How Our Relationships Impact Our Creative Life

Have you ever felt like your creative juices don’t flow? Or like you lack inspiration or energy to create something new? 

Now, to get to the answers to these questions, maybe try to remember when was the last time you allowed joy to enter into your life. When was the last time you allowed the relationships in your life to nurture and inspire your creativity.

Get in touch with the memories that made you feel ecstatic, radiant and full of joy. Who were the people accompanying you during those moments? What were you doing? Where were you? What activities or non-activities sparked that sensation of connection and inspiration to perhaps do or learn something new? 

Close your eyes for a moment while you relive these memories…

As you are reliving these memories, feel into how often moments like these are created in your day-to-day experience, or how often during the week you allow yourself the time and space to create and re-create these feelings. This is key to creativity.

There are two key words here: joy and relationships. They go hand by hand. We are supposed to live our relationships in joy. Of course relationships can sometimes be challenging and that is also part of growth. When a relationship is not nurturing or lived in joy, it can cause the opposite effect. It can drain our energy and our creative juices dry up. We don’t feel inspired or safe to express.  However, challenging moments can also inspire creativity as a way of healing but I will talk about this in a different post. In this one, I will focus on the impact of positive relationships have in sparking our creative expression.

It is like the rule of 80/20 or the Pareto Principle. This principle states that “for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the "vital few")*. This principle can be applied to anything in life. If applied to our relationships, we can measure how beneficial or detrimental they are to our life and how they can impact our creative flow. Our relationships can be challenging 20% of the time and that is ok because 80% of the time they are nurturing and inspiring. If, on the contrary, they are 80% of the time challenging and only 20% of the time safe and inspiring, they will be detrimental to our creativity and expansion. It is a simple principle that gives a clear innerstanding and guidance on how to let our creativity’s flow be impacted by our relationships. If a relationship drains and dries our creative flow, it is not a relationship we should cultivate in the long run because it will also have a negative impact in other areas of our life. 

When creativity is not safely expressed and witnessed, it will impact our wellbeing, mental health and will stop our expansion. It is like a domino effect that starts with ourselves, gets impulsed by the relationships in our lives and comes back to ourselves either feeling depleted or blooming. 

Creativity is not only about knowing how to paint, sing, dance or play an instrument. Creativity is also about creating memories with the people in our life that we are going to cherish in our long term memory and that is going to inspire us to improve our lives and expand our self-expression. 

Creativity is all about self-expression, however this may come for you. Perhaps you would like to cook a big dinner to bring your friends over and create connections. Perhaps you decide you want to decorate your room differently or you want to invite your friends for an arts and craft evening. However you decide to express yourself, creativity flows when people get together to share their unique stories and expressions of their true self while being fully heard and held in their expression.

It is not a small thing that indigenous tribes get together to sing and dance as part of their traditions. They celebrate the small things, always in gratitude and appreciation for each other’s presence and the best way they express this is through music; singing and moving their bodies, laughing and in joy. They are continuously connected to Nature which is the main source of inspiration for their chants and development of inner wisdom. They expand their families by joining and matching with other families. They rarely experience feelings of loneliness or isolation. They are a big community and they stick together through the thick and thin of life’s journey.

Why do we do it differently in the big cities? It is mainly because we are disconnected from Nature. We forgot how to be in alignment with Nature’s rhythms because we disconnected from our bodies’ cycles to meet the system’s needs rather than our own biological needs. This creates separation and isolation. We don’t make quality time to develop intimate relationships where we can safely express our own inner reality. This inevitably has an impact on our creative expression. 

If we don’t have a safe space where we can share our truth, our dreams, our experiences in life; all of that is doomed to wither. If we don’t give an outlet to our creative expression, we feel depressed, imprisoned and purposeless. If we don’t nurture our relationships we are cut off from a great source of inspiration to create and express the life we want. We ultimately won’t nurture and cultivate that safe space we utterly need to be able to express freely and authentically with others. 

We need the relationships we create with others because they are the witnesses of our experience. We need people to witness our experience, not as a source of validation but as a way of sharing our existence in this world, and others benefitting from our own unique creative gifts. When we share our gifts with others, they feel inspired to share their voice too. It is a beneficial chain that never cuts off when it is constantly binded by our relationships’ expansion.  

Developing the connections that we already have and creating new ones will always be the bridge between our inner world and how we externally manifest it. 

Being in Nature is our true Nature and the Nature of our relationships and our creativity. We are naturally creators, even though societal norms conditioned us to believe otherwise. 

*https://www.juran.com/blog/a-guide-to-the-pareto-principle-80-20-rule-pareto-analysis/