There is a part of me that still hesitates to say this out loud: I am creating my own songs. My own playlist. My own musical voice. And I love it.

I am not a trained musician. I did not study composition or grow up performing. And yet lately, when the world feels loud and my interior feels crowded, I find myself turning toward melody. Not to impress. Not to reinvent myself. But because music has become a place to put what I have been carrying.

For most of my life, I wrote.

I journaled daily. I wrote essays and poetry. I would fill pages and then distill the swirl into a short poem. It was how I unclogged the drain in my brain.

After COVID and burnout, even writing became impossible. I had no words for what I was feeling. The exhaustion was deeper than language. Through social paint nights and then working with an artist friend, I discovered painting could express what language could not. I began painting small pieces each morning and sharing them quietly on Instagram. The canvas could hold what I could not yet articulate.

Writing and painting were never about product. They were process — a way to move big emotions instead of storing them. Creativity was the way, even before I understood it was helping me metabolize grief, burnout, and the strain of living in a chaotic world.

The power of painting as a process eventually led me to my first Intuition Painting® retreat. I did not go seeking certification. I went because something in me recognized the medicine of it. To paint without critique. To let the body lead. To allow image to emerge without explanation. It opened a depth of integration I hadn’t known was possible. I eventually became a certified facilitator — not for the credential, but because I had experienced how transformative the process could be.

Music adds another layer of medicine.

The Four C’s didn’t come to me as a brand or a plan. They came through grief, through unknowing, and through a single question that quietly changed everything. While I was in the Trauma, Grief, and Renewal Certificate Program at Southwestern College, one of my teachers shared something his own mentor had once given him. He talked about how loss often shatters our spiritual frameworks. When that happens, his mentor had told him, we’re not left with better answers, we’re left with a better question:

What do you actually turn toward now? What truly grounds you?

His mentor had given him a simple assignment, and he passed it on to us. Choose four words. Not beliefs. Not doctrines. Four words you return to when everything else falls away. Four words you reach for when you need guidance, steadiness, or orientation. He said: This is your higher power. And this is also your work. When I did the exercise, the words that came weren’t new at all:

Creativity. Compassion. Connection. Coherence.

There is a moment in every real transformation when the old way no longer works, but the new way has not yet arrived. It is the long, curving, learning space between knowing and not knowing. And it is almost always filled with frustration. We are taught to treat this space as a problem to solve. Something to fix. Something to escape. But this is the deeper truth:

This is where resilience is built.

My brother was a surfer. He didn’t surf as a hobby, but as a way of being in the world. We grew up living close to the ocean, and he built his own boards in an old playhouse at our childhood home. He died too young, and years after he died, one of his close friends told me something that stayed with me: my brother’s favorite quote about how to live came from Nietzsche — amor fati, “love your fate.” Not just a phrase he liked, but a way he understood life. A way of meeting what comes instead of fighting the shape of things.

That conversation changed how I saw him. And how I saw life.

I’m lucky to live by the ocean. I can walk to the cliffs, sit and journal in front of the horizon, wander down to the tide pools, or walk along the shore finding seashells and feeling my toes in the sand. When life feels like too much, the water reminds me how to come back to myself.

In therapeutic settings, this is often called blue space therapy or nature-based therapy—the use of water and natural environments to help calm the nervous system, reduce stress, and support emotional regulation. There’s good research behind this. My own version of ocean therapy isn’t clinical. It’s personal, creative, and experiential. It’s how I use the ocean to listen, to settle my body, and to let what’s inside begin to move—often through walking, journaling, and painting.

At its simplest, ocean therapy is a grounding practice. It’s about letting your senses lead instead of your thoughts: feeling your feet on the ground, noticing the rhythm of the waves, listening to sound, watching light move on water, and letting your breath slow.

Ocean therapy isn’t about escaping life. It’s about regulating the nervous system and remembering how to feel again. The rhythm of the waves slows my breath. The wide horizon gives my mind more space. My body softens before my thoughts do.

Creativity isn’t something we do once we feel better. It’s often what helps us feel better in the first place. I’ve learned this slowly, through years of holding too much—stress, grief, responsibility, unspoken emotion. What finally became clear is this: the body is always processing experience, whether we help it or not. When it has nowhere to put what it’s carrying, it finds other ways out.

Anxiety.
Numbness.
Restlessness.
Fatigue that sleep doesn’t fix.

This isn’t weakness. It’s the nervous system asking for movement.

Lately, my grandson has been completely immersed in Star Wars. His Christmas presents revolved almost entirely around it—LEGO building sets, books, a backpack, games, and more. Watching his excitement has been pure joy, but it also led me to an unexpected realization.

His love for Star Wars connects directly to my own long-standing fascination with Joseph Campbell.

Eckhart Tolle’s book A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose is an invitation to awaken. It asks us to step out of the ego’s grip and live from presence, awareness, and the deeper intelligence of the soul.

Intuition Painting® is a powerful, embodied way to practice exactly what Tolle teaches

When you paint from intuition, you are not just creating art. You are practicing consciousness.

If the central teaching of A New Earth is that suffering comes from identifying with the ego and freedom comes from awareness, then Intuition Painting® becomes the place where this insight is no longer theoretical. It becomes lived, felt, and real.

As Tolle writes, “Awareness is the greatest agent for change.” The canvas is where that awareness comes alive.

Rewiring your creative pathways, one brushstroke at a time

There is a powerful insight that shows up again and again in neuroscience and attachment research, often connected to the work of Dr. Karyn Purvis. The brain learns and changes faster through play.

Some studies suggest it can take hundreds of repetitions to form a new neural pathway through effort and discipline alone. But when learning happens in a state of play, that process can accelerate dramatically, sometimes taking as few as 10 to 20 repetitions. The exact numbers vary, but the truth behind them is clear. Play speeds up rewiring.

