Creativity is the alchemy that transmutes suffering into expression, fear into inspiration, and loss into legacy. It enables us to tenderly hold life’s contradictions — the beauty amidst the destruction, the joy coexisting with the despair.

I'm hosting an online creative circle for Walking in This World, and you're invited to join me. Walking in This World is the second book in The Artist's Way series, a time-tested process for creative recovery and growth created by writer Julia Cameron.

When I picked up The Artist’s Way in 2018, I didn't realise how it would impact my life. I had known about the book since around the time it was published. Over the years, I would see well-loved copies lying around friends’ houses and art studios.

Famous quotes about creativity. Read what artists, writers, scientists, entrepreneurs, spiritual leaders, and psychologists have said about the challenges and rewards of creativity.

How many times have we hidden our inner dreams?

Hidden them from others out of fear we'd be judged or discouraged, or be flatly dismissed with the words ‘you can’t just do what you want’.

Have you ever stopped yourself short from fully throwing yourself into making something, worried it will get messy Maybe you keep thinking about the thing you want to make, or say, or do, but you never get started.

When we receive a creative impulse, it can come through quickly. When it arrives, it doesn’t always make sense in that neat kind of way. And when we spend time with our ideas, developing them through the creative process, meaning can be fluid. We’ll start one place and end up someplace radically different.

I recently wrote about how I'm inspired by the calm energy of kaizen, an approach that requires making small, continuous changes over time. I’m playing with methods to develop habits and behaviours to create change in my life. For a few weeks, I experimented by trying out different habits to support my creative exploration, purpose, and well-being.

At the close of last year, I completed The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, a book and self-study program developed by Julia Cameron in the 1990s. The course helped me reclaim my identity as an artist and return to my passions with new energy and confidence. At the start of the course, Cameron introduces a few exercises to repeat over the 12 weeks.

Growing up, my teachers encouraged me to draw as an act of exploration. To let my eyes trace a line, not looking down at my drawing, but instead looking at what I was attempting to represent. I’d let my drawing unfold outside my frame of vision.

As this year kicks off, I’m experimenting with methods to weave new habits and creative behaviours into my daily routine. I'm inspired by the calm energy of kaizen, an approach that requires making small, continuous changes over time.

After spending my life surrounded by highly creative people, I’ve realised creativity is a mindset, not just a process of exploring and making. Could it be possible that creative people’s brains really do work differently?