Creativity and Imagination at Play

We find and lose and find ourselves through creative expression.  Creativity and the myriad of ways that it comes to life in myself and others is what lights me up. It’s that same creative energy I see flowing so freely through children, even children who are struggling through their childhood. As a small child my home environment was largely an intense, unpleasant and unsafe place to be. I couldn’t physically leave that space as often as I would have liked. Before the age of 8 I had mastered the art of disappearing into my own world. A world created entirely out of my imagination. Children are amazing like that. My imagination was my first greatest escape from a reality which I had no escape.

Entire days, weeks, months, years of my life were spent pretending I was anything or anyone other than who I actually was. As an adult I have a wild imagination, as a child it was a survival skill. In the absence of love, reason and understanding children develop their own skills to cope with their life circumstance. In so many cases the very survival skills that children develop to get by become the stumbling blocks to growth into adulthood.

Thats why its sometimes painful for adults to allow themselves to feel their creative energy. The blocks we feel in our adult lives more often than not stem back to childhood experience/s in one way or another. This is why it is so important to create safe spaces that allow for the organic expression of creativity and the vulnerability that it brings up. We don’t just simply grow out of childhood wounds, they often shape our adult lives in ways in which we do not understand. Safe places to explore our own innate creativity is vital, creativity is one of our greatest human resources. I never miss an opportunity to share that truth with the children and adults around me.

The Creative Kind was born to create safe spaces and places for creativity and imagination to play. These are not things to be put away in adulthood but rather tools for living our whole lives. Creativity, imagination and play are paramount to living happy, healthy, wholehearted lives. We feel that people hold the key to their own understanding and that creative expression is a pathway to knowing, understanding and loving oneself. The question is not whether or not we are creative, its is…

How can we use our creativity to enhance our own lives?

Melanie Lee