How do we stay alive in our despair?

As highly sensitive, complex, and intense people, we neurodivergent creators can find ourselves particularly vulnerable to experiencing persistent worry and feelings of hopelessness.Our acute perceptiveness makes it challenging to tune out the calamities of the world, and our orientation to truth-telling makes it hard for us to fake a sense of false positivity about things that are frankly awful.

In this online workshop, we begin by acknowledging that despair can be an appropriate response to the conditions of the world, and sometimes the conditions of our own lives. But we’ll investigate together how we as creatives can access pathways to aliveness and hope that allow us to work skillfully with despair, and even make something of it.

We’ll explore:

·       What wisdom can we glean from artists, writers, and other creators who have worked with and through times of despair?

·       How can we build the inner and outer resources we need to live with feelings of despair without being taken down by them?

·       How can we intentionally use our creative practice to transmute despair into possibility?

This workshop is part of the six-month Saltee + West series. To learn more about the series and subscribe to all six workshops, please visit www.salteeacademy.com/salteewest