Where does your creativity live?

Where do you feel like the bubbles of your creativity come from? From inside your skull, in the space between your ears? Or is there something more complex and embodied at play when we imagine?

We’ve been culturally conditioned to distrust the wisdom of our bodies. The Western philosophical split of the mind and the body, the world view entrenched when Descartes decided ‘I think, therefore I am’, gave priority to cold logic and rationality, pushing aside intuition and the felt sense. If we think of our bodies as ‘matter’, as machine-like and broken down into separate parts, then they are stifled into silence.

It seems we’ve internalised the duality of sentience and matter so deeply we can barely hear the whispers of our body communicating. But if we connect with our bodies as a single, sentient totality, intricately connected by our neuron-laden fascial network – then we can hear it’s intelligence. Connecting with body is connecting with intuition.

Intuition might be different from imagination, but they’re intimately linked. There’s the ‘gut feeling’ that an idea has potential, the heart flutter when you’re exposed to something new that shifts the foundations of your perception. Ideas ferment in deeply embodied states of movement or meditation where there is space for full body intelligence to make itself heard. Embodied creativity is a slow process, like all things that are worth doing tend to be. It’s not a lightbulb moment, more a slow sunrise of a realisation. We need to slow down so we can listen.

Embodied creativity needs time to nurture, it needs quiet space to expand – things that can be hard to find. It lives in slow movement, in intimate connection with the breath, in the liminal spaces of deep rest. It’s within your body to discover.