Creative intuition is the ability to quickly identify valuable or useful creative ideas without conscious thought. As with all intuition, it is described as instantaneous without any conscious understanding of how the mind created the idea. –Simplicable
Intuition is Creative
Back when I was first truly starting on my spiritual journey, I worked through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way with a small group of women. Cameron encourages you to slowly begin exploring your feelings about creativity.
I’d done fairly well in art classes in middle school. But by high school I was a typically petulant teenager and stopped taking art classes: I had to go to college and get a job, after all. Art was not for people like me.
But by the mid-90s I had started meditating regularly, and used the gentle nudging of Cameron’s writing to explore creativity. Sure, Cameron made suggestions, but it was up to me to decide what to try. A friend suggested craypas, and boy, that was all it took.
I created craypas drawing after craypas drawing – just playing with the texture and colors, not following any specific rules and not hoping for a really good grade or someone’s approval. Remarkably, most drawings explored the images and feelings that came to me during meditation.
It was purely intuitive drawing. Listen to what Picasso said about intuition:
I don’t have a clue. Ideas are simply starting points. I can rarely set them down as they come to my mind. As soon as I start to work, others well up in my pen. To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing… When I find myself facing a blank page, that’s always going through my head. What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas. -Picasso
You may not be Picasso, but you can definitely be creative. Grab some crayons and paper. Sit quietly, and then just color. Ignore the rules, and just do what feels right.
It OK to do what feels right to you. The idea is to figure out what you do all on your own, without an art teacher grading you or friends critiquing you.
Poetry is Heaven Whispering
I’ve always been a poet; heck I even won a poetry award in high school. But in my 30s, fell in with some amazing poets in Athens, Georgia, and created remarkable poetry.
In poetry, words slip and slide like colors on a painting, like craypas or watercolor. I just followed what was my unique way of using words and fellow poets encouraged me to “just do me.”
The ‘Morning Pages” technique of Julia Cameron gets me going. I simply sit down, take a pen in my hand, and start writing whatever shows up. Usually I’m whining about the fact that it’s early and I’m tired and don’t know what to write or why I’m bothering to write.
But then magic happens, and the voice shifts.
There is a marked shift in the writing. It’s whiny and then -poof! It’s clear and beyond competent. Look at these divine words that simply flowed out of me one morning on it’s own.
Creativity Is Intuition
Once you’ve tried your hand at a little creativity (whether it’s craypas or poetry – or your favorite creative endeavor,) it eventually becomes easy to intuit everything and anything. Want to add a garden to your back yard? Sit in the backyard at different times of the day and feel what would make you happy. Just listen to your heart, and you’ll know exactly what to do.
What creative practices do you do? How do you use your intuition when being creative?
