I love mentoring other creatives on their journey. I love seeing their longings, progressions, their thoughts, their ideas, how things start to sneak in and grow into something bigger. I’ve learned so much from other people. I think it’s important as creatives to nurture a healthy creative community. 

I understand even more now how important awareness is and how to look at your world with awe and wonder. I know even more now how important it is to have your identity in a really grounded place, and not dependent on the external, instead what comes from an internal place. I know even more now, how important the imagination is, and how to nurture and feed the imagination. And I also know how strong the resistance and fear is to doing our creative work. 

[It's important to] know your core messages and your stories around your creativity because most creatives struggle with that. When we can learn about ourselves, how far we have come, our adult self can tend to that, and find the truth, and take the risks in creativity to be more self-aware and do the work you want to really do.

You have very specific things that only you can bring to the world. They are going to come through you. I'm going to know something about you through your work, and you're going to be communicating something to me about you through your work. Lean in to your creativity, allow it to flower, do your creative work through your mind, through your heart, and out of your hands into the world. Just imagine and allow your creativity to flower. If you’re going to go forward, you have to work through the hard [parts].

I see a lot of trauma that's come about specifically, by the words of influential people in their life, specifically around their creativity, their creative gifts. It is something that I notice with almost every creative person I know. It's that resistance that comes from outside from others which they internalize. It’s heartbreaking how people literally have lost decades of their creative life because of the words of one person or two people. Oftentimes it happens in those formative years. It can happen in elementary, junior high, but a lot of times specifically I see it happening as people near the last years of high school and college, when they are deciding what comes next for them. It’s a really formative time. They are asking “Who am I going to be?” It's a pattern and what I find that's interesting is that people don't really talk about it. 

She has a flowy dress on, dancing/slipping/sliding across the linoleum floor, kind of like a ballerina but uncoordinated. She’d be spinning in her yarn-knitted slippers that her grandmother knitted for her.  Really vibrantly patterned saturated colored shirts from the 70s. And a ping-pong table where she could make art.

You have to allow self-permission to follow your passion, creative longing.  Learn to let [your art] go, to let it go and do its good work in the world. When it’s done working through you, you can then release it. It’s a whole other process, learning to let go.