Shaun McNiff - Imagination in action : secrets for unleashing creative expression

Imagination in Action is that rare book that can serve equally the experienced artist in need of a creative tune-up as well as the wary beginner about to dip a toe into any of the expressive arts. Shaun McNiff, as he has done throughout his long career, dances us forward, inspiring, supporting, gently challenging, and pointing out how the journey can be even more enjoyable and full of life.

Pat B. Allen, author of Art Is a Spiritual Path

McNiff weaves his philosophy of art therapy, creativity, and studio practice with practical, hands-on activities for therapists, teachers, and individuals. The book reads as if you are by his side in his studio classroom as he integrates vivid stories and keen knowledge with decades-long observations. This is an essential book for anyone who believes in the power of art to transform the world.

Deborah Putnoi, author of The Drawing Mind

ABOUT THE BOOK

Hes spent a career helping people access their creative potential, and now Shaun McNiff is sharing the secrets hes learned from observing his own creative process as well as that of othersboth those who identify as artists and those who dont. The result is nothing less than a master class in creativity by one of the great creative theoristsand practitionersof our time. This is intended as a practical text, Shaun says, a creativity primer, striving to capture the essential things that have been of use to me and others. The wealth of instruction he provides here in these essential things will be indispensable to artists of all stripes, as well as to all who strive to express themselves with honesty and authenticity using any of the media life makes available.

SHAUN MCNIFF is internationally recognized as a founder and leading figure in the arts and healing field. University Professor at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he is past president of the American Art Therapy Association and the author of several other books including Art As Medicine, Trust the Process, and Creating with Others.

Sign up to receive news and special offers from Shambhala Publications.

Or visit us online to sign up at shambhala.com/eshambhala.

Imagination in Action

Secrets for Unleashing Creative Expression

Shaun McNiff

Shambhala

BOSTON & LONDON

2015

Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Horticultural Hall

300 Massachusetts Avenue

Boston, Massachusetts 02115

www.shambhala.com

Cover art by Shaun McNiff

2015 by Shaun McNiff

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McNiff, Shaun.

Imagination in action: secrets for unleashing creative expression / Shaun McNiff.First Edition.

pages cm

eISBN 978-0-8348-0197-4

ISBN 978-1-61180-201-6 (paperback)

1. Creative ability. 2. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) 3. Imagination. I. Title.

BF408.M337 2015

153.35dc23

2014042224

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing ... I am a responding instrument.

William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

Forever is composed of Nows

Emily Dickinson

Contents

Creativity is the ability to take what exists and change it into something new through unique responsive acts. It puts imagination into action.

Rock the Reigning Order

Creativity is a defining quality of the human spirit, a force of nature, the mainstream of imagination accessible to all. Yet it is not free to run in schools and societies still repressed by restrictive ideas about the nature of creative intelligence, how it can be cultivated and taught, who can do it and who cannot, and how it changes the world.

The shackles to be cast off are largely fashioned by misperceptions that creativity and art are the domain of a talented few rather than the truly universal pulse advancing life everywhere. This narrow view is all too conveniently paired with entrenched values about educational basicsthat is, that these basics do not include creative expressionand natural resistances people have to risking and acting outside the norm.

Forty-five years ago during a revolutionary time I was given a chance to cultivate creative expression in the back wards of a state mental hospital. My start was fortuitously in sync with emerging international communities training artists, students, teachers, therapists, and group leaders believing in the creative potential of every person. Engaging beginners, we explored how to create environments that would support optimal creative expression by understanding resistances, fears, and blocksonly to discover how valuable the same processes are to experienced artists.

After writing many books exploring ways to further creative expression and working with people throughout the world committed to the arts and healing, I am fortunate to have the opportunity to reflect on the practices and ideas that have been most useful in helping myself and others. Of course I build upon all of my previous works and especially Trust the Process: An Artists Guide to Letting Go (1998), and I inevitably restate earlier discoveries, but this present book integrates what went before with new insights on creating with the shadow, witnessing and judgment, quality, resistance, the responsive aspects of creating, and most essentially how the creative expression is indivisible from nature.

While setting out to write a creativity primer for the general public I may have unintentionally written my most direct account of how art healing works, since the elemental qualities of the creative process are the same as healing. This accident underscores how anything with its finger close to the pulse of the creative source will fly the coops of conceptual silos and how the dynamics of nature hold all.

I start by reframing creativity itself and demonstrate how to reliably create if you are able and willing to let it happen in your most natural way. Commitment and attitude are everything. The most intractable obstacles and blocks are in the mind and in approaches to creativity that reinforce too much thinking and not enough practice and play. Of course thoughts and ideas have a prominent place in the creative realm but, as we show here, they have to relax their controls and follow the lead of physical gestures and passions that carry within themselves innate drives for quality and beauty. We will practice how to transform harsh inner judges into perceptive witnesses of the unique nature of a creative expression, its suchness transcending good and bad, and we will explore how difficulties and disturbing things are time-tested fuel for the alchemy of art.

Creativity is the ability to take what exists and change it into something new through unique responsive acts. It happens by building or simply altering relationships. The creative act involves doing things differently, sometimes even in unthinkable and illogical ways, which can be risky when the world values conformity and prescribed truths. It is a process of the moment rarely working in planned and predictable patterns. This accounts for why it is so universally misunderstood and seldom integrated into formal education. Creativity puts imagination into action. It rocks the reigning order.