I've been in an exciting and expansive era, incorporating more creativity into my offerings and work. It feels invigorating, and it's getting me to think more deeply about creativity itself. I've always felt like therapy is a creative act. It's generative, exploratory, intuitive, unique, and works best when we pay attention to what authentically wants to be expressed. It's also process-oriented, not outcome-oriented. More and more, I'm coming to feel that it's this creative process itself-- and the container that cultivates it-- that is therapeutic, rather than any specific goal or result.

How do we create such containers in our lives? How do we cultivate spaces where authentic, healing, exploratory creative practice can take place? I am collaborating right now with a fellow therapist and writer to ask these exact questions, and to build a workshop together that brings these questions into our own lives and bodies: how do we nurture a sensual creative practice? How can we honor our senses, our bodies' innate knowings, to build a creative container that we can come home to? What is worth showing up to with constancy and devotion-- what is it that's worth practicing?

These questions have brought us to unpredictable, deep, and rich places, and have me even more curious about the mysterious alchemy of creativity. Stay tuned for more details; we'll be announcing more about this virtual workshop soon!

One of the tarot cards that I most associate with creativity is The Lovers. This may seem strange at first-- isn't the lovers about love? It is, but more so, it's about the sense of expansive play and exploration that love can bring. This kind of expansive play and deep engagement can come in a romantic relationship, to be sure, but it can also come in a creative process, a devotional project, or anything else that we find ourselves deeply compelled by.

I think of the Lovers card as representing a dance partner-- whether that dance partner is a romantic partner or a creative pursuit, a friend or a mystery or an adventure. Whatever it is, it brings a sense of dancing with-- of exploratory and ecstatic presence, of curious questioning, of intuitive and shifting movement, of erotic play.

When I use "erotic" here, I'm not using it to mean just "sexual" (although it could mean that)-- I'm using it in the much broader sense of the word, in the sense of its root, eros, which refers to life-giving energy, to creativity and love. The therapist Esther Perel is well-known for discussing the erotic in this broader sense. She describes eroticism as "this quality of aliveness, of vibrancy, of vitality, of renewal."

Perel is not the first to describe the broader uses of the term erotic. Audre Lorde writes of the erotic as power in her 1984 essay "The Uses of the Erotic," a classic and vital text that describes the erotic as a resource that each of us has within us, and which connects us to our deepest feelings, and is therefore a deeply potent source of power and information.

"The erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation... It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves."

-- Audre Lorde, *Sister Outsider*, 1984

If creativity is an exploratory, expansive expression of our innate life-force, then it is an erotic act-- an act of eros, an act of power, an act of connection. For we cannot be truly creative while alienated from ourselves, our sensations, our intuition. To connect to our own creativity is to connect to our own power.

And this is why it's not a politically neutral fact; just the opposite. As Lorde writes: "Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex." (Though, I could argue, we're also taught to separate eros from sex as well-- that could be a whole other newsletter).

People so empowered are dangerous-- dangerous to a system that benefits from our alienation, from our numbness, from our immobilization. A system that maintains the status quo when we are disconnected, disembodied, distracted.

The workshop I'm co-developing focuses on sensual creative practice for this exact reason; because connecting to our senses, honoring our sensitivity, connects us to our creative power and empowers us to respond to the world. Jenn Grannemen, author of Sensitive, argues that a better word for "sensitive" might be "responsive." What we call sensitivity is really our bodies, minds, and nervous systems responding to the world. When we are connected to our own senses, our own feelings, our own responses, we are thus more connected to the world. And then we are in the true, empowered, expansive dance of connection-- with whomever or whatever our dance partner may be.

The Erotics of Creativity