You Can't Create Spring From Winter Thinking.

What if the answer isn’t more effort, but simply a new perspective?

Creating Change Through Creative Spring Thinking

Yesterday I spent the day at a creative workshop, with a focus on the emerging spring. What a joy it was to gather with people around a table, sharing objects and stories, listening and writing tales.

We gathered things from the natural world, cut shapes out of coloured paper, wrote words and created collaborative books of poetry, sewing the spines to bind them together. This was the wild kind of creativity. The kind where thoughts are scattered across tables like the blossom petals outside the window, and nothing quite makes sense… until, without much warning at all, it does.

There was glue on hands. Laughter. Silence.

The uncomfortable stretch of being asked to write and share - dyslexic spelling mistakes and all - and the joy that comes when a tumble of words find their way out from the dark into the light.

And I was reminded of something I say often to my clients, but felt in my body again yesterday: You cannot solve a problem from the place where it was created. If you stay inside the same four mental walls, you will keep rearranging the same old furniture. On some days it might very well look different, but it will feel more or less the same.

Creative thinking asks something perhaps more brave and more fundamental of us. It asks us to step out of the maze and climb up a little higher. It asks us to sit by the river instead of pushing against the current - and be prepared to feel into what happens.

Ah, and then there’s that pattern that still sneaks up on so many of us when we're at our most stretched or tired. So many capable people try to think their way out of patterns that were built in survival and find themselves overworking, overgiving and inevitably, over-controlling. Doing this may have helped hold everything together in the past, but the part of us that created those strategies is not the part that will set them free. I teach this stuff and have it embodied into my body deeply by now, but still, at times I get caught up in this old pattern. It's natureal, but there are ways to create do much more difference.

Freedom requires new perspectives and a different relationship to the nervous system.

It requires space. I work with this all the time, and if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that no matter how skilled we may become, it often requires guidance from someone outside the pattern who can see what we can’t.

And collaborative freedom is a delight, so that’s all ok.

Change does occur so much more easilly through creative thinking, but we can only create so much for ourselves. And if winter is solo in some way, spring encourages a creatively collaborative approach: Collaboration between mind and body, between communities, and, because you can’t escape this truth, as much as the human race is often trying, a deep and profound creative collaboration between us and the natural world.

And through this we let go and let something else flow.

Yesterday, surrounded by colour and conversation, I watched how quickly flow and insight appear when we allow ourselves to loosen the grip a little (or a lot!). I watched this happen in myself and the others in the room when we stopped trying to be logical and efficient and instead allowed ourselves to be curious.

An important distinction to remember - Creativity isn’t just about art (although living an artful life is another aspect of how we can employ our creativity). Creativity is about possibility and letting your life reorganise itself in a way your old thinking couldn’t access.

Spring thinking is what excites me and is the work I do with my clients because it’s not about fixing or pushing, but helping the people I work with to step outside of the architecture of the problem, so something genuinely new can emerge. Perhaps a little like spring shoots pushing through soil that looked, just a short while before, completely still and dormant.

I’m sure it won’t come as much of a surprise when I tell you that winter is not my favourite season, but I have worked hard at allowing the dormancy to gift me more deeply. I wonder if you have a season that speaks to your soul more completely than another? Feel free to message me to let me know what this investigation ignites in you. Let me know perhaps what you find supportive about it and what you find to be a challenge…

There are seasons for enduring.

And there are seasons for creating.

Perhaps this is yours.

Warmly,

Kirsty x

Kirsty Macdonald

Transformational Coach, Therapist and Embodiment Teacher

www.KirstyMacdonald.co.uk

Book your free discovery call here: https://calendly.com/kirstymacdonald/discovery