Creativity, Self-knowing and Permission to be fully alive. By Elena Bradley, RN-BSN

I didn’t start keeping an art journal because I wanted to be creative. I did it because I was searching for a way to metabolize what I was witnessing as a naive Montana girl experiencing systemic injustice for the first time as a Nurse in New Orleans.

 I became a RN in 2017, I moved to New Orleans in October of 2019 and was a first responder in my role as a home health nurse during the first year of the pandemic. I did not know I was signing up for this, it was beyond overwhelming and I due to the swampy/humid climate I was unable to blow off this building steam with a brisk hike up a mountain. I found art journaling by searching for a way to stay soft without collapsing. Searching for a way to remain human inside structures that often felt anything but.

Before I began this practice, I understood the world through analysis. Afterward, I began understanding myself.

I built a bridge and gained a way to access parts of myself that didn’t speak in polished sentences. Access to emotions that lived beneath competence.
Access to something quieter and truer than performance. I didn’t really “like” the art I was making, but it felt important.

And that changed everything.

I wasn’t trying to “figure myself out.” I was learning to inhabit myself.

Recently, I read the book Your Brain on Art by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross. According to neuroscientists and creativity researchers, art isn’t just a hobby or a talent.
It’s a biological process that the human brain is wired for.

When we draw, paint, collage, write, sculpt, or move creatively, multiple systems in the brain activate at once:

• sensory processing
• emotional regulation
• memory integration
• imagination and future thinking
• motor coordination
• meaning-making

In other words — creativity recruits the whole brain.

The authors use the word “neuroaesthetics” to describe how aesthetic experiences — creating or encountering beauty — change the brain and body. Art literally helps us process experience. Not by analyzing it. But by feeling and expressing it.

This has completely reshaped how I look at my art from this time in my life and it has become so much more powerful and meaningful to me. The Nervous System Loves Creativity. There’s beautiful science behind why this works. Polyvagal theory, developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, teaches that our nervous system is constantly scanning for safety or threat.When we feel safe, we enter what’s called a ventral vagal state — a place of connection, curiosity, and openness.

Creative practice naturally cues this state:

• Gentle, rhythmic hand movement.

• Soft visual focus.

• Exploration without urgency.

• Play without evaluation.

When the nervous system feels safe, deeper layers of experience become accessible. Not because we force them open, but because safety allows them to surface.

Creative expression:

• Engages bilateral hemispheres of the brain.

• Reduces amygdala activity (fear center).

• Increases vagal tone and parasympathetic regulation.

• Strengthens neural pathways related to narrative integration.

Most of what shapes our behavior lives beneath conscious awareness:

• Old stories about worth.

• Protective adaptations.

• Unspoken grief.

• Quiet desires.

When we stay only in language, we stay in analysis. But when we engage image, metaphor, and sensation, we access deeper neural pathways.

One of the biggest take-aways insights from Your Brain on Art is that creative activities can shift our nervous system into a more regulated state. When we engage in rhythmic, sensory creative work — like sketching, cutting paper, layering paint, or writing freely — the brain releases neurochemicals associated with wellbeing:

• dopamine (motivation and reward)
• serotonin (mood regulation)
• oxytocin (connection)
• endorphins (relief and pleasure)

Creative expression can lower cortisol and calm stress responses. Which might explain something many of us have felt intuitively that sometimes sitting down with a page and a pen changes how we feel without us needing to explain why. The act of making something becomes a way of metabolizing experience.

One of the things I love most about creative practice is that it gives us access to parts of ourselves that language can’t always reach.

Art lets us explore questions like: What am I holding right now? What feels unresolved? What is asking to be seen? Not through analysis — but through image, color, symbol, and intuition. Sometimes what shows up on the page surprises us.

A shape we didn’t expect. A phrase that arrives out of nowhere. A feeling that suddenly makes sense.

Creative practice becomes a form of listening. This practice changed the way I relate to myself and to the world around me.

 I am so pleased to be offering a space to share this practice with others! Starting last month, I have a new monthly offering called “The Creative Body Collective” and Art journaling club held at Enso. It will be once monthly, and consisting of themes like:

• Accessible nervous system education and practices.

• Symbol and metaphor exploration.

• Guided creative prompts and artistic techniques.

• Spacious time to create.

• Optional reflection and connection with .

My intention is to create a container where people can access themselves more fully. Because when we belong to ourselves, we move differently in the world. We speak differently, choose differently, lead differently, and love differently.

If you’ve been craving a space for depth without heaviness, creativity without performance, community without overwhelm, this may be your invitation.

The first evening for the Creative body collective was last Thursday, we explored the intersection of our sensory perception and creativity with sounds, smells, watercolor paint, and colored pencils. It was so fun! I am really excited to be offering this experience at Enso and hope to see all who are interested or excited about something like this in our community.

 I hope after reading this that you find yourself with a little more permission to doodle on your pages and explore your inner world. I hope you remember that creativity is something we all carry. And that sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is simply sit down with a blank page and see what wants to appear.