Recently I was asked to give a short talk about my creative journey. The question I was asked to answer was this:

How does experiencing the creative aspects of ourselves deepen our own spiritual journey, increase self-awareness, and provide greater energy and joy at this stage of life?

Because several friends asked me if I had a written transcript of the talk (no, just a few note cards which I didn’t always follow), I decided to write a post that summarizes my response to the question above. Some of this story will be familiar to those of you follow my blog, as I’ve written about parts of this journey in many different blog posts.

My Accidental Creative Journey

Just after my second grandchild was born I bought a little point-and-shoot camera so that I could take pictures of our grandchildren. I had tried to use my husband’s digital camera to make photographs and decided that it was “too complicated” for me. I wanted something simple and easy to use.

At first the photos I made with that camera were terrible. But I kept working with the camera and gradually got better at using it. One day I took it out to the woods to attempt to make closeup shots of my favorite wildflowers. I tried and tried to make clean photos with shallow depth of field. But my point-and-shoot didn’t let me change the depth of field and I lacked the skill to capture the image I saw in my mind’s eye.

I decided to take a photography workshop using my husband’s digital camera. It was not a DSLR but it did allow me to set it on manual operation and begin to learn basic photographic concepts. I told myself that I didn’t want to invest in a better camera until I knew whether I would really like photography or not.

That first workshop was all it took…

I fell madly, deeply, totally in love with photography!

The next week I bought an entry level DSLR camera and began a creative journey I never expected to take.

Seeing beauty everywhere

I began seeing beauty everywhere I looked. As I drove to work, I would be filled with wonder at the beautiful color of the sky, or the clouds, or fog over a marshy area near the road. Most of all I began seeing the light in a way I had never seen it before.

Today, 7 years later, I still see beauty everywhere. Sometimes I feel like some kind of Pollyanna with my constant litany of beauty. But I don’t care. It’s how I see the world.

The creative journey changed my life!

I’m a different person now than I was when I started this journey and much happier than I ever imagined I could be.

After I bought my DSLR camera, I began taking photography workshops on weekends and during vacations, and began making thousands of photographs. In the fall of 2010 I signed up to attend a photography workshop in Hawaii in March 2011. Little did I know that I had just made an appointment with destiny.

At the Hawaii workshop (called “Images of Gratitude”), I met a wonderful woman named Akiko, who owned and operated the charming rustic bed & breakfast where our workshop group stayed. During the workshop several of us had a serious discussion with Akiko about how short life is and how all of us wanted to change our lives to do what we loved. We talked about living simply and limiting our material wants. Akiko’s life shined as a beacon of inspiration, showing me how choosing a simple life doing what you loved was possible.

I came back from the workshop and told my husband that I needed to figure out a way to leave my job as a software engineer within the next year so that I could spend my time doing photography.

Be Careful What you Ask For…

One month later I was laid off from my job as a software engineer. Even though I now know this was the best thing that ever happened to me, at the time it was devastating. I felt loss, shame, and fear. But I never wavered in my decision to leave the corporate world and take up photography. I knew I was done writing software.

I was scared, beyond belief but serendipitous events had already begun popping up in my life.

The day before I was laid off from my job, a friend at work had told me that he’d made an appointment for me to take my photographs to a coffee shop in South Minneapolis. The coffee shop displayed local artists’ work and he thought I should do a show there. The appointment was for the day after I ended up being laid off!

So the day after the layoff, I pushed through my fear and all the complex feelings following a job layoff and took my photographs to the coffee shop. That was in late April 2011. September 1, 2011 I celebrated the opening of my first photographic show at that coffee shop.

By then I had created my own business, Marilyn Lamoreux Photography LLC, taken a Women in Business workshop and several other photography workshops, opened an Etsy shop where I sold prints online, and started this blog.

It was overwhelming and I was driven to “create a successful business.”

Angels Watching Over Me

Thank God I didn’t know how crazy dumb I was, how bad I still was as a photographer, and how much I had to learn. I never would have had the courage to do all that I did.

And it has been the BEST THING! It changed me and my life beyond my imaginings.

Happier Than Ever Before

At first I was obsessed with proving to myself that I was “worthy.” I was stuck in ego-land, believing that I needed to create a successful business, to be productive, to prove to myself I was worthy. So I buckled down and I learned about social media, blogging, SEO, fine art printing, and business accounting.

I worked more hours each day than I ever worked as a software engineer and most of the time it was pure joy. But as I started really trying to make a profit, I noticed that not everything I was doing was bringing me joy. I hated focusing on SEO on my website and in my Etsy shop. I didn’t want to spend my time on Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms pimping my work.

Noticing that most of the successful photographers I had met taught workshops, I taught a few classes on using Lightroom and Beginner’s Mind Photography and discovered that teaching did not bring me joy. I like working 1 on 1 with students but did not like scheduling classes that spanned several weeks, filling my schedule with weekly preparation for teaching and class time.

At the same time my husband and I were now confident that we had “enough” to live comfortably and I did not need to earn an income to help support us in our retirement. While my pension was not as large as I had planned it would be, we were fine.

Joy is productive, even when the results are not tangible…

At about the time that I began paying attention to what was bringing me joy and what wasn’t bringing me joy, the leader of a workshop I attended gave me the following personalized message about joy:

“Joy is productive, even when the results aren’t tangible or easily measurable. You need not have anything to show for it. Do what you love only because you love it — eventual rewards will come and be icing on the cake. Until you can comfortably rest in experiencing joy for the sake of joy, you cannot commit to doing what will inspire joy in others.” — personal message to me from Liv Lane

Joy School!

I started focusing on doing only what brings me joy and quickly discovered that what I thought might bring me joy often didn’t bring me joy. My mind wasn’t very good at planning or predicting joy. I began letting go of head and ego stuff and consciously following my heart. I discovered that I could feel joy in my body — sometimes fizzy and jazzy feelings in my solar plexus, sometimes peaceful and flowing, or feelings of expansion and wonder, or losing track of time.

I began to notice those things I call anti-joy often brought physical pain, tightness and contraction.

Then I started noticing how often I did things because I felt I should do them. And I started confronting my “shoulds” one by one and eliminating them. As a strove to discover purpose in my life, I began to understand my purpose to be becoming fully who I am. And I believe the best way to do that is to follow joy.

Camera Play Takes Pain Away

I’ve struggled with chronic pain for most of my adult life but I began to notice that my pain lessened when I went out in nature with my camera. I could hike longer before pain stopped me and recover faster. I now feel better than I remember feeling in the past 10 years. I used to say that I was lucky to have 1 or 2 days a year when it felt good to move for a few hours of the day. Now I experience 2-day stretches where it feels good to move and those good days happen more and more frequently.

Learning self-compassion

Along the way I’ve become more compassionate and kinder towards myself. Following joy is a way of befriending myself and accepting deeply both my challenges and gifts, and embracing who I am.

A Developmental Journey

I’ve learned that the creative journey is a journey of self-discovery. The more I learn about photography the more that I learn that growing as a photographer means growing as a person. Once I had mastered some of the technical and compositional aspects of photography I discovered a new level of challenge. Pretty pictures were no longer enough. I found myself asking, “So what?” about the photographs I made. What does this make me feel? How is this photograph different from a million other photographs of flowers? What is my photographic voice? What do I want to say? Who am I?

The journey brings me face to face with my fears and resistance and typical patterns of responses, and my desire to take my creations to the next level forces me to push through the fears, resistance, and old patterns. Although I might like to sleep in until I wake up, I’ve now experienced the wonder I feel whenever I am out in nature for sunrises and the exquisite early morning light.

Sharing my work with others and writing in my blog used to feel like I was getting naked in public. Now it feeds my soul.

The desire to explore new parts of the world with my camera helps me to overcome doubts and concerns I might have about not being able to physically handle a workshop or trip. Sometimes I do have to make adjustments, but I’ve discovered I’m capable of doing much more than I imagined a few years ago.

My passion for photography takes me to new places and gets me moving into the world in a new way. I love that I am often pushing through fears, letting go of the need for any particular outcome, and embracing what is more fully than ever before.

Becoming more open and allowing myself to become vulnerable

Something new that has just begun emerging in the past year, is how portrait work and group photography is teaching me to be more present and open. In a portrait session if I’m worried about pleasing the subject or if I’m uptight and nervous, it always shows in the photographs. To get real photographs, I have to be totally present and real, open and vulnerable. I need to be a confident calm leader setting the tone so that the person I am photographing can allow him or herself to become open , real and vulnerable as well.

Creativity is healing

The creative process is a healing journey. It’s a way to build new wiring in the brain. Instead of trying to eliminate old ways of thinking and being, you go towards what you want and towards joy and in the process build new healthier patterns and wiring.

“…based upon everything we know about the brain in neuroscience, that change is not only possible, but change is actually the rule rather than the exception. And it’s really just a question of which influences we’re going to choose for our brain.” Richard Davidson

I feel so blessed to have fallen in love with photography. My wish for you is that you find some creative outlet that brings you such joy.

May you walk in beauty.