This article is an excerpt from a past MONTHLY LETTER. If you enjoy this kind of grounding support, sign up to receive the monthly coaching package: it includes an article like this one, journaling prompts, creative practices, spiritual rituals and supportive tools to help you navigate your rebellious path as an artist or creative entrepreneur.

This month, we're getting curious about resisting the urge the canvas, when we keep setting our art on fire instead of nurturing our creative flame.

Here’s a confession for you: my creative mind destroys more than it builds. And I do build. But sometimes, the joy I experience in the creation is nowhere close to the liberation I find in its shattering.

Maybe you can relate to the irresistible urge to burn it all to the ground and start fresh. This rather uncontrollable death drive that leads us to suffocate what never even got a chance to take its first breath. This impulse to bring it all to ruins before it could really ever become anything.

There is a certain addiction in creative annihilation.

We create to destroy.

To create something better to destroy.

To create something greater to destroy.

To create something bigger to destroy.

Instead of being masters of creation, we become masters of destruction. We throw our ideas, hopes and dreams into the fire, watching the passion turn into ashes before our very eyes. We keep feeding the stories that starve the muse— adding chapters and chapters into our very own Book of Perfectionism.

In reality, what our creative mind is seeking in the destruction is to create something with more freedom, more space. In the shattering— we long to break free from the expectations, the pressure, the ideals we imposed on ourselves and our art.

In the shattering— what we’re actually praying for is breathing room.

Our creative flow has been asphyxiated by the not-good-enough stories we recite like bedtime stories and we’re gasping for air. Underneath this urge to burn it all to the ground lies the belief that creativity is not worth our time or energy if it does not meet our idealistic standards.

We feel angry, pressured, disappointed, stuck… so we destroy. Only to feel even more angry, pressured, disappointed and stuck. We keep setting our art on fire instead of nurturing our creative flame. The thing is— when we choose to burn the canvas instead of choosing a different story to tell ourselves, we pile up creative heartbreaks and we cannot learn from the later stages of creative growth.

Dear creative mind, there is an even bigger liberation, an even greater freedom, an even stronger satisfaction in the creation— once we learn to create without what we need to break free from (idealism, perfectionism, expectations, pressure, people-pleasing). We must let our inner artist take the creative lead, instead of handing the brushes to the part of us that believes we’re handing knives. Instead, let’s explore how we can learn to create without the burden of perfectionism— and sit with the unease of the beginner, the discomfort of our art not being what we had in mind, and dare to see where that leads us.