What's Love Got To Do With It?

A Fearless Assessment

Dear reader,

Each time I hit publish on a new next excerpt for the book here, I have an increasing awareness of how uncomfortable I am doing so. It’s always a mix of feelings between being a little excited, relieved to have it out there, but disappointed & uncomfortable with sharing it in its fledgling raw form. I am always aware, at the time I publish these first drafts on the blog, of the edits and additions I plan to make. Always with a knowing that the flow, the sentence structure, and the choice of certain words as placeholders waiting for me to identify what it is I need to bring more life into the writing, is not what the final version of the book will be.

I do not share this discomfort with you as a confession in hopes for your reassurance or to make excuses, but to illustrate what my own creative process is like behind the scenes, a process that is not uncommon when it comes to the work of an artist. Exactly what the content of this book will be.

To Recover Your Intuitive Voice is to work through the thoughts and emotions, the inner resistance and reluctances we encounter; the blocks in all their many forms, and identify them for what they really are. The Intuitive Voice is our core, most authentic and unique expression of ourselves. It is not without connection to the people and spiritual practices that are important to us, we are not islands unto ourselves. We want to be seen, to belong, to be witnessed as artists and humans, without having to pretend to be other than who we are or having to put on our “Sunday Best” to be approved.

Whether your own creative practice is a profession or a hobby, whether you write poems, prepare a beautiful welcoming table for others, pour your creative energy into a new recipe, stitch, paint, or sculpt, the hidden inner limiting belief messages can deter you from believing that your deepest longings for your art and life are not truths your heart is speaking to you.

From the place of artist, writer, truth seeker, way sharer, I bring you my own process & experience of shedding layers and identifying those internalized messages. The unspoken rules from infancy forward serve to influence and inform us of who we are expected to be. To show up looking less than perfect is taboo in many families and wider cultures. The reasons underneath are vast, but perfectionism at its core is a shield that our inner self-protector parts have used to avoid whatever the consequences were when that expectation took root.

To see that shield for what it is, a limitation to being able to connect to your deeper knowing; the voice inside of you that keeps pressing, whispering, waking you in the middle of the night with its longing for something more, is a first step. You may be able to identify exactly what your own something more is, or it may just be a vague sense of drudgery that plagues you each Monday morning when the alarm clock rings and you face yet another week of the same tedious work routine. You may believe that it is simply too late, you’ve done let the better years of life pass you by, so what is the point of beginning to change anything now?

This is not an exclusive longing limited to artists. It is a universal human experience. How many bumper stickers have been sold with the proclamation of YOLO! (you only live once) as a motivator? It is of course, as the other bumper sticker slogan goes, never too late to be what you might’ve been.

To have a big picture dream is like hanging a postcard of a vacation destination on the refrigerator door to remind you of why you’re choosing to stay home on a Saturday night instead of dining out to celebrate the end of a week. We don’t know how long it will take us to get there, or any of the obstacles that might encounter along the way, we just know that it won’t happen without the conscientious decision to take that first step.

In the process of taking each next right step toward your own wholehearted connection to your core unique self, the idea of what that big picture longing is may change. You’ll grow in your own understanding of what the dream represents, what the life you long for really is, only when you are walking towards it. To begin and to shift, to start over, and to recalibrate with better clarity through each step, each time you allow yourself to tune in and listen to your own deepest knowing, your own intuitive voice, can be very uncomfortable. It will stir up that inner critic part of you each time.

Today’s excerpt is the introduction to Section 2 of the book, which will focus on all the many ways our inner critic, the Art Critic part of our messaging, as it pertains to the studio, will try to deter you. The blocks and the resistances we encounter as artists fall into very common categories but the origin of where they took root is your own lived experience and will be different than mine.

It is my hope, in the chapters to come, to break down many of those categories and that you’ll begin to have breakthroughs for your own journey back to your unique core and most authentic self.

I’m including a pretty generous preview with this post, as an introduction to the new subscribers who have made there way here through the Recover Your Intuitive Voice for Art + Life blog. And I’d like to invite all of you who subscribe to this blog to subscribe there as well. I am currently running a free 36-day series of video conversations and art exercises that were foundational to much of the outline of this book, and especially for this section. More details can be found here.

With love and gratitude to you all,

Crystal Marie

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Between Hard and Beautiful Places; Collage Art Painting by Crystal Marie

One of the gifts of my particular strain of the neurodivergent brain is a trait called Echolalia¹. For as long as I can remember, it has presented itself through the urge to repeat certain sounds, syllables, accents, words and phrases. To roll them around on my tongue and savor their feeling, to release built up tension in my brain as if a pressure valve through my mouth, which sometimes brings me the underlying poetic rhythm of words when I write. Quite frequently it presents itself as an ongoing soundtrack of music and lyrics playing in the background of my mind on any given day.

The ironic thing about the way echolalia often presents itself rhythmically with song lyrics, is that I really don’t think to listen to music at home the way many people do. I can identify songs and genres and artists that I connect and gravitate to but typically it’s podcasts or NPR playing on my radio.

Rarely am I able to recite more than a few lines, even the most popular songs from those high school years that hit with such strong nostalgia we can’t help but sing along. I joke that I am the One Line Wonder. It is usually the catchy line from the chorus and the rest of the song? I’ll just hum along or make something up to amuse myself.

When those single lines begin to play so loud on repeat in my brain, in that earworm² sort of way, demanding my attention, I’ve learned to recognize them as clues. My intuition is creating a connection to something I’ve been ruminating on, or offering me a potential title for my art that connects it to the deeper meaning. Often, in looking up the single line I can recall, I find something so relevant in the rest of the song lyrics that it hits me afresh how the Intuitive Voice serves as a guide. All those layers of pattern recognition and that mysterious spiritual connection leaning in and pointing me towards the something I’ve been searching for.

A recent earworm was Tina Turner singing What’s Love Got to Do With It³ or more accurately, these three lines over and over and over and over:

Oh-oh-oh, what's love got to do, got to do with it?
What's love, but a second-hand emotion?
What's love got to do, got to do with it?

I nearly ignored it in favor of getting to my task list. Had I pushed that feeling aside instead of looking up the lyrics, I would have missed out on the gem hiding in the next line:

Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?

And even more treasure waiting further down in these lines:

I've been taking on a new direction
But I have to say
I've been thinking about my own protection
It scares me to feel this way

Suddenly it clicks. Here in lyric form is the armor we put on in life that follows us into the studio and our related creative endeavors. Tina singing so succinctly, the battle that wages inside when we’ve been hurt by something or someone in the past. How we want to engage, we want to show up and be seen, to make something deeply meaningful and get our work out there, but dang, we know that makes us vulnerable.

Or maybe we don’t know. Maybe it isn’t a cognitive thought at all, that armor can be so deeply infused in our psyche, we don’t even question it. It’s an ongoing conditioning to conform to our family systems and the expectations placed on us through societal norms, governing everything from our appearance, to our behaviors, to what we do with our own time. Our internal limiting beliefs, like those earworms, playing on a loop inside, present us with plenty of believable excuses for not daring to step outside of the preordained lines.