About a year ago, a colleague recommended the book Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross.
What’s inside this book felt like soul-level truth to me… what I’ve intuitively known for years, if not decades, is being proven true by science. Art has the power to:
- Release stress and anxiety, activating our parasympathetic nervous system
- Reduce physical pain and elevate our mood
- Help us process and move through challenging emotions
- Create a spaciousness in our mind, making room for possibilities to arise and ideas to flow in
- Help us look at challenges with a fresh perspective and aid us in solving problems
- Connect us to ourselves, our inner wisdom, and our intuition
This book came at a time that almost felt divinely orchestrated. For several months, I’d been exploring what my next chapter would look like. After getting my transformational coaching certification in 2020, and coaching dozens of clients since then, I knew I wanted to do something impactful, something in the personal growth space that would empower others to uplevel their lives.
But it always felt like something was missing… something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
One day, I was leading a client through an Ikigai exercise (the Japanese “reason for being”), helping her to connect with her own unique purpose in the world. And it suddenly dawned on me what was lacking in my own journey… art!
As a lifelong artist, I realized my longing for something different was connected to what I wasn’t doing in my career… making art. I suppose this should’ve been obvious, but for someone who tends to think primarily with her logical, left-side brain, it just didn’t occur to me what I really needed to feel complete.
So I started to play around with teaching art, launching an acrylic painting membership and welcoming 12 amazing students. But a few months in, I realized how much I missed the personal growth journey I led my clients on in coaching.
This summer, as I was preparing to shut down and reimagine the membership, I picked up Your Brain on Art for a second time. I decided to approach it like a devoted student, taking notes every time something clicked or gave me whole-body goosebumps. It made even more sense than it did the first time around – I kept nodding my head over and over again. “Yes!” I’d exclaim, feverishly jotting things down I wanted to remember.
In total, I wrote down 77 quotes or things that struck a cord – concepts I knew I eventually wanted to share and teach through the lens of my own experience as an artist and coach.
Now, as I write this in August of 2024, some massive things are unfolding behind the scenes over here. I’m working on creating something that marries the things I love about both personal development and art, preparing to launch it in the coming weeks.
But in the meantime, I’m excited to keep sharing my favorite insights and a-has from this book I love so much. So this article is not only the inaugural post for my new blog, it’s also the beginning of a series – an in-depth review of Your Brain on Art from my perspective as an artist, a transformational coach, and someone who is just a little bit obsessed with neuroscience and the power of our minds.
Watch for more posts coming weekly… I can’t wait to share my thoughts with you!