying the critic! Thanks for sharing. You have a wonderful website, and blog. I shall return!