Potential Space
A held & playful space for creative therapists
About
A part of me has always been stuck nostalgically in the past where the possibilities for fun and wonder seemed endless and more specifically on the cusp of when it all changes; when we realise that life isn’t all fairies and fireflies.
Children “...soon know that they will grow up... You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.”
(James Barrie)
Magical thinking interestingly continues into our late childhood (Selma Fraiberg), extended by our desire to keep just a little of the magic alive. We know it not to be true and yet we cannot quite bring ourselves to accept it. We do not realise in fact that it comes from within; from our own mind eye’s ability to play, daydream, create...
I made futile attempts as I grew up to hold on to my early childhood. A degree in fine art and then teacher training a little later in life and I began to see how stifled my creativity was as an adult; that it was in fact my lack of innocence – the pressure that I placed upon myself for being ‘good’, particularly at art – that held me back.
What was missing for me was not anything that could be taught as such, in a skill set sense. It was the freedom away from expectation, the space to breathe and trust in what needed to be expressed without judgement. There was a disconnect between my art and the process of playing for playing’s sake.
A bursary project focussed on childhood wonder and time as a creative agent (both through Creative Partnerships) were wistful nods to this. It was my training however as a play and creative arts therapist that paved the way, not only to my letting go as a creative, but to my providing what I now know to be Potential Space, both for myself and for others.
Now I create and live more freely and I help others to do the same. I understand that to be there for or with others we need to hold space for our own creative practice; for whatever’s alive within us and in need of our attention.
The last few years have taught me, with a little help from a friend/somatic coach, that embracing life with both softness and playfulness is everything. Even approaching my new venture in this manner, imagining that I am ‘playing at’ setting up a website, a membership, a creative enterprise… keeps most - for I am not completely free from the harsh adultlike critic - of the hardness at bay.
For in Eileen Agar’s words, “Most of life’s meaning is lost without a spirit of play. In play all that is lovely and soaring in the human spirit strives to find expression... To play is to yield oneself to a kind of magic; and to give a lie to the inconvenient world of fact.”
Let’s do this together!
Softly,
