Opening What is Closed: Re-Connecting to the Creative Process
Six-week online workshop for artists, writers, and creatives of all stripes.
This 6 week course for artists, writers and other creatives offers a container to reveal and dismantle what is blocking freedom and joyfulness within one’s art-making process. The course will approach this from two directions: shining a light on unhelpful habits and judgements that one has accumulated, while at the same time supporting connection to what is truly fascinating and meaningful to us.
Each session will include teaching to support reflection on the joys and obstacles within our own creative process, and there will be time for sharing and questions each week. Half of the meeting time will be devoted to a “creative process session”
This course will allow for a particular
The creativity courses I offer are based on a few tenets:
Exploring your own creative process from within allows for radical transformation
Working in our own space within our own mediums offers a chance to re-enliven our day-to-day art practice. In support of this intention, there are no specific projects or techniques offered within this course. Instead, these courses offer a chance to enter into relationship with what you are drawn to explore – what you love – from new perspectives that can bring more awe, joy, and freedom into the experience of making art.
A supportive, group container emboldens us to challenge our limiting habits and beliefs more deeply.
These group workshops and courses have been something I’ve been developing and refining over years with the intention to provide artists / creative types a safe and effective place to enliven and deepen their own art making process. You can see some of my previous courses here (both creativity and meditation).
Opening What is Closed:
Re-enlivening one’s relationship to art making.
This 6 week course will offer a structure to survey one’s own creative process and the nature of what may be blocking ease and freedom within it. This course will weave in approaches from wisdom traditions (primarily Buddhist ones), along with reflective exercises & basic meditation instruction in service of releasing creative blocks and increasing one’s connection to making art. All types of creatives welcome. Each meeting will include a group work session.
2026 Dates TBA – Sign up for registration notifications here.
Trusting What is Fascinating:
Developing freedom within our creative process and confidence in what inspires us.
This 5 week course explores our relationship to what calls us to create – both the obstacles to inspiration, and the beauty of opening fully to what is beautiful or meaningful to us. This course will offer weekly guided contemplations intended to evoke a sense of connection to inspiration, as well as a group work session to explore what is fascinating to us. All types of creatives welcome.
2026 Dates TBA – Sign up for registration notifications here.
Art as a Path of Practice:
What comes from exploring creative process as a spiritual path.
This 5 week course will lean into the particular beauty and depth of the art-making process that has nothing to do with worldly successes and failures. This offering will include weekly talks that make connections between creative process and spiritual/meditative practice, guided meditations, and a chance to explore the spiritual dimension of our art-process within group work session. All types of creatives welcome.
2026 Dates TBA – Sign up for registration notifications here.
About Creativity Workshops & Courses
A supportive, collective container for opening and deeping one’s creative process
There is something magical that happens when we share the intention to move beyond limiting beliefs and constraints of habit alongside others holding the same intentions. While I will contribute the teaching and structure for the course, I am always left with the impression that the most valuable element is the collective field of support and willingness that comes from participants. As a meditation teacher I’ve seen how powerful it is for people to learn meditation in a group context – to go beyond one’s habits of mind and move into new terrain is just made more “doable” with the silent support of a group. I’ve found the same to be true when doing this work of opening what is blocking possibility within our art process, and so offer this group structure. We don’t share work or have critiques, and speaking or asking questions is optional – the intention is to make as supportive a space as possible to discover for ourselves what is blocking ease, freedom, and dynamism within our creative process.
Who are these courses for?
Anyone who engages in making art or craft of any kind is welcome (painters, dancers, musicians, writers, textile artists, poets, crafters, digital artists, filmmakers, ceramicists and more). In this context, labels like professional vs. hobbyist don’t apply – if you are called to make any kind of art, then you have a creative process that can be opened and explored and loved more fully. People find these courses helpful in reinvigorating one’s connection to art making, or as a basis to explore a new form of art making that feels to be calling them.
What are the sessions like?
These courses/workshops are centered on a weekly group zoom meeting. The main meeting sessions are 2 hours long, and include a period of teaching/talk to inspire reflection around one’s own creative process. There is also time for questions/sharing/reports around creative process. Depending on the course there will usually be a short guided meditation or contemplation that encourages connection to what inspires us.
Each meeting will also include a 45 minute “creative process session” where each participant works within the medium of their choice, with simple guidelines provided + a time to check in about how it went. Most courses will also have optional mid-week optional 1-hour creative process sessions made available during times chosen by participants. Recorded guided meditations + exercises will be made available.
A little about me & my approach…
A few things inform the particular way I teach art process work. The first element is my spiritual/meditation practice and experience as a dharma teacher. I’ve practiced (mostly) Buddhist meditation approaches since 2002, and was authorized to teach dharma by Rob Burbea in 2020. Buddhist wisdom practice involves the cultivation of sensitivity to the activities of mind that fixate our experience in certain ways that hold in place unnecessary suffering, and it offers tools to deconstruct those limiting habits of perception. My approach to working with creative blocks is heavily informed by these teachings. Having a long term meditation practice, and then teaching and supporting other meditators as a teacher, has clarified for me some things about what works for people who wish to deeply transform aspects of their inner life. The structure, elements, and rhythm of the sessions are very related to what I’ve learned in this way. As an artist for more than forty years (BFA in painting Rhode Island School of Design, MFA in film UCLA), I’ve moved through a pretty full range of highs and lows in terms of the ease and beauty available through art making, including a decade of non-painting in the years after attending art school. In my early 30s I was lucky to find my process painting teacher, Barbara Kaufman. She introduced me to process work, and supported me in re-enlivening my own art making process (which remains a source of adventure, wonder, and deep connection for me).