The Creativity for All Podcast

Today's guest is Shilpa Shah. Whether it is with her coaching, community building or with her meditation practice, singing and storytelling, creativity is at the core of everything she does.

A community builder and facilitator at heart, Shilpa tells us how she uses her experience, creativity and a focus on what feels good, to help people connect at a deeper level, build relationships, be playful, and open to new ideas. How creativity is an integral part of activism, as is showed with the Black Lives Matter Movement, and how, following a long tradition embraced by social change movements, she used singing as a form of protest, but also of healing, with the singing circle she created.

We also talk about being open to creativity and creating the space to welcome and nourish it. Shilpa describes her creative approach to meditation and how, during lockdown, she ran meditation circles to help people deal with anxiety and loneliness and wrote a short story for children to help them understand the isolation and stress caused by such an extreme situation. She even shares with us, and for the very first time, a beautiful poem she wrote about connecting with nature.

To me, Shilpa is the embodiment of what it means to come alive creatively, so I hope you will enjoy her interview.

Shilpa Shah's portfolio

Shilpa's short story:

The Creativity for All Podcast is sponsored by Blue as an Orange, where we believe in creativity through communication and offer mentoring and coaching for aspiring writers, tailored language tuition and editing/translation services.

We've been told repeatedly for the past four months, that lockdown is the ideal time to be creative. But is it, really? When is a good time to be creative and is free time, together with the obligation to remain at home, conducive for embracing our creativity successfully?

In this episode, I analyse the pressure to be creative at a specific time, i.e. during a global pandemic, and dismantle a series of assumptions in the process. If you've been feeling the pressure and haven't figured out what to do, this episode is for you!

Today's guest is Kate Spence. Kate is an archaeologist, academic and moonlight potter. She went to her first pottery evening class with her mother, as a teenager, and has taken it up again in 2017. She produces tableware at Kiln Cambridge, working alongside a wonderful community of like-minded makers and enjoys throwing on a potter's wheel and experimenting with glazing.

She's interested in the role of ceramics in everyday rituals surrounding the preparation and sharing of food, and the way relationships are formed with and through ceramics. She's also fascinated by the role of creativity within an ancient craft with long-established traditions, and the opportunities that creativity offers us daily.

Kate describes her creative approach in helping her students explore their own ideas and how pottery has given her the freedom to play, but also taught her to embrace uncertainty and re-evaluate her take on a 'ruined piece'. Not only is she passionate about her craft and creativity, but you're going to learn a lot about pottery, so I hope you will enjoy this episode.

Instagram: @katespenceceramics Kiln Cambridge

Many of us have experienced the fear of embracing our own creativity. In fact, it's one of the key reasons why we choose not to be creative. And while there's a lot to fear at the moment – and the fear of being creative might seem entirely irrelevant or secondary – there's no better time to address the fundamental need to express ourselves through creativity and turn our fear of all things creative into a joyful and exciting exploration. Creativity is good for our mental health and we need it more than ever.

Today's guest is Julie Martin. Julie is an embodied yoga teacher who wants her students to think outside the box, get off their mat and shake up old dogmas! She wants us to find freedom to unfold into the beauty of a yoga practice that emerges from the inside. It is a practice of inquiry - a somatic exploration of sensation, movement and stillness. With over twenty-five years of experience, Julie offers teachings for yoga teachers, who wish to evolve and empower their practice and teachings, as well as encourages yoga students around the world to break free from linear, injurious yoga to embrace a practice based on how it feels - not what it looks like.

Now more than ever, we need to focus on our well-being, physical and mental, and to me yoga is the union of both. I've been taking Julie's classes online for a couple of months and her creative approach to teaching yoga has led me to invite her on the Creativity for All Podcast.

She talks about how, after twenty-five years, she's had to break the rules and follow her own path to rethink her yoga practice and teaching creatively and how she sees yoga as an exploration and an opportunity to develop a relationship with our body, without judgement, and to discover sensations through movement.

After listening to this episode, I'm pretty sure you will be tempted to start a yoga practice and/or refresh an existing one or, at the very least, your take on movement and your own body is likely to change, so enjoy!

