Art is all around you. It is rich in variety and has nuances of beauty beyond measure. And all of this is just waiting for your unique sensibilities to unlock its endless wonders.
Even if your life seems way too busy to give art much serious attention, consider how difficult it is to find nurturing sources of comfort in these frenetic times.
Art is nothing less than an inexhaustible well filled to the brim with inspiration and joy. It can accomplish wonders uplifting your spirit, calming your mind, and eliminating body stress.
To access these wonders, you don’t need to be creating or making art. It works for both the creator and the viewer. In fact, it’s the perfect synergistic partnership: both creator and viewer need each other.
And no matter in what form creativity finds expression, it requires little from you except awareness and acknowledgment. Painting, drawing, music, dance, or any other creative output, can all have the same transformative effect. After that first tentative step, it will shower you with endless rich and varied goodness.
Here’s a compact list of its benefits:
1. It opens a multitude of new doorways
Art introduces you to vast, expansive worlds full of new ideas, concepts, ideologies, aesthetics, and possibilities. When you decide to experience it without reserve, it’s much like enrolling in a multitude of college classes that all focus on creative thinking. The depth of learning now available to you is staggering.
2. It takes you on journeys
You interpret art in your own individual way, just as the next person does in theirs. You can’t help adding your own unique flavor to each of your interpretations. As you enjoy a creative work, you focus on and process what you are seeing, hearing, or feeling. This in turn stimulates your imagination. And from there it’s only a short step to losing yourself in a limitless, self-created world. It’s just you, the creative work, and your deepening appreciation.
And of course, the next creative work your experience will take you on yet another unique journey. There is no end to it.
3. It accesses hidden capacities of your mind
Art stimulates your subconscious and uncovers capacities that were previously unknown. The more you immerse yourself, the greater the hidden depths that are revealed and experienced. Art energizes your brain on a multitude of levels and helps make it whole, efficient, and balanced.
4. It challenges you to grow
At first glance, certain creative works can seem hard to take. It might be controversial, provocative, or so opaque it’s just plain difficult to understand. Most likely the artist spent great emotional and physical energy in efforts to express and share something important. So there’s a very good chance something of great worth is hidden inside.
By suspending your first impulse to dismiss out of hand a tough piece, you increase your chances of easing into a state where you understand the artist’s intent. And you never know, you just might arrive at a place where you appreciate what the artist was trying to get at.
Yeah, you just might grow.
5. It encourages you to be creative
Even if don’t consider yourself an artistic person, creativity always remains available to you. When you experience a particular piece of art for the first time, it exists in an incomplete state. Art requires you, the observer, to extend it. By spending time with a creative work, by savoring and enjoying it, you improve it and make it our own.
You become a co-creator.
6. It is Healing
Art nourishes the soul at a deep, primal level. It provides you with release and a way to engage fully with an experience. And when you participate completely, both emotionally and spiritually, you increase the odds of experiencing all manner of spontaneous healing.
Yep, spending time appreciating art can indeed zap stress, and it’s excellent for both your physical and mental health.
7. It is both captivating and freeing
Art is a celebration of heady human achievements. It captivates you with its mysterious allure, then further tantalizes you with its refusal to be confined by definitions, reasons, restraints, or directions. It weaves a seductive tapestry of stories around your being that firmly places fire in your belly and stardust in your eyes.
It sets you free.
8. It encourages you to think
Art can inspire you to contemplate, and perhaps even embrace, ideas far outside your normal thinking patterns. It encourages you to use your brain in ways radically different from what your parents, schools, and peers might insist is the correct way to think.
And that’s a splendid thing!
9. It’s a hoot
Ah, the indescribable pleasure of luxuriating in the exquisite interplay of colors, textures, and masses. Or the ethereal journey evoked by a sublime piece of music. Or the sensuous and rhythmic world created by the movement of bodies in full dance.
Simply put, art is a hedonist’s glorious heaven. It’s unbridled joy!
10. It uplifts your spirits
An exceptional creative work allows you to transcend your emotional baggage and the dulling effects of everyday life. In the company of that art, you become spiritually energized and physically rejuvenated.
Gravity melts away, your body feels feather light, and your emotions expand into a buoyant liveliness.
You find yourself inexplicably happy.