Unique Creative Voice: The Challenge of Communication

28/7/2015

I admit it. Teaching Yoga in Spanish is not the way I'd normally suggest you go about finding your creative voice.

In fact, I spent 10 years in the studio looking for mine. But something didn't quite gel.

Then one fine day, with the turn of life's wheel, I found myself in front of a room full of Spanish Yoga students with the words "Teach Me" burning in their eyes.

Here was a whole new level of challenge unrelated to contorting myself into extreme postures in front of a group of strangers.

The challenge of communication:

Communicating ideas in a language that is not my own. A language in which, I'm definitely competent but I will never speak like a native.

Communicating to people from a culture in which I live immersed, but that will always be 'other'.

Communicating ideas and systems from a third culture that I don't pretend to have more than a passing understanding of, despite my lifetime practice.

For this kind of communication, I had to reach deep within. I had to bypass all the usual paths.

I had to find something that resonated so strongly within ME, that I couldn't fail to get it across.

What came out was NOT the traditional Yoga of my early Sivananda training.

What emerged instead was:

a Yoga informed by my own physical shortcomings. A lifetime of injuries and the corresponding recoveries I've fought for.
a Yoga influenced by the myriad of physical disciplines I've practiced. And the insight I've got from them about how the body works.
a Yoga focussed by thousands of hours of creative work. Work that honed my ability to quiet my mind.
a Yoga of the 21st century in which, thankfully, the internet offers a window onto every kind of Yoga style practiced on the planet.

In other words, MY Yoga.

Photos of one of my Yoga classes taken by my very talented student, Nuria Vargas.

With each class I grew more confident. I saw the rapid progress my students made. The happiness on their faces as they made it.

Something important had shifted. I had freed myself from a belief that had bound me for a long time: That there's a RIGHT way to practice and teach Yoga.

I had become a creator.

I didn't need rocket science to figure out the same thing needed to happen in my art life.

If my way of teaching Yoga is as effective and valid as anyone else's, then surely my way of making art is too?

And if MY Yoga is a mixture of all my different life experiences, then my art must be that too.

And if I what I did to teach those Spanish students was find an authentic way of communicating, then isn't that exactly how to reach an audience for my art?

Seems I spent so long looking in the studio for my creative voice, I forgot that what I need to express visually isn't about art.

It's about life.

And life happens outside the studio.

Even if we need to go back inside to express it.

Your journey towards a unique creative voice HAS to be a reflection of you.

You're not going to find your creative voice the way I did.

What part of YOUR life might you need to bring into your art?