Episode 1: Why Fight the Inner Critic?

08/24/21 
The Growing Creative Podcast
S1E1: Why Fight the Inner Critic?

In today's episode, Jane shares her story with the Inner Critic - the voice in your head that criticizes all your creative freedom. As you listen to this and future Growing Creative episodes, you'll sense that the metaphor of growing plants is so accurate for creative growth because so much of the growth happens under the soil, down in the dirt. It can be messy. Roots have to grow deep down into deep places to enable the flourishing and blooming we all desire to see. 

Resource Links:

-  Artist Wyanne Thompson

- Dan Allender Story Workshop  

- James K. A. Smith Article "We Can't Think Our Way Out of this Mess"

- "The War of Art" by Stephen Pressfield

  See the full transcript of this episode here. 

Jane Boutwell is an artist & creative coach based in Atlanta, Georgia. She loves to nurture and empower others to pursue their creative callings.

"I am an artist with an inquisitive mind, a heart connected to nature and a soul yearning towards God…a child of dirt and dance…a beauty bringing blessing writer… a poetic painter and potter.

Starting with mud pies as a child in the backyard, my creativity includes tactile, intuitive, and deeply-in-touch-with-nature ways of being in the world. I see myself as an apprentice in God’s art studio of the natural world that is full of metaphor, imprinted with the character of the Maker.

It is my passion to share the shimmering beauty and deep truths I find in the creative medium that seems most fitting. Those creative expressions include gardening, quilting, writing, painting, sketching, ceramics, dancing, creative coaching, podcasting, and family life with my husband and four children in Tucker/Atlanta, Georgia."

Join the email list to learn more about special offerings : https://www.janeboutwellstudio.com/contact
Free Sketchbooking resource here: https://view.flodesk.com/pages/5f7b3597322e6ae12d5c774e

Follow @janeboutwellstudio on IG for more.

Transcript

In today's episode, I'm going to share some of my story with the inner critic. That's a term for creatives referring to that voice in your head, that criticized as a whole, your creative freedom going through past trauma can be what triggers those voices to crop up in your life. And sometimes a big trauma or stress event can be the impetus to us finally saying "enough,

that's it. I'm fighting this voice. And I can't let it hold me back any longer". As you listen to this and future Growing Creative episodes, you'll sense that the metaphor of growing plants is so accurate for creative growth, because so much of the growth happens under the soil down in the dirt. It can be messy roots have to grow deep down into dark places to enable the flourishing and the blooming we all love to see.

You're listening to the Growing Creative Podcast. And I'm your host Jane Boutwell, I'm an artist and a creative coach. This is a space that will nurture your heart and empower you to pursue your creative calling, whatever that may be. 

I'm starting this podcast - and it occurs to me that I should probably really begin with telling you my why, as I think about why I feel passionate to encourage people, to follow their creative purpose, the reason the, the dream in their heart, their little eye idea of something that they don't want to admit to anybody or they're, or you're an established artist or writer, but sometimes it just feels hard to keep going. I am incredibly passionate about helping people stay the course. And he, at the, the hard work of letting what is in you as a creative come out as the pandemic head, I use that odd break and our normal routine to launch my art business because it felt, it felt incredibly important to me in the midst of the cast of our world. It felt like this is the time when we most need beauty and creativity to work out the, the difficult stuff we're going through. I was incredibly floored when I read an article by James K, a Smith where he very intellectually articulated things that I had already been feeling deeply. And I wanted to share a quote from his article. That's titled I'm a philosopher. We can't think our way out of this mess. He said, needless to say, I've abandoned all hope that we can think our way out of the mess we've made of the world. The pathology that the sets us in this cultural moment is a failure of imagination. Specifically. The failure to imagine the other as neighbor empathy is ultimately a feat of imagination and arguments are No therapy for a failed shriveled imagination. It will be the arts that resuscitate the imagination.<inaudible> I want to tell you a little story of what happened when I was in my own personal year of crazy. Everything is going wrong and it wasn't 2020. All those certainly we experienced the reverberations of what's been going on in our world. At that time. For me, it was 2017. Sometimes I call it 2000 strep in team because, well, I'll just do a quick fly by shall I, the year begins and less than a week into it, we have someone break into our house to rob us. Thankfully, they didn't take too much, but certainly our confidence and sense of safety was stolen. A few days later, I have a family member show up in need of medical care and rehab. And I had no idea where to even begin this family member lived with us off and on for the next weeks undergoing treatment that was intense and emotionally heart aching, and less than a week after that family member left our home, we were going to celebrate our anniversary yet. My husband had just discovered water. We thought all over the basement floor. The basement is my creative space. That is where I go to hide away from all of the kids upstairs. Sometimes they're down there with me, but it's where I go to make whether it's sewing and quilting or painting. The basement is, is my refuge and my creative layer and covered in what we found out with sewage. So we had a surprise basement renovation on our hands with a six month. This is all the while when my youngest is six months old, the youngest of my four children is six months old, surprise basement renovation, sewage on the floor. Everything gets pulled out and undone. And in the midst of that renovation, we had one dozen cases of strep throat among the six of my family members in my home, which is an excruciating experience and incredibly stressful. The rest of the year included a tree near like sideswiping our house, breaking a few windows and smashing everything in the backyard headlights that went around and around my kids, it was a crazy hard stressful year. And I came out of that. And the best advice that I got from a counselor was that I needed to paint. I needed to be creatively expressive to be well, just according to what this person got to know of me and how I made. And I thought, well, go great. That's what I want to do. Anyway, that prescription doesn't cost as much. Well, you know, I'd rather put it on art supplies than pharmaceuticals. There aren't bad side effects. However, the time that I spent down in my basement, coming back to my studio arts, I had graduated with a fine arts degree, but in the midst of raising and homeschooling off and on the four children, I found my creative outlets to be places more textiles with creating quilts and knitting and gardening far-ranging and I, the paint, you know, sometimes paint and clay, it can be messy. And I just, I think also I realized that the end road of that seemed like galleries. And that was something that, to me didn't feel like something I wanted to pursue at the time, as I've gone on this healing journey, I've really seen how I have had a lot of loud inner critic. And as I came back to my painting, every time I showed up to do the work, there was so many cruel voices in my head telling me so many negative things about how terrible I was at this. And why was I even bothering and all, I mean, you name it. I heard it, everything scourging me against doing this thing, creating I've since read the war of art by Steven Pressfield. And he talks about the resistance and how anytime you set out to do something creative, good, even if it's just toning your abdominal muscles, anything good. There is an equal and opposite force of evil. That's resisting it. And you will meet that when you try to do something good. Well, I was meeting at big time and it was so discouraging and hard to keep showing up and having perfectionist inner monologue. That was just mean, and I knew that I had big, bold, creative, free playful, whimsical work in my heart that needed to come out. And I just couldn't let it out. Around this time. I had a friend who was going to go to a Dan Allender retreat, well workshop it's called the story workshop put on by the Islander center out of Seattle. Dan Allender is a psychologist and theologist, and I had loved his books for years, and it never occurred to me that I could do further learning. I've always loved not only the arts, but there'll be and healing counseling, kind of things, bringing the two together, especially. But I realized that I needed to do this work. The story workshop, where you go back into your own personal story, origin stories, they call them the beginnings of your story. When you're young, young child, the younger you are events happen that are traumatic, whether it's what you would think of as trauma car wreck or worse or small instances that just break your heart. Those things change who you are. They change how you relate to the world.
And I knew that I had to address those things. I had been to an art show and really enjoyed seeing the art of Wyanne that's W-Y-A-N-N-E for anybody that wants to look her up on Instagram, her accounts, a beautiful, bold world of whimsical color and free playful painting on huge canvases and hearing her story. But you have to listen carefully because she has a speech impediment due to mouth cancer, where she lost her tongue. And I was profoundly moved to go to her artist, talk at the decay contemporary gallery and in Marietta few years ago. And I heard her speak and talk about how she had always been a painter, but she worked small and she had always wanted to work big, but she had been too afraid and she had never even stood up to do an artist talk before because of her own fear and perfectionism and inner critic. But after having cancer and nearly dying, having a small chance to live and surviving it, she said, you know what, that's it. If I'm still here, I'm doing what I made to do. And I'm not letting fear stand in my way, hearing that I kept asking myself the question, what is it going to take for me to do that work I was made to do, what is it going to take for me to get this whimsical, playful, raw, honest artwork out of my heart and into the world. Am I going to have to wait till I have a devastating cancer that threatens my life to break of the fear and the inner critic and the perfectionism that's holding me back. I did not want to. That is not how I would like to do it. I would not like to wait for something like that. I decided that 2017 for us and all the trauma that it held was enough to break me out, but it's been hard work. That's this, that's what drove me to the story workshop. And when I went to this weekend long intensive workshop with the Dan Allender center, he started out by saying, 'We live in a place that's a battlefield between good and evil and evil does not have as much power as good, but it has been around a long, long time.' And if you can think of someone in the military that can profile people, see them and look at them and just make snap judgements. Like I can tell exactly what you do, where you are, how you relate to the world, what your career is, where you're from, what area, because of your accent. You've got people who can humans with limited, very limited abilities, but yet we can profile someone instantly with great training. Well, evil's been around long enough to profile, and it has the ability to see very young children at the earliest age and see that twinkle and sparkle in their eye see exactly where they're most gifted, how they show up in the world and reflect the goodness and beauty of God into this world, through their gifting. And what do you think evil does with that information? It's strategic Scott limited needs. It's gotta be strategic. So it uses it's. It uses trauma events, knowing that our brains are wired to be so captive to trauma and get stuck and be vulnerable in moments of trauma. And so uses trauma moments in our early childhood to particularly target the places in us that are most deeply gifted to shine, light and beauty and goodness into this world. Hearing this was like putting on 3d glasses and all of a sudden, you know, those books you've looked at that have the 3d goggles. And then all of a sudden the everything jumps out of the page. That's what it was like. I could look at my own life and see, it's not just a random assortment of hard things I've been through. I have been strategically under attacked in order to be silenced in the places that I am most gifted. One of the things that I heard from Rachel Clinton who spoke at that workshop, she said, our places of deepest harm is the very soil of our calling. She said, the stories of greatest suffering are surrounded by the areas of our greatest beauty that sink in here, we and our creative hearts as artists, writers, photographers, whatever ways you have of creatively showing up in the world like this quote by James K, a Smith about imagination, whatever ways you have of showing up and inviting and helping nourish and grow people's imagination through the work you were made to do.
It's under attack strategically, the places in you that need to be the most free to do that are sheltering and, and self protective stances around areas of your deepest hurt. What I hope this does is I hope it makes you feel the courage to press into those places, to look into them with curiosity, when you bump up against things that trigger you and make your knees shake,
and you get woozy and all like, you know, your whole system upset. And it's like, it didn't seem like that big of deal. Why am I just undone? Because it's connected to some early trauma memory you have, and let's get curious about it and lean in because there's clues there. If you lean into your places of trauma and hurt and inner critic and perfectionism, those places that get you stuck and have resistance against your freest creative self, there are clues there to what you were most made to do the places of deepest harm and hurt in your past are the very soil of your calling. Will you dig in the dirt? I hope so. I truly hope so. I've been on a journey of doing it myself and it it's watered with tears. The growth that happens is water with tears. You can't do it and keep your heart protected behind walls and numbing addictions. You've got to let your heart crack open and be vulnerable and feel the hurt and let the vulnerability of forgiveness come in. We'll talk more about that. I hope that you're willing to do that work because the world needs us. The world needs us to show up with the playful, imaginative creativity we were made for to invite us all, to see things differently, to see that there's more here to open our hearts. I hope that you'll join me on this journey into more creative freedom and growth, and the pole bravery of showing up with a warrior heart that is soft and empathetic and has compassion for others that starts with compassion for yourself in your own earliest Tinder places. Until next time Have courage take hearts and bravely faced the hard stuff, knowing that there's and there's goodness, and there's beauty. And thank you for listening to the Growing Creative Podcast. 

I'd like to thank Shepherd Martin for audio editing and the music is provided by Sad Moses. Don't forget to check out the show notes for transcripts and links to sources mentioned in the show today.

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