The Work of Recovery Begins with Deep Listening

Excerpt from Chapter 2

“Uncontainable Night” Cold Wax Encaustic by Crystal Marie

The Work of Recovery Begins with Deep Listening

Recovering our Intuitive Voice and living and working in connection to our deeper truths—those parts of ourselves at the core of our identity we feel most passionate about and wish to impart in our creative endeavors, can feel daunting to attempt. This is the work of the courageous, an act of vulnerability requiring introspection and self-examination. The good news is that as humans we already spend a great deal of time in introspection, averaging up to half our waking life wandering from our present into the realm of the imagined.  

Our journeys inward take us through cherished memories and troubling events alike. These reflections on circumstances of the past, silly musings, and completely made-up scenarios, help us problem solve, relieve our boredom, and take us away from the stressors of everyday life. The answers we need to resolve an issue and the ideas of the creative often come to us when the hands are occupied, and the mind is free to wander.

Yet so often, the thoughts we ruminate on will ramp up our nervous system and induce a greater degree of anxiety. Who hasn’t spent time repeating a difficult conversation or heated argument in their heads, injecting all the things we wish we had said in the moment? What we wouldn’t give to go back and say the thing we wished we had said right there in the moment, convinced if the right words had come the outcome would have been much different.