"Writing or painting and not sharing the result is like cooking a delicious meal and throwing it away” a great artist friend once told me. And this sentence struck the right chord and made me understand that "good and completed" is better than perfect.
As children, we were not inhibited to express our creativity: singing, dancing, drawing, playing music. We used to dream big, our imagination had no limits to what we thought we could accomplish. In some cases, parents and teachers encouraged our creative expression, and then often, somewhere growing older, we stopped. Stopping may have been caused by lack of time or external circumstances or by our own unconscious self-sabotage: the little voice whispering in our ears with a smile “you are not good enough. This is childish. Go and do something else. You should grow up. You will never make it…”
Being creative can be scary in a world that seems to value logic way more than imagination. And so creativity is kept inside for ourselves, a secret garden maybe too personal to share?
Horses are mirrors of our inner selves and they can help us reconnect with our creativity and reclaim our dreams.
Horses live in the now, and in their presence it is easier to stay in the now as well. In the company of horses we reconnect to our authentic self, to nature and the expression of who we are. Letting our creativity flow is vital. It is like playing: essential because it offers us the ideal space to learn, to grow, to smile, to wave aside the problems that are bogging us down, to find creative solutions to everyday challenges.
It is not necessary to be a professional artist or a genius: expressive art in any form is valuable in and for itself.
Spending time with the horses – my "hanging out with the horses" – prompts a light-hearted flow of creativity and frequently leads us to remember some form of expression we believed lost such as drawing or singing or shaping clay or writing poems or taking photographs. We can let our imagination roam without limits and we remain fully grounded at the same time.
The result is a healthy lift in our energy because we can express ourselves freely. Our rational mind may be putting up obstacles, like the idea that we are too old or do not have enough time, but horses are there to remind us to stay in the present and that this is enough.
In these moments the fear of not being accepted/acceptable or good enough dissipates because each creative act takes us into a space of beauty and authenticity, and in the end empowerment.
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