Intuition is accessibility: finding creativity in movement
Phoebe is an artist and movement instructor, her work lives at the intersection of art, intuition and taking care. Phoebe runs a design studio called Okay Shoe that launched an oracle deck called the Okay Oracle for slowing down and taking care. She thinks creativity builds resilience, intuition is accessibility and that art and feelings will change the world. When she isn’t teaching goofy dance moves disguised as pilates or making stuff, you can find her in the park with an oat milk latte walking her dog.
Creativity and intuition are things we all have. They are tools we carry with us day-to-day, but we do not live in a world that fosters the use of creativity or intuition. Wellness and feeling good have been commodified by capitalism that tells you when and how to feel good and who should get to feel good. What if we already have the tools we need, to feel, to tap into intuition, and creativity? Connecting to the messages our bodies whisper to us is a practise, something we have to get really specific in tuning into. Moving our bodies is a tool that helps us slow down so we can cultivate mindfulness and care for ourselves. Tapping into our creativity removes roadblocks to intuition to make intuition accessible. Intuition is accessibility.
What role does creativity play in your life? So many of us declare that we “are not creative”
but, as children we freely pick up crayons and colour whatever whenever, climb and jump and swing freely. Creativity is something inherent in us all. Moving and self expression is something we carefully quiet inside of ourselves. Creativity is something that we use freely but have been told by systems of oppression, parents, teachers, friends, ourselves, that it isn’t for us – that it belongs to those who attend certain schools, that we are creative or we are not creative, that creativity is only valuable if it makes a certain about of money, that creativity has to be unique or good enough or make certain work look a certain way or make X amount of money.
Moving teaches us to PLAY. To take up space to listen, to foster resilience, so we can create, so we can feel. Maybe moving is a space to come back to yourself or a moment to express yourself. But by using creativity as a pathway to ourselves, to our center, to the grey middle areas that we live in, we can feel our bodies requests and preferences for comfort, joy, grief and expression.
What are the systems in our lives that tell us to avoid intuition? Racism, patriarchy. And what are our protests against these things? To slowly remove these mental roadblocks for ourselves so we can do the work of removing the systematic barriers to access. To create space for ourselves to find and feel good. To express and articulate what our bodies feel, or maybe what our bodies are trying to communicate with us, to us.
By feeling and articulating creativity with our bodies we are better able to understand what we need to move. Creativity is intuition, the deep hearing and listening and honouring of what our bodies are asking of us. Intuition is accessibility, the path for all to feel good inside themselves.
Moving is just one way of expressing ourselves, and it is a practise. The practise of listening, the practise of arriving into ourselves, the practise of creating space for ourselves to feel okay.