242: Using Creativity for Emotional Alchemy - plus a song!

When emotions are stuck within you - how can you use your creativity to get things moving? Sometimes the muse within you is a quiet whisper - other times screaming for your attention. Today we'll talk about how to find the voice - and what to do once you have. And, towards the end, I'll share a song with you that arrived after recording my last episode, on the process of going through a breakup and grieving. (song is at 19:20) As always, I’m looking forward to your thoughts on this episode and what revelations and questions it creates for you. Please join us in the Relationship Alive Community on Facebook to chat about it! Sponsors: Find a quality therapist, online, to support you and work on the places where you’re stuck. For 10% off your first month, visit Betterhelp.com/ALIVE to fill out the quick questionnaire and get paired with a therapist who’s right for you. Resources: Check out my Secrets of Relationship Communication COURSE for a masterclass in how to improve the communication and connection in your relationship. I want to know you better! Take the quick, anonymous, Relationship Alive survey FREE Guide to Neil’s Top 3 Relationship Communication Secrets Guide to Understanding Your Needs (and Your Partner’s Needs) in Relationship (ALSO FREE) Support the podcast (or text “SUPPORT” to 33444) Amazing intro and outro music provided courtesy of The Railsplitters Transcript: Neil Sattin: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Relationship Alive. This is your host, Neil Sattin. Today's episode is going to be a little bit different. I have a few things to share with you about how to use creativity as a way to help move through emotions, and it's something that's really served me well in the past and continues to serve me well, as you'll see momentarily, because after we talk about this topic I am going to share a song with you, a song that that just emerged this past week Neil Sattin: Okay, so let's dive into the topic at hand, which is creativity and giving yourself permission to have a voice and to use your voice in ways that can help mobilize especially challenging emotions and bring them to the surface, express them in ways that are productive and maybe even move on or transmute those emotions along the way. Neil Sattin: Now, the emotional content of our lives can sometimes be quite raw, and whether it's something that we ultimately want to address with another person or not, it can be helpful to spend some time with the content in order to get a different look at it, get a different perspective, allow it to move within you and also to give you more information. I believe that our emotions are there as signals to help us understand how we are processing the world around us, and so they live in us, but they're not meant to just be stuck there. Neil Sattin: And sometimes when an emotion is just there over and over and over and over again, it's there because it requires something of us, maybe it requires a change in our lives, or maybe it's just a voice in you that needs to be heard. Now, I'll tell you that over the years, creative expression for me has been a huge way to help me deal with the things that are going on my life, and sometimes those things are happy, joyous things, and I want to find ways to celebrate even more, and sometimes those things have been painful and hard to understand, and being creative has given me the opportunity to work with those feelings to understand some of the deeper things that are going on within me that are at play, some of the different thoughts, the different inner voices that are speaking. Neil Sattin: And giving yourself the opportunity to do that can be an immensely freeing and transformative thing. And there are any number of ways to do that, you can create something that's just for you, you can create something that you share with people who you trust and who care about you, you can create something and share it with the world, or you can create something and burn it, or forget about it, because the act of creation in and of itself is alchemy, it allows you to work with what you're experiencing and in a way to move it outside of you. Interested in reading the transcript for the rest of this episode? Click here to download the full transcript of this episode!