Guest Blog with Anita Chari
I’m truly excited to be joining the SomaSpace community and to have the chance to share my work with you. Over the next two months, I’ll be publishing a series of blog posts to introduce you to the principles of my Embodying Creativity program, which I’ll be teaching in my upcoming classes at SomaSpace. Throughout my posts, I’ll share with you my journey of learning about these tools, which I believe are essential for connecting to a paradigm of creativity, health, and sustainability. Every two weeks I’ll introduce a new concept from my work, along with tools and exercises every few days that you can use in your daily practice. I invite you to share your thoughts and questions with me along the way at [email protected] or find me on Instagram, @anita.chari.embody, and stay tuned for new exercises, videos, and tools for your creative practice and wellbeing. I’m also offering a 25% discount on private sessions for new clients during the month of January, so please don’t miss this opportunity to start your year off from a place of empowerment, purpose, and embodied stillness!
Each and every one of us is a being that emerged out of nothing, from stillness. If we take a moment to really consider this, we can see that each of us, at the core of our being, is inherently a creative process, a dynamic movement of becoming. Without struggle, without trying, we are already creative just because we are here. No matter what we choose to do in our lives, we are in a continual process of self-renewal and self-creation. Just as in our first moments of life, as embryos, one of the first gestures of our being after fertilization is a long period of stillness before our cells divide into more and more complexity. Within this stillness, in which we do absolutely nothing, potency builds—we are nothing but our creative potential.
Long after these early moments of life, it can be incredibly difficult to connect with the felt sense of our inherent creativity. So much of the time we struggle to feel passionately in contact with the desires we have for empowerment and expression. Trauma from childhood, accelerated living, technology, ambivalent relationships, and unprocessed emotions all contribute to a sense of unease and disconnection from how our creativity wants to express itself. For a long time, I struggled with the connection between my personal trauma and my creative expression. Like many creative people, the source of my stories, my music, and my expression seemed to flow from a place of wounding that I needed to express. For me, as a child of Indian immigrants living in the US, it was a childhood of alienation in a culture where I felt foreign and excluded that was the source of my pain. And yet this painful imprinting also threatened to silence my voice. This is a paradox that I think many of us struggle with: Our life struggles are the source of our creativity, yet if we don’t know how to resolve those experiences in a healthy way, our expression can’t come to fruition.
As part of my personal journey, understanding the connection between creativity and trauma has become my passion and my path. I’ve worked for more than a decade to learn about how to transform personal and collective trauma through creativity. The result of my work is a process called Embodying Creativity that brings together embodied practices, trauma resolution, and creative work. This program fuses my experience as a somatic practitioner, published author, musician, and academic to teach you how to resolve the trauma that you hold in your body that impacts your experience of wellbeing and creativity, causes anxiety, and cuts you off from the energy that fuels your creative path. In the coming months, I’ll be offering drop-in classes, private sessions (on Skype and in-person at SomaSpace), and intensive weekend workshops in this work. I invite you to join me to find a deeper level of vitality, expression, and health in your work and in your body.
In this series of posts and, at a deeper level, in my upcoming classes on Embodying Creativity, you will learn:
~ How traumatic events in our lives manifest as “imprinting,” as energy held in the physical body that limits creativity and wellbeing.
~ Techniques for resolving traumatic imprints from your history that will amplify your emotional and physical health, calm your nervous system, and rejuvenate your creative process.
~ Resources to bring the inherent health of your nervous system online in times of stress and creative blockage, allowing you to use more of your energy toward your creative goals.
~ Tools for understanding your own unique “creative sequencing,” that will allow you to magnify your creative potential in every phase of your process.
~Concepts for understanding the fundamental connection between creativity, relationships, and health.
I’ve been fortunate on my journey to have learned these tools that attune us to the creative process and that facilitate emotional and relational healing. Creativity is healing, because it allows us to resolve patterns from our history and to create something new. We meet ourselves and our world in a deeper way through bringing new possibilities into being. And healing is creative. Because it can only happen when we liberate ourselves from the limited perspective of our wounding to have a new experience of the world.
Creativity is a physical and ethereal process of the unseen coming into form. Like birth, it is often painful. In the creative process we are compressed and expanded, rocked with contractions. We wait in stillness, afraid that we will never get to the other side. And then when we complete something, despite the struggle, we are seduced to begin again.
Join me for upcoming evening classes at SomaSpace (4050 NE Broadway Street Portland, Oregon 97232):
Friday, January 17, 2020, 7-10 pm, $35 pre-registration (receive a 25% discount for taking the 4-class series)
Friday, February 21, 2020, 7-10 pm, $35 pre-registration
And if you know someone who could benefit from this work, please do share this post with them, or better yet, come on over to anitachari.com to subscribe to my list for weekly resources and reflections for your wellness practice! You can contact me at [email protected] for more information, to register for classes (drop-ins welcome) and to schedule private in-person or Skype sessions.