The Creativity for All Podcast is sponsored by Blue as an Orange, where we believe in creativity through communication and offer mentoring and coaching for aspiring writers, tailored language tuition and editing/translation services.

Julie's Online School for Yoga Teachers

Events, online yoga and more for everyone

Facebook: @brahmaniyoga Instagram: @brahmanijulie

Being creative is not a passive process, creativity isn't born out of the void. To get creative, we need to feed and stimulate our brain. But where do we start, especially when our energy and concentration levels aren't as high as they used to be? In this episode, I look at what makes us creative, even in the most stressful of times, and how to nurture and nourish our own creative potential in a kind, compassionate and strategic way.

Today's guest is Dominique Henz. Dominique studied theatre and film in Germany, Scotland and Australia. She was a director at the Mainz State Theatre, worked for ZDF, the German public-service television broadcaster, for Deutsche Bank, the University of Göttingen, the Max-Planck-Institute and has written a PhD on the Australian movie director, Peter Weir.

In 1994, I saw a beautiful and heartbreaking production of a play by Joshua Sobol entitled Ghetto, directed by Dominique, as part of her third-year project at Glasgow University. She was a student still, but already a fully-formed director, putting together a play in English, aged 22, which included a band singing and performing live.

I chose to invite Dominique on the Creativity for All Podcast, because in the twenty-five years that I've known her, she has showed an uncanny ability to use her creativity to not only further her career, but to challenge herself to keep on learning new skills and exploring new fields.

We talk about her desire to understand others, how they work, what their stories are and how communication and interconnectedness are at the core of everything she does. About the role of storytelling, not only in creativity, but in everyday life, and about tackling fear and venturing outside of our comfort zone.

Dominique shares her motto and experience of following her intuition and approaching complex or tricky situations creatively. I've always found her courage and creative approach to life inspiring, so I hope you will enjoy her interview.

A shorter episode, published a week early, on the relationship between anxiety and creativity, the role of storytelling, and embracing creativity in order to fight anxiety.

These are scary and anxiety-inducing times, so I hope this episode will encourage you to be creative and bring you some respite from the relentless news cycle. Stay safe.

Today's guest is Meg Kissack. She's a coach, writer, podcaster and all-round rebel-rouser for creative and multi-passionate women, who want to do the things only they can do and leave the world a brighter place. She is the founder of That Hummingbird Life, host of The Couragemakers Podcast and The Daily Pep! Podcast. Her motto is: ''Everything changes when you believe you matter''.

I've invited Meg because she uses her own creativity to not only encourage others to nourish and sustain theirs, through her podcasts and writing, but also to coach creative women, helping them tap into their unused creative potential.

'We need to be creative thinkers to survive in this world' she says, and rightly so.

Meg has an honest, compassionate and insightful take on what happens when we start being creative. We talk about listening to our intuition, giving ourselves the permission to create, the importance of being curious, the fear of failure and of success, the benchmarks we set for ourselves when it comes to being creative and the creative scars, bruises and boxes we have to navigate in order to embrace our own creativity. Every interaction I've had with Meg has left me inspired, so I hope you will enjoy her interview.

The Creativity for All Podcast is sponsored by Blue as an Orange, where we believe in creativity through communication and offer mentoring and coaching for aspiring writers, tailored language tuition and editing/translation services.

To most of us perfectionism is a badge of honour, the personality trait you brag about in interviews or performance reviews, the indispensable ingredient to a successful career, to a successful life. It's the engine driving us fast, faster and faster for the most perfectionist among us. Perfectionism pushes us to always do better, to challenge ourselves further, ignoring any progress or accomplishments, while often putting our health and well-being at risk.

When it comes to creativity, is perfectionism our friend or our foe? Is it the engine we have to use in order to be creative or is it our very own poison, or both? Can we be creative without being perfectionists? Is it remotely possible?

The Creativity for All Podcast is sponsored by Blue as an Orange, where we believe in creativity through communication and offer mentoring and coaching for aspiring writers, tailored language tuition and editing/translation services.