This is exactly why Intuition Painting® works so deeply.

In expressive arts, we talk a lot about painting freely…following your impulses, trusting the unknown, and letting color lead the way. But when we try to do that, the mind immediately fights back.

Michele Cassou, creator of the Point Zero approach, describes these inner blocks as the Three Dragons, the forces that rise up whenever we step into true creative freedom. You see them in every Intuition Painting® session. We all do. And naming them helps loosen their grip.

I’ve been researching this idea of high vs. low vibration emotions. We hear a lot about “high vibration” as if it means being happy all the time, thinking positive thoughts, or avoiding anything uncomfortable. But high vibration has nothing to do with forced positivity or spiritual glossing-over.

It’s something much deeper, calmer, and more honest: alignment. With your body. With your intuition. With the natural rhythms of your life. And that alignment only becomes real when we stop treating “low” emotions like failures and start seeing them for what they are: information.

Every Emotion Has a Vibration

Every feeling you experience carries a frequency. Not “good” or “bad”, simply signals that reveal what’s happening inside you. Low-vibration emotions are not signs you’re off your path. They are messages pointing toward what needs attention, truth, or care:

• Fear shows where safety is missing
• Anger shows where boundaries were crossed
• Sadness shows where tenderness is needed
• Grief shows what mattered deeply
• Shame shows where healing and honesty are calling for you

There is wisdom in every emotion. When we stop labeling feelings as right or wrong, we unlock their purpose.

I came across a simple video about ikigai the other day, nothing flashy or “life-changing,” just a gentle explanation of this Japanese idea of a reason to wake up in the morning. But something in it landed deeply.

It made me pause and ask myself: What is my ikigai? What actually makes my life feel worth living…beneath the goals, the roles, the doing? Especially since I recently retired, what is my reason for being at this stage in my life?

That small moment of reflection inspired me to write this blog post and to explore what ikigai really means and to invite you to discover your own.

The Intuition Painting® Guiding Mantras are gentle prompts that awaken your inner muse and reconnect you with your natural creative flow.

Each one is a simple shift in mindset—an invitation to release fear, trust your instincts, and let your imagination lead the way.

With Intuition Painting®, these mantras help you:

• Move beyond fear

• Open creative flow

• Spark insights and “ahas”

• Free stuck energy

• Lift your mood and motivation

• Deepen your connection to your inner wisdom

I keep these mantras posted around my art studio as reminders of what really matters in the creative process—and you can, too.

In Intuition Painting®, we try to avoid familiar symbols — hearts, stars, trees, butterflies, and so on — not because they’re wrong, but because they often come from habit rather than intuition. The question is: Are you making a pretty picture, or are you letting brush, color, and emotion lead the way?

Just as a writer avoids clichés to find fresh language, we paint beyond cultural symbols to discover our own imagery and meaning. That said, if a familiar image appears, I never tell someone not to use it — and sometimes I use one too. Maybe it really is their intuition, or maybe it’s simply a placeholder when they feel stuck. In the first of the four sessions in a workshop, that’s common. By the second or third, the painter often paints over it or transforms it into something unexpected.

We had a beautiful 2-Day Intuition Painting® Workshop at the new Juniper Moon Artisan Market in Paradise, Utah, held during the luminous Harvest Moon on October 6 & 7.

What a gift to share the magic of this process with the loveliest people — souls willing to dive deep, trust their intuition, and let the colors lead the way. Each brushstroke became a whisper from the soul… each painting, a mirror of transformation.

Mapping Myth to Creativity: Back in 2023, when I attended my first Intuition Painting® Workshop in Joshua Tree, CA with founder Montine Blank, I realized that the wheel of the process mirrored the archetypal paths of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey (the external quest) and Maureen Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey (the inner transformation). Wanting to understand this more deeply, I mapped the stages together—interweaving mythic storytelling with the creative flow of Intuition Painting®—to show how the process guides us through both an outward adventure and an inward awakening.

While I wasn’t raised with art, creativity, or painting being a focus—or even really encouraged—I fell in love with it late in life. It arrived quietly at first, as a coping skill for burnout, frustration, trauma, and the emotional unraveling that followed my divorce, almost 20 years ago. What began as a way to survive became something sacred. Now, painting is part of my everyday life, and I honestly can’t imagine life without it.

I couldn’t sleep last night and was scrolling on Instagram. I became fascinated with a post that someone had submitted a question to AI and received a profound answer…especially interesting because it mirrors what we do in intuition painting. I wanted to see if I got the same answer so I asked ChatGPT this: “Based on all the great psychologists, What are the 5 things everyone must understand about life or they risk failing at it?” It was basically the same answer. The interesting thing I realized is the relationship to what we do in intuition painting, read on:

Aceso: Goddess of the Process of Healing

I paint a lot now. It’s become a daily meditation—a quiet return to myself through color, texture, and breath. As I painted this image of a medicine woman, she spoke to me of her power. She is Aceso, Goddess of the process of healing. Not of sudden miracles. Not of quick fixes. But of the gentle, sacred unfolding—one breath, one choice, one brushstroke at a time.

The magic of Intuition Painting® lies in helping you access and trust your intuition—not as a fleeting feeling, but as a full-body knowing.

Through the act of painting without rules or judgment, we quiet the thinking mind and awaken the deeper wisdom held in the head, heart, and gut—our three inner “brains.”

Did you know you have three brains?

I am facilitating Intuition Painting: Painting Through Grief over the next couple months at my home for anyone that may be interested in this unique experience.

This is a gentle, creative workshop for healing through color and expression. No painting experience needed—just an open heart.