Your healing story is a creative story
“What was your first memory of self-judgment?” the healer asked. The answer came to me so quickly.
I was in Sedona, AZ for a retreat when I received this question. I sat in a circle with three other people and the healer. He worked with us one-on-one, and I was last. After witnessing his power and intuition with the others, I was excited, but a bit scared, about what he had for me.
So when he asked this question after saying that the only thing that keeps coming up for him is self-judgment, I felt seen, called out, and, honestly, a bit relieved that there wasn’t some sort of secret demon inside me waiting to be exorcised. Instead, it was a known demon, and this was the validation, permission, and clarity I needed.
***
A few weeks ago, I had an epiphany. I was in the middle of launching my 6-week Boundaries Course for the third time, and I was feeling a major contraction. I loved facilitating this course, but some part of me was STRUGGLING. I’m not sure if I was depleting myself with promoting it, if I didn’t want to run the course anymore, if I was sad that fewer people had applied than in the past, or what.
All I knew is that something felt missing, even before I opened applications at the end of January. After attending a retreat in Chicago, I came to the conclusion that to make space for more expansive and creative endeavors, this would be the last time I’d facilitate the Boundaries Course.
“This is the last time I’m running this course!” I wrote in my promotional emails. A little over a week later, while driving down the 10 freeway, I heard a whisper that said “Desi dreaming”. No joke. My whole body felt LIT UP with the possibility of creating a dreamy space for Desi (South Asian) folks to come together, have community, create, and heal from the pressures of trying to be a certain way to please our parents and our culture. I wanted this space to be a place where we could dream and create whatever we wanted for ourselves.
After I heard this whisper, I felt certain about my next move, and it did not include wanting to facilitate the Boundaries Course. I think I was holding on to it waiting for something else to arrive in its stead. And this something was more expansive and creative—it felt like a breath of fresh air AND a relief. I dreamt up what I am now calling “The Desi Dream Space”, and I cannot wait to see how it blooms.
The morning after my epiphany, I boarded a plane to Phoenix to head to my Sedona retreat.
Image ID: Nisha around 6 years old is smiling on a driveway. She has short hair and is wearing a red windbreaker and blue pants. She is holding a lavendar backpack in her left hand..
When the healer asked, “What was your first memory of self-judgment?” this was my answer:
My first memory of self-judgment was when I was 5 or 6. I had found major delight in making these paper pillows out of handwriting practice papers. I’d staple two sides of two pieces of paper together, stuff it with paper, and then staple the rest of it around and VOILA! A paper pillow. And not only did I find this revolutionary, I saw it as a GIFT. I gifted my mom these pillows, one after another after another. One time while she was cooking dinner, I presented what I didn’t realize would be the last pillow I made. She snapped at me, “Nisha, stop making these, you’re wasting paper!”
In that moment, the judgment about my creativity, which I had been LOVING until that point, went down the toilet. I judged my creativity and my worth. I looked at the pillows and suddenly they looked boring. Too boring to give to someone as a gift. It’s no surprise that 35 years later when I did Ayahuasca and saw my mom holding me as a baby I asked her, “Are you proud of me?”
The healer’s question opened me up in ways I knew and didn’t knew. I hadn’t connected this memory to self-judgment. In fact, I tried not to think about this moment of rejection, yet it was so vivid in my mind’s eye. It especially hit home when the healer proceeded to talk about how when we are in self-judgment, we start to look for other things we might be good at, which also manifests as perfectionism. He said, “When you find yourself in perfectionism,” motioning his hands to his right side, “move over to the side of creativity,” sliding his hands to the left.
This blew me away. Questions that have haunted me for so much of my life were “What is my passion? What do I want to be when I grow up?” I searched high and low, taking assessment after assessment, doing informational interviews, and a lot of research. I’ve been a IT consultant, recruiter, voiceover artist, speech therapist, and librarian. And they never felt deep enough for me. Now I’m a life coach, writer, and speaker. Looking elsewhere for what “defined me” has been the longest, most gnarly, thread of my life. While I LOVE what I do, I have still found myself in go-go-go mode when creativity has beckoned me. I put my creative ventures on the backburner cuz someone has to pay the bills! Little did I realize that this creativity was a haven for me. A salve. A meditation. An anti-perfectionism medicine that wasn’t elsewhere. It was always here.
