As a teacher of creative process, I feel that it’s not my business to try to describe what you will find beyond the known and beyond the mundane. The mystic knows they cannot convey to another exactly what they have seen. But they can try to offer tools, directions, and maps of sorts—and hope something comes of that.
I could say something similar about an artist. An artist cannot show you directly “art” in its fullness. They can create something and share it with you with the intention that it opens something in you. Neither the artist nor the viewer is fully in control of the impact; instead, the artist tries to reveal a door where there was only a wall previously within the viewer.
If, as a dharma teacher, I try to tell you what freedom looks like—how it’s going to feel and how it’s going to be—then that’s setting up a kind of barricade for you. If I give the impression that a free person acts this way and expresses their emotions that way, then I’m not really talking about freedom; I’m sharing my languaging of things, my preferences. As a creative process teacher, I prefer not to give projects, prompts, or art methods. I don’t like to suggest materials or do demonstrations. I prefer to leave it really open. So far, I’ve chosen to teach without the sharing of artwork. So no critiques of or commenting on or praising of each other’s work. Yeah, I’m totally, on one level, curious about what people are making and doing. I love art; I love poetry; I love it all. But when I ask to hear about how it felt for you to make it, vs. asking to see what you made, I’m trying to serve your path above all else. And through this sharing of basic principles (the tools of opening what is closed), I am pointing to something far more valuable than my praise or another’s praise. Success comes and goes, but an enlivened and engaging creative process is an endless source of joy and meaningfulness.
When I do share specifics (about how things felt for me, about how they looked for me, about what opened up for me) I try to always do it very clearly from the perspective of myself, my life, my history, my story. Not because I think I’m so great. But because it’s a clear way of illustrating something around the potential impact of these tools. How do they open up in a life? Because they always and only open something up within the specificity of someone’s life and creative process. The tools are meaningless on their own; their beauty and value can seen through what they’ve made possible within an individual’s life and process. In these sessions, sharing about our process is strongly encouraged. There are some things we can see and learn about art and the creative process only through the ways that we feel it frees us.
From my perspective, spiritual art is not defined by how it looks, or whether or not it falls into a certain set of aesthetics. And for me, that’s really important—this was confusing to me for a long time. Not that I thought about it overtly, but I had this kind of idea of what spiritual art would look like. It would be very, I don’t know, very simple. It would be very peaceful. It would probably be very abstract. I don’t know where I got that idea, but I definitely had it. None of these things, I think, are really part of what is interesting about this exploration for me. It’s how can your creative process free you at the root? How does it open your sense of who you are? How does it open your sense of what this human life is?
One last thing to say is that when I teach in this area of art practice/mystical practice I don’t worry in the same way about keeping my personality in view, or sharing on that personal level in the same way I would teaching dharma. I feel more like a co-explorer than a teacher within this subject, or a kind of process coach. Because it’s really clear to me that those drawn to creative exploration already know what is essential, what is primary. They have already experienced being in relationship with the mystery that is revealed through art and through creative process. Even those who long in some way to create but don’t consider themselves artists are being pulled by something they already recognize or remember. What is most valuable in this domain of exploration can only be experienced directly through one’s own creative process.