Creativity as Chaos
The last few weeks I’ve been in the thick of re-learning creativity, and confronting what it means to hold space for this volatile process. In the midst of this a newsletter felt very uninteresting :-) now, I’m happy to be back.
I see creativity as complex energy transformation. We’re never actually creating something new—it’s about what we are gathering and releasing, and how we bring it all together, collaborating with space and time. There is so much mystery in creative process. Creativity is not only holding space for volatility, but respecting chaos as a vital ingredient.
Honoring chaos in a rigid capitalist culture can literally get you labeled insane. We’re taught that the definition of health is productivity, regarding the body as a machine and erasing/ pushing out anomalies. We aren’t taught to build up our capacity to hold chaos, we’re taught to fear it and pretend it does not exist.
Chaos is our reality. Our world is not only uncertain, it’s deeply sick. Our global economy and systems are organized around exploitation— pillaging the earth because it’s profitable, enslaving Congolese people for smartphone minerals, massacring Palestinians for beachfront property and oil, the list is endless. A world organized around profit over LIFE is fundamentally chaotic.
Pilates is about stabilizing the core of our body, and then mobilizing against this to challenge the stability. We build steadiness with focused consistency and curiosity, not rigidity or control. Pilates is all about energy flow. Every time I come back to this practice, I feel new capacity to confront the chaos within and all around me. So…
I’m joining the faculty at The Floor! Class here have been transformative for my body, and I’m so excited to learn this style of contemporary Pilates. I’m deep in study now and hopefully will have a new in person class by October, in downtown Brooklyn.
Pilates as Energy Practice will continue! Virtual Saturdays 11am-noon EST, sliding scale $15-22, max 8 ppl. I’ll start folding in learnings from my training at The Floor right away. Join us!
May we expand through the chaos and return home to this abundant Earth