Navigating through common difficulties encountered on the creative path.

Luna is a poet and multidisciplinary artist who has worked across the fields of theater, puppetry, design, film and even circus. This little list only covers a portion of her creative experiences.

From an early age she was expressing complex emotions, like the emotion of confusion, using water colour paints.

She is no stranger to the creative journey and the different challenges and obstacles which can arise along the way.

We sat down and talked about finding the balance between self-time and social-time, how to manage the expectations we we bring to our own creative process, and some of the ways we can make space for our unique creative voice to come through.

This is Part 1 of my talk with Luna. Stay tuned for Part 2 which will be up next week.

Highlights and Takeaways

* It's a challenge trying to maintain the integrity of your own creative voice and market yourself at the same time.

* Making time to not do anything allows our minds to empty and provides the space for our creative voice to come to the surface.

* Creating space for yourself and maintaining social connections is a balancing act. Tuning into ourselves and asking, what do I need right now? Time with myself or time with others? ensures that we are filling ourselves with what we need in that moment.

* When we know the things which nourish and feed us creatively it becomes easier to say no to things because we know what we are saying yes to.

*  If you’re going to be weird be the best weird you can be.

Show Notes

* [09:56] Luna: People are innately creative. We are all working with different frequencies - much like tuning a radio. I might go and see a wonderful show with a friend and what I see is vocalised experimental performance and the power of colours clashing together and becoming words; and what she sees is gesture and motif and symbol through movement. From the same performance our creative muse works through us in completely different ways.

The Expectations We Place on Our Creativity [12:40]

* Ben: Whenever I took my interests seriously (trying to take it to the next level) I would often find myself getting really serious about it and put all this pressure on myself to produce something amazing to make people go, “wow!”

* Luna: We have this preconceived idea of what we should be doing. It’s easy to get caught up in the shoulds; “I should be performing here, I should be publishing there, I should be working with these people.” Everyone goes through those phases no matter what it is they have achieved so far.

* These shoulds run completely counter intuitively to the natural flow of creativity. The shoulds are coming from the head and completely divorced from the heart.

* I feel that we’ve become very driven by the sense of a marketplace. I watch a lot of artists who put themselves under a lot of pressure to market themselves and a lot of business ethics has has worked its way down into art: how are you promoting yourself?, who are you networked with? where are you sharing your work? as apposed with, what are you feeling? and are you sharing it?

* We’re curating ourselves all the time on social media and it becomes very hard to give yourself the space to go through the creative process (to just let it flow).

* Ben: It’s quite a delicate balance to stay true to the creative voice and market yourself at the same time.

* Luna: You can’t completely separate yourself from the marketing aspect. It’s beneficial to be able to talk about your work a...