How to Connect to Your Creative Essence

And rekindle the power of The Sovereign Artist Within

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This article is part of the series about The Circles of Art Marketing, our proven, and unique marketing framework. We’ve been focusing on the inner-most circle, The Sovereign Artist Within, which is all about truly connecting with your creative essence. Without nurturing this connection, you will eventually burn out, and all of the other circles will be a struggle. This inner circle is all about feeding your soul.

So far we’ve covered the following:

Circle 1: The Sovereign Artist Within
1. Your Truth
2. The Sovereign Artist Within

Those articles covered the idea of “The Sovereign Artist”, its importance to your creativity, and the negative consequences that can happen if you don’t nurture this connecting to your soul. Today’s article, How to Connect With Your Creative Essence, provides practical ideas about how to find “Your Truth” and reconnect with the source of your creativity.

Please note, the terms creative essence, your truth, inner self, The Sovereign Artist, creative self, true self, etc, all refer to the same thing - the deepest, truest, most authentic version of yourself, your creative self, which happens when your soul is in harmony with the universe and your true creative drive.

Last week I wrote about the dark time I experienced burnout, losing my creative drive, and the slow process of slowly opening up my soul fire again. This is a danger every artist faces and there are many things you can do not only to discover your true self, your essence, but also to reconnect with what I call The Sovereign Artist within. Even if you are creatively healthy at this moment, these methods are important to remain connected with your true self. As always, these are just ideas and guidance and you may mix and match them as you like or, you may even find your own ways, not listed here, to remain a creative child at heart. Please note, these categories overlap in several ways, for example, “Nature” and “Noticing” are highly correlated, as are “Mediation” and “Solitude.” There are endless ways to make this work with your own personality and predilections.

Here are the methods I have successfully utilized to reconnect and remain connected to The Creative Source of my essence, my true self, The Sovereign Artist within.

“Crash and Burn” Journaling

I journal almost daily and I often utilize a method called “Crash and Burn.” The name is intended to remind me that the quality of what I write doesn’t matter - only that I do it. I don’t recall where I learned of this idea, but I didn’t invent it. The rules for “Crash and Burn” are simple: you start writing and you are not allowed to stop for at least five minutes (although I frequently write for ten or twenty minutes). No editing. And no stopping to think. You are allowed to write, “I can’t think of anything…blah blah, but I still can’t think of anything” but you can’t stop writing (or typing in my case). You must keep the pen or fingers moving. I often “seed” these sessions with something I see in the room, or an idea that pops in my head.. For example, I’ll say, “I’m noticing that my iphone screen has a small crack in it. I recall that crack happened when a lady bumped into me on our last vacation, and she turned out to be a really nice person. In fact, we had drinks with her and talked about…… Anyway, cracks on phones are a bit like scars aren’t they, and we all get scars both mental and physical in this life…..” I just typed that on the fly while working on this article, free form. And you can already see that it’s going in a direction that could quickly get deeply philosophical. So any “seed” can lead you in unusual and deep directions. Many of my Crash and Burn sessions, with much editing, have become the Reflections on my personal Substack blog. However, as I write them, they are not intended to be shared, and simply exist to open the flow between you and your creative source. They are quite similar to the idea of Morning Pages found in seminal book, The Artist’s Way.