When Creativity Becomes Medicine
“Creativity can help us process experiences that are too complex for words alone.”
This morning, as I sat writing beneath our mango tree, a butterfly landed on the cosmos flowers I grew from seed. Watching it dance from bloom to bloom, I was reminded how often my own healing has come through simple creative acts - the patient tending of a garden, the quiet flow of words onto paper, the meditative process of mixing colours until they are just the perfect hue I'm looking for.
Creative practice offers unique medicine for our hearts and spirits, something I've experienced deeply in my own life and witnessed countless times with others.
In my upcoming book, I explore how creativity can help us process experiences that are too complex for words alone. Just as my garden has become a place where I can work through challenges while nurturing new growth, any creative practice can become a gentle way to heal and understand ourselves.
Recently, while planting Greek basil and lemon thyme in my herb garden, I found myself reflecting on how similar gardening and healing are to creative practice. Both require patience, gentle attention, and trust in natural timing. We can't force a seed to sprout any more than we can rush our creative or emotional healing - but we can create conditions that support growth.
In our Creative Hearts Community, members often share how their creative practice becomes a safe container for processing difficult experiences. Someone might work through grief by photographing small moments of beauty. Another might find clarity about a decision through intuitive painting. Someone else might heal old creative wounds through gentle experiments with new materials.
The key isn't to focus directly on healing, but to create space where healing can happen naturally. Like the way my cosmos attract butterflies without trying, simply showing up for our creative practice often brings unexpected gifts of insight and restoration.
Today, I invite you to consider:
How has creativity helped you heal or understand yourself better? What creative practices feel most nurturing to you? Where in your life might you need creativity's gentle medicine?
May you hold this gentle reminder close to your heart: Your creativity isn't just about making things - it's about making meaning, making peace, making space for your heart to heal and grow.
Join Creative Hearts - My Supportive Monthly Membership
Join Flourish: The Art of Creative Living - My Year-Long Creativity School
Be kind to yourself and nurture your creativity.
With my warmest wishes,
~ Nicola
P.S. If you're curious about exploring the healing aspects of creative practice, both my program "Flourish" and our Creative Hearts Community offer gentle guidance for this journey. Join us to discover how naturally creativity and healing flow together.
P.P.S. Cosmos are simple and often easy to grow from seed in many climates. I'm so in love with how beautiful they are, their faces dancing in the breeze, and the way they attract and feed the butterflies in my garden. Have you grown cosmos before? What's your favourite flower to grow in your garden? Feel free to leave a comment below and let me know ~ I'd love to hear!
About Nicola Newman
I'm a Creative Business Coach, Award-Winning Artist & Mentor for Creative Hearts who want to flourish, flow & prosper.
My passion is inspiring and supporting Creative Hearts to trust their inner wisdom and carve out a life that’s personally meaningful and fulfilling to them.
I share practical, evidence-based tools for Creative Hearts seeking to improve their lives or businesses. My work draws from acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), mindfulness-based techniques, body-based practices, and neuroscience -- and my own creative living adventures -- among other approaches.
My mission is to support Creative Hearts to:
Dissolve creative blocks, develop a loving relationship with themselves, nurture their creativity and reframe the beliefs and patterns that keep them from following their heart and making the creative contribution they would love to make in the world.
My approach is to embrace gentleness, playfulness and self-care to navigate self-doubt and instead cultivate deep self-trust so you can truly enjoy the creative process, bring together your body of work, make money doing what you love and leave a creative legacy you’re proud of.
Let’s pour a cuppa and get to know one another, shall we? :) Read more about my story here.
