The Art of Creative Healing Podcast

The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook at maryrosecrook.substack.com/subscribe

Hello everyone, I posted inner memorials as a new podcast today but I sent you the wrong audio, an earlier version…huge apologies! I should have realized when it was 2 minutes shorter than expected. Here is the newer episode with the correct audio, which isn’t vastly different but I think it’s more complete.Thank you for following this substack, I really appreciate the messages, feedback and encouragement…Maryrose.The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook at maryrosecrook.substack.com/subscribe

The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook at maryrosecrook.substack.com/subscribe

The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook at maryrosecrook.substack.com/subscribe

The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook at maryrosecrook.substack.com/subscribe

Get full access to The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook at maryrosecrook.substack.com/subscribe

Get full access to The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook at maryrosecrook.substack.com/subscribe

Get full access to The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook at maryrosecrook.substack.com/subscribe

The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook at maryrosecrook.substack.com/subscribe

Get full access to The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook at maryrosecrook.substack.com/subscribe

Get full access to The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook at maryrosecrook.substack.com/subscribe

The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook at maryrosecrook.substack.com/subscribe

Get full access to The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook at maryrosecrook.substack.com/subscribe

The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook at maryrosecrook.substack.com/subscribe

Get full access to The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook at maryrosecrook.substack.com/subscribe

Get full access to The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook at maryrosecrook.substack.com/subscribe

At first it can be too quiet to get our attention…the parasympathetic system, the healer within. Sufferers of complex ptsd often have a lot of volume going on inside them, reflecting whatever configuration of flight, fight, freeze and faun that their particular experiences have led to.But personally, after years of driving myself to keep creating art, out of fear of losing something that just kept calling me, I started to feel some kind of deep stillness.It was like suddenly being able to breathe, stepping into a secret garden and feeling complete safety and endless ease. Somewhere calming, timeless, unchanging yet always renewing. I can see now that this is where joy comes from, and why I couldn’t feel it when I was driving myself so hard.A line from the iching springs to mind, this is from hexagram 44, Coming Together: “Keep this melon growing in the shade. It is a blessing from heaven.”This is a gentle reminder that we need to be careful, that inside us is something worth cherishing, and the more we devote ourselves to it, the more it will bless us. This isn’t about ambition, it’s about connecting with something deep in ourselves. It’s a reminder to shelter new skin, new energies, new inspirations, to love them into being rather than to immediately subject them to unnecessary criticism.This brings me to the number 7 tarot card, The Chariot…I always love to see this card.Jodorowsky gives it this voice, in his passage “And if the chariot spoke:”"I am full, absolutely full, of strength. Nothing is wasted; I am rooted in the planet and a lover of all its energies. They propel my movement. Like a knight of fire, I do not budge from my place. I do not crawl upon the ground. I see on high. I travel with time without ever leaving the moment. Without past, without future, the sole time possible: the present, like a jewel beyond measure. Everything here is nowhere else.”I always feel this speaks directly to the power and strength of the parasympathetic system: its fully present moment, its healing and regeneration; the way it soothes digestion, anoints sleep, sends it’s gentle pulse through our whole bodily engine, till it feels like we purr. Is it our purr, or the love of the parasympathetic system for its role in our lives…for the meaning this soothing gives to the system which brings it into being?I’m starting to like the idea of collaborating with healing systems in my body, rather than wishing they’d just do their job…I’m starting to believe everything in the world is sentient…so maybe even a system in the body has experiences and feelings…More and more I am feeling like it’s a struggle to shut out healing. But I still do engage in the struggle. Shutting it out with a fixation on my phone, a dull scrolling through darkness, the need to prove some small point so as not to feel like we know nothing…the need to measure, to identify and map this darkness, which seems to increase in volume every day.But the more I feel this the more I feel the parasympathetic system knocking gently at the door. Why would we not let it in?I’m a great believer in the inner wisdom of a place inside each of us, like the garden I mentioned earlier, an untouched temple, a place inhabited by a larger part of ourselves, our natural healer. You can call it the original spirit, or the unified field, or the god within… But I always thought of gods as thunderous, and this being feels soft, gentle, mellow. In order to contact this part of ourselves we need to match its energy.I don’t think this is something you can will into being…so it wasn’t until I felt safe to create in some less driven and obsessive manner that this stillness showed up. The reason for my lack of safety was the fact that I had become excited by so many creative endeavours over the course of my life and they had all run aground. But it was also because of my inner critic, my complete lack of self esteem, my overactive symptoms of complex ptsd. So I painted as if someone was standing over me with a whip.Nowadays I have a stockpile of inspirational texts I can listen to in order to open my mind when I feel especially shut down. A lot of them relate to the Tao. “Taoism: An Essential Guide” is one of them. “The Secret of the Golden Flower” is another. I also find listening to David Lynch’s audiobook “Catching the Big Fish” has a similar effect, especially since he reads it himself. For me these texts are ways to sense the divine which is all around us. I’m not meaning this in a religious sense, but the divinity which is the spark of life within every living being. I find I get closer to that spark, when I’m engaged in creativity, or walking in the morning when the birds have just woken up, or meditating.That concept of the essence, the original spirit which cannot be seen, but for me, in reading the concepts which apply to the Tao, I find that visions can be felt, even if our eyes can’t actually see them.This is a quote from “The Secret of the Golden Flower”, it’s just a text that I really enjoy, and I find I come back to often when I’m painting something simple like a background.“In the square inch field of the square foot house, life can be regulated. The square foot house is the face. As for the square inch field on the face, what can it be other than the heavenly heart? In the middle of the square inch dwells the splendour. In the purple hall of the city of jade dwells the God of Utmost Emptiness and Life. The Confucians call it the empty dwelling in the middle; The Buddhists call it the terrace of the spirit; The Taoists call it the ancestral land, the yellow court, the mysterious pass or the prenatal opening.” The Secret of the Golden Flower.For me there is something mysterious and magical about the way this is worded…the empty dwelling in the middle, the terrace of the spirit, the heavenly heart and the splendour, these all refer to the third eye…the concept of the Golden flower is of the blossoming of pure understanding, and this is all about meditation.I found out about this text from a friend in my Qi Gong class who was going blind. He found these texts very enlightening and because I respected and admired him I felt very lucky to have him as a guide.I understand that some of us need the evidence of our senses, or long for “expert witnesses”, for science to catch up with the unexplainable. But what if you don’t want to wait?At some point after starting to paint I became more instinctive…having been in a painful situation for a long time in terms of my mental and physical health, I found ideas other than “what colour paint should I try today?” edging into my thoughts. I started feeling much stronger and more certain of my direction…talking less, and feeling more. Prior to this I’d kept up a stream of chatter…I think in order to drown out my toxic inner commentary.It’s worth being aware, when you are starting to grow a new self care system, and to begin to hear new ideas from deep inside yourself, that the people you surround yourself with, and those relationships which are often very reflective of the shape of your complex ptsd, can be very rattled by a change in your behaviour.And if you’re coming to a creative life late on as I did you may find people sling around criticisms about talent and training…so before you even begin you’re made to feel inadequate…if you allow their comments to get to you. “You are not a writer!” someone yelled at me, when I opened up about a novel I was having fun writing “you don’t get up at 5am to write!!”Or someone coming into my studio for the first time and saying “Well that part’s wrong for a start…”.Who are these people who feel so entitled to say these things? I’m not totally certain but I do believe they are mostly other sufferers of complex ptsd, as most of them fit the profile, but with more of a fight mode than flight mode. Or maybe it’s a fight mode as applied to other people who are in flight…they probably are running away from something.Maybe they don’t like to see someone edging their way towards that cliff they themselves want to jump off…?But I always allowed these interactions to disempower me. I think now that I opened myself up to precisely the people who would shut me down because that was better than daring myself to try something that might not work…this has a lot to do with complex ptsd…our lowered sense of self worth and the horrifyingly familiar comfort and security of hearing the same hyper critical commentary we have inside our own heads about ourselves, coming out of the mouths of people around us…friends, teachers, family members, partners. It is somehow reassuring?This makes me think about the punk movement and how freeing it was…and how yeah! Who cares about talent and training?! But there was talent, and talent is often not the issue, it’s such an easy slur for people to level at someone trying to dare themselves to dream…punk was a distillation of talent, and they broke a mould that was in danger of stifling them, just like many an art movement before them. And out of that movement came a blast of music, writing, film, and art without which even Eraserhead might not have come into being, amongst other things…Eraserhead is such a litmus.What I’m saying here, is when you’re starting to open up to yourself and to messages from your depths, you need to develop some trust…it really is like trying to communicate with wildlife…you have to be quiet and you need to be still. It doesn’t help to bring a loud and opinionated friend like your negative inner commentator along.Meditation will get you such a long way, and daily engagement with creativity will activate the parasympathetic system, which kicks in that very deep healing. It’s slow and gentle, and sometimes it doesn’t seem like anything is happening at all. But on the deepest level there are huge changes are occurring.And eventually you find you have company…you can laugh at the silly things people say because your transformation is uncomfortable for them, because that secret melon is getting so huge that it can’t be ignored any more. Being no longer alone; that’s what I have found in this method of healing with creativity, of finding my own inner stillness…Having spent years running away from this concept, believing that I was never so alive as when I was literally bouncing off walls, with every nerve ending frayed and painful, I reached a point in which I could actually sense something calm within me, and from that moment on I’ve worked to enlarge my relationship with that quiet and gentle creature which purrs from the dream filled shadows of us all.The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook at maryrosecrook.substack.com/subscribe

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Gorgeous rainy day here, if you don’t live in a desert you might not appreciate how special this is, but I can assure you it’s an event whenever it happens. The sound is a little textured, rain drops on the umbrella, shoes on wet sand, and some glitches, but overall you should be able to hear what’s being said… Get full access to The Art of Creative Healing with Maryrose Crook at maryrosecrook.substack.com/subscribe