After my divorce, I started writing about my life A LOT more. I was published in The Rumpus (scroll to the second story), Kajal Magazine, Entropy Magazine, and more. Despite the bylines, it’s the process of writing that makes me feel alive. I feel the awe and delight like when I made my paper pillows. Writing was my first entry into myself as an adult. It was always within.
When I started collaging last year, I would look through magazines and cut out what struck my eye and create various layouts without noticing the time go by. I wasn’t obsessed with perfection, I just wanted to create. And the more I created, the more I envisioned creative possibilities. As Maya Angelou says, “You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”
This is also how I felt when I thought of The Desi Dream Space. It felt like a creative, expansive, and dreamy space where other South Asians could meet imperfectly in the face of WHO and HOW others thought they needed to be. In his craft book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King wrote,“It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.” If this space can be even an ounce of life support for other South Asians, I have done my job.
I adored my paper pillows, and while they weren’t adored back, I now know they were still adorable. The healer told us, “Children don’t judge themselves, someone judges them and then they carry it.”
When I received that judgment from my mom, I carried it in the pit of my stomach. I carried it in the back of my mind. I carried it whenever I sloppily made something. It validated my not enoughness in the creative realm, it drove me to scour the world, searching for my perfect passion. I don’t need to carry it anymore. This isn’t to blame my mom or judge her back. After all, she was a busy immigrant mom raising two kids and trying to make dinner. This is a story of what happened and how I’m reclaiming what was lost within me.
***
My healing story is a creative story. And this creative story will always be a love story. It is what brings me to this page. It is what generates the energy for me to connect to the Earth in the form of celebrating myself, hugging trees, crying with a friend, collecting magazines for collaging (and dreaming about collecting them), and cutting open a perfectly ripe avocado.
My healing story is a reclamation of deep time, a concept I first read about in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. Deep time is “that sense of timeless time which depends on forgetting the abstract yardstick and plunging back into the vividness of reality instead….moments when, to quote the writer Gary Eberle, we slip ‘into a realm where there is enough of everything, where we are not trying to fill a void in ourselves or the world’. The boundary separating the self from the rest of reality grows blurry, and time stands still. ‘The clock does not stop, of course,’ Eberle writes, ‘but we do not hear it ticking.’”
My body vibrated with tingles and lightness when I read that last line. To not hear the ticking of the clock from an alarm or calendar reminder or to-do list is divine. It’s another way of saying, “I have agency.” It’s another way of asking, “What am I not hearing?” It’s another way inquiring, “What connects me to creation?”
You might see healing as inner child work, shadow work, subconscious patterns, attachment styles, mother wound, father wound, intergenerational trauma, and the dance between codependency and boundaries. But what is within these worlds? What was created? What was destroyed? What is dormant? These questions can help you discover how your healing story is a creative story. And that creative story is a love story that expresses your embodiment, your intuition, and your expression. Does it get better than that?
So tell me, how is your healing story a creative story?
ICYMI, here’s what I’m offering in Nishaland!
Enter The Desi Dream Space, a 4-month dream space to create space beyond societal and self-judgment because there’s no one right way to be Desi. This is open to South Asian women, femmes, trans women, non-binary, and gender non-conforming folks. We start April 4. Wanna know more? Come an open house on March 19 or March 26 anytime between 11am-1pm PT/2pm-4pm ET.
I’m leading a workshop for BIPOC women about Boundaries on Saturday, March 18 at 11am PT! This 90-minute workshop, Graceful Boundaries for BIPOC Women will be more discussion-based and focus on navigating boundaries as BIPOC women looking to heal intergenerationally. Sliding scale. Register here.
If you are Black and/or Indigenous, I have ONE 6-month coaching scholarship. The only cost to you is $300. Apply here by Saturday, March 18.
