Art and Soulie Spot 6

Stories from the Creative Path

Musings on Creativity from the multi-faceted Becky Ridge

What follows are Words by Becky and Images by Sally:

Listening
(aka GListening)
Sally Swain © original art

Finding that space of stillness…

Imagination is cultivated in an environment of stillness and timeless rest. A settling into one’s core.

 

Child Psychiatrist, Winnicott, says that one’s sense of self is consolidated during periods of quiescence. In fact boredom is a welcome relief to our constant striving ‘busyness’.

There is a parasympathetic connection within this process as well that allows a pause, a digesting and absorbing of the nutrients of life. When our nervous system can just ‘be’ slowly finding that deep stillness of flow as if floating on a gentle ocean’s wave. Rocking into quiet and grace integrating on a cellular, as well as an intellectual level.

Here lies the bedrock of imagination.

This is also called the warming-up phase. If we constantly move from spontaneity into creativity and then into warming up again, there is no breath of life to both appreciate and to rest in the activity.

Dreamboat
Sally Swain © original art

This “core of the unbound self” returns us to the sacred beginnings of our human form when the notochord, that first organic beginning of our body self comes into shape and form. The core is the channel of communication and spaciousness within the nervous system and the fluid systems of the body. Here within our inner ocean, we find the pause of space to meditate, draw, or create as the wings of our imagination unfurl with soft delight.

Our self or soul is free to exist and play awaiting discovery and awakening within this core while providing the depth for inspiring an individual’s creativity and spontaneity.

Float
Sally Swain © original art

Find that space of emptiness to enjoy that deep sense of floating in the timeless rest of deep stillness. AHHhhh sweet relief.

Rebecca M Ridge PhD. TEP, Integrative psychotherapist. Psychodrama Trainer. Author of The Body Alchemy of Psychodrama

And now back to your host:

I (Sally) was inspired by Becky’s s p a c i o u s expansiveness to recall a painting I did a couple of years back.
It’s called Neurocosmos.
I love the idea that the macro can be echoed in the micro and vice versa.

Becky talks of our inner ocean.
How about our inner galaxy?
I love that an image can capture the farthest reaches of Big Outer Space and at the same time, an under-the-microscope view of inside the body or brain.

Sing along with Joni Mitchell …’we are stardust…we are golden’…

Neurocosmos
Sally Swain